From the supernatural to the subconscious, every era in human history has had the opportunity to answer the enigma of what dreams mean. Now a team of scientists from the UK and Italy have sought to answer this question by creating an AI tool to analyze tens of thousands of dream reports, the largest dream analysis study to date.
The goal: to test what psychologists call the “continuity hypothesis” of dreams, which states that dreams are an extension of the life of a waking person.
Do dreams reflect reality?
The powerful algorithm has concluded that … yes. There are no hidden meanings in them.
The tool automatically scored the dream reports, greatly speeding up what is normally a slow and time-consuming manual process; scoring dreams based on a wide variety of factors, such as which characters appear and how they interact with each other . Such systems have led many professionals to conclude that dreams are nothing more than a continuation of our daily lives.
However, other research has also shown the opposite: that stressful dreams reduce stress throughout the day, for example. One of the best known sleep systems developed for creating dream reports is the Hall and Van de Castle system ; a dream coding system that allows standardized assessments and is quite complex. Use detailed rules to recognize and measure 10 elements within dreams, such as characters, emotions, activities, or social interactions.
Confirmed continuity hypothesis
The researchers based the new tool on the Hall and Van de Castle system. They validated their results by running AI on more than 24,000 dream reports (stories stored in DreamBank, a public database compiled from dream studies of people who were between 7 and 74 years old at the time of the experience, from 1910 to 2017) and compared what it concluded with the valuations that had been made manually. They found that it had an error rate of only 0.24%, thus confirming the continuity hypothesis.
“We discovered that most of the dream stories were in fact a continuation of what our dreamers would probably experience in real life ,” explain the researchers in the journal Royal Society Open Science , which collects the study.
In the future, “our tool could lead to automatic diagnostic or prognostic indicators for mental health in general,” they conclude.
Among the conclusions of the experts, the following stood out:
- Men generally had more violent dreams than women
- Dreams changed as people got older. A teenager dreamed more of negative social interactions and confrontation than he dreamed of later.
- War veterans dreamed of violence and aggression far more often than those without a military background.
- Blind people, who often depend on others to help them in their daily lives, had the friendliest and least violent dreams.
- Blind people tended to dream of imaginary characters.
Referencia: Alessandro Fogli et al. Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports, Royal Society Open Science (2020). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.192080
