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Methods

Dream interpretation

The notion that dreams contain hidden meanings has been popular for centuries. During the second century AD, Artemidorus Daldianus produced a five-volume work entitled “The Interpretation of Dreams”. In the 1890s, Sigmund Freud associated specific meanings to characters, objects, animals, and scenarios that frequently appeared in dreams. More recently, sleep scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of coding dreams.
There are more than 150 dream rating and content analysis scales today, and the best validated and most widely used one remains the Hall and Van de Castle’s. This coding system sees a dream as:
a) a cast of characters (for example, a depressed man, a friendly woman, a cute dog);
b) a plot in which characters interact with each other (for example, the depressed man patting the dog);
c) a process reflecting different affective states (for example, the depressed man now feels safe and relaxed).

Problem

Dreams are coded according to the Hall and Van de Castle’s scale manually and as such the number of dreams that can be coded is very limited.

Solution

We designed a Natural Language Processing tool that automatically scored 24K dream reports according to the Hall and Van de Castle’s scale. From each dream report, the tool extracted nouns to identify people, animals, and fictional characters, and verbs to classify interactions in terms of friendly interactions or acts of aggression. The results suggest that it is possible to build future technologies that bridge the current yawning gap between real life and dreaming, ultimately making our ‘sleeping mind’ quantifiable.

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Exploration hints

The catcher shows the dimensions extracted from the dream reports.

Click on the highlighted feathers to read the corresponding dream reports.

Each dream report comes with highlighted keywords. These tend to link the report to the person’s real life conditions.

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Publications

Alessandro Fogli, Luca Maria Aiello and Daniele Quercia
Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports
Royal Society Open Science, 2020

Edyta Paulina Bogucka, Bon Adriel Aseniero, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia
The Dreamcatcher: Interactive Storytelling of Dreams
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2021


Press Coverage

What do our dreams say about us? | Portable TV
New Insights Into Dreams and What They Say About Us | The Wall Street Journal | PDF
This new algorithm can find the hidden patterns in your dreams | Science Magazine | PDF
Do dreams reflect reality? | The Economist | PDF
Scientists Created AI to Analyze People's Dreams on a Massive Scale | Vice | PDF
Living the dream | Daily Mail | PDF
Dream analysis with AI | The Naked Scientists | PDF
On life and dreams | Cosmosmagazine | PDF
Dreamcatcher is an A.I. that could help analyze the world’s dreams | Digital Trends | PDF
Coronavirus latest: Dreams could hold the key to understanding mental health impact of future pandemics | The i paper | PDF

More news...


About

The Dreamcatcher is a project from the Social Dynamics group at the Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge.
If you have any comment or question, please email us at team@social-dynamics.net.

logoSocialDynamics

Authors

Alessandro Fogli, Edyta Bogucka, Bon Adriel Aseniero, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia

What can we learn from automatically interpreting thousands of dreams?



Research articles

Alessandro Fogli, Luca Maria Aiello and Daniele Quercia
Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports
Royal Society Open Science, 2020

Edyta Paulina Bogucka, Bon Adriel Aseniero, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia
The Dreamcatcher: Interactive Storytelling of Dreams
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2021


Press Coverage

What do our dreams say about us? | Portable TV
New Insights Into Dreams and What They Say About Us | The Wall Street Journal | PDF
This new algorithm can find the hidden patterns in your dreams | Science Magazine | PDF
Do dreams reflect reality? | The Economist | PDF
Scientists Created AI to Analyze People's Dreams on a Massive Scale | Vice | PDF
Living the dream | Daily Mail | PDF
Dream analysis with AI | The Naked Scientists | PDF
On life and dreams | Cosmosmagazine | PDF
Dreamcatcher is an A.I. that could help analyze the world’s dreams | Digital Trends | PDF
Coronavirus latest: Dreams could hold the key to understanding mental health impact of future pandemics | The i paper | PDF

More news...

Code and Data

Link to: data
Link to: code


According to the continuity hypothesis, our dreams reflect what we experience in our real lives. To see how, select one of these real people who recorded their dreams:

How does it work?

The dreams tend to reflect . For example, consider this dream: