New tool can automatically analyse dreams and finds they 'don't contain hidden messages'

Have you ever woken up from a dream that made absolutely no sense and wondered what it was all about? More recently, sleep scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of coding dreams - with more than 150 dream rating and content analysis scales available today including the best rated 'Hall and Van de Castle' system. The new tool developed by the Cambridge team set out to resolve that problem by finding a way to process the language describing dreams automatically. 'To tackle these challenges, we designed a tool that automatically scores dream reports by operationalising the widely used dream analysis scale by Hall and Van de Castle,' the team wrote. In the therapeutic context, the main goal of dream analysis is to help people address their real-life problems and the team say their tool can be used to help people identify latent emotional states, and to help people cope with significant life events.