The Quick profile report does a check of 19 features (words categories and other properties) of a dream, cluster of dreams or a whole set of dreams. The results are displayed in a table that also shows the values found in the Hall/Van de Castle male and female norms (columns labeled fnorms and mnorms). These are included for comparison purpose only. I have not established any significance levels for any of these categories, so please don't be alarmed if your results are far from the norms. It should also be noted that there's a degree of inaccuracy in any of these measures - especially those that rely on lists of words. Some words appear in more than one category. The report also depends on the use of the Porter stemmer when adding the set of dreams. Scores for some categories will be lower if the stemmer is not used. [The values for the male and female norms display different results, depending if the stemmer is on or off. All results shown here are with the stemmer on.]
The report can be run from the Search menu of any dream or dream cluster. You can also run it from the second command selector on Bag O' Dreams' Search panel.
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Note that some of the categories are editable. The words for these are listed in a file named "categories.txt" in the settings folder. Editing these lists will throw off the expected results.
You can get a rough idea of dream content, or at least tone; Are there more positive emotions that negative?, Is there sex in the dream? etc. Beyond this you might be able to guess something about the dreamer such as gender: males use more sex words and articles than females, or age: young dreamers use fewer "big words" and relatively more punctuation (probably because their sentences are shorter).
Another use that I am exploring is to identify the author of a sample of dreams from characteristic differences in the categories.
Here are the results from 3 samples of 20 randomly selected dreams of the same male dreamer:
Number of words 253 258 198 Negative emotions 0.61 0.46 0.40 Positive emotions 0.79 0.62 0.75 Self reference 4.49 5.28 5.33 Social 5.22 5.11 6.94 Personal pronouns 4.42 3.06 4.55 Strangers 0.51 0.64 0.83 Cognitive 1.46 1.43 1.61 Sexuality 0.14 0.06 0.0 Body/sensation 1.14 1.04 0.93 Motion 1.2 1.02 1.01 Articles 10.62 10.98 9.78 Conjunctions 4.34 4.22 4.35 Quantifiers 1.28 1.7 1.51 Negations 0.83 0.89 1.13 Tentativeness 0.16 0.17 0.25 Relative tense 0.9 0.88 0.9 Punctuation 23.1 23.13 24.7 Big words 14.76 14.12 13.8The most consistent features of this dreamer are the very high frequency of punctuation*, low self reference, low tentativeness, and a preference for present tense (Relative tense close to 1.0). Also note that in all three samples positive emotion words outnumber negative emotion words. This is the reverse of the pattern in the norms.
*Examination of the dreams reveals that the dreamer has a fondness for hyphenated expressions and indicates italicized text by enclosing it in /forward slashes/.
According to a study by Gill and Oberlander: "Perception of e-mail personality at zero-acquaintance: Extraversion takes care of itself; Neuroticism is a worry", extroverts use fewer first person pronouns and a more informal writing style which included multiple exclamation points and ellipses (in e-mail texts). Extroverts are also known to use more positive emotion words and the present tense.
The category Cognitive is a superset of the Causation category. It contains words like "because, reason, realize, decide, remember". Lower counts in Causation are also associated with extroversion.
I do not have results of personality test for this or any other dreamer so my suspicion that he is an extrovert cannot be tested. An important point to emphasize here is that personality can be revealed by other types of writing. The strength of the result, assuming it is true, isn't dependant on the dream being an especially potent carrier of the "true personality" of the dreamer. There's no reason to think of the dream as revealing our unconscious desires: any writing (or other form of self-expression) can reveal something about its author.
It has been shown that certain types of writing tasks are more revealing of gender, personality, age, etc. than others. Dreams are written after the fact and it would be difficult to tease apart the "contribution" of the waking personality versus the dreaming self, if such a distinct personality exists.
It would be interesting to compare the features of dreams and other writing genres from the same individual. Differences might reveal which features specifically result from the state of dreaming. For example, you might compare writing about events recalled after a night's sleep. Schwartz used a travel diary of the previous day's events, so that the tasks were similar to recalling a dream.
See also: Pennebaker & King: Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference.