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Today, Onur Varol and Filippo Menczer at Indiana University in Bloomington, use network science to study the similarities between dreams reported in English, Chinese and Arabic—research that is funded in part by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

They say their results provide a new window into the cultural links between dreams experienced by people in different parts of the world. What’s more, the work clearly back Hall’s cognitive theory.

Network science has changed the way researchers study a wide range of disparate subjects. The networks formed by the web of links between friends and contacts have become well-known thanks to the explosive emergence of social networking sites.
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Abstract, Connecting Dream Networks Across Cultures Wrote:Many species dream, yet there remain many open research questions in the study of dreams. The symbolism of dreams and their interpretation is present in cultures throughout history. Analysis of online data sources for dream interpretation using network science leads to understanding symbolism in dreams and their associated meaning. In this study, we introduce dream interpretation networks for English, Chinese and Arabic that represent different cultures from various parts of the world. We analyze communities in these networks, finding that symbols within a community are semantically related. The central nodes in communities give insight about cultures and symbols in dreams. The community structure of different networks highlights cultural similarities and differences. Interconnections between different networks are also identified by translating symbols from different languages into English. Structural correlations across networks point out relationships between cultures. Similarities between network communities are also investigated by analysis of sentiment in symbol interpretations. We find that interpretations within a community tend to have similar sentiment. Furthermore, we cluster communities based on their sentiment, yielding three main categories of positive, negative, and neutral dream symbols.