Coding Search Help

The "SearchCodings" program allows you to search for coding elements in dream series that have been coded using the Hall/Van de Castle system of content analysis.

Like our DreamBank word-search engine, the coding search form uses regular expressions. It's important to know how to use regular expressions properly if you want to perform useful searches here, so you may want to read our regular expression tutorial if you haven't already.

The coding search program will display any coding cards that contain the codings you enter. (If the dream narratives are available, you can see those too.) You can choose to find only dreams that contain ALL elements you specify (AND mode), or dreams that contain at least one of the codings you enter (OR mode).

For example, if you do an "AND" mode search, and you type "1FMA" in the Characters box and "OU" in the Settings box, you will find dreams containing the dreamer's mother AND an unfamiliar outdoor setting. The same search in "OR" mode will find dreams with either the mother or an unfamiliar outdoor setting (or both).

(If the above paragraph made no sense to you because you have no idea what the connection is between the dreamer's mother and "1FMA", you probably shouldn't be using this coding search program. Click here to use DreamBank instead.)

If you do a search in AND mode, you will get a report that shows how many dreams contained each coding you typed in, and how many contain every one of them. This is called a contingency analysis, and you can use it to determine whether certain things appear together more often than chance would predict.

Notes

• The DreamBank keyword search engine makes a couple of exceptions to the normal regular expression rules (in DreamBank, ^ matches a word boundary and _ matches a space). This SearchCodings program makes no such exceptions: a space matches a space, and word boundaries are represented by \b.

• In the social interaction categories (aggression, friendliness, sexuality, and activities), there is a checkbox that says "allow reversal." Check this box if you want to find interactions between two characters, but you don't care who initiated the interactions.

• All of the social interaction categories work the same, so the examples listed below under Aggression also work in Friendliness and Sexuality.

• If you want to find the dreamer, simply type 'D', and word boundaries will automatically be added to the beginning and end, so that you will not accidentally find the dreamer's daughter (1FDA) as well. If you type anything other than just the letter D, the word boundaries will not be added.

Examples

Category	To find this:	Type this:
Characters	female characters	\wF\w\w
Characters	children or babies	\w\w\w[CB]
Characters	either one of the dreamer's parents	\w[JMF][MFX]\w
Aggressions	all aggressions	code:  ..
Aggressions	dreamer is the victim of an aggression from an animal	aggressor:  ANI code:  .> victim:  D allow reversal:  not checked
Aggressions	dreamer is the aggressor in a physical aggression (with any character)	aggressor:  D code:  [5-8]> allow reversal:  not checked
Friendliness	any friendliness between the dreamer and his/her siblings	befriender:  D recipient:  \w\w[BT]\w allow reversal:  checked
Sexuality	any mutual sexuality involving the dreamer	initiator:  D code:  .= allow reversal:  checked
Activities	physical activities by anyone	code:  [PML]
Success, Failure, Good Fortune	For these categories (and Misfortune and Emotions as well), most of the same rules apply as when searching for characters, but remember that there might be strings of characters joined by plus signs. If you just want to find all dreams that contain at least one of these elements, type \w in the "character" box (\w matches any number or letter).
Misfortune	bodily misfortunes to the dreamer	code:  [56] character:  D
Misfortune	dreams with falling or danger of falling	code:  3
Emotions	negative emotions (AP, AN, SD, or CO)	code:  [ASC]\w
Emotions	positive emotions experienced by the dreamer along with others	code:  HA character:  D *\+   (must include the space)
Settings	Geographical settings	code:  \wG
Objects	body parts	code:  B\w
Modifiers	positive evaluations	code:  E\+
Modifiers	descriptions or age: young or old	code:  A