How much can you tell about a person’s concerns and relationships from studying a series of 28 consecutive dreams, some of them quite short? Can anything be known without a case history, free associations, or amplifications? Here’s a chance to find out for yourself by seeing how well your answers to 30 mundane, everyday questions compare to the answers provided by the dreamer.
Then you can read the Autobiographical Sketch she wrote at my request two years after she and one of her professors mailed me the dream series. Does the sketch fit with the mental portrait you drew of the person on the basis of the dreams and her answers to the questions?
You can use any method you’d like to in analyzing the dreams, but for those who’d like some guidance, we suggest that (1) you think of the 28 dreams as a coherent whole, with each dream one piece of the puzzle; (2) read through the dreams slowly and for each one (a) underline words or phrases that strike you, (b) jot notes in the margins about how the dreamer interacts with parents, siblings, friends, etc., and (c) note any potential “themes” you see emerging; (3) then look back at your underlines and jottings to see if any interaction patterns or themes did arise.
We also find it useful to look for “spotlight” dreams that seem to be especially revealing and therefore help to illuminate other dreams. (There are at least two such dreams in this series, and one even has a light in it.)
If you know even one thing about a person, there is the immediate danger that you are using this information, not the dreams, to make inferences about them. So all references to specific times and places have been eliminated, mundane pseudonyms have been used for her three housemates, and she is just “college woman.”
For information on the dream series method, see the three papers by Calvin S. Hall that are available on dreamresearch.net: “Diagnosing Personality By The Analysis of Dreams,” “A Cognitive Theory of Dreams,” and “A Cognitive Theory of Dream Symbols.”
There is also a study on dreamresearch.net showing that a dream series can lead to a portrait of a dreamer that is as accurate as one drawn through the use of both a dream series and the free associations to the dreams: Walter Reis, “A Comparison of the Interpretation of Dream Series With and Without Free Associations.”