The dream markup language project

Dreammarkup.org is the place where you can learn about the Dream Markup Language Project. If you like these ideas then please join the Dream Markup Group. We need every helping hand as this is an challenging interdisciplinary project.

Why do we need a dream markup language?

A markup language assigns meaning to a given string of characters, i.e., text. For instance in any newspaper you'll find headings above the article. Being a heading is completely independent of the meaning of this heading. This is called structural markup. Any structural element is marked as such, no matter what its meaning is. This is best explained if I take a syntactic markup for a sentence.

a) John follows John

(the two Johns being different entities)
Thus the markup will look like:

<subject>JOHN</subject>follows<object>JOHN</object>

This is quite easy and can be done automatically when the machine knows the rules for parsing a sentence.

In dreams, however, things look different. Of course, we could focus on the syntactic features of dream reports. But dream reports are not dreams. Dream reports are but a written representation of the weirdest things that happen when we sleep. It would only be possible to work with a corpus of dreams if we had a kind of semantic annotation for dreams.
In contrast to the structural markup, semantic markup only focuses on the meaning of the text. Thus our sentence a) (John follows John) could be annotated in the following way:

<young>JOHN</young>follows<old>JOHN  </old >   

So we describe the first John to be young and the second one to be old. That is semantic interpretation which is not available on the interface “text” buth which the dreamer normally knows.

Advantages of dream markup

So what do we gain if we use annotation for dream reports? As far as I know, the only systematic evaluation of dreams has done with the Hall/van de Castle-approach (see the Link-Section for more information) with a set of coding rules. They have found out that in average, the content of dreams is constant, i.e., that the amount of people occurring in dreams, the amount of killing, love-making is constant all over the world.
That is very interesting but they just evaluate the dreams, they don't annotate them. You can only say: This dream is average or this dream is strange in respect to this or that.

With dream annotation you can ask different, more complex questions according to the markup you have chosen. For example:

• Do most murders in dreams happen indoor or outdoor?
• Is there a correlation between the occurrence of relatives and the action in the dream?
• How often is a dreamer the patient of an action?
• Etc.

You see: Dream markup makes it possible to establish relations between some of the semantic meanings that you have encoded in the dream.

More information about the theoretical issues of Dream Markup are to come soon.