Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports

Abstract

Sleep scientists have shown that dreaming helps people improve their waking lives, and they have done so by developing sophisticated content analysis scales. Dream analysis entails time-consuming manual annotation of text. That is why dream reports have been recently mined with algorithms, and these algorithms focused on identifying emotions. In so doing, researchers have not tackled two main technical challenges though: (i) how to mine aspects of dream reports that research has found important, such as characters and interactions; and (ii) how to do so in a principled way grounded in the literature. To tackle these challenges, we designed a tool that automatically scores dream reports by operationalizing the widely used dream analysis scale by Hall and Van de Castle. We validated the tool’s effectiveness on hand-annotated dream reports (the average error is 0.24), scored 24 000 reports—far more than any previous study—and tested what sleep scientists call the ‘continuity hypothesis’ at this unprecedented scale: we found supporting evidence that dreams are a continuation of what happens in everyday life. Our results suggest that it is possible to quantify important aspects of dreams, making it possible to build technologies that bridge the current gap between real life and dreaming.

Dreaming during lockdown: a quali-quantitative analysis of the Italian population dreams during the first COVID-19 pandemic wave

“…This data is in line with what emerged from a longitudinal study by Pesant and Zadra (2005), who demonstrated that psychological wellbeing is inversely correlated with dream content characterised by aggressive interactions, negative emotions and episodes of failure. In fact, according to the perspective that regards dream material as a continuity with daytime material, the content of dreams reflects what is experienced in everyday life (Domhoff, 1996;Domhoff, 2003;Fogli et al, 2020).…”

“…This result is confirmed in the literature, since a hypothesis, now widely accepted and complementary to the continuity hypothesis, maintains that the dream is a time when thought continues, albeit in a different state of consciousness, leading, through the development of problemsolving strategies, to solutions to problems faced in everyday life (Barrett, 2017). From this point of view, dream activity probably allowed the population to recover and re-process the emotions and experiences encountered during the pandemic reality, then identifying the most effective strategies to respond adaptively to the stress of the pandemic reality (Fogli et al, 2020).…”

“…Barrett (1996), in fact, asserts that dreams constitute a window on the trauma and its effects. One hypothesis postulates a continuity between dream activity and everyday events, in which therefore dream analysis can allow the comprehension of the experiences the population has had, and the sensitivity elicited by them (Fogli, Aiello & Quercia, 2020). Moreover, an additional hypothesis to this one argues that dreams not only recover what is experienced in everyday life, but also constitute a mode of thought, albeit in a different state of consciousness, which allows the activation of processing and problem-solving processes (Barrett, 2017).…”

The Language of Dreams: Application of Linguistics-Based Approaches for the Automated Analysis of Dream Experiences

“…This possibility was already illustrated by a series of studies by Bulkeley [ 57 , 59 , 60 ], who successfully identified some of the dream themes that are normally assessed through manual scoring by exploring dreams collected in dream databases using predefined sets of terms related to different categories of interest. More recently, Fogli and colleagues developed and validated a more advanced tool combining syntactic analysis with a dictionary-based approach [ 77 ]. In particular, the authors focused on three specific Hall and Van de Castle’s categories (“characters”, “interactions”, and “emotions”) and designed a dictionary-based tool that recognizes linguistic items recurring in dream reports as referring to specific entities of interest.…”

Epidemic dreams: dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The hypothesis postulates that dreams are a continuation of our waking experiences, especially of those that trigger vivid emotions. It was first formulated by psychologist Calvin Hall in the 190s, and, in the following decades, it has been extensively studied [ 26 , 27 ].…”