Analyzing Your Dreams by Looking at the Most Common

Once, before I was married, I had a dream that I had met the man I was going to marry. I was so excited until my family ate him. Turns out he was a chocolate brownie.

Have you ever had that dream? Probably not, though I once heard that Louie Anderson had a dream he was embalmed in butter. I’m the 9th of 9 kids and he’s the 10th of 11. Coincidence? I think not.

But what about the more common dreams we all share? Why do people seem to have

such similar dreams when our sleep, experiences and our brain states are different? According to studies, there are 55 common themes that all people, across gender, country, and culture have. I was going to list the first 10, but 55 isn’t that many, so I decided to list them all. I grouped some of the similar ones together, so the list is a little shorter than 55:

• school, teachers, and studying, failing an examination
• being chased or pursued
• sexual experiences
• falling, being on the verge of falling
• arriving too late
• a living person being dead, a person now dead being alive
• flying or soaring through the air
• being frozen with fright