Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Could where you're at in life right now, say being unemployed, affect the way you dream? Well, there's a new study that shows how our sleeping minds can mirror our working lives. And when you're out of work and your purpose in life is iffy, your dreams can change too. I'm here with researchers from the Center for Organizational Dreaming, Dr. Emily Cook and Kyle Napierkowski.
Emily, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
And Kyle, welcome to you as well. Thank you so much. So how do we get to a place where like our life is not going so great?
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Chapter 2: How does unemployment affect the way people dream?
Maybe we're unemployed and then it actually starts affecting the way our dreams function. Walk me through how this can happen.
Yes, absolutely. So for a long time, we've actually known our dreams are reflective or continuous of our waking life. So the things that we do and the things that we worry about during the day is the raw material that is used to build the often very strange stories in our dream content.
Chapter 3: What does recent research say about dreams reflecting waking life?
But one of the big challenges that we've always faced in this field is at the level of a single dream, we often can't pinpoint exactly what's going on. So I know there's all sorts of dream dictionaries people often try and sell that really don't do the job. They're not very good interpretive sources. But what Kyle and I work on is dreams at scale.
So these patterns, these stories, and these clues in dreams are very, very quiet. But when we amplify that signal over hundreds, usually thousands of dreams, it comes through a lot more clearly. So these very small patterns, we can see them in our big data sets.
And where are you getting this data set from? My understanding is you went to a social media website.
Chapter 4: How do dreams change when someone is unemployed?
It's kind of wild. It's like Freud meets Silicon Valley. You're taking just users' reports of their dreams online?
That's a really good way to put it. Yeah. So this is, you know, because of this day and age with the access to the data and access to the tools to process that data, we're able to do things that, you know, in the history of dream research, you could never do. It was always on, you know, a single dream journal or a single couple case studies of individuals.
But yeah, people are posting their dreams all over the web, different forums, dream apps that we have partnerships with, et cetera, and posting that for public consumption. So we're able to take those dream reports that are all around the web, match it with the dreamer's other online activity, and do things about those dreamers. So in this case, unemployment.
We have the sort of data set of users that are out on the web talking about job hunting or being unemployed or things like that, losing their job. So that's the sort of seed audience.
And then we can match that with our dream audience and find those people that are specifically unemployed and having dreams and compare that to people that are not unemployed and see what are the differences between those two populations.
Okay, let's start talking about the dreams. For those who've never heard of the continuity hypothesis, myself was one of those people before I read about your research. Can you explain it? Like our dreams basically are subconscious and the staff meetings we go to during the day or the unemployed job searching we do during the day. Are dreams just a continuation of that?
Well, yes, but there's a little bit more to it. So one way of thinking about the continued hypothesis is very literally. So if you play soccer during the day, you'll have dreams about soccer during the nighttime. But it's not always a direct reenactment. So as you probably can guess from how bizarre your dreams are, often things happen in your dreams that never would happen in real life.
For example, maybe you're playing soccer with Donald Trump. Sometimes the way that the dreams reenact our experiences during the day, whether or not that's an actual activity you participated in, a thought that you had, a memory that came back to you, they will reenact them during the night, sort of like living metaphors. So it might not be a direct mapping. It all gets jumbled up.
And like I say, that's why we need the big data sets to really piece apart what kind of continuity is happening in the dream narrative.
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