Extraneous Findings from Twitter Dream Search

The process of selecting dream narratives from a twitter search of the word dream and creating #dreamlog has revealed many aspects of our collective attitude towards dreaming.  While these are  extraneous to the narratives being shared, they do render a portrait of what the unconscious is up against as it tries to deliver its perspective.

Many thousands of tweets each day contain dream. A great many use dream in the sense of hope for one’s life, like a dream job or romantically like “I dream of you.”  It’s a small percentage of the search results that contain actual dream narratives.  When folks do not share the narrative of their dreams, it is common for them refer to a dream experiences in the following ways.

Weird, strange, odd, bizarre, crazy:  These words disparage and denigrate the dream in the same manner they would if a person was being referred to.  They create a defensive position in relation to the dream contents making it easier to dismiss or ignore.   That being said, the language of dreams is odd to our rational sensibilities.

Good or Bad: This feeling toned reaction to the dream often gets coupled with an expectation that the dream will influence in some way the outcome of the following day.  In these instances it’s as if the emotional reaction to the dream is all that is valued which then gets translated into an attitude for approaching the upcoming day.

Horrific:  Freight from a dream experience is a regular occurrence in the search stream.  This includes reports of waking with a racing heart beat, screaming, and body sweats.

Best ever, worst, craziest:  the use of superlatives when referring to dream experiences tends to exaggerate the specific message, again leading the dreamer away from the message the dream is conveying.

Finally, a certain dismissive attitude can also be gleaned in comments like  “thank goodness it was only a dream” and “I do not believe in dreams anyways.”

One of the goals of #dreamlog is to create a place for the language of the dream to reside without the burden of these collective attitudes.