Following is an abstract I wrote for the ASD Conference in 1997 describing how I created categories in DreamSpinner. Presented at ASD Conference in 1997 Dreams are recorded in many different ways. Paintings, dancing, collages, poetry and of course the dream journal where a dream narrative is our attempt to translate our wildly vivid and densely packed dreams into words. Dreams translated into Dream Narratives is literature, or at the very least, written language. As such, it conforms to the useful conventions and concepts used in linguistics when studying a body of text.
Language is fluid, flexible and constantly changing.
It's a bit like the chaos theory. The more you look, the more there is to see. Now that we have computers with speed, power and large storage capacities, we have the tools needed to explore dream narratives from many different angles, which we could not do with hand written journals or series. But how do you categorize thousands of words. There are of course as many different ways as there are dreamers wanting to categorize.