The Interwoven Sources of Dreams

The subject of this book is the study of dreaming from a specific point of view, one that provides useful and enlightening results: the analysis of the complex patterns of links among the memory sources of dreams. The significance of these patterns is logical and emotional at the same time. This approach is interdisciplinary: it directly involves the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, linguistics, computer science, mathematics (graph theory), history of psychology, literature, and motion pictures. However, no specific advanced expertise in any of these fields is required for understanding the various contents.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I is dedicated to theories and methodologies regarding dream functions and dream interpretations: these theories and methodologies are considered in the perspective of their implications for the study of links among dream sources. Some meaningful examples of dreams, or metaphors or dreams, that can be found in poetry or motion pictures, are also considered. Part II describes a method for the identification of link patterns that is based on a linguistic and partially automatic analysis of verbal data consisting of dream reports and associations provided by the dreamer. This method is rigorously defined, efficacious, and not difficult to apply. It allows obtaining, through the introduction of heuristic rules, plausible explanations for significant aspects of a dream. Finally, part III shows how this method can be concretely applied to a number of important dreams reported in the literature.