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Alta is an adult woman who wrote down her dreams in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and added a few in 1997 when she called to offer the dreams to us. This series has not been heavily studied yet.
Angie is a college student whose dreams are of interest because she wrote them down at two different ages, 18 and 20. Are there differences?
Arlie is an older adult woman who wrote down her dreams in the 1990s. She gave them to us in 1998. This series has never been studied, except by the dreamer.
Barb Sanders (not her real name) is a middle-aged adult woman who has written down most of her dreams since about 1977. The series is ideal for detailed studies, for several reasons: (1) we have interviewed Sanders and her friends at length, so we can provide background information after analyses are made; (2) we have done numerous studies of the dreams that can be built upon with new methods -- these studies are discussed in Chapter 5 of G. William Domhoff's book The Scientific Study of Dreams (2003); (3) the series is so extensive that it is extremely useful for studying subsets on specific issues (e.g., how she interacts with her ex-husband Howard, or how she reacted to an infatuation with Derek, or how she conceives of each of her three siblings and three children, or how she conceives of cats and dogs, or what happens when she is on or near bridges). For the "cast of characters" in Barb Sanders' dreams, click here. The full text of our interviews with her (in PDF format) is available here, and our detailed analysis of Barb Sanders' dream series -- our best case-study to date -- is here.
1138 more dreams from Barb Sanders, written down in 1997 through 2001. These dreams are not included with the first set because they were written down by the dreamer after she was aware that her dreams were being studied. It is not likely that they changed, but it is better to analyze the first set separately for scientific purposes, just to be sure.
(Read the info about the first Sanders series for details about her life.)
These 250 dreams are a representative sample of all dream reports that range from 50 to 250 words in the first set of Barb Sanders' dreams. (Read the info about the first Sanders series for details about her life.)
The Hall/Van de Castle codings for characters, social interactions, misfortunes and good fortunes, successes and failures, and emotions are available for each of the dream reports in this sample. For those who want to compare the results of their own methods with those obtained with the Hall/Van de Castle categories, this is a very good sample.
The 388 dreams in this set were collected in November 1996, January 1997, and February 1997, from girls attending a school in the San Francisco Bay Area. The girls ranged from 4th through 9th grade, with 5th and 6th graders providing 51% of the dreams. The girls wrote the dreams in diaries that they kept at home. All identifying information has been removed, and the first names that are included are pseudonyms. This set of dreams covers the longest age span -- six years -- from one school that is available in our dream database. It also contains the best set of dreams from 4th, 5th, and 6th graders that is available anywhere, as far as we know. (For more about this series, including a table with details about each dreamer, click here.)
Bea's vivid dream reports from age 14 to 16 provide one of the longest and most detailed dream journals we have from a young teenager. There are a smaller number of dream reports from her early years in college, but they are nonetheless useful for a comparison with her dreams as a teenager. (For more information about Bea and her dream series, including the "cast of characters" in her dreams, click here.)
See Bea 1.
These dreams were collected in the mid-1990s from several men and women ranging from their 20s to their 70s, but most are from 40 to 65. Some are congenitally blind; most of the others have been blind for over 20 years, but one older woman has been blind for only a few years. (For more about this series, including a table with details about each dreamer, click here. For a published article discussing these dream series and summarizing other research on blind dreamers, click here.)
Chris was a Wall Street businessman in his 50s, and the happily married father of daughters 20 and 18, when he wrote down several hundred of his dreams out of his own curiosity between June and December, 1968. He later sent 100 of them to Calvin S. Hall. He served in the army in World War II and traveled widely thereafter. He was also a transvestite, which is what makes this series unique. Click here to read Calvin Hall's inferences about Chris, as well as Chris' own notes on his dreams.
Chuck is a young Ph.D. researcher in one of the highly developed physical sciences. It might not be expected that such a person would keep a dream journal over the space of several years, but it just goes to show there is no predicting interest in dreams. He sent us the first 75 dreams in the series and we coded them with the Hall/Van de Castle system. But we know nothing about him except what comes through in the dreams.
These are dreams from women in a college setting, collected in 1997 or 1998 for a study of dream content at a university on the East Coast of the United States. We have not studied them, and we have no access to the dreamers for possible feedback. The dreams are of use for comparison with earlier dreams from college settings.
These are dreams from men in a college setting, collected in 1997 or 1998 for a study of dream content at a university on the East Coast of the United States. We have not studied them, and we have no access to the dreamers for possible feedback. The dreams are of use for comparison with earlier dreams from college settings.
These dreams were collected by Calvin Hall from his students in an undergraduate course in personality at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947 and 1948. Well over a thousand dreams were collected, but on this Web site we've included only the 681 dream reports that came from the female students. (For more about this series, including the questions that were asked as part of the dream recording process, click here.)
This series of 24 dreams from a 21-year-old college student is of interest for the predominance of a few concerns and interests that fit well with her waking life. It is also of interest because it may contain examples of various forms of figurative thought. This series has been analyzed independently by two students who knew nothing about the dreamer; they asked the dreamer and one of the dreamer's friends to agree or disagree with a series of written questions based on the analysis. (For more information about Dahlia, click here.)
David is our code name for a young man in his early 20s who began writing down his dreams in 1990 at the age of 13. His series is the only one we have that covers the teenage years, although there are relatively few dreams for the ages 13-18. (For more about this series, including a "cast of characters," click here.)
This remarkable series of 6,100 dreams in German comes from the philosophical psychologist Detlev von Uslar, a German-born citizen of Switzerland and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Zürich. Von Uslar published these dreams in a companion CD-ROM to his book, Tagebuch des Unbewussten: Abenteuer im Reich der Träume (Diary of the Unconscious: Adventures in the Realm of Dreams), published by Königshausen und Neumann in 2003. The CD-ROM includes reveries, daydreams, and his thoughts about the dreams, but we include only the dreams here. (The book itself discusses his views of the dreams and his general ideas about dreams. For a brief summary of each chapter of von Uslar's book, click here.)
Dorothea lived from 1887 to 1965. This series of about 900 dreams covers the years from 1912 to 1965. There are 54 dreams from ages 25 to 40 and 85 from ages 41 to 55. She did not start writing down every dream until 1959, when she was 72. Dorothea kept her dreams for her own personal reasons. She was not in therapy and had no interest in the clinical theories of dreams developed by Freud, Jung, and others. She did not write to Calvin Hall offering her dreams for study until a few years before her death. (For more about this series, including the dreamer's own commentary on her dream journal, click here.)
Ed was 57 when his wife Mary died of cancer after 32 years of marriage. When he dreamed about her shortly after her death in June of 1980, he experienced it as a precious moment of being with her, and wrote it down. Two months later, he dreamed about her again, and wrote that one down too. Soon he found himself writing down every dream in which she appeared. In the first 22 years after her death, he wrote down 143 dreams -- as few as two in one year, as many as 14 in another. The dreams have much in common with other dreams of deceased loved ones. In a few early dreams she comes back to life or provides him with reassurance that she is doing well. Many dreams are about the time of her final illness, but others are about their earlier life together, providing a portrait of a marriage. For the dreamer's reflections (written in 1996) on his feelings toward Mary, his thoughts about their marriage, and the cast of characters in the dreams (all names are fictional), click here.
Edna is a congenitally blind first-year college student whose 19 dreams from October 1948 to January 1949 are of great value because she explains the various sensations -- primarily auditory and tactile -- that allow her to gauge the elegance of a restaurant or know how big a room is. She also provided researchers with her explanations for some of the content in her dreams, describing tensions with her father and her attraction to her handsome 27-year-old dancing instructor. (For Edna's comments about her own dreams, click here.) For the many people who ask us if blind people dream, and if so "how," this dream series is the best answer we know of; but see also the series labeled "Blind Dreamers."
Elizabeth first recorded a few of her dreams in 1991, and she began recording consistently in 1999. She is the single mother of a son, born in 1983, whom she has raised alone since he was 18 months old. During this time she worked in business management and also began to attend college.For the "cast of characters" in Elizabeth's dreams, click here.
These dreams come from Emma's husband, who is called "Frank" in Emma's dream series. His series is far shorter and more sporadic than hers. He only wrote down dreams of special interest to him, or that he thought would be of interest to people with whom he corresponded. There are often gaps of many years between dream reports. They were not kept in a regular journal; the 72 dreams were brought together in one place by him well after Emma gave us her series, and he did so at her urging. They appeared in scattered notes and copies of old letters to various friends. They came to us on musty scraps of paper, in envelopes with postmarks on them, and on thin, barely readable pieces of carbon paper. We made photocopies and returned the originals to him. (For more about this dreamer and the potential usefulness of this series, click here.)
Emma is an elderly woman who wrote down her dreams from 1949 to 1951, and again from 1960 to 1997, although there are very few dreams or no dreams for a few of the years. We have a considerable amount of biographical information on Emma that we can make available to researchers who carry out a blind analysis of the dreams.
This series is unique in that it starts at age 12, the youngest starting point of any series we have, and continues in sporadic fashion to age 21. At first it reflects many young teenage concerns, such as rock stars, then it expresses many young adult concerns, such as boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. It also has themes of kidnapping that may or may not be typical of teenage dreamers. (For more information about Esther, click here.)
These dream reports -- in German -- were collected in the mid-1990s from college students (108 female and 44 male) at a major German university by dream researcher Michael Schredl. The students were asked to keep a dream diary for one or two weeks. They provided anywhere from two to five reports each. We have made the dreams anonymous by changing the names of people and places. We also adopted a single term for "mother" ("Mutter") and "father" ("Vater"). Our thanks to Dr. Schredl for giving us copies of these dream reports.
Die vorliegenden Traumberichte stammen von deutschen Universitätsstudenten (108 weiblich und 44 männlich). Sie wurden Mitte der 90er Jahre von dem Traumforscher Michael Schredl gesammelt. Die Studenten wurden gebeten, über einen Zeitraum von 14 Tagen ein Traumtagebuch zu führen. Pro Person sollten davon jeweils 5 Traeume eingereicht werden. In einigen Fällen wurden jedoch weniger Träume erinnert. Um Anonymität zu gewährleisten, wurden Personen- und Ortsnamen geändert. Darüber hinaus wurde ein einheitlicher Begriff für "Mutter" und "Vater" gewählt (z.B. Mutter statt "Mama"). Wir danken Herrn Dr. Schredl, dass er uns diese Träume für unsere Traumdatenbank zur Verfügung stellte.
This set contains the 500 dream reports on which Hall and Van de Castle based the female norms in their 1966 book on The Content Analysis of Dreams. The dreams were collected in Cleveland, Ohio, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. NOTE: Unfortunately, some of the original cards are missing, possibly lost to the mists of time. These are the numbers of the cards we can't find: 146 (text is missing); 305, 329, 346, 347, 353, 354, 366, 367, 368 (text and codings are missing).
This set contains the 500 dream reports on which Hall and Van de Castle based the male norms in their 1966 book on The Content Analysis of Dreams. The dreams were collected in Cleveland, Ohio, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. NOTE: Unfortunately, some of the original cards are missing, possibly lost to the mists of time. These are the numbers of the cards we can't find: 106, 107, 108, 109, 349, 351, 392, 393, 394.
This dream series consists of 4,352 dream reports, written down from ages 12 to 25, by a young woman out of her own interest in dreams, and with no interest in dream theories or psychotherapy. The series is unique for the early age at which it begins and the frequency of reports in the teen years (ages 13-19).
It may be interesting to compare the Izzy series with the dream series that was tape-recorded by "Jasmine" from her early teens to her mid-20s, and with the dream reports written down by "Bea" at ages 14 and 15.
(For more information about Izzy and her dream series, including the "cast of characters" in her dreams, click here.)
Jasmine is a young woman who recorded hundreds of her dreams from age 14 to 27. In addition to the young age at which Jasmine started keeping a dream journal, there is another unique feature to this series: Jasmine was born with optic nerve hypoplasia, an atypical form of blindness. She can recognize people by means of their hairstyle, their hair color, and the way they walk (and of course she can recognize their voices because her hearing is normal). She can read 26-point type if it is very close to her face, so she did not rely on braille growing up. For reading regular-sized print, she has a video magnifier that takes a picture of the document and enlarges the image on the screen. For working with her computer, she uses text-to-speech and screen-magnifying programs. Because Jasmine's dreams were tape recorded, usually in the morning, they are often longer and contain more detail than most dream reports. (For more information about Jasmine and her dream series, including the "cast of characters" in her dreams, click here.)
Jeff is a 17-year-old high school senior who contacted us after he had kept a dream journal for several months. It is the longest series we have from a person that age or younger. It is also of interest because sometimes Jeff has lucid dreams. (We have no other series where lucid dreams are a prominent feature.)
Joan was a college student in her mid-20s when she wrote down these 42 dreams in the mid-1980s. She is a lesbian who is dealing with relational issues in the dream series. These dreams are of interest for those who might want to study possible themes and metaphors in a dream series. That is, her issues seem to be expressed metaphorically in some dreams, but we won't spoil your fun by expressing our hunches. (For more about this series, including the dreamer's own commentary on her dream journal, click here.)
Kenneth began this amazingly detailed series of dreams during his first year in college, writing down every dream he recalled for the next three years, sometimes two or three a night: he reports that he'd typically wake up multiple times per night and jot down extensive notes of the dream imagery, actions, characters, and emotions. The next day he would write the dream down in full based on these notes, which often took more than an hour each day. Therefore, this is the most complete home dream series we have. It is also the best series we have from anyone under age 21. It shows great consistency in its major characters and themes over the three-year period, but has not been studied in detail. It shows how realistic dreams can be for some people.
For the "cast of characters" in Lawrence's dreams, click here.
In the late 1990s, Mack was a 21-year-old college student who almost never remembered dreams. However, he was an open and inquiring student who hoped to go to graduate school in experimental psychology, so he made a strong effort to write down every dream he could recall for a two-month period as part of an exercise in a psychology class. The result is a series of 38 dreams that he found to reflect many of his waking interests and concerns. He reported that his dream recall disappeared again when the study was over, which fits with studies showing how important motivation is for dream recall for many people.
Madeline is a young woman in her 20s who gave us her dreams a year or two after she graduated from college. Her series is unique in that it stretches from childhood to early adulthood with only occasional interruptions. This series was studied by members of a college class, who then asked her to answer a series of questions, many of them concerning the class focus on religion and spirituality. Those questions and her answers can be found in Madeline's "Further Info" file.
These 23 dreams come from a young boy who went from age 6 to 8 over the course of this dream series. The dreams were reported spontaneously to his mother over a 19-month period. At first he seemed very interested in telling them, but as time went on, he became less interested in talking about his dreams. The boy is a classmate of Melissa, whose dream series also was collected by her mother. He is the top male student in his class. Mark's mother is a friend of a dream researcher, and that is why she had the idea to write down the dreams. Note: "John" is Mark's only sibling, who is five years older.
This excellent and important series of dreams comes from a highly intellligent young girl at three different ages: from 7y5m to 8y5m for the first 67 dreams, 11y0m to 11y9m for the next 14 dreams ("part 2"), and 13y0m to 13y1m for the next 8 dreams ("part 3"). There is every reason to believe that these are authentic dreams, as explained in the further information below. It is the first series we know of from a person of such a young age. A quick comparison of the three subsets of the series shows the kinds of similaries and differences we might expect based on laboratory studies of children's dreams. However, the series has never been studied in depth. (For more about this series, including an interview with Melissa's mother, click here.)
"Melora" was a 23-year-old college student, the wife of a graduate student in psychology, and a new mother when she tape-recorded 144 of her dreams between June 19 and December 1, 1962. This is a remarkable number of dreams for 5+ months, making this series useful for studying the consistency of dreams over a short time period. Since she often remembered two or more dreams a night, this is also a very good series for anyone who wants to search for similarities in the dreams of a single night. Then, between January 11, 1963, and September 24, 1965, she wrote down another 67 dreams. This series is invaluable most of all because we also have 128 of her husband's dreams for the same time period (see "Melvin"). It is interesting to compare how often they dream of each other and of their little daughter, and to see how each portrays the other. Their dreams from the same night also can be compared, but it must be said that an earlier comparison of the two series by Calvin S. Hall did not turn up any patterns. (For further information about Melora, click here.)
These 128 dreams come from the husband of a prolific dreamer, "Melora", who tape-recorded 211 of her dreams at the same time that her husband was also recording his dreams, starting in June, 1962. This makes the series useful for comparisons of the dreams of a husband and wife. It is very revealing to see how he dreams about his wife, which can be done with the simple keyword search of "my_wife", and then comparing these dreams with her dreams about him. It is noteworthy that the dreamer and his wife remained happily married for the rest of their lives. In addition, the dreams are of interest in their own right. Melora's husband was a psychologist with an interest in dreams and parapsychology. He also dreamt about recreational drugs that were available in the 1960s. He liked to read science fiction, which seems to be a factor in some of his dreams.
"Merri Anderson" is an artist in her late 30s who began writing her dreams down in 1999, sometimes using them as a basis for some of her paintings. However, another main impetus for starting a dream journal was the appearance in her dreams of her sister, older by nearly two years, who had been killed in January, 1996. (She died on life support with Merri and their brother Rudy -- younger than Merri by four years -- at her side.) This sister, Dora, a well-educated, successful professional greatly admired by Merri, is the most frequent character in her dreams. The series is notable for how revealing it is concerning her conceptions and concerns in relation to her family members and friends. The concern with color and art work of various kinds is also striking. (For further information on Merri's series, including a cast of characters, click here.)
The dream reports in this collection come for one of the earliest and most extensive studies of dream content ever conducted in the sleep laboratory. They are the only set of dreams in the DreamBank that includes dream reports collected in a sleep lab. In addition, the set also includes dreams written down at home from the same young adult males who were studied in the lab. The study was carried out in 1963-1964 at the University of Miami by Calvin S. Hall and Robert Van de Castle with a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. The main results can be found in a paper by Domhoff and Schneider in the Dream Library on dreamresearch.net. Their findings show that home and lab dreams differ mainly in terms of the greater amount of physical aggression in home dreams. This means that dreams written down at home, if done so fully and carefully, can be useful in dream research.
These dreams from teenagers (ages 14-18) were collected by students at a suburban Midwestern high school in early 1998. The students did their own analyses, then sent the dreams to us. They used our Most Recent Dream method to collect the dreams. These dreams have not been analyzed by us yet; they are of possible use for age and gender comparisons, and for attempts to find conceptual metaphors in teenage dreams.
Nancy is a bright, attractive, white working-class woman in her late 20s who has two young daughters and wants to go to a professional school in a health-related field after she finishes her undergraduate work. Her dreams seem to be a dramatization of all her interests and interpersonal relations, as she confirms in her own analysis of the dreams. She has a fact-oriented, no-nonsense mind. She prefers scientific courses to humanistic ones. There is nothing subtle about her dreams, and they do not seem as metaphoric as some of the other college dream series. (For more about Nancy, click here.)
The person we call "The Natural Scientist" was born in 1893 in a small farming town in the Midwest. He graduated from a state university in 1916 and joined a federal government agency that did natural science work. Except for nine months in the U.S. Army in 1918-1919, he worked as a natural scientist for the federal government until his early retirement due to declining health in the late 1940s. There is no information on the life of the dreamer except for what appeared in a four-page obituary in a scientific journal. This information reveals that his waking interests are reflected in his dreams and that he was a lifelong bachelor. His dream journal was meant strictly for his own curiosity about the nature of dreams. (For more about the Natural Scientist, including his own preface to the dream journal, click here.)
Most of the dreams in this remarkable series were written down on his own initiative while "Norman" was a patient in various prison hospitals. On some nights he reported two or three dreams. Many of the reports are very brief, but the dreams are very revealing nonetheless. The dreams were analyzed by Calvin S. Hall for a book by Alan P, Bell and Calvin S. Hall, The Personality of a Child Molester (1971). For a summary of Hall's analysis, showing how well Norman's dreams reflect his life, not to mention his sexual preoccupations, see Chapter 8 of Domhoff's Finding Meaning In Dreams.
Pegasus is a factory worker from the northern Pennsylvania-Ohio area who kept a detailed record of his dreams between 1949 and 1964 because he thought they provided useful clues in picking winners in horse races. His series is unique because it comes from a person who is both a member of the blue-collar working class and passionate for betting on horses. Surely no one has recorded dreams for reasons such as his. For an analysis of some aspects of this dream series by Calvin S. Hall, along with a presentation of the limited information available on Pegasus's waking life, click here.
These dreams were collected from 48 male and 48 female college students (ages 18 to 20) in Lima, Peru, in 1970 by Susana Urbina as part of her work toward a Ph.D. in psychology from Fordham University in 1972. Each student turned in eight dream reports over a period of two weeks to three months. Urbina, now a professor of psychology at the University of Northern Florida, translated the dreams into English. The findings from her work can be found in the following article: Urbina, S. P., & Grey, A. (1975). Cultural and Sex Differences in the Sex Distribution of Dream Characters. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 6, 358-364.
Phil is a retired humanities professor with no professional or theoretical interest in dreams. He has provided us with dreams from three periods of his life, stretching from age 15 to age 62. We have no other dream series that covers such a long time span starting from such a young age. The dreams have never been studied. No biographical information is available on Phil, and he is not available to provide answers to questions, but it is still a great series. (For further information about Phil and his dream series, click here.)
"The Physiologist," whose real name was Percy G. Stiles (1875-1936) was a 22-year-old graduate student at Boston Tech (later known as MIT), when he decided to write down all the dreams he could remember (out of scientific curiosity) between October 24, 1897, and January 9, 1898, a total of 46 dreams, and then 40 more that he deemed noteworthy for one reason or another from 1898 to 1918, a total of 86 dreams in all. It is the earliest carefully kept dream journal we have. At the least, this is one set of dreams that no one can say was influenced by the theories of Freud or Jung. For more information on the Physiologist, and for his very interesting comments and analyses concerning the contents of his dreams, click here.
This is a sample of 19 young women who contributed varying numbers of dreams to a graduate student's dissertation project in the 1990s. None of the women know each other. The names and places in the dreams are entirely fictious. Ten of the women were three months pregnant; nine had had an abortion three months before they began writing down dreams. A content analysis of the dreams suggested that there were few or no differences between the two groups, although there are large individual differences (as there always are in any sample of dreamers).
Ringo was 24 years old when he wrote down these 16 dreams in the fall of 1964, when he was taking part in a research project. He was a junior in college and lived at home with his parents and three younger brothers (ages 21, 19, and 17). He played drums in a band, hence the pseudonym "Ringo." Note that at least three themes or activities appear more than once, suggesting the consistency of his dreams in a mere 26 days.
Rob Bosnak is a well-known, Jungian-oriented dream analyst and dream-group leader who has written several books on dreams, including one -- Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming (Delacorte Press, 1996) -- that includes 53 of his own dreams and his analysis of them. But are his interpretations plausible? Does he understand his own dreams? To answer that question for yourself, you can make your own analysis and then compare it with his. You also can compare his analysis with what emerged from a Hall/Van de Castle content analysis of the dream series, and with what several students concluded after they made their own separate blind analyses of the series before they read his interpretations.
For the further analyses, click here.
Samantha is a college-educated woman in her twenties who volunteered her dream journal in September, 1999. It is first of all of interest because it is one of the most contemporary dream journals we have from someone under 30. It is also of interest because the dream narratives are often longer than in many journals. We purposely know nothing about her. Samantha's relationships to the named characters in her dreams are listed at the end of each dream report. All names have been changed, and they are consistent throughout the series. (E.g., "Walter" starts out as an ex-boyfriend and later becomes a boyfriend, but it is the same person.)
These dreams were collected at a middle school in Central California for a research project that resulted in a paper comparing seventh-grade girls and boys with each other and with the Hall and Van de Castle norms for women and men. (Click here to read the paper.)
This collection contains 299 dreams (164 girls, 135 boys) in German. They were collected by Inge Strauch of the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Zürich, Switzerland (Strauch, 2004). They are part of a longitudinal study on the development of dreams and fantasies from late childhood through early adolescence, supported by the Swiss National Fund. For more information (in German) about this series, click here.) Die in dieser Datenbank vorliegenden 299 Heim-Träume wurden an der Abteilung Klinische Psychologie der Universität Zürich im Rahmen einer vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds geförderten Langzeitstudie erhoben, die die Entwicklung von Traum und Phantasie von der späten Kindheit bis zum Beginn der Adoleszenz zum Thema hatte. Zu mehr Information (auf Deutsch) über dieser Datenbank, klicken Sie hier.
Toby is a young man in his early 20s who attends college in a beach town. He is the ultimate party animal in his dreams. Plenty of drugs (usually marijuana), drinks, and women who like him. In real life he seems to be a happy-go-lucky kind of guy who is very easy going and usually smiling. It could well be that women like him as much in real life as he thinks they do in his dreams -- not that he is without qualms and tensions as he parties along. This is the most recent series we have, from early 2006.
Tom was a 21-year-old graduating senior when he recorded these 27 dreams in the 1990s. An outgoing, competitive person and very good student, in his dreams he takes great interest in young women, wants to be noticed for his physical prowess, can't find the means to go skateboarding and surfing, experiences hassles at work, and has conflicts with his father and a male housemate.
These are Most Recent Dreams from women ages 18-24 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They were collected on April 3, 1996.
These 35 dreams were collected over a six-week period in the spring of 1995, by a mother who had her 10-year-old daughter say her dreams into a tape recorder each morning. The result is a very unique and rich series that seems more believable than most dreams reported at home by young children. They compare well in content and structure with dream reports from this age group in David Foulkes's Children's Dreams (1982), which is based on laboratory awakenings. This series can be usefully compared with the dreams of girls of the same age in "Bay Area Girls," and also with the dream series from 7-year-old "Melissa." (For more information about Vickie, click here.)
There are three sets of dreams from this Vietnam War veteran, who had nightmares about his intense combat experience for decades after he returned to the United States. The first set consists of 98 dreams, including many nightmares, that he recorded off and on for more than 30 years after he left Vietnam (1971 to 2008). The second set of dreams, consisting of 32 dream reports, was written down over a three-week period in 2015 (at age 66) at our request, shortly after he contacted dreambank.net to offer his nightmare journal for future research. The third set consists of 463 dreams recorded between September 2016 and September 2017.
Although much has been written about the PTSD dreams of war veterans, this is the only journal we know of that contains a series of nightmare reports written down shortly after they occurred. Similarly, there are no everyday dream diaries we know of from a combat veteran who suffers from PTSD that consist of all the dreams that were written down daily over at least a two-week period.
For more info about this man's life during and after the war, including a glossary of some of the military jargon used in the dream reports, click here.
This set consists of college women's dreams that involve weddings. Some were collected in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Cleveland, Ohio, by Calvin Hall. Others were collected by two different students at UC Santa Cruz in the first half of the 1990s. Wedding dreams are of potential interest because of all the mishaps and unusual occurrences that are found in them. In terms of the categories employed in the Hall/Van de Castle coding system, these dreams contain many "misfortunes" of various types.
These dreams, from teenage girls ages 11-18, were collected by four different students at four different suburban schools in the mid-1990s. Since they were collected by different people at different times and places, they should not be considered a good sample. Instead, they are of interest because they give a rough idea of how dream content changes as girls mature from their preteens through the senior year in high school.