Evidence map›Paper›PMID 32968499›Full record

ArticleRoyal Society open science2020

Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports.

Alessandro Fogli, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Royal Society open science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
9citing papers in PubMed
1.9field-weighted citation impact, top 14% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

9 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Article
  3. Dream content influences daily spirituality.Frontiers in psychology · 2025
    Article
  4. New strategies for the cognitive science of dreaming.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024
    Review
  5. The influence of intentions on dream content.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2024
    Article
  6. Article
  7. Review
  8. Article
  9. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.

Alessandro FogliComputer Science Department, Università degli studi di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy.
Luca Maria AielloNokia Bell Laboratories, Cambridge, UK.ORCID 0000-0002-0654-2527
Daniele QuerciaNokia Bell Laboratories, Cambridge, UK.
Nokia (United Kingdom) · GBRoma Tre University · IT

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Sleep scientists have shown that dreaming helps people improve their waking lives, and they have done so by developing sophisticated content analysis scales. Dream analysis entails time-consuming manual annotation of text. That is why dream reports have been recently mined with algorithms, and these algorithms focused on identifying emotions. In so doing, researchers have not tackled two main technical challenges though: (i) how to mine aspects of dream reports that research has found important, such as characters and interactions; and (ii) how to do so in a principled way grounded in the literature. To tackle these challenges, we designed a tool that automatically scores dream reports by operationalizing the widely used dream analysis scale by Hall and Van de Castle. We validated the tool's effectiveness on hand-annotated dream reports (the average error is 0.24), scored 24 000 reports-far more than any previous study-and tested what sleep scientists call the 'continuity hypothesis' at this unprecedented scale: we found supporting evidence that dreams are a continuation of what happens in everyday life. Our results suggest that it is possible to quantify important aspects of dreams, making it possible to build technologies that bridge the current gap between real life and dreaming.

Indexed as

digital healthdreamsHall–Van de CastleNLPsocial computing

Identifiers

PMID32968499
PMCPMC7481704
OpenAlexW3080442798

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.