What are our dreams telling us - especially in turbulent times?

In our latest work, we examined more than 44,000 dreams shared spontaneously by users on Reddit's r/Dreams forum. These were not filtered through lab settings or surveys - they were raw, real, and deeply personal. By applying latest natural language processing techniques, we uncovered 217 recurring dream topics grouped into 22 themes like family, violence, or religion - forming the most comprehensive bottom-up dream taxonomy to date. And these themes shift: during COVID-19, dreams turned inward, more about indoors, teeth, and blood than about outdoor, socializing, or movement. After the start of the war in Ukraine, dreams of violence, nuclear war, and death surged.

You can explore the full taxonomy as an interactive map - see how themes cluster, shift, and resonate across thousands of dreams.

Our approach departs from traditional dream science by letting patterns emerge from the data itself, without predefined psychological categories. That allowed us to uncover how nightmares, vivid dreams, lucid states, and recurring themes each have their own emotional fingerprints. These collective dream shifts reveal how global crises imprint on our collective inner lives—turning the sleeping mind into a mirror for the world outside. Like seismographs of the psyche, dreams offer a unique lens on how populations process trauma, isolation, and upheaval. By listening to many, we learn not only about individual minds—but about our shared emotional world.

Epidemic dreams: dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic

Why were our dreams during the pandemic weird? In a collaboration with Harvard Medical School, we tackled that question by combining state-of-the-art research in Network Science and Machine Learning. We developed state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing algorithms that can reliably extract health mentions from text. These algorithms processed more than 2000 dream reports one the researchers collected, and 57 million tweets which reflected waking-life experiences. We were then able to test what psychologists call the continuity hypothesis. This says that dreams reflect a dreamer’s quotidian experience rather than Freudian violent urges or sexual repression.

Unsurprisingly, we found that dreams were aligned with waking-life experiences: people both posted and dreamed of COVID-19 symptoms such as cough and fever. Yet, more interestingly, the world of dreams departed from the real world in significant ways. Dream reports contained surreal conditions, often unrelated to the virus. People dreamed of attacks of bugs, grasshoppers, and maggots. They also dreamed of teeth and hair falling apart, and of body parts being deformed (e.g., ``long bodies with very short legs’’) or turning into powder. It turns out that sleep deforms real-life experiences through the lens of emotions and figurative imagery, and that these unrealistic health experiences mirrored worries that were otherwise hard to express.

The study suggests that there is a hidden, perhaps subconscious, layer of unexpressed reactions to the virus. If the virus continues to run rampant through the world, it will soon become endemic, and dreams could become a subject of serious scientific scrutiny to partly deal with the long-lasting effects of the pandemic.

Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports

Sleep scientists often refer in their research to the continuity hypothesis, According to it our dreams directly reflect what happens in our real lives.

We designed and developed The Dreamcatcher – an interactive visual tool that explores the link between dreams and waking life through a collection of dream reports. The aim of the Dreamcatcher was to increase the general public’s awareness about the benefits of dream analysis.

The tool allows to explore sleep patterns and dive into single dreams of real people who recorded their dreams for research purposes.

The Dreamcatcher: Launch demo

Publications

• Dream Content Discovery From Social Media Using Natural Language Processing. EPJ Data Science, 2025 PDF
• Epidemic dreams: dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Royal Society Open Science, 2022 PDF
• The Dreamcatcher: Interactive Storytelling of Dreams. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2021 PDF
• Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports. Royal Society Open Science, 2020 PDF