Welcome to The DreamBank, a collection of over 20,000 dream reports. The reports come from a variety of different sources and research studies — but NOT from dream-collecting Web sites — from people ages 7 to 74, and they can be analyzed using the search engine and statistical programs built into this site. The publicly-accessible dream reports in the DreamBank have been "anonymized": the names of all non-celebrity characters, as well as some place names and other details, have been changed.
What's new
Bill Domhoff is featured in two episodes of Alie Ward's "Ologies" podcast.
Bill's latest book — The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming: The Where, How, When, What, and Why of Dreams — is now available from MIT Press. The book makes frequent use of DreamBank keyword searches to analyze dreams on many different topics; Chapter 4, the last part of Chapter 7, and a section of Chapter 8 present the results from analyses of several of the dream series found on this site.
Several of the people who have contributed dreams to the DreamBank wrote prefaces to their journals which may be of interest. We've also done quantitative analyses of some series, which you can learn about when you click the "More Info" button in the search engine, and we've collected some highlights of the prefaces and analyses. For a broader overview, look at the grid that summarizes all the series we have available for searching.
If you're looking for ideas on the kinds of research you could do using the DreamBank, see the article we published in Consciousness and Cognition in 2008, Studying Dream Content Using the Archive and Search Engine on DreamBank.net. For an example of an in-depth study that uses DreamBank word strings to examine two long dream series, see this 2020 article.
To make serious use of the DreamBank, you have to take the time to learn how to construct sensible search queries; click here or on the help link in the search form for more information.
Click on the links below to start using the DreamBank.
- Dream Search: frames version — This is the "normal" interface to the search engine; the search results are presented as "panes" in a
larger window. - Dream Search: no frames — The dream reports appear in a new window; this is best for those with very
small screens. - Random sample — Draw a random sample of dream reports (which match a specified length) from one or
more series. - Coding Search -- Some of the dreams in the DreamBank have been coded with the Hall/Van de Castle coding system, and a utility for searching those codings is available to scientists or students doing serious research. Please contact us
for information.