Tag: word searches

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Dreaming of Nature and the Nature of Dreams

The First Australian Regional Conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams starts on April 19, and I have prepared a video talk for the conference titled “Dreaming of Nature and the Nature of Dreams.”  The talk can be found on Youtube, and the statistical data I reference can be found in Google docs.  More info about the IASD and the Australia conference is here.

I start the talk by briefly mentioning some of my early writings about the interplay of dreaming and nature: a 1991 article “Quest for Transformational Experience: Dreams and Environmental Ethics,” my doctoral dissertation/1994 book The Wilderness of Dreams and its notion of “root metaphors,” Herbert Schroeder’s chapter on dreams and natural resource management in my edited 1996 book Among All These Dreamers, the study of politically conservative and liberal people’s dreams and views of the environment in 2008’s American Dreamers, and Dreaming in the World’s Religions, also in 2008, with several stories of the inspirational roles that dreaming play in the nature awareness of indigenous cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania.

The main focus of the talk is the findings I’ve made about the statistical frequency of nature references in dream content, using the word search methods of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb).  For this presentation I created a baseline sample of 2087 dream reports of more than 50 words but less than 300 words in length, from a total of 1232 females and 855 males.  The sample includes children, college students, and adults.  All are American and all are educated and/or computer literate.

Using tools on the SDDb that anyone can access, I studied these 2087 dream reports for references to the following categories of nature content: Weather, fire, air, water, earth, flying, falling, and animals.  (Can you guess which of the four classic elements (fire, air, water, earth) appears most often in dreams?  Can you guess which animals appear most frequently?) After laying out my findings I discuss the technological and political issues involved in bringing the insights of dreaming to bear on waking world environmental problems.

About halfway through the talk, our cat Strauss makes an appearance over my right shoulder.  It was a sunny day by Portland, Oregon standards, and the local birds were very active outside my window.  It was hard not to look at what he was looking at!

 

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Zeo Sleep Data and the Ur-Patterns of Dream Content

So far I’ve done word search analyses on 20 series of dreams from individuals and 9 sets of dreams from large groups of people, a total of more than 18,000 dream reports. It’s too early to say anything definite about the patterns that have emerged from this data. More reports need to be gathered from a wider variety of people, and more improvements need to be made in the SDDb word search template.

Still, a few basic patterns have appeared in nearly all the collections I’ve studied. I’m calling them ur-patterns because they seem to represent deep structural elements of dream content (ur- as in “original” or “primal”). That’s my general hypothesis, anyway, and each new set of dreams is another chance to test and refine it.

Here are the ur-patterns I’ve identified so far:

  1. Of the five senses, sight words are used most often, smell and taste the least.
  2. Of the five major emotions (fear, anger, sadness, confusion, happiness), fear words are used most often.
  3. Of all the categories of cognitive activity, speech words are used most often.
  4. Of the four natural elements, water words are used most often.
  5. Falling words are used more often than flying words.
  6. There are more references to family characters than animal characters, and more to animals than to fantastic beings.
  7. There are more references to friendliness than physical aggression.

Looking at the KB DJ 2009-2010 series with Zeo sleep data (available at google docs), a scan for these patterns finds good but not perfect evidence for each one.

Vision-related words are used more frequently across all the Zeo measurements, with smell and taste words almost entirely absent. Fear words are used more frequently than other emotion words. Speech words are the most used among the cognition categories, and water is the highest among the natural elements, though earth is a consistently high second. The usage of falling words is always higher than, or equal to, flying words.

The family > animals pattern > fantastic beings was not as clear-cut. Fantastic beings always had the lowest word usage, but animals were not always lower than family. When the names of the dreamer’s immediate family were added to the search for characters, the total frequency of family-related words rose higher than the usage of animal words in 15 of the 17 subgroups.

The friendliness > physical aggression pattern was not perfectly evident either. In part this is due to a “false positive” problem in the SDDb template. The word search category for physical aggression includes the word “bit,” which the dreamer used in almost 10% of all the reports as a term meaning “small amount,” not a physical bite. I’ll provide revised numbers once I’ve fixed this. For now, looking at how often the word “bit” is used in each Zeo subgroup, it appears the physical aggression frequencies will drop below the friendliness frequencies in most, but not all, subgroups.

In sum, the ur-patterns appear across virtually all the subgroups of Zeo sleep measurement. No matter what aspect of sleep was measured, the dream reports used the same basic frequencies of words in several major categories. High or low proportions of sleep did not correlate with any major change of dream content, at least at this level of analysis.

In future posts I’ll look at the few variations from these patterns (high physical aggression, animal, flying, and earth references) in relation to the dreamer’s waking life concerns, taking the possibility of metaphorical meaning into account.

I will also look at each of the five types of Zeo data and see if I can identify any particular variations that rise to the level of statistically significant correlation. If any such correlations emerge, they may guide us toward specific areas where a measurable aspect of sleep does interact with basic patterns of dream content.

 

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Children’s Dreams: A Word Search Analysis (part 5)

From numbers to narrative: The SDDb makes it easier than ever to combine quantitative and qualitative modes of dream research.  It’s possible to look only at numbers when studying dreams, just as it’s possible to look only at their narrative qualities.  But now that digital archives provide the ability to do both in a variety of creatively coordinated ways, there’s no reason you have to choose one method or the other.  

In fact, the burden is now on single-method researchers to explain why their investigations would not be enriched by the easy integration of other methods.  For those of us who have long struggled to explain and defend the advantages of multidisciplinary research, this is a satisfying turn of the tables.   

Back to the children’s dreams: After using the word searches to highlight some large-scale patterns in this set of 622 dreams, I’m ready to look into the dream narratives themselves. 

Depending on your original question, you may want to start reading a set of dream narratives at the very outset, or you may want to extend the statistical analysis even further than I have up to this point.  Given my initial interests, I have enough statistical information by now to feel comfortable going ahead and reading selected dream reports with a focus on details that relate to special themes I’m studying in terms of “big dreams.”

I start with death, in part because I’m curious what kids are thinking, feeling, and imagining about the end of life. I’ve also found in past studies that dreams relating to death are often connected to bigger religious/spiritual beliefs in the individual’s life.  Guided by that, I often begin reading my way into a set of dreams through the reports using death-related words.

Here are some of the children’s dreams about death that illustrate recurrent themes found elsewhere in the set, along with my initial notes about what might be going on.

“I remember having a dream that my mom died. I couldn’t recall where I was. All I could think about was who was going to take care of us. I felt scared. I don’t remember how my dream ended.” (boy, 17)

Many of the death-related dreams involved a mortal threat to parents or family members.  This surely reflects a primal fear in child psychology.   

“I had a dream a couple of nights ago about my mom dying and I couldn’t save her. It was very hard to understand why I had a dream like that about my mom.” (girl, 9) 

Here is the same theme, with an extra emphasis on the child’s futile efforts to stop death.  The dream pushes her waking mind to consider something it does not understand but can’t help wondering about.

“My mom and dad were in the house with me and there were ghost versions of my mom and dad. The ghost versions of my parents let me play computer games and do whatever I wanted and they were yelling a lot. They shot the real versions of my parents and then my parents died. I cried but then Jesus showed up with me. This was a vivid nightmare i had when I was 8.” (girl, 15)

There’s more bizarreness in this dream, which may reflect metaphorical dimensions of meaning (hard to explore without the ability to dialogue with the dreamer).  She is scared of the death not of her parents but of their disciplined care for her (their superego function?), which is then replaced by the companionship of Jesus.  What does this say about the adolescent psychology of religion?

“One night when I was about 15 years old I had a dream that I was at home and everyone was sleeping when we got a phone call saying that my grandfather had died. The next morning after I had woken up from the dream I went downstairs and my mother was crying. My grandfather had been put into the hospital after a heart attack but luckily he made it through.” (girl, 15)

Strange things happen in families during times of grave illness and death.  Perhaps the girl subliminally heard the phone call while sleeping and incorporated it into her dream, or perhaps her dreaming mind picked up on the emotional stress of her family through means we do not yet understand and wove it into an adaptive preparation for the crisis in waking life. 

“I played with my dog Lita that died 2 years ago. i took her on a walk to our favorite rock and she licked my face. I was so happy. I wished it was real.” (girl, 10)

There are several visitation dreams in the set, some with family members and some with animals.  It’s a dream of happiness and mourning that spurs waking reflection on the relation of wishes and realities.

“It was about my cat Nick he died over a year ago and I dreamt that he came back to life to hang with me and my family this happened about a month ago it felt so real that when I woke up and saw he was not there I was so sad.” (girl, 11)

A similar kind of visitation dream prompts waking feelings in relation to loss of a pet.  Is this type of dream a cruel reminder that would be better ignored, or is it part of the lifelong psychological process of coping when loved ones die?  Could it also be a dawning insight into the existential fact of mortality for all of us, animals and humans alike?

“I had a dream a few days ago that I was in Japan in the 40’s. I was there when one of the bombs dropped from either Heroshima or Nagasoki. I don’t know which one. But I remember seeing the huge mushroom cloud engulf the city the cloud was right in front of me. I didn’t feel afraid. I felt accepting of whatever death was about to come. I was 15 when I had this dream.” (girl, 15)

A spiritually precocious dream in which the girl imagines herself into the iconic scene of nuclear horror that defined the nightmares of the 20th century.  She describes an unusual emotional calm as she accepts the inevitability of death.  It would be very interesting to know more about this girl!  Her experience resonates with the mystical dream traditions of many cultures, where apocalyptic imagery can herald moments of existential insight and self-transcendence.

Next: What can be learned from these findings

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Children’s Dreams: A Word Search Analysis (part 4)

To summarize the results of the word search analysis so far:

The dreams of this group of 622 children ages 8-18 have more references to family, animals, and fantastic beings, more happiness and sadness, and more flying as compared to the Hall and Van de Castle “norm dreams” of young adults.

As mentioned earlier, it took less than half an hour to search all the dreams for the 40 word categories.  It would have taken perhaps 100 hours to get equally precise results using what used to be a standard method of dream content analysis (i.e., a team of two people reading the dreams, coding them, then comparing results and determining intercoder reliability).

A word search approach doesn’t eliminate the need for people.  It frees them to devote those extra 99 ½ hours to higher-level analyses and intuitive explorations of patterns in the data.

Now that I’ve got this initial orientation to the set of dreams as a whole, I can look in more detail at particular groups.  First up is gender—what are the male-female patterns in this set of dreams?

Of the 622 participants, 228 were boys and 394 are girls.  It’s a girl-biased sample, which for various reasons is fairly common in dream research.

The boys and girls have similar frequencies on perceptions, with the boys using somewhat more intensity words and the girls having more references to color.  The girls have somewhat more fear, and the boys more happiness.  They are mostly the same on cognition and nature words.  The girls have more family and animal references and more friendliness, while the boys have more physical aggression.  The boys have more references to Christianity, the girls more to death.  (see the table below)

In adulthood, women tend to have higher frequencies than men on many dimensions of dream content and recall, which was mostly the case with this group of children, i.e. the girls were higher than the boys on many categories.

The biggest exception is the higher physical aggression among the boys, which fits with previous studies of gender differences in dream content.  If confirmed by other studies of children’s dreams, this finding would indicate that a gender disparity in aggressive dreaming appears very early in psychological development.

More unexpectedly, the boys had a higher frequency of happiness in their dreams.  If the continuity hypothesis applies here, does it mean boys are happier in general than girls?  I’ll have to look at the dream narratives in more detail to see what that might be about.

Part Five:From numbers to narrative

YQ Males YQ Females
(N=228) (N=394)
Perception
Vision 20.6 20.1
Hearing 3.5 4.6
Touch 0.9 3.3
Smell 0 0.5
Taste 0.9 0.5
Intensity 19.7 15.2
Chromatic color 4 5.6
Achromatic color 2.6 5.3
Aesthetic evaluation 11 14.7
Emotion
Fear 17.1 21.1
Anger 2.6 3.3
Sadness 4.4 4.8
Confusion 1.3 2.8
Happiness 12.3 8.1
Cognition
Awareness 2.6 4.6
Speech 12.3 16
Imagination 0 0.8
Planning 0.4 1
Choice 4.4 2.8
Effort 1.8 0.5
Reading/writing 0.9 2.3
Nature
Weather 2.2 2.3
Fire 4 4.8
Air 5.7 3.3
Water 11 9.4
Earth 6.6 5.3
Flying 6.6 4.1
Falling 5.7 7.4
Characters
Family 39 45.4
Animals 18 20.1
Fantastic beings 6.6 5.3
Social Interactions
Friendliness 28.5 37.3
Physical aggression 22.4 16
Sexuality 2.2 1.5
Culture
School 16.7 16
Transportation 12.7 11.9
Technology 7 5.1
Money 4.8 2.5
Christianity 5.7 2.3
Death 4.8 7.6
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Children’s Dreams: A Word Search Analysis (part 2)

Once you’re ready to perform a word search analysis—once you’ve formulated a question, chosen a dream series, and acknowledged the limits of your approach—you have to decide the length of the dream reports you’re going to study.

 If you search for reports of any length, your results will include lots of short reports saying “none,” “no dream,” etc.  You’ll also get answers like “dreamed of a whale,” or “plane crash,” reports so short that it’s hard to work with them. You might also get super-long reports with elaborately detailed descriptions and additional waking commentary, which are also hard to work with.

 Unless you specifically want to study the shortest or longest reports, my advice is to set minimum and maximum word lengths for your searches. 

 I started by setting the searches for dreams between 20 and 300 words.  That gave me 622 reports to study.  After I learn more about the series I’ll look at the shorter and longer dreams and find a way to integrate them into the analysis.

 One factor I’m always thinking about is how to make my findings commensurable with those of other researchers. For example, the Hall and Van de Castle content analysis system, which has been used as a base of comparison by many researchers, focuses on dream reports between 50 and 300 words in length. Eventually I’ll look at that narrower range of reports, but at the beginning of my analysis I want to cast a wider net and include more reports in my initial assessment, hence the lower minimum length.

 So, where to start the word searching? 

 My immediate, admittedly vain concern was to know whether I was right or wrong about a recent prediction I made about this dream series.

 A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about people’s dreams of Harry Potter, drawing on results from another survey on highly memorable dreams I commissioned from Harris Interactive.  In that survey 1003 American adults 18 years and older reported dreams between 20 and 300 words in length, and I found two reports using at least one of the following words:

 “harry potter” voldemort hogwarts hagrid dumbledore malfoy snape hermione draco

At the end of that post I predicted there would be more HP-related dreams in the Harris children’s survey, which I had not yet studied.  Now that I have the children’s survey uploaded into the SDDB, I can quickly put that prediction to the test. 

 Of the 622 dreams between 20 and 300 words in the children’s survey, 6 of the dreams used at least one of these HP-related words, 1% of the total vs. 0.2% in the adult survey.

 It’s not an epic difference, but it’s statistically significant (p=.036), and it makes sense in terms of the different roles the HP novels have played in the waking lives of children vs. adults.      

 OK, I wasn’t completely wrong.  That’s the first thing I wanted to settle.

Part Three:Using the pre-set template of 40 word categories