Celebrity dreaming: Belief in the freudian dream perspective

In this study, we replicated and extended the work of Williams et al. (2020) by finding that most individuals believe the Freudian perspective on dreams, regardless of whether or not the theory description contained Freud’s name in a citation. Also consistent with prior work, we found participants’ attribution of meaning to celebrity dreams to be higher when the dream about the celebrity was cast in a positive rather than negative light. In a key extension we documented more specificity of the relationships among dream perspective support, dream scenario valence, and celebrity attachment and admiration by examining all subscales of the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS). We found participants who supported the Freudian perspective tended to score higher on the Intense-Personal (IP) subscale than participants who supported a non-Freudianperspective. Also, those who experienced a positive dream scenario about their favorite celebrity tended to score higher on the Entertainment-Social (ES) subscale than participants who experienced a negative dream scenario. Through this replication and extension, we proposed multiple avenues for future research.