Dream wildest dreams

In her new book, The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why We Dream, author Andrea Rock (an award-winning medical and science reporter) presented the first-ever systematic study of dream content among people the world over, begun in the 1980s.
It turned out that people in small tribal societies tend to have the greatest proportion of physical aggression in their dreams, with the highest reports among the Yir Yiront, an Australian Aboriginal group for whom 92 percent of dream interactions were aggressive—defined to include everything form aggressive feelings to nasty remarks to physical attacks on possessions. Among industrialized societies studied, however, Americans ranked highest for aggression in dreams, with scores of 50% for U.S. males (34 percent for females) versus 29 percent for Swiss men and 32 percent for Dutch men.