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Hi all, Reading this article was a particular pleasure for me because it pulled together both where I began in studying dreams (studying frequency of dream recall in both my undergraduate and graduate research) and my current interests (the impact of trauma on psychological functioning). Intriguingly, I never thought to juxtapose those two interests but now that someone else has done it, it seems like such an obvious thing to do. Mind you I had to first get over my jealousy over 1) the nature of the sample, 2) the size of the sample, and 3) the incredible participation rate. Puts to shame anything I have done! However, more seriously, the author is to be applauded for the first two and the participants for the last. The paper itself is a remarkably scholarly and lucid article. And now for a few loosely connected remarks... I like the fact that the author differentiated between different types of trauma. There is considerable literature to back up their belief that observed violence is less traumatic than directly experienced. However, their finding with gender highlights an even more important "truth": we cannot judge for another what "should" be more traumatic because individual meaning and experience inevitably shapes how stressful events are experienced. This often becomes a problem in empirical studies because our designs to do not easily accommodate such individual experience (and our statistics treat it as error). As an aside, I have been ruminating increasingly on the varying utility of empirical/quantitative versus qualitative methodologies. Especially with dreams it often feels like we lose a great deal of information when we drop these experiences into a regression melting pot (says the woman who continues to primarily use empirical methodology and regression analyses in her own research). Recently, in the research on abuse, "betrayal" has emerged as a variable of interest in classifying trauma that may predict poor psychological functioning and increased use of dissociation. Specifically, the hypothesis is that trauma which involves a betrayal of trust (e.g. the situation where a parent or respected authority is the perpetrator) is more traumatic, particularly to children, then other stressful events. In its extreme form, the hypothesis would predict that greater violence experienced at the hand of a stranger is less traumatic than "milder" violence at the hand of a parent. Now I may be on slippery ground here, because I am not aware of the nuances of the violence in that region, but it would appear that as a group these children are exposed to violence from "outsiders" which would not have that element of betrayal. I guess this takes me in several directions... we need more research on what makes trauma traumatic. We need more research, like this study, on the effects of different qualities of trauma. We need to think about how our methods can be adapted to be more sensitive to nuances in meaning associated with trauma (to idiographic experiences of trauma). Let me be clear that I am NOT saying that these children's trauma is trivial. In fact, I would imagine we should think of both groups as representing to some degree a rather stressed population. For example, I am a little concerned about the closeness in scores of the two groups on the psychological functioning measures. My guess is that this is not a measurement problem but may reflect the experience of the children. From my meager experience of one trip to Israel, Galilee is geographically close to hot spots and the reality of war seems never far from anyone's mind. I remember a playground which contained brightly painted tanks, "reclaimed" from an earlier round of hostilities. As a child I lived on military bases in Europe. Although it was peacetime and I never experienced any war related violence, the possibility of war was ever present. To this day I hate the sound of our local sirens which call out the volunteer fire force, because to me such sirens mean war. The bottom line is that some of the researchers hypotheses may not have worked out because the children were closer in experience than might appear at first glance. What the author calls repression, I would think may be better described as avoidance: there is quite a collection of different strategies being combined under their label of repression, as they themselves are quick to point out. The research on traumatic memory is certainly highlighting that there are many ways to "forget" or avoid thinking about trauma and these probably carry different "price tags" for the individual and also have varying effectiveness. It will be interesting in the future, as we become better able to theoretically sort out and measure these different strategies, to see how these reflect in dreaming styles. In an unrelated vein, I would like to know a little more about how the regression analyses were conducted. Were all variables entered simultaneously or were they entered in a planned sequence? I would also be interested in knowing about the role of dreams in that culture. Dream recall likely has a different significance in a culture that talks about dreams, values dreams, then it does in a culture that neglects dreams... So what do we make of the findings between recall and type of symptoms? As a fan of dream recall I was a little dismayed (and surprised) that frequency of dream recall was associated with greater depression in response to increased trauma. Anxiety is a more "direct" response to trauma (and therefore adaptive?) whereas depression more reflects despair and defeat. This is one of the reasons I want to understand more about what role dream recall plays in the culture. And I will end these initial comments with a commendation to the author for not confusing correlation with causation when considering the significance of the dream recall findings. Kathy Belicki