mappingWhat I mean by mapping is an intuitive extension of the idea from both mathematics and the neurobiology of the cerebral cortex.
In mathematics one can create a mathematical function such that one map of mathematical values is converted into another map of mathematical values. The formula creates a one to one relationship between points but transforms the view.
In neurobiology, the cerebral cortex has been found to have a hierarchical structure. At one level of this structure are cortical regions that perform a specific range of functions. For example, at the back of your head near the base of your neck, the lowest extent of the cerebral cortex processes visual information from your eyes. Other sensory and motor areas have been identified. Various regions of cortex are interconnected in a regular way with neurons projecting axons (the part of the nerve cell that sends an electrochemical impulse over a relatively large distance to influence another neuron) in one or both directions between the two regions. Many of these cortical regions have been found to retain a kind of spatial map of the world. For instance there is the "motor cortex" which has neural connections to the muscles of the body. In a regular way you can move an electrode through this region in a regular continuous way and see the response of the muscles of the body change in a regular way.
As you can see from this image the motor cortex doesn't give each square inch of muscle the same space in the cortex. So even though the size of the human bodies musculature is mapped on a one-to-one basis with the actual muscles there is a translation so to speak when it comes to the size of the respective physical spaces between the two maps.
In this way the brain connects and interconnects maps of motor and sensory and other types of regional neural processing together.
How does this pertain to dreams? I believe that when dreams are structured in scenes or even repeat scenarios that this is often an experience of the same archetypal content taken from two different "maps". Where this can be helpful is if you notice a similarity in content between two dreams or two scenes from a dream you can attempt to find the "function" that maps the two together. Alternatively, it may be helpful to see how one scene is analogous to the other.
For example, let's say you dream that you are standing outside of a house and you see the sun setting. In the next scene you are in a house and notice it is getting dark and you turn on the light. This might indicate that the first scene is an "outer" perspective on a process of "darkening" while the second scene is an "inner" perspective on the same process. This is not to say that all the aspects of the two dreams/scenes will map onto the other but the overall forms of the two scenes/dreams may yield further insight if this idea of mapping is applied. In my experience mapping seems to be done partially as if each dream were not a whole perspective but a part of a perspective.
