In your wildest dreams: the language and psychological features of dreams

In this paper, we provide the first quantified exploration of the structure of the language of dreams, their linguistic style and emotional content. We present a collection of digital dream logs as a viable corpus for the growing study of mental health through the lens of language, complementary to the work done examining more traditional social media. This paper is largely exploratory in nature to lay the groundwork for subsequent research in mental health, rather than optimizing a particular text classification task.

[1]  G. Hall,et al.  The Interpretation of Dreams , 1914, Nature.

[2]  C. Hall,et al.  The content analysis of dreams , 1966 .

[3]  R. Cartwright,et al.  Broken dreams: a study of the effects of divorce and depression on dream content. , 1984, Psychiatry.

[4]  J. Hobson,et al.  Dream bizarreness and the activation-synthesis hypothesis. , 1987, Human neurobiology.

[5]  George Lakoff,et al.  How metaphor structures dreams: The theory of conceptual metaphor applied to dream analysis. , 1993 .

[6]  J. Allan Hobson,et al.  Emotion Profiles in the Dreams of Men and Women , 1994, Consciousness and Cognition.

[7]  Michael Schredl,et al.  Emotions in Diary Dreams , 1998, Consciousness and Cognition.

[8]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  The Secret Life of Pronouns , 2003, Psychological science.

[9]  J. Mccrone,et al.  Dreams , 1920, The Lancet Neurology.

[10]  Michael I. Jordan,et al.  Latent Dirichlet Allocation , 2001, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[11]  Murray L. Wax,et al.  Dream sharing as social practice. , 2004 .

[12]  Thomas E Joiner,et al.  Suicidality and sleep disturbances. , 2005, Sleep.

[13]  R. Cartwright,et al.  Relation of dreams to waking concerns , 2006, Psychiatry Research.

[14]  Peter D. Turney,et al.  Automatic Dream Sentiment Analysis , 2006 .

[15]  M. Rudd,et al.  Fluid Vulnerability Theory: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding the Process of Acute and Chronic Suicide Risk. , 2006 .

[16]  Cindy K. Chung,et al.  The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2007 , 2007 .

[17]  Cindy K. Chung,et al.  The Psychological Functions of Function Words , 2007 .

[18]  Orsola Gambini,et al.  The dream as a model for psychosis: an experimental approach using bizarreness as a cognitive marker. , 2007, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[19]  R. Cartwright,et al.  The Contribution of the Psychology of Sleep and Dreaming to Understanding Sleep-Disordered Patients , 2008 .

[20]  Carey K. Morewedge,et al.  When dreaming is believing: the (motivated) interpretation of dreams. , 2009, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[21]  Celestine Okorome Mume,et al.  Nightmare in schizophrenic and depressed patients , 2009 .

[22]  Kirill Kireyev Applications of Topics Models to Analysis of Disaster-Related Twitter Data , 2009 .

[23]  M. Schredl Dream content analysis: Basic principles , 2010 .

[24]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[25]  K. Klein,et al.  Coherence and Narrative Structure in Personal Accounts of Stressful Experiences , 2010 .

[26]  Jiawei Han,et al.  Geographical topic discovery and comparison , 2011, WWW.

[27]  A. Boals,et al.  Coping with Stressful Events: Use of Cognitive Words in Stressful Narratives and the Meaning-Making Process , 2011 .

[28]  Michael Schredl,et al.  Sleep and dreaming in patients with borderline personality disorder: A polysomnographic study , 2012, Psychiatry Research.

[29]  David S. Ebert,et al.  Spatiotemporal social media analytics for abnormal event detection and examination using seasonal-trend decomposition , 2012, 2012 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST).

[30]  B Phillips,et al.  History of the Study of Dreams , 2012 .

[31]  Stuart Adam Battersby,et al.  Experimenting with Distant Supervision for Emotion Classification , 2012, EACL.

[32]  Lindsay T. Graham,et al.  A Review of Facebook Research in the Social Sciences , 2012, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[33]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Social media as a measurement tool of depression in populations , 2013, WebSci.

[34]  Saif Mohammad,et al.  CROWDSOURCING A WORD–EMOTION ASSOCIATION LEXICON , 2013, Comput. Intell..

[35]  Jaap Lancee,et al.  Prevalence of Nightmare Disorder in Psychiatric Outpatients , 2013, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

[36]  James H Fowler,et al.  Friendship and natural selection , 2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[37]  Michael Schredl,et al.  Continuity between waking life and dreams of psychiatric patients: A review and discussion of the implications for dream research , 2014 .

[38]  Cindy K. Chung,et al.  When Small Words Foretell Academic Success: The Case of College Admissions Essays , 2014, PloS one.

[39]  Tiina Virta,et al.  I know how you felt last night, or do I? Self- and external ratings of emotions in REM sleep dreams , 2014, Consciousness and Cognition.

[40]  Mark Dredze,et al.  Quantifying Mental Health Signals in Twitter , 2014, CLPsych@ACL.

[41]  Mark Dredze,et al.  From ADHD to SAD: Analyzing the Language of Mental Health on Twitter through Self-Reported Diagnoses , 2015, CLPsych@HLT-NAACL.

[42]  Ryan L. Boyd,et al.  The Development and Psychometric Properties of LIWC2015 , 2015 .

[43]  Glen Coppersmith,et al.  Quantifying the Language of Schizophrenia in Social Media , 2015, CLPsych@HLT-NAACL.

[44]  Glen Coppersmith,et al.  Exploratory Analysis of Social Media Prior to a Suicide Attempt , 2016, CLPsych@HLT-NAACL.

[45]  A. Germain,et al.  Nightmares and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) , 2016, Current Sleep Medicine Reports.

[46]  Joshua J. LaRocque,et al.  The neural correlates of dreaming , 2014, Nature Neuroscience.

[47]  Antal van den Bosch,et al.  Unraveling reported dreams with text analytics , 2016, Digit. Humanit. Q..