Most of the PKM and data science tools are used to analyze our conscious thoughts. However, our subconscious plays a much more important role in our lives, so it would be highly important to learn to analyze it using all the amazing tools that we have at our disposal.
In this article, we demonstrate how you can use InfraNodus tool for self-reflection in order to analyze your dreams.
The approach is based on importing (or logging) your dreams into InfraNodus and then using its advanced text network analysis and visualization engine to reveal recurring ideas, topics, semantic patterns, and images that tend to come up in your dreams. You can then use the built-in GPT AI to generate questions and ideas in relation to those patterns and to rewire them in new ways. Finally, we also demonstrate how you can detect the structural gaps in your dreams in order to identify some parts of your subconscious that are not yet connected and building new bridges between them.
Video Tutorial
Step-by-Step Dream Analysis and Interpretation Workflow
The workflow below proposes a step-by-step dream analysis and interpretation workflow.
1. Logging and Importing Your Dreams
First, you need to log your dreams to have some data to start with. This can be done using a pen and a paper, a notes app on your phone, or any dream journaling app. It is recommended to do that right after you wake up. It is also helpful to write in the present tense, as if the dream is still happening, to improve recall.
You can also use InfraNodus to log your dreams. In order to do that, simply create a new text graph and write your dream impressions there. You can then combine those graphs into one when you perform analysis. You can also import all the dreams into the same graph if you don't need dream-by-dream analysis.
2. Revealing Recurring Dreaming Patterns: Words as a Network
The next step is to visualize the dream content and to reveal recurrent patterns within. This can be done using the Menu > Top Concepts Synthesis feature, which shows all your graphs at once. If you have some other graphs in your account, you can also combine them manually by using the graph comparison feature. Simply choose the "Combine" option to merge several graphs in one.
As a result, you will get something like this:
The graph uses network analysis metrics to reveal the most influential terms and topical clusters. The nodes represent the concepts that you use in your dreams, while the connections represent their co-occurrences. For example, if you used "driving" and "road" in the same context often, they will be closer to each other on the graph and have the same color. The bigger nodes on the graph have a bigger betweenness centrality measure, while the nodes that tend to co-occur together more often have the same color. Think of it as a social network of words that like to "hang out" together in your dreams. This representation allows us to apply social network measures and reveal the groups and the most influential words in this particular discourse of our dreams.
In our example, we can see that the most prominent concepts (shown bigger on the visualization and also highlighted in the Analytics panel) are:
- "people",
- "house"
- "start"
- "time"
- "place"
These are the main protagonists of my dreams: places and people. Note, these are not necessarily the most frequently used concepts, but the concepts that connect the different ideas in my dreams most often. There is a difference because we use betweenness centrality measure to calculate the importance of concepts and this is different from frequency although it does correlate with it.
We can also see that the main topical clusters (shown with distinct colors on the visualization and in the Analytics panel) are:
- house place room
- stay found guy
- thought good felt
- father woman tell
3. Using GPT-3 AI to Interpret Dreams
We can also use built-in GPT-3 AI to interpret the topical clusters identified in the previous section. This will provide us an overview of the main topics that occur in our dreams and open a different perspective on our dreaming patterns:
As you can see, I'm dreaming about:
• House and spaces
• Decision-making
• Creative expression
• Human interaction
This feedback could indicate some important patterns that tend to come up in my subconscious. I could ask myself why they are so prevalent in my dreams: does it mean that there is a certain concern regarding finding a house or having a fixed place to live, for example?
All this is very useful information, because I get insights about my subconscious dreaming and what my unconscious is trying to deal with while I'm in the state of sleep. Moveover, being aware of our dream patterns makes it more likely that I'm going to recognize them again while I'm dreaming, increasing the chances of a lucid dream.
Now that articicial intelligence identified recurrent topics in my subsconscious, let's move one step deeper and see what is hiding underneath.
4. Revealing the Underlying Patterns in Dreams
Now that we analyzed the surface structure of our dream-subconscious, we can dive into the deep structure: the underlying ideas and images contained in our dreams.
In order to do that, we can select the most prominent concepts on the graph and temporarily hide them. This can also be done using the Analytics > Reveal Underlying Ideas function.
We can now see more precise topics coming up that allow us to better understand the nuance of our dream imagery:
• Lake beauty
• Room place
• Waiting end
• Road driving
We can see that a lot of beautiful things, for instance, occur when we're dreaming about lakes. This could not only be interpreted as a generally healthy state of the subconscious mind but also serve as a sign that it might make sense to spend more time and nature, particularly at lakes because our subconscious associates it with good experiences.
5. Dream Interpretation Using GPT-3 AI
When we find some concepts or ideas that seem interesting to us, we can select them on the graph and use built in GPT-3 AI to generate a question or an idea that would encourage us to ponder about this particular combination of concepts.
In order to do that, just click on a few nodes that seem interesting to you personally on the graph, then go to the Analytics > Relations panel and explore all the other terms that are connected to it. Then, use the built-in GPT AI functions to generate summaries that contain those concepts or to develop them further.
What you're doing practically here is connecting your subconscious to all the existing human knowledge that AI represents (because this is how GPT AI works: it trains on all the texts that have ever been written and then learns to generate the most typical outcome for the prompt that it's given). You can then explore how the images that you dream about can be interpreted using the breadth of human experience.
It is important to emphasize this step: we just derived an interpretation of symbols based on the context of the dreams themselves. We did not look into a book that tells us how we should interpret water, but, rather, just observed what is the context where the notion of "water" appears in our dreams. Of course, we can also add to our subjective interpretation a more general interpretation as well, which would take archetypes and collective experience into account.
6. Navigating through Dreams and Lucid Dream-Weaving
Sometimes, while you're dreaming, you can jump from one dream to another. Another interesting occurrence is when you realize that you're dreaming inside the dream, so you can start steering the narrative: this is what's called lucid dreaming.
You can do a similar thing with the interactive InfraNodus graph of your dreams.
To do that, simply select some of the relevant concepts and then click the "search all graphs" button to see which dreams this combination occurs in. Then double-click the dream (a square node added on the graph) to get to the exact part of that dream where you were encountering those ideas).
This is a great way to navigate within your subconscious, uncovering interesting dreams and memories that you would otherwise forget.
7. Identifying the Blind Spots in Your Subconscious
InfraNodus has a feature that can detect a structural gap in your dream: the topics that you are dreaming about but not in the same context.
This can be a very interesting way of identifying the blind spots in your subconscious and thinking of a possible way to connect them. This can usually lead to very interesting results that may enhance your understanding of yourself.
To do that just go to Analytics > Gap Insights and click the Reveal the Structural Gap button. InfraNodus will show the structural gap and the topics where it occurs. You can then think of a connection or use built in GPT AI to generate a question that would encourage you to think of a connection between these two topics.
In this way, it's like doing the Yungian psychotherapy work on yourself, using data science and AI as a therapist.
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If you're interested to try this out, please, sign up and log in InfraNodus self-analysis app: https://infranodus.com/use-case/introspection-self-reflection
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