Dreams and mind-wandering have long fascinated psychologists and researchers studying the human mind. This is partly because these experiences offer glimpses into people’s inner lives, emotions, past experiences and desires.
One way of studying dreams and mind-wandering is to ask people to report their experiences. These accounts can then be analyzed to identify recurring themes and other patterns.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, the University of Turku and other institutions recently analyzed thousands of reports of dreams and mind-wandering using a mathematical approach called graph theory. The findings of their study, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that the language people use when describing dreams and mind-wandering could offer some hints about their mental health.
“Dreams and unguided waking thought, here referred to as mind wandering, are thought to reflect unique individual differences and mental health,” wrote Peter Coppola, Pilleriin Sikka and their colleagues in their paper. “We use graph theory to analyze a large dataset of dream and mind wandering reports from 176 individuals.”
A detailed analysis of dream and mind-wandering reports
The researchers analyzed 3,053 dream and mind-wandering reports that were collected as part of an earlier study by Sikka and some of her colleagues. These reports were provided by participants living in the U.K. and Australia via an online platform.
The team used graph theory to examine networks in which individual words formed the elements, with connections linking words that appeared next to one another in the reports. Instead of only focusing on the themes discussed in the participants’ reports, they thus examined the language used and how words were connected.
“We found that dream reports have a more complex structure, while mind-wandering reports have fewer word repetitions and are more verbose, with essential transition points in the structure of the texts,” wrote the authors. “Dream reports, which rely on recall over longer periods of time, tend to have more word repetitions, local cliques, and global integration, comparatively indicating a small world structure.”
During the earlier study by Sikka and her colleagues, participants were asked to contribute reports over the course of two weeks. By analyzing repeated reports, where available, the team could also uncover recurring patterns in the language individuals used and how they structured their narration.
“Capitalizing on a repeated measures design, we found that the structure of dream and mind-wandering reports contains individual-specific information,” wrote the authors. “Finally, we observed that word centrality (i.e., lower lexical diversity) in dream and mind-wandering reports is predictive of depression and anxiety symptoms, respectively. Thus, this approach is sensitive to individual differences, quantitatively differentiates reports of two different states of consciousness, and seems promising for cost-effective analyses of large naturalistically occurring qualitative datasets.”
Clues hidden in people’s words
The team found that dream reports tended to have more complex structures than mind-wandering narrations. In contrast, when reporting mind-wandering episodes, participants appeared to use more words and fewer repetitions.
The researchers also examined whether report structures were associated with self-reported mental health symptoms. Specifically, they found that word centrality, a measure reflecting how connected words were within the networks and associated with less varied vocabulary, in dream reports could predict symptoms of depression. The same measure in mind-wandering reports could instead predict anxiety symptoms.
While the ability to predict mental health symptoms from the reports does not establish a causal relationship between dreams or mind-wandering and mental health outcomes, this study suggests that the structure of reports could potentially offer some clues about people’s current psychological state.
Notably, these findings do not establish that the analysis of dream and mind-wandering reports could be used to diagnose a mental health condition. Future studies could set out to further explore the potential value of these reports in diagnostic and therapeutic settings.
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Publication details
Peter Coppola et al., A graph theory approach to chart the architecture of dream and mind-wandering reports, Communications Psychology (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00509-5
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Communications Psychology
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