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Dream themes
The database arranged by what you are looking for rather than by what kind of thing it is. Every record appears under exactly one theme, and the archives are deliberately not here: they answer a different question and have their own wings.
371 of 399 records, across 16 themes. The remainder are the two archives.
- The body21Teeth, hair, blood, breathing, and the sensations that turn out to have a physical explanation. Several of these ask the bodily question before the interpretive one, because that is where a wrong reading does the most harm.
- Animals42From the animals people actually meet to the ones almost nobody encounters and everybody dreams about. Disgust and fear behave differently here, and the difference is usually the whole reading.
- The house and its rooms21Rooms, stairs, doors, and the objects that stay put. Dreamed buildings are wrong in specific and repeatable ways, and this is where that concentrates.
- Travel and vehicles17The road, the timetable, and every way a journey fails. Control dreams outnumber crash dreams by a long way, which is the reverse of what the traditions suggest.
- Weather, water and the land44The sky, the sea, what grows and what is buried. The approach is reported far more often than the arrival, in storms and in waves alike.
- Objects and things35Carried, worn, used and broken. A dream object is nearly always reported through a failure: the phone that will not dial, the key that will not turn, the bag that will not close.
- People27Dream characters are drawn from whoever a dreamer has encountered recently and often, weighted by exposure rather than by significance. Most of these entries exist to say that.
- Places and buildings20Where dreams are set, and the places with a history under them. Dreamers describe several of these as occupied in the past tense.
- Food and drink8Shaped by one constraint: taste and smell are barely reported in dreams, so a food dream is a dream about a situation with food in it.
- Events and occasions26Weddings, funerals, exams, arrivals. Every one has a script, which makes them legible in a dream and easy to over-read, because dreams break scripts far better than they complete them.
- What you do22Falling, flying, being chased, hiding, and what happens between people. The actions people report most, including the ones readers arrive frightened of.
- Feelings and states26The emotions dreams actually produce, and what the dreaming self does. Fear is not the commonest, and a third of nightmares are not primarily about it.
- Screens, machines and sound8The one group with no interpretive tradition at all, because it is too recent to have one. Most of it turns out to be about what the dream could not do.
- The strange and the uncanny19Rooms that are two places, people who are two people, and the traces something has left. Ordinary dream construction, described here rather than mystified.
- Colour and number23Nine numbers rather than the thirty every dream dictionary carries, because the traditions are deep for a handful and absent for the rest. Colours are properties rather than things, which changes what an entry can honestly claim.
- The founding twelve12Snake, teeth, water, fire, blood, the mirror, the door, the key, the clock, the moon, the spider and the bridge. The records the database was built around, and still the deepest.
Other ways in
Themes are one of three. The category hubs group records by what they are, and the dictionary lists every one of them in alphabetical order.