A protocol for eliciting dream associations oriented to the recognition of episodic dream sources.

Abstract

The use of associations with dream reports, although being diffused and greatly useful in psychotherapy, has so far played a limited role in dream research not directly finalized to therapy. On the other hand, it is difficult to investigate a basic property of dreaming, that of establishing connections, without searching for information beyond the dream report: indeed, the simplest and likely most effective way of obtaining this information consists in asking the dreamer for associations. Well-defined and rigorous methods are however necessary for research approaches which aim to achieve a better understanding of how the dreaming mind operates by processing and combining the dreamer's memory sources: we propose an experimental protocol ("Associations for Dream Reports Protocol") aiming to give a contribution in this direction. According to this protocol, the dreamer completes a form which asks him or her to describe a recent dream, to name key words or short phrases that characterize the dream, and, for each word or phrase, to provide associations that allow possible episodic sources, definite in space and time, to be identified. To be more effective, the method takes advantage of the presence of a researcher while the dreamer is completing the form: the terms of the interaction between dreamer and researcher are subjected to marked restrictions and rigorously defined. The protocol was applied to a homogeneous group of participants; the observed link patterns presented interesting phenomena, whose occurrence presented high statistical significance.

Morning naps architecture and mentation recall complexity

“…This approach, unlike a more structured questionnaire, was preferred to replicate a more naturalistic approach to the investigation of nap mentation. The participants were also asked to briefly provide episodic associations with the mentation items that emerged as most significant (for details of the association method, see Barcaro et al, 2016). The results of these memory associations are not reported here.…”

A Hypothesis About Parallelism vs. Seriality in Dreams

“…To illustrate our point of view we briefly discuss three examples. The rationale for the analysis of dreams consists in observing that (Barcaro et al, 2016):…”

“…Analyses similar to those carried out for the examples can be performed considering many other dreams that have been reported in the literature, which offers a large amount of dream reports together with associations (see, e.g., Delaney, 1993; Barcaro et al, 2016).…”

“…The memory sources of a dream generally refer to recent or remote events in the dreamer's life, including significant “present concerns.” The sources exhibit a network pattern that can qualitatively and quantitatively be described by an appropriate graph representation (Barcaro and Carboncini, 2018). To tackle the issue of how a serial output is obtained as a result of a distributed process, our reflections rely on four phenomena that characterize the network pattern (Barcaro et al, 2016):…”