The Content Analysis of Dreams

Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle's book introduced the coding system still used today for empirical dream-content research, a method for counting and classifying what actually appears in reported dreams, characters, settings and emotions, across large samples rather than interpreting any single dream's symbolism. Its standing rests on that system having become the field's working standard, adopted and applied by later researchers rather than merely proposed once. It is honestly limited in scope: it establishes what themes appear and how often, a genuinely different question from what any dream or symbol means, and this atlas draws on it only for that empirical prevalence data. Use it for how common a given dream theme actually is; it is not a source for symbolic interpretation of dreams, which this literature does not attempt to settle.