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 and 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. This research indicates a way of detecting typical dreams, not only as a description of similar contents, starting from arbitrary lists, but empirically finding just those contents that are typical of dreams compared with waking narratives.