A Nation-By-Nation Guide To How The World Dreams
Dreams. They’re weird, right? When we put our heads down at night, our minds crank out some often absolutely bizarre made up yarn to act as our ‘overnight entertainment’, leaving us confused, scared and often fascinated when we snap back to Earth. While even the smartest and most well read experts on the topic can never really know what a dream might mean, it is certainly curious how so many of us seem to conjure up the same, or at least similar stories, for ourselves.
In a genuinely interesting collection of data, Secret Linen have scoured the Google trends and developed a world map of Dream Trends. Using worldwide search data from Google Keyword Planner, they have created a key’ed world map that identifies the most common dream topic for the majority of the world’s nations. The results paint a bizarrely intriguing picture of the shared experiences we appear to have when we put our heads to pillow.
Down here in New Zealand, the most common theme is the long-studied phenomenon of ‘Dreaming about losing ones teeth’. While again, it’s impossible to be certain as to what specifically it means when you dream about your teeth unexpectedly falling out, the most popular explanation that ‘experts’ have been able to suggest is that it is associated with feelings of loss or anxiety about a significant change in one’s life. Given all that’s happened in the world in the last two years, I think it’s fair to say that might be an understandable justification for the prevalence of this dream, though its far from the most popular response in most countries.
While the spread is extremely varied, some reoccurring themes include ‘Dreams about travelling’, ‘Dreams about cheating’ (unfortunately, most common with our trans-Tasman neighbours, Australia) and ‘Dreams about an ex-partner’. One theme with interestingly high-frequency is ‘Dreams about being pregnant’, an oddity when you consider it’s only likely to effect around half the population. The study found 18 different countries reported as the most common search, including the UK, France and several other European nations. Like with errant teeth, pregnancy dreams don’t always have to carry a literal interpretation, however, as Secret Linen notes that they can also be a metaphorical representation of growth, or something new of significance emerging in our lives, be that a job or a relationship or something of this nature.
While its hard to see a clear through line through a lot of the data here (other than that for some reason, almost all of North Africa seems really enamored with ‘Dreaming about dogs’), it is still fascinating to think about how despite our massively different real-life experiences, our dreams so often lead us to the same places. Who knows, the next time you sleep next to your partner, they could be having the same dream as you (though for Australians, that might not be such a great thing…).
