Waking-Life and Dream Social Networks: People Mix Differently but Their Centrality Is Similar

An individual draws on memory of people and their relations during deliberate recall of his or her social network and during spontaneous generation of people while dreaming. We compare social networks produced by each use of memory in a case study. A dream social network was made for major people in a long series of dreams of a woman. Two people were linked if they occurred in a dream together. The dreamer responded to a questionnaire about relations between major people in waking life. A waking-life social network was made by linking two people if the individual indicated they knew each other. A similarity between the two networks is that people important (central) in one network tend to be important in the other network. The networks have differences. Community structure is more diffuse in the dream social network. The dream social network has fewer completed triangles than the waking-life social network. Assortativity, a network measure, is positive in the waking-life social network, but negative in the dream social network. Differences are consistent with findings that rapid eye movement sleep, the stage from which most dreams are reported, facilitates remote associations in memory. During dreaming, the dreamer's memory of people and their relations is not so much searched as explored.