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Dreams and mind-wandering have long fascinated psychologists and researchers studying the human mind. This is partly because these experiences offer glimpses into people's inner lives, emotions, past experiences and desires.

One way of studying dreams and mind-wandering is to ask people to report their experiences. These accounts can then be analyzed to identify recurring themes and other patterns.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, the University of Turku and other institutions recently analyzed thousands of reports of dreams and mind-wandering using a mathematical approach called graph theory. The findings of their study, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that the language people use when describing dreams and mind-wandering could offer some hints about their mental health.

"Dreams and unguided waking thought, here referred to as mind wandering, are thought to reflect unique individual differences and mental health," wrote Peter Coppola, Pilleriin Sikka and their colleagues in their paper. "We use graph theory to analyze a large dataset of dream and mind wandering reports from 176 individuals."

The researchers analyzed 3,053 dream and mind-wandering reports that were collected as part of an earlier study by Sikka and some of her colleagues. These reports were provided by participants living in the U.K. and Australia via an online platform.

The team used graph theory to examine networks in which individual words formed the elements, with connections linking words that appeared next to one another in the reports.

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