The content and structure of dreams are coupled to affect

Variation in dream affect (valence and arousal) is associated with changes in topical content and semantic structure. Positively valenced dreams exhibit more coherent, structured, and linear narratives, while negatively valenced dreams have more narrative loops and dominant topics. High arousal dreams are structurally dominated by few high arousal topics and incoherent topical connections, whereas low arousal dreams contain more loops. These findings suggest that affective processes are associated with both the content and structure of dreams. The study combined word embedding, topic modeling, and network analysis on over 18,000 dream reports from the DreamBank corpus, using Discourse Atom Topic Modeling to represent latent themes as a sparse dictionary of topics and identify their affective associations.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Dreams offer a unique window into the cognitive and affective dynamics of the sleeping and the waking mind. Recent quantitative linguistic approaches have shown promise in obtaining corpus-level measures of dream sentiment and topic occurrence. However, it is currently unclear how the affective content of individual dreams relates to their semantic content and structure. Here, we combine word embedding, topic modeling, and network analysis to investigate this relationship. By applying Discourse Atom Topic Modeling (DATM) to the DreamBank corpus of >18K dream reports, we represent the latent themes arising within dreams as a sparse dictionary of topics and identify the affective associations of those topics. We show that variation in dream affect (valence and arousal) is associated with changes in topical content. By representing each dream report as a network of topics, we demonstrate that the affective content of dreams is also coupled to semantic structure. Specifically, positively valenced dreams exhibit more coherent, structured, and linear narratives, whilst negatively valenced dreams have more narrative loops and dominant topics. Additionally, topic networks of high arousal dreams are structurally dominated by few high arousal topics and incoherent topical connections, whereas low arousal dreams contain more loops. These findings suggest that affective processes are associated with both the content and structure of dreams. Our approach showcases the potential of integrating natural language processing and network analysis with psychology to elucidate the interplay of affect, cognition and narrative in dreams. This methodology has broad applications for the study of narrated experience and psychiatric symptomatology.