What do women dream about? This 95-year-old researcher found some clues.

As 95-year-old dream researcher Monique Lortie-Lussier has aged, her own dreams have changed.

“I am the main character, interacting with people I have known, some of whom have died,” she said. These often include episodes with her late husband before he developed dementia. “I see them in my dreams. My dreams are quite pleasant. It doesn’t really matter what happens in them, I am feeling good.”

Lortie-Lussier, a retired adjunct professor of social psychology at the University of Ottawa, spent her academic career conducting dream research, with a particular focus on women’s dreams, including how they change over a life span.

“There are all sorts of things that happen in dreams,” Lortie-Lussier said. “You have to know yourself to know what you are dreaming about. Dreams, in a way, are fantasies of the mind. Some are quite realistic, others not at all.”

Studying women’s dreams

Like many of the women whose dreams she studied, Lortie-Lussier was forced to balance her own career ambitions with the demands of family life and the changing roles of women in society.

Although Lortie-Lussier completed her undergraduate studies in 1952, she delayed her academic career to focus on marriage and children. When she completed her doctorate in 1979 at the age of 50, a colleague, Joseph De Koninck, encouraged her to consider dream research.

“I approached her to study the dreams of women who, like her, occupy positions traditionally held by men,” said De Koninck, now professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa School of Psychology.

Lortie-Lussier’s work showed that dreams offered a new lens through which women could be studied. Although women’s roles in the workplace and at home have undergone dramatic shifts since the 1980s when the research was conducted, it showed that analyzing dreams offered insights into the experiences of women and how they were adapting to changing roles.

In 1985, Lortie-Lussier and De Koninck published a paper, “Working mothers vs. homemakers: Do dreams reflect the changing role of women?”

The study found that when women worked outside the home, their dreams were driven more by the desire for social recognition and achievement. Compared with “homemakers,” the dreams of employed women were more likely to be set in the workplace rather than a home setting.

And their dreams were more likely to include the presence of male characters – the men they interacted with in their jobs. And they were marked by more unpleasant emotions associated with their work environment.

The “homemakers” studied, on the other hand, experienced more “overt hostility” in their dreams, such as criticism, from or with other people.

Some of the dreams showed an overlapping of both worlds. One woman told Lortie-Lussier about a dream in which she was “mixing things from the kitchen at her sink while she was doing something from the office.”

“Why not study women’s dreams? Maybe they tell us more about women than women can express in their waking life,” she said. “Their dreams could reveal some of their struggles, some of their conflicts, their role conflicts and the problems that young women and older have around the issue of work and family.”

Changing dreams as women age

Lortie-Lussier’s research also found that young mothers often experience anxiety dreams about their children.

“Their children might be falling, or something dangerous would be happening, and the mother couldn’t get there in time to prevent it,” she said. “These left the mothers feeling anxious about what would happen to the child.”

One study compared the dreams of female students to those of working women. Their dreams reflected their life stage.

Younger women’s dreams were focused on friends, boyfriends and love.

“They were very preoccupied with social relationships with their peers,” she said. “The working women were preoccupied with their children, and conflicts between work and family. Their dreams reflected quite a bit about their working life.”

Her studies of women also found that their dreams become more enjoyable and calmer as they age because their lives become less complicated by family or workplace conflicts.

Dreams mixing past and present

After more than a dozen papers and presentations at international conferences, Lortie-Lussier “went on to be recognized for her contribution to the understanding of evolution of the dream experience in both men and women with life stages and particularly in aging which had so far received little attention,” De Koninck said.

Because of government regulations – since abolished – Lortie-Lussier was forced to retire at 65 but continued supervising and collaborating with doctoral students and teaching as an adjunct professor until recently. For the past decade, she has been volunteering for the Council on Aging of Ottawa, and served on its board for five years.

She says she thinks about the afterlife but doesn’t dream about it. At her age, her dreams are mostly about having a good time. “I dreamed a couple of times about organizing a party with friends of mine, some of whom have died,” she said. “They are a mix of the present time and the past, and they are mostly a lot of fun.”

The origin of dreams, whether pleasant or puzzling, often defy explanation, she said, making them an endless source of wonder.

“That’s the mystery of dreams, that sometimes we dream these bizarre dreams and don’t know where they come from,” she added. “There are so many unknown elements in dreaming. It’s still a mystery.”