Alta is an adult woman who wrote down her dreams in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and added a few in 1997 when she called to offer the dreams to us. This series has not been heavily studied yet.

Angie is a college student whose dreams are of interest because she wrote them down at two different ages, 18 and 20. Are there differences?

Arlie is an older adult woman who wrote down her dreams in the 1990s. She gave them to us in 1998. This series has never been studied, except by the dreamer.

Barb Sanders (not her real name) is a middle-aged adult woman who has written down most of her dreams since about 1977. The series is ideal for detailed studies, for several reasons: (1) we have interviewed Sanders and her friends at length, so we can provide background information after analyses are made; (2) we have done numerous studies of the dreams that can be built upon with new methods -- these studies are discussed in Chapter 5 of G. William Domhoff's book The Scientific Study of Dreams (2003); (3) the series is so extensive that it is extremely useful for studying subsets on specific issues (e.g., how she interacts with her ex-husband Howard, or how she reacted to an infatuation with Derek, or how she conceives of each of her three siblings and three children, or how she conceives of cats and dogs, or what happens when she is on or near bridges).

For the "cast of characters" in Barb Sanders' dreams, click here.

1138 more dreams from Barb Sanders, written down in 1997 through 2001. These dreams are not included with the first set because they were written down by the dreamer after she was aware that her dreams were being studied. It is not likely that they changed, but it is better to analyze the first set separately for scientific purposes, just to be sure.

(Read the info about the first Sanders series for details about her life.)

The 388 dreams in this set were collected in November 1996, January 1997, and February 1997, from girls attending a school in the San Francisco Bay Area. The girls ranged from 4th through 9th grade, with 5th and 6th graders providing 51% of the dreams. The girls wrote the dreams in diaries that they kept at home. All identifying information has been removed, and the first names that are included are pseudonyms. This set of dreams covers the longest age span -- six years -- from one school that is available in our dream database. It also contains the best set of dreams from 4th, 5th, and 6th graders that is available anywhere, as far as we know. (For more about this series, including a table with details about each dreamer, click here.)

The 388 dreams in this set were collected in November 1996, January 1997, and February 1997, from girls attending a school in the San Francisco Bay Area. The girls ranged from 4th through 9th grade, with 5th and 6th graders providing 51% of the dreams. The girls wrote the dreams in diaries that they kept at home. All identifying information has been removed, and the first names that are included are pseudonyms. This set of dreams covers the longest age span -- six years -- from one school that is available in our dream database. It also contains the best set of dreams from 4th, 5th, and 6th graders that is available anywhere, as far as we know. (For more about this series, including a table with details about each dreamer, click here.)

These dreams were collected in the mid-1990s from several men and women ranging from their 20s to their 70s, but most are from 40 to 65. Some are congenitally blind; most of the others have been blind for over 20 years, but one older woman has been blind for only a few years. (For more about this series, including a table with details about each dreamer, click here.)

These dreams were collected in the mid-1990s from several men and women ranging from their 20s to their 70s, but most are from 40 to 65. Some are congenitally blind; most of the others have been blind for over 20 years, but one older woman has been blind for only a few years. (For more about this series, including a table with details about each dreamer, click here.)

Chris was a Wall Street businessman in his 50s, and the happily married father of daughters 20 and 18, when he wrote down several hundred of his dreams out of his own curiosity between June and December, 1968. He later sent 100 of them to Calvin S. Hall. He served in the army in World War II and traveled widely thereafter. He was also a transvestite, which is what makes this series unique. Click here to read Calvin Hall's inferences about Chris, as well as Chris' own notes on his dreams.

Chuck is a young Ph.D. researcher in one of the highly developed physical sciences. It might not be expected that such a person would keep a dream journal over the space of several years, but it just goes to show there is no predicting interest in dreams. He sent us the first 75 dreams in the series and we coded them with the Hall/Van de Castle system. But we know nothing about him except what comes through in the dreams.

These dreams were collected by Calvin Hall from his students in an undergraduate course in personality at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947 and 1948. Well over a thousand dreams were collected, but on this Web site we've included only the 681 dream reports that came from the female students. (For more about this series, including the questions that were asked as part of the dream recording process, click here.)

This series of 24 dreams from a 21-year-old college student is of interest for the predominance of a few concerns and interests that fit well with her waking life. It is also of interest because it may contain examples of various forms of figurative thought. This series has been analyzed independently by two students who knew nothing about the dreamer; they asked the dreamer and one of the dreamer's friends to agree or disagree with a series of written questions based on the analysis. (For more information about Dahlia, click here.)

David is our code name for a young man in his early 20s who began writing down his dreams in 1990 at the age of 13. His series is the only one we have that covers the teenage years, although there are relatively few dreams for the ages 13-18. (For more about this series, including a "cast of characters," click here.)

This remarkable series of 6,100 dreams in German comes from the philosophical psychologist Detlev von Uslar, a German-born citizen of Switzerland and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Zürich. Von Uslar published these dreams in a companion CD-ROM to his book, Tagebuch des Unbewussten: Abenteuer im Reich der Träume (Diary of the Unconscious: Adventures in the Realm of Dreams), published by Königshausen und Neumann in 2003. The CD-ROM includes reveries, daydreams, and his thoughts about the dreams, but we include only the dreams here.

(The book itself discusses his views of the dreams and his general ideas about dreams. For a brief summary of each chapter of von Uslar's book, click here.)

Dorothea lived from 1887 to 1965. This series of about 900 dreams covers the years from 1912 to 1965. There are 54 dreams from ages 25 to 40 and 85 from ages 41 to 55. She did not start writing down every dream until 1959, when she was 72. Dorothea kept her dreams for her own personal reasons. She was not in therapy and had no interest in the clinical theories of dreams developed by Freud, Jung, and others. She did not write to Calvin Hall offering her dreams for study until a few years before her death. (For more about this series, including the dreamer's own commentary on her dream journal, click here.)

Ed was 57 when his wife Mary died of cancer after 32 years of marriage. When he dreamed about her shortly after her death in June of 1980, he experienced it as a precious moment of being with her, and wrote it down. Two months later, he dreamed about her again, and wrote that one down too. Soon he found himself writing down every dream in which she appeared. In the first 22 years after her death, he wrote down 143 dreams -- as few as two in one year, as many as 14 in another. The dreams have much in common with other dreams of deceased loved ones. In a few early dreams she comes back to life or provides him with reassurance that she is doing well. Many dreams are about the time of her final illness, but others are about their earlier life together, providing a portrait of a marriage. For the dreamer's reflections on his feelings toward Mary, his thoughts about their marriage, and the cast of characters in the dreams (all names are fictional), click here.

Edna is a congenitally blind first-year college student whose 19 dreams from October 1948 to January 1949 are of great value because she explains the various sensations -- primarily auditory and tactile -- that allow her to gauge the elegance of a restaurant or know how big a room is. She also provided researchers with her explanations for some of the content in her dreams, describing tensions with her father and her attraction to her handsome 27-year-old dancing instructor. (For Edna's comments about her own dreams, click here.) For the many people who ask us if blind people dream, and if so "how," this dream series is the best answer we know of; but see also the series labeled "Blind Dreamers."

These are Most Recent Dreams from women ages 18-24 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They were collected on April 3, 1996.

These 35 dreams were collected over a six-week period in the spring of 1995, by a mother who had her 10-year-old daughter say her dreams into a tape recorder each morning. The result is a very unique and rich series that seems more believable than most dreams reported at home by young children. They compare well in content and structure with dream reports from this age group in David Foulkes's Children's Dreams (1982), which is based on laboratory awakenings. This series can be usefully compared with the dreams of girls of the same age in "Bay Area Girls," and also with the dream series from 7-year-old "Melissa." (For more information about Vickie, click here.)

This set consists of college women's dreams that involve weddings. Some were collected in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Cleveland, Ohio, by Calvin Hall. Others were collected by two different students at UC Santa Cruz in the first half of the 1990s. Wedding dreams are of potential interest because of all the mishaps and unusual occurrences that are found in them. In terms of the categories employed in the Hall/Van de Castle coding system, these dreams contain many "misfortunes" of various types.

These dreams, from teenage girls ages 11-18, were collected by four different students at four different suburban schools in the mid-1990s. Since they were collected by different people at different times and places, they should not be considered a good sample. Instead, they are of interest because they give a rough idea of how dream content changes as girls mature from their preteens through the senior year in high school.