A psycholinguistic method for analysing two modalities of thought in dream reports.

Following the general idea of a substantial bydimensionality of mind, a cognitive psycholinguistic model is proposed attempting to describe how two thinking modalities - named Y and X - may contribute to the production of a dream report. Based on this model, two sets of syntactical-lexical categories were defined whose counts, divided for report length, should indicate the contribution of the two modalities to the verbal report of the dream. Preliminary results, based on the analysis of dream reports contributed by 70 subjects, confirmed the factorial validity of the Y and X measures. Comparisons of REM and sleep onset reports confirm that Y and X factorial indices are sensitive to discriminate state dependent characteristic of sleep mentation