The goal of this data visualization project was to explore a series of dreams that I had during a course of psychotherapy from August 2017 to July 2018. I was hoping to revisit them in order to examine the frequency and pattern of my dreaming. Additionally, my therapy primarily focused on dream work and often centered around understanding the various symbols, affects, and themes that would emerge from my unconscious. Accordingly, the research questions guiding this project were:
- How many dreams did I have when examined by month and day of the week?
- What were the most common symbols, affects, and themes represented in my dreams?
When I was first considering this project, I had originally decided that my primary audience would be myself. Obviously, I am a person who frequently dreams, and I hoped visualizing my transcribed dreams would provide another opportunity for self-reflection and personal growth. However, after discussing the project with my course instructor, Dr. McSweeney, she reminded me that dreaming is a rather common experience and therefore other people might also be interested in the results of this project. Thus, I have now expanded my audience to include anyone who dreams and is interested in dream analysis.
My first set of visualizations focus on examining the frequency and pattern of my dreaming experiences. Since my therapy was scheduled to repeat each week on the same day and time, I thought it might be interesting to determine when my dreams occurred. Specifically, I wanted to understand if there were certain months during my treatment where I experienced an increase in dreaming. Likewise, I also wanted to know if there were certain days of the week that resulted in more dreams. I thought utilizing bar charts would provide the simplest and easiest method of displaying this type of information.
The next set of visualizations are a series of treemaps that represent three different variables: Symbols, Affects, and Themes. Since recurring symbols, affects, and themes are an important aspect to dream work, I wanted to be able to represent which symbols, affects, and themes were the most common throughout my dreams. Accordingly, I thought a treemap would be able to capture and visualize this data in both a simple and engaging manner. The use of color and size for each treemap makes the visualization easy to interpret and understand.
Although obvious, it is worth reiterating that my visualizations are based on the dataset I created and imported into Tableau. In other words, the design of my original dataset was critical in regards to being able to create my desired visualizations. Toward that end, this project in particular revealed both my limitations in setting up a useful dataset and how that will impact any type of planned visualizations. I attempted to transform transcribed narratives into “categories” that could then be meaningfully examined and visualized. While it is certainly possible to transform narratives into a dataset that can be utilized appropriately in Tableau, I believe this project taught me that I need much more training, education, and experience. I tend to believe that if I had known how set up my original dataset appropriately, I most likely could have created additional and more compelling visualizations. Finally, it should also be noted that visualizations for this project reflect non-causal relationships and have not been tested for statistical significance. Additionally, the results are based solely on my dreaming experiences and therefore will most likely not generalize to other individuals and/or populations.
Future visualizations based on this data set should explore additional relationships between when the dreams occurred and the most commonly reported symbol, affect, and/or theme. It was my intention to try and create a visualization that would depict which symbol, affect, and theme were the most common during each month of treatment. Since my sessions were often linked together through both my waking and dream lives, understanding the relationship amongst the variables might provide additional meaningful information, i.e. Did my dreams in January feature certain symbols, affects, and themes versus the other months? Future visualizations could also explore additional variables that are typically associated with dream work. Variables such as the “dramatic nature” of dreaming, Jungian archetypes, and “complexes” could all be useful information. Finally, future dream visualization projects that provide information to therapists and patients on a regular basis, such as weekly or monthly, could potentially yield meaningful insights in to the nature, course, and goals of a particular treatment.
