to Dream - Tracking Dream Elements

Tracking elements of the dream

Did you notice the character, location and emotion lists in Alchera? These are based on the work of dream researcher Hall. New users of dream journaling software usually like to keep account of dream elements like characters but sometimes question why they should be interested in the generated charts or where they can find more information about these scales. This article supplies some background information.

Quantitative analysis

When talking about dreams people usually tend to think about dream interpretation. Unfortunately if you want to do scientific dream research, dream interpretation is much too subjective, not in the least because dream symbols can be highly personal. Scientific research prefers to work with numbers and statistics in order to do quantitative analysis. This is were the Hall scales come in. Basically these scales provive a very easy to understand method to classify - amongs others - characters, locations, objects and social interactions.

When using a number of dreams, quantitative analysis can be used for a kind of dream interpretation. Somebody who dreams of people fighting each other more than the average dreamer may have some kind of mental or physical problem, especially if scores at other scales differ from the averages also. Of course, you need to be very careful not to jump to conclusions here. But at least using scales will give more objective results than symbol interpretation. Not that you would care where it concerns your own dreams, but for scientific dream research objectivity is important.

Using scales will also make it easier to find changes in dreams of a particular dreamer during longer periods. You could also do this by indexing important symbols or themes, but it will never give as much information as a set of scores on the Hall scales. If you have entered more than one year of dreams in Alchera, try the context menu of the Hall charts windows. It will let you choose which year you want to see represented in the charts.

More information

More information can be found in Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle. An explanation of the Hall scales is only a small part of this book, but if you're seriously interested in dreaming you want to have a look at this title anyway.

On the internet you should take a look at the quantitative analysis site of Adam Schneider and G. William Domhoff.