1So Luke, for our next psychology assignment we have to do something on sleep and dreams.
2Right.
3I've just read an article suggesting why we tend to forget most of our dreams soon after we wake up.
4I mean, most of my dreams aren't that interesting anyway,
5but what it said was that if we remembered everything,
6we might get mixed up about what actually happened and what we dreamed.
7So it's a sort of protection.
8I hadn't heard that idea before.
9I'd always assumed that it was just that we didn't have room in our memories for all that stuff.
10Me too.
11What do you think about the idea that our dreams may predict the future?
12It's a belief that you get all over the world.
13Yeah, lots of people have a story of it happening to them,
14but the explanation I've read is that for each dream that comes true,
15we have thousands that don't, but we don't notice those,
16we don't even remember them.
17We just remember the ones where something in the real world,
18like a view or an action, happens to trigger a dream memory.
19Right.
20So it's just a coincidence really.
21Something else I read about is what they call segmented sleeping.
22That's a theory that hundreds of years ago,
23people used to get up in the middle of the night and have a chat or something to eat,
24then go back to bed.
25So I tried it myself.
26Why?
27Well it's meant to make you more creative.
28I don't know why.
29But I gave it up after a week.
30It just didn't fit in with my lifestyle.
31But most pre-school children have a short sleep in the day don't they?
32There was an experiment some students did here last term to see at what age kids should stop having naps.
33But they didn't really find an answer.
34They spent a lot of time working out the most appropriate methodology,
35but the results didn't seem to show any obvious patterns.
36Right.
37Anyway, let's think about our assignment.
38Last time I had problems with the final stage,
39where we had to describe and justify how successful we thought we'd been.
40I struggled a bit with the action plan too.
41I was OK with the planning,
42but I got marked down for the self-assessment as well.
43And I had big problems with the statistical stuff,
44that's where I really lost marks.
45Right.
46So shall we plan what we have to do for this assignment?
47OK.
48First, we have to decide on our research question.
49So how about 'Is there a relationship between hours of sleep and number of dreams?'
50OK.
51Then we need to think about who we'll do the study on.
52About 12 people?
53Right.
54And shall we use other psychology students?
55Let's use people from a different department.
56What about history?
57Yes, they might have interesting dreams!
58Or literature students?
59I don't really know any.
60OK, forget that idea.
61Then we have to think about our methodology.
62So we could use observation,
63but that doesn't seem appropriate.
64No.
65it needs to be self-reporting I think.
66And we could ask them to answer questions online.
67But in this case, paper might be better
68as they'll be doing it straight after they wake up...
69in fact while they're still half-asleep.
70Right.
71And we'll have to check the ethical guidelines for this sort of research.
72Because our experiment involves humans, so there are special regulations.
73Yes,
74I had a look at those for another assignment I did.
75There's a whole section on risk assessment,
76and another section on making sure they aren't put under any unnecessary stress.
77Let's hope they don't have any bad dreams!
78Yeah.
79Then when we've collected all our data we have to analyse it
80and calculate the correlation between our two variables,
81that's time sleeping and number of dreams
82and then present our results visually in a graph.
83Right. And the final thing is to think about our research and evaluate it.
84So that seems quite straightforward.
85Yeah. So now let's...