Dreams

I will start relating my dream cycle with the stories that my brain creates every night. Is anyone else interested in tracking this down?

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Can you say a little more about what you mean? I’ve tracked my dreams in the past, mainly just whether I remember dreaming and some notes about the content of the dreams and possible connections with my waking thoughts. Is that what you plan to do?

I hope you write your dream stories into something like evernote and then do some statistical analysis of the content and topics. Maybe even compare it to your journal entries. Do some social network analysis of the people who show up in your dreams and real life using a program like gephi.

Probably too much, but anywho. Yes, I’d love to see a quantified selfer present some dream analysis. Regardless of what the project entails.

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Chat GPT has prompt entry limits but it doesn’t seem implausible that I could use some service to extract dream descriptions and discussions from my fairly voluminous journal entries, or to identify people and place descriptions from dream related entries.

I recorded my dreams every night for a few years. To achieve this, I developed the habit of always sleeping with something nearby to write on. I’d wake up and try remembering the dreams before opening my eyes. I’d then go straight to the pen and paper to record them. This was crucial because it’s easy to miss important parts of a dream before writing it down due to changing body position or sensory stimuli. Once a dream is written down, it’s more or less safe. Even 15 years later, I remember when I read. I’ve never tracked my dreams using technology as my diaries predate the smartphone era. Avoiding stimuli that could disturb concentration seems delicate, but probably doable.

In Jung’s analytical psychology, dreams are portraits of a larger image that is being built up each night, so seeing them connect is the interesting part. We see the big picture when we have a sizable inventory of past dreams. In my experience, I saw various threads of deeply connected dreams that took place months or years apart, some of which would encompass up to 6-7 dreams, if I remember correctly. Most of these connections would happen while re-reading my notes. Maybe technology could aid in making new connections and visualizing them somehow. These days you could even try to think of a prompt and have a bot come up with a drawing of your dreascapes.

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Long term dream analysis is one of the interesting things that a language model might help with. My practice was to review the dream notes the next morning or within a few days and use them as prompts for my journal. Typically I could understand something of the narrative commentary that my dreams seemed to be making on my waking thoughts. The practical interpretive methods described by Freud in Interpretation of Dreams were very useful: there were often traces of daily events that had a surprising emotional resonance in the distorted form they took in the dream, and when I asked myself where the emotion came from I would pick up on a connection with another train of thought related to long term, deeply felt aspirations and conflicts, often linked to events in the past. By bringing this narrative link into consciousness I found myself better able to notice my emotional responses to ordinary daily events, which made my ordinary experience more interesting and also helped me respond more flexibly. The dream journaling had a strong effect. For me it was interesting to note that although I started out (many years ago) being an enthusiast for Freudian theory, my increasing doubts and ultimate skepticism about the model of consciousness didn’t seem to have any negative effect on the practical use of the dream interpretation technique, which stopped having theoretical interest but continued because it was a great help to me. However, now, when I look back on my dream reports, they are very difficult to understand except in relation to the interpretation that was made at the time. I do wonder if there are semantic themes that would give me a different perspective. I never found the work of Calvin Hall very useful personally, even though it is fascinating academically, but perhaps with the help of language models this could be more personally relevant.

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I don’t know if this project is still ongoing, but I think it’s quite interesting! Some years ago, I use to write down on my laptop (almost) all of my dream (I think I did it with some consistence for at least one and a half year). I also wrote down the main “events” or the strongest emotions of the previous day to see if there were some correlations.
I never did an analysis though. I didn’t consider current language model, but I think it would be interesting to do an analysis now.

Does somebody know if there are some interesting scientific studies about how using dream analysis in everyday life?
How is your project going?