It is possible that our dreams can be cataloged, coded, and made into predictable algorithms? That we could then use the information to recognize and analyze dream content in different ways? One study of over 24,000 dreams suggests that’s exactly what can happen. (1) Seems that Dr. Sigmond Freud, famed Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, may have been correct all along. He believed that our dreams are merely a continuation of our reality… that the meaning of our dreams can be realized if we take into account the context of our lives.
What Are Dreams, Really?
There is something magical and mysterious about dreaming. We fall asleep and enter a whole new world where anything becomes possible. Whales can dance in the sky among rainbows, your childhood puppy may appear in your arms right out of thin air, or maybe you finally get to marry your pop star crush. Anyone who has ever had a dream can understand why ancient people and civilizations tended to give their dreams a lot of spiritual meaning. Looking to symbolism as a way of explaining the strange imagery projected on the screen of their minds every night… that seems like a natural direction to take. How else to explain them? But as people became more sophisticated in our thinking and interpretation of the world around us, Freud and other scientists came up with another idea.
The Continuity Hypothesis Of Dreams
“The continuity hypothesis of dreams” is a theory that our dreams are actually a continuation of our reality. It turns out, through research, that our lives do impact our dreams. (2) A day filled with anxiety will become a night fraught with nightmares. Likewise, our brains can sometimes work out solutions to tough problems while in a dream state. Dr. Freud was among the first to suggest that our dreams can be interpreted through our waking lives, but other scientists and researchers have been excited by this prospect throughout the decades, building on his theories and even creating what is known as the Hall and Van de Castle system.
Codifying And Analyzing Our Dreams
The Hall and Van de Castle system catalogs the content of our dreams. It looks at what characters appear, the quality of our interactions with them in the dream, etc. (3) It is exactly as labor-intensive as it sounds. But this new study of over 24,000 dreams has built from it what is now known as the DreamBank. It’s a database of dream reports, compiled by a machine learning tool that’s programmed to analyze thousands of terms and keywords. Validated against hand-written dream accounts of the Hall and Van de Castle process, the database has a good bit of refinement left to go. It is effective at interpreting the dream against the more labor-intensive system about three-quarters of the time, but the results are still quite encouraging.
With such a huge database of detailed dreams, other exciting information is beginning to come to the fore, like major support for the continuity hypothesis of dreams. According to their research, there were a number of “statistical markers” that are likely to reflect what the dreamers have been experiencing in their waking life.
Whatever really happens when we sleep, one thing is for certain: we’ll get to the bottom of it one day. We humans have this almost mysterious, otherworldly side to us. But the curiosity and interest of our greatest scientific minds will unravel and codify it… eventually!
