Fictive content in dreams

Fictive elements are dream content which don’t correspond with literal waking experience. When making predictions about a dreamer, under the assumption of the continuity hypothesis, fictive content needs to be excluded. An obvious example of fictive content is flying: the dreamer reports of floating or flying in the air without mechanical assistance. There are a few other typical dream themes which we can probably identify as fictive. More difficult to identify are content that isn’t obviously “fantastic”.

One place where I think I’ve had some success is in identifying fictive family members. In the previous post I used an expression that matches most of a dreamer’s family members:

(my (\w+ )?(mother|father|sister|brother|daughter|son|wife|husband|...))

The sub-expression “(\w+ )?” optionally matches a word followed by a space. It helps to match text like; “my eldest daughter”, “my older brother”, “my ex wife”.

How do you tell if a report of a family member is fictive? In the case of a young dreamer, reports of “my (son|daughter|husband|wife)” could be excluded, except that we might be wrong about the dreamer’s age. We could also look for quotes around the family name, or phrases like “supposed to be” preceding the match. Another idea comes from the observation that fictive family member are relatively rare compared to real family members. A dreamer who mentions “my son” 3 times but mentions other family members at a much higher rate, probably does not have a son. In the Predictions search I use a “fictive threshold” for reported family members.

fictive_threshold = max(brother_count+sister_count, son_count+daughter_count,         mother_count+father_count)/15;

If the count for a family member match is lower than this threshold, or less than 3, it is considered fictive.

Of course, a dreamer’s life situation is subject to change. The dreamer may marry or have a child - after recording years of dreams. In that case real spouses and children may be marked as fictive.

Although this fictive threshold trick seems to work for family members, I’ve yet to find another category where I can apply a similar technique.