How are dreams turned into data?

How are dreams turned into data?

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The DreamWell Dream Dictionary is data-driven and based upon over 200,000 dreams. The methodology for turning dreams into data is relatively simple, but it takes a lot of time. There are three main steps to this process:

  1. Finding dreams
  2. Defining dream symbols
  3. Running the analysis

Step 1: Finding dreams

The first step is to find as many dreams as possible from as many places as possible.

We have identified over 200,000 publicly accessible dreams from across the internet. A large majority of these come from reddit (r/Dreams, r/LucidDreaming, r/DreamInterpretation, and r/thisdreamihad). Additionally about 25,000 dreams come from the Sleep and Dream Database which includes the famous DreamBank dataset. 

The data used in the DreamWell Dream Dictionary creates biases. This is true for any dataset. Unfortunately, this dataset will likely not be inclusive of everyone that dreams. As a result the current version DreamWell Dream Dictionary is simply a first step. We acknowledge the short-comings of this dataset and hope that these can be addressed in future iterations.

Step 2: Defining dream symbols

The second step is to define dream symbols. A symbol is anything of interest in a dream. These can be emotions like fear or happiness. A symbol can be characters like cats, mothers, or ghosts. We’ve defined over 1,200 different symbols. 

The trick here is to define a list of words associated with each symbol. For example, if the dream symbol is “mothers”, then a list of words such as “mom”, “mother”, “mommy”, “mum” and so on would be created to identify the symbol of mothers.

This isn’t perfect because language is complex and a single word can be used to refer to many things in different contexts. For example the phrase, “mother of pearl” contains the word “mother”, but isn’t really related to the dream symbol of “mothers”. As a result a second word list is defined that contains phrases that contain the word of the symbol, but aren’t related to the symbol. 

The number of dream symbols in the DreamWell Dream Dictionary continually grows and is based upon the scientific research of dream content. The list of dream symbols have been heavily influenced by the Hall/Van de Castle coding system, Kelly Bulkeley’s work on digital dream analysis, J.M. Debord’s (RadOwl) fantastic dream dictionary, the Typical Dream Questionnaire, and data-driven topic modeling (publication to be submitted). 

Step 3: The analysis of dream symbols

At this point, there will be over 240 million data points, a data point for each of the 1,200 symbols for each of the 200,000. So how is sense made of all of this data?

One of the most interesting things is simply the frequency of different dream symbols. This is easy to understand. If I want to know how many dreams have fear in them, I simply have to find the number of dreams with fear and divide that by the total number of dreams in the database. 

However, understanding the relationship between different symbols is interesting. For example, I might want to know if dreams of cats relate to fear. Alternatively, I might want to know which symbols are most related to death in a dream. The list of questions goes on and on.

It is best to start with a fictional example. Perhaps I want to know how much dreams of cats relate to fear. There are two major steps I will need to take.

First, I will calculate the percent of cat dreams with fear and the percent of non-cat dreams with fear. I’ll use round numbers to make things simple. Perhaps 50% of cat dreams have fear in them and 25% of non-cat dreams have fear in them. In this case dreaming of a cat would increase the chance of the dream containing fear by 100%!

This is already informative, but I really don’t know what to make of a 100% increase of fear in cat dreams. Is this a lot? Is this a small amount? 

Second, I will then calculate how much fear changes for each of the 1,200+ dream symbols. Perhaps dreams of snakes increase fear by 300%, dreams of kitchens increase fear by 20%, dreams of mothers decrease fear by 30%, and so on. 

At this point, there will be a list of how much each symbol relates to fear. It is then simply sorted, ranked, and each symbol is given a percentile. If you’ve ever taken a standardized text, then you know what a percentile is. Perhaps dreams of cats have a percentile of 80% for fear. That means it increases fear more than 80% of all of the other dream symbols.  If it had a percentile score of 20%, then it means that cats increase fear less than 20% of all dream symbols. In fact, a percentile score of 20% probably means that dreaming of cats reduces fear in dreams!

There are tables like the one above in the DreamWell Dream Dictionary. These are based directly on the percentile scores. 

  • Much less than usual means there was a percentile score of less than 10%
  • Less than usual means there was a percentile score between 10% and 40%
  • The same as usual means there was a percentile score between 40% and 60%
  • More than usual means there was a percentile score between 60% and 90%
  • Much more than usual means there was a percentile score of more than 90%

The same thing is true for the circular bar charts seen for each symbol. Higher bars mean higher percentile scores. Lower bars mean lower percentile scores. There are two horizontal lines that can be used as guides. There is one at the 50th percentile and one at the 100th. 

So in the graph above, earthquakes are at nearly the 100th percentile for disasters which means they increase disasters more than nearly 100% of dream symbols. Earthquakes are around the 50th percentile for hearing, which means they increase hearing more than 50% of dream symbols. Earthquake dreams are around the 10th percentile for family. So this means dreams of earthquakes reduce family in a dream more than 90% of dream symbols.

Data is only one part of the story

Overall, this approach is relatively simple (at least compared to using more advanced techniques. It simply takes a lot of time to define the dream symbols and to make sense out of them.

This is where reading dreams is important. It’s really important to read dreams in order to understand what happens in them. Personally, I’ve been stunned at the breadth of dreaming experiences. People have dream experiences that I never would have imagined.

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