From the graph
Shared dreams
Tonight, thousands of strangers will dream the same dream. Most of them will never know. Dreamgraph exists to change that.
What is a shared dream?
A shared dream is when two or more people dream the same thing - the same theme, the same imagery, sometimes the same night. The term covers a spectrum. At one end sits something measurable and surprisingly ordinary: across any city on any night, people are dreaming of the same things - being chased, water rising, teeth falling out - without ever knowing it. At the other end sit the extraordinary claims: two people who say they met inside the same dream. Dreamgraph is built on the first kind, and quietly curious about the second.
Shared, mutual, collective - what the terms mean
Shared dreaming
two or more people independently report dreams with the same theme or content in the same window of time.
Mutual dreaming
two people report dreaming of each other, or describe the same dream from both sides. Widely reported for centuries. Never verified under controlled conditions.
Collective dreaming
a theme rising across many dreamers at once, in a city, a country, or a group of people who share something in common. This one is measurable. It's what Dreamgraph measures every night.
How often do people dream the same thing?
Far more often than most people expect. Decades of dream research show the same themes recurring across cultures, languages and generations - the overlap in what we dream is real, constant and measurable. What's been missing is an instrument pointed at it. A dream logged alone is a diary entry. Thousands of dreams logged together become a graph - and the graph shows the overlap that no single dreamer can see.
How Dreamgraph detects shared dreams
When you log a dream, it's read once, privately, to identify the themes it included. Then it joins the graph as anonymous data. Every night, Dreamgraph compares what people actually dreamed against what the graph would normally expect - by city, and by the things dreamers have in common. When a theme rises well above its baseline, the graph flags it as a signal, and everyone whose dream included it is told. No dream is ever shown to another user without permission, no signal is published from only a handful of dreamers, and matches are always anonymous.
What the graph can and can't tell us
The graph can tell you how often a dream appears, where, among whom, and when it spikes. It cannot verify that two people occupied the same dream, and it will never tell you what your dream means. Whether we're connected by our dreams is an open question. Dreamgraph's answer is not to speculate. It's to measure.
Questions
What is a shared dream?
When two or more people dream the same thing in the same period of time. It ranges from theme-level overlap, which is common and measurable, to reports of two people sharing a single dream, which remain unverified.
Can two people really have the same dream?
At the level of themes and imagery, yes - measurably, and more often than you'd think. At the level of two people meeting inside one dream, it's been reported for centuries but never proven. Dreamgraph measures the first and keeps an honest, open mind about the second.
What is mutual dreaming?
Two people dreaming of each other, or reporting the same dream from both sides, usually on the same night. It's one of the oldest and most persistent claims in dream reporting.
What is collective dreaming?
Many people dreaming the same theme at once. This is the form Dreamgraph tracks every night, city by city.
How do I find out if someone dreamed the same thing as me last night?
Log your dream. If your city or your cohort shows a signal on a theme your dream included, Dreamgraph tells you - you'll know you weren't dreaming alone.
Add your dreams to the graph. Logging is free, always.