Social Networks
of Characters in Dreams
Richard Schweickert, PhD,
is Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, in
the USA. He has developed mathematical models of human information
processing and of short-term memory. He recently finished a term
as Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.
Abstract
The well known small world
phenomenon is that two randomly chosen people are likely to have a
short path of acquaintances linking them (Milgram, 1967). Many
social networks have another property, called clustering: If a
person knows two people, those two people are likely to know each
other (Watts & Strogratz, ). A social network can be formed for
characters in dreams. Consider two characters affiliated if they
are in a dream together. (More fine grained ways of judging
whether two characters are socially related are possible, but this
one has the advantage of simplicity.) Characters in dream reports
of two individuals were coded, with a modified Hall-Van de Castle
(1966) system. The result is that characters in dreams have a
social network with properties of waking social networks, in
particular, short paths linking characters and high clustering. A
finding from social network research may be relevant to dreaming.
Weak ties are important in social networks, for example, the most
useful tips in finding a job come from acquaintances rather than
close friends (Granovetter, 1973). It may be that dreaming helps
maintain weak associations in memory.
References
Granovetter, M. (1973). The
strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 81,
12387-1303.
Milgram, S. (1967). The small
world problem. Psychology Today, 22, 61-67.
Hall, C. S., & Van de Castle, R.
(1966). The content analysis of dreams. NY:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H.
(1998). Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature,
393, 440-442.
