Dreams are recorded in many different ways. Paintings, dancing, collages, poetry and of course the dream journal where a dream narrative is our attempt to translate our wildly vivid and densely packed dreams into words. Dreams translated into Dream Narratives is literature, or at the very least, written language. As such, it conforms to the useful conventions and concepts used in linguistics when studying a body of text.

Language is fluid, flexible and constantly changing. How do you pin those words (lexical units) down? It's a bit like the chaos theory. The more you look, the more there is to see. Now that we have computers with speed, power and large storage capacities, we have the tools needed to explore dream narratives from many different angles, which we could not do with hand written journals or series.

But how do you categorize thousands of words. There are of course as many different ways as there are dreamers wanting to categorize. Here is how I chose to do it for DreamSpinner.

Major premises I had when creating DreamSpinner's categories:

I began by "melting down" my 3,000 dreams into an alphabetical list of all the words I used. I assumed that I would have a sufficient enough vocabulary to encompass the most frequently used words. Turns out that is correct. Statistical prediction indicates the first 15 words on a frequency count list will account for 25 percent of the text sample. The first one hundred words will account for 60 percent; and the first one thousand is used in 85 percent of the sample. Checking the most frequently used words is like taking a blood test. Is the white blood cell count up or down from the norm? This is valuable information. However, there are many one time usage words that are individualistically unique. Psycholinguistics and Stylolinguistics learn much through studying the one time usage words.

So I now had a list of 10,000 words. I had to determine what is a word. Is it the root word, or is each syntax variation of a word a separate word. Is a different meaning of the same word a separate word. Is a phrase a "word"? I decided to work with the material as root words, incorporating the syntax variations under the one root word. If the word had more than one meaning, as most did, then I would give a separate root word connection for each different meaning. I used the Parts of Speech categories, keeping verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs separated.

Example: Hit = Take a toke off a marijuana cigarette. (Category: Street drugs, sub category of medicine.)
Hit = Physically strike someone with your body.(Category: Motion and if aggressive, Category: Social Interaction, then sub-category Aggressive.)
Hit = Strike a baseball with a bat. (Categories: Games, Motion, Recreation Related)
Hit = A popular song at the "top" of the charts. (Category: Music, Up)
(There are more, of course.)

Now I wanted to hook each root word to at least one category. DreamSpinner itself was born of ideas inspired by Calvin S Hall's "The Meaning of Dreams". I found Bill Domhoff's and Adam Schneider's Quantitative Analysis of Dreams Web page and immediately began trying to match my word list from my dreams into the categories the Hall/Van de Castle coding system had spent years developing. I certainly couldn't come up with anything better.

I ran into a problem though. A great many of my words simply did not fit under the Hall/Van de Castle categories. I was using every word in my dream narrative. So I had to start inventing, melding, and stretching categories beyond what the Hall/Van de Castle system indicated. Many of the Hall/Van de Castle categories focused on concrete words, like names of objects and action verbs. Many of my words were abstract, prepositional or connecting in nature. I researched linguistic materials for category ideas and managed to get all my root words under some category or other.

By this time DreamSpinner had progressed to the place where I could begin linking each word in the dream to the specific root word which is then hooked to one or more categories. Some categories weren't working. Many words had essentially the same meaning whether used as a verb, noun or adjective. So we elected to toss out the differentiation in Parts of Speech. Categories became morphed, renamed, cut up into pieces, or blended together until the mix met the actual data experience of my dreams.

In order to create the category system I now have, I researched:

This brings us to the end of the Abstract reprint. Following the references, is the next step. Metaphors!! Are they Universal?

Using the process I described above in the abstract, I created a giant dictionary which is organized in a thesaurus like category system. I developed the capability of not just searching single words (as metaphors) but related words together. Dream Dictionaries we are used to seeing give a single word and try to make a general statement about the possible meaning of that word. I have expanded the concept of metaphor because I believe that metaphor is our mother tongue. That's how we think (check out the reference to George Lakoff's books.) Therefore, my philosophy is that ALL words used in a Dream narrative are metaphors.

Water, for example is considered a universal metaphor. In my view, it is not enough to examine the metaphor "water". The water is a specific type of water (lake, ocean, puddle, drinking water, mud, tears) and the actions and feelings about the water is critical to the possible personal interpretation of what water means in MY dream. Is it tidal waves or calm water? What colors are involved. What happens on or in or near the water? DreamSpinner, because of the unique category system and the linking process can pull up a dream set where all dreams have lakes in them, and only those lake dreams with agitated water is called up. The frequency count that comes up for that dream set will tell me hundreds of fascinating facts. Who is most frequently found in those dreams? Are there more or less animals involved in those dreams? What is the most frequent emotion? Armed with this information, I can formulate what the metaphor water (in relation to lakes and agitated water) means specifically for me.

Doing my own dreams, I learned that most of my lake dreams had something sinister and scary lurking under the surface of the lake. There is a high incidence of strangers. The emotions are most commonly terror and fear. What a gift that is to see that recurring pattern that I wasn't even looking for.

Now I want to be clear about my bias about metaphors NOT being universal except in a very general sense. Because MY lake dreams indicate that pattern, it does not mean YOUR lake dreams mean that at all. Only after collecting dreams from many people and DreamLinking them will I have the ability to compare and contrast and make any formal statement about "Lake" dreams, or any other metaphors I examine.

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