Dreams Collected Online Show Thinking Patterns

There are lots of dreams that flummox us. What do you remember from one?

There may be loads of meanings: car troubles may lead to a feeling of helplessness, even rotting teeth might show you that you are overwhelmed with money worries, according to dailymail. :

William Domhoff, from the University of California, Santa Cruz, is collecting a list of dreams, called a 'DreamBank'. There are 22,000 dreams so far, which can be seen by anyone online.

Some are individual dream sets---about 73 of them--- collected from persons. Some are collected in groups. Read some of them here, in his dreamnet.

"As soon as people find out what I do, they want me to interpret their dream," says Domhoff to atlasobscura.

Under pseudonyms such as 'Pegasus: the factory worker' and 'Toby: a friendly party animal', most of the dreams are "bizarre, dull or terrifying", and can be located through search engines.

Many dreamers watch motifs in their dreams, including weed, sex, partying or tattooing.

"I'm in my brother's room and Dan is doing the shading on my back tattoo and he's doing it in red. And even though I don't want it in red, I apparently don't really care. We then walk over to my brother's closet and there is a piece of skin hanging on a hanger with a back tattoo of a weird robot on it, and Dan says, 'What do you think of this? We should shade yours like this one.' I wake up."

Nightmares, rather than dreams, seem quite common. Madeline, a college student, writes: "I saw myself in a mirror with blonde hair, and I was sullen. The me in the mirror moved separately from my movements, it was very creepy and I was sort of afraid. The image reached through and grabbed at me. I tried punching it and yelling."

Domhoff is working with big data sets, while most of them are categorized. Frequencies for those categories in dreams are set aside, from an individual or a group. Having turned into percentages and rates, and by comparing them with norms, it is possible to figure out the uniqueness of a person or group's dreams. Due to a lot of 'noise' in dreams, trying to understand just one dream is impossible.

As dreams are expressions of worries in waking life, he believes that collecting them helps to arrive at some conclusions about them.

"Dreams correlate with age, gender, culture, and personal preoccupations, as evidence on this site and in many research studies suggests," Domhoff said. "They are very 'revealing' of what is on our minds. We have shown that 75 to 100 dreams from a person give us a very good psychological portrait of that individual. Give us 1000 dreams over a couple of decades and we can give you a profile of the person's mind that is almost as individualised and accurate as her or his fingerprints."

Domhoff agrees that smartphone technology can help us to bring together more dreams and their indications.

"We are thinking creatures because thinking is a valuable adaptation, but that doesn't mean that all forms of thinking have a function," he added. "Dreams at this moment in the collective findings of dream researchers seem to be a 'throw-away' production, an off-hand story to while the night away."