Social Networks: Dreams vs Reality Aren’t So Different
It has long been believed that dreams are rather unorderly and unsystematic in nature, created through random brain activity. However, this article sheds light on the idea that they actually are much more orderly than we might have once guessed. Quartz shares a recent research study in which nearly 1400 dreams of five individuals were analyzed to discover how social networks were constructed in those dreams, and how they compared to the real social networks of the individuals having the dreams.
The researchers found that the social connections in one’s dreams would often reflect the real-world social network. For example, you are more likely to dream of both your Cornell friends Tim and Kate in a dream together, than you are to have a dream of say, Tim and your first-grader teacher back home. While this may seem obvious to some, again it is important to realize that this information would seem to go against the notion of dreams being the result of random brain activity. If that truly were the case, seeing Tim and your first-grader teacher together in the same dream wouldn’t be so far-fetched and would be just as likely to happen as a dream with both Tim and Kate.
Granted, with only five dreamers this is a rather small study and conclusive results cannot necessarily be drawn from it. However, this does open an interesting door to future research and discover into how the mind works, and how it manages the ever-changing social networks we find ourselves immersed in.
http://qz.com/553677/facebook-for-dreams-scientists-are-mapping-your-brains-social-networks/