Dream contents of early adolescents, adolescents, and young adults: A cluster analysis with T-LAB

A text analysis of dreams and waking-life narratives let us detect typical dream contents. The sample is composed of 1,000 subjects, from early adolescents to young adults, including males and females. For each subject, we collected a dream and a waking-life episode according to "the most recent dream" (Hartmann, Elkin, & Garg, 1991) and "a recent episode" methodology (Maggiolini, Cagnin, Crippa, Persico, & Rizzi, 2010). Through a word analysis, we were able to identify the typical narratives of dreams and episodes. We identified 5 clusters of dreams: dreams of (a) fear and escape, (b) school, (c) competition and sport, (d) attack, and (e) falling and spatial disorientation. Instead, regarding episodes, T-LAB identified 5 clusters: episodes of (a) fun with friends, (b) competition and success, (c) significant emotions, (d) family relationships, and (e) accidents and diseases. This research shows a way of empirically finding typical dreams, without starting from an arbitrary list. Typical dreams are not only a description of similar contents in different dreams, but those contents that are typical of dreams compared with waking narratives.