For five individuals, a social network was constructed from a series of his or her dreams. Three important network measures were calculated for each network: transitivity, assortativity, and giant component proportion. These were monotonically related; over the five networks as transitivity increased, assortativity increased and giant component proportion decreased. The relations indicate that characters appear in dreams systematically. Systematicity likely arises from the dreamer's memory of people and their relations, which is from the dreamer's cognitive social network. But the dream social network is not a copy of the cognitive social network. Waking life social networks tend to have positive assortativity; that is, people tend to be connected to others with similar connectivity. Instead, in our sample of dream social networks assortativity is more often negative or near 0, as in online social networks. We show that if characters appear via a random walk, negative assortativity can result, particularly if the random walk is biased as suggested by remote associations.

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Continuity between entities in dreams and those in waking life arises from memory. In broad terms, the people a dreamer knows are associated in the dreamer's memory, and during dreaming people associated in memory tend to occur together in dreams. To obtain details, we gave a dreamer a questionnaire about whether pairs of major people know each other in waking life, and if so, how emotionally close they are. The greater the emotional closeness of a pair, the more likely the pair was to occur in a dream together. The more often a pair co-occurred in a dream, the more likely the pair was to know each other in waking life. In waking life, relationships with kin decay more slowly than relationships with others. A consequence would be that over time, as new friends replace the old, kin tend to become associated with many people. We found that in waking life, those who knew the most others were family members. People who occurred with the most other people in dreams were also family members. As relationships decay over time, memory for the relationships degrades as well. To maintain memories, we propose that associations between people in memory are refreshed when people are dreamed about together.

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