The language people use to describe their inner experiences arising during sleep and wakefulness provides a window into the mind. Dreams and unguided waking thought, here referred to as mind wandering, are thought to reflect unique individual differences and mental health. Here we use graph theory to analyse a large dataset of dream (n = 1434) and mind wandering (n = 1619) reports from 176 individuals.
We found that dream reports have a more complex structure, while mind-wandering reports have fewer word repetitions and are more verbose, with essential transition points in the structure of the texts. Dream reports, which rely on recall over longer periods of time, tend to have more word repetitions, local cliques, and global integration, comparatively indicating a small world structure. Capitalising on a repeated measures design, we found that the structure of dream and mind-wandering reports contains individual-specific information.
Finally, we observed that word centrality (i.e., lower lexical diversity) in dream and mind-wandering reports is predictive of depression and anxiety symptoms, respectively. Thus, this approach is sensitive to individual differences, quantitatively differentiates reports of two different states of consciousness, and seems promising for cost-effective analyses of large naturalistically occurring qualitative datasets. This work was supported by research grants from the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Emil Aaltonen Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (to Pilleriin Sikka), the Cambridge ESRC Impact Acceleration for the “MIND Research Study–Dreams and mind wandering during the pandemic” (to Alejandro Ezquerro-Nassar and Tristan A.
Bekinschtein), the Bial Foundation grant 312/18 (to Tristan Bekinschtein), and the Australian Research Council (to Jennifer Windt). We would also like to thank the participants who provided the data for this study and Lavazza for their continuous support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Open access funding provided by University of Skövde. These authors jointly supervised this work: Natália Bezerra Mota, Tristan Andres Bekinschtein. Consciousness and Cognition lab, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Peter Coppola, Alejandro Ezquerro-Nassar & Tristan Andres Bekinschtein Neuropsychology Service, Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Lincoln, UK Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, and Turku Brain and Mind Center, University of Turku, Turku, Finland Pilleriin Sikka, Katja Valli, Jarno Tuominen, Antti Revonsuo, Ville Loukola & Nanna Strid Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Skövde, Skövde, Sweden Pilleriin Sikka, Antti Revonsuo & Nanna Strid Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Katja Valli, Manuela Kirberg & Jennifer Windt Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Centre for Brain and Behaviour, Department of Psychology, School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK Institute of Psychiatry at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – IPUB/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, BR, Brazil Research Department at Mobile Brain, Rio de Janeiro, BR, Brazil Human Experience Dynamics Ltd, London, UK T.A.B. is Co-founder of Human Experience Dynamics, Ltd.
N.B.M. is the chief of science at Mobile Brain, an EduTech startup. N.B.M. has been a consultant to Boehringer Ingelheim and is and has shares in Motrix, another EduTech startup. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
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