My sympathies to you Liberals...

[Broken Glass Can]

I had no idea that you were suffering from nightmares and homosexual dreams. You have my sympathies.

Dreaming in blue and red

Even in dreams, there's a red state-blue state divide, says Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

He has studied how self-described liberals and conservatives dream for about 13 years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they go about it differently.

"There is a liberal personality type, or a conservative personality type, that plays out in dreaming as well as waking," says Bulkeley, who recently presented a paper on his findings at the International Association for the Study of Dreams annual conference in California.

Conservatives sleep more soundly than liberals, and they have fewer dreams. In addition, the dreams of liberals are more "bizarre."

What does this mean? It depends upon whom you ask.

The "blue state" interpretation, Bulkeley says, is that liberals "have a more ... open-minded and imaginative approach to the world. Conservatives are less imaginative and open-minded, and their dreams are narrower, less varied and less intense."

The red-state take?

"Conservatives are more anchored, more realistic in their approach to the world," says Bulkeley. "Liberals could be seen as fanciful, their heads in the clouds, unrealistic, out of touch."

"I've had people read the findings in these two different ways," he says.

Bulkeley also found that before 2000 - during the Clinton administration - conservatives suffered from significantly more nightmares than liberals. Once George W. Bush became president, however, the rate of nightmares among liberals has risen, while among conservatives the rate has dropped.

During his most recent study, conducted during the 2004 election, one liberal woman's nightmare had her watching television news on election night, with the announcer declaring victory for Bush. He then pointed at the woman and said, "You're at fault!"

Liberal women in general, he says, remember more of their dreams, have the poorest-quality sleeps - and report dreams about homosexuality at a higher rate than anybody else.

On the other end of the spectrum are conservative men: They have the toughest time remembering anything about their dreams, they enjoy the soundest sleeps - and dreams about homosexuality just don't happen, they report.

All of this matters, Bulkeley says, because it helps buttress the idea that "dreaming reflects our engagement with the communal world."

"A lot of researchers and people in the public think that's still an open question," he says. "Dreams are random, they are nonsense, they have no connection to anything. I don't think so, and I think we have good evidence to support the contrary."