Dream count 2002-2020

 

1335+ dreams from 2002-2020 logged in Obsidian

 

I finally finished* my dream project. I added every dream I could find from 2002-2020 into a program called Obsidian. Now all of my dream journal entries are in one place instead of haphazardly strewn about several notebooks, phones, and hard drives. Putting them all into Obsidian allowed me to easily search through my dreams for repeating themes by adding tags to each entry and linking dreams to related ones. This was not something I was able to do prior to finding this program. (Big thanks to @starlitstudy on Twitter for introducing it to me!)

 *This is actually an ongoing project, but the first step I wanted to accomplish was to look through dreams up to 2020. At the end of each year I will update my findings with added data from the year. 

 

***Important note*** Before getting into the results of my research, I want to point out that one reason I was able to do this at all is white privilege. This was honestly not something I even considered until recently (this unawareness is also the result of privilege), but it is nonetheless true. I as a white passing person am statistically much more likely to sleep long enough to have restful sleep and time to record all these dreams. The field of dream research is also incredibly whitewashed. Of all the books on dreaming I have ever read, I don't think any of them were written by a Black person. This is a great disservice to humanity because we ALL deserve the rest and healing that comes from a good nights sleep. We ALL deserve to be able to access the healing that can come from dream work. I strongly encourage you to check out this article by Maria Minnis that talks about this problem and provides links to various studies for further learning.

 

The purpose of this endeavor I outline in this article here. To summarize, I basically wanted to see if there are any correlations to my dreams such as time of year, moon phase, day of the week etc.

The total number of dreams I used in this sample size is 1335 from the years 2002-2020. There are about 40 dreams from those years that I did not include because I never wrote down the date. Once those 1335 dreams were added, tagged, and organized, I did a count to see how many dreams I had for the following:

• day of the week

• season

• moon phase

• sun sign (tropical)

• moon sign (tropical)

• sun/moon sign element

• sun/moon sign modality

• prevalence of out of bounds planets

• prevalence of eclipses

In this article I will go over the results for:

• day of the week

• season

• moon phase

The next article will delve into more of the astrological findings. I know not everyone is interested in astrology, so this article will focus on the more mundane findings.

Without further adieu, here are the results.

 

Dreams for each day of the week. 1335 dreams from 2002-2020 were counted.

The day of the week that had the most dreams was Monday. This was surprising to me because I was expected the result to be a day in the weekend. Monday had a total of 212 dreams out of 1335 (15.88%). Thursday had the least number of dreams with 173 out of 1335 (12.96%). The results are pretty evenly distributed so I don't think the day of the week has too much influence on my dreaming.

 

Dreams by season. 1335 dreams counted from 2002-2020

The results for seasons was pretty striking to me. Summer has significantly more dreams at 497 out of 1335. Spring had 295, Fall had 267, and Winter had 294. At first I thought there were more dreams written down in the summer because I was not in school, but I don't think this was the case because for the vast majority of these entries I was working full time regardless of season. 

Dreams per moon phase. 1335 dreams sampled from 2002-2020

Another surprising result is that the majority of my dreams occurred during the Moon's waning crescent phase. I was expecting these results to be much more evenly spread out, but a full 25% (334 dreams out of 1335) occurred during this specific phase. I also had more dreams during the waning moon (652) than the waxing moon (593). 

Why did I have more dreams during the summer, on Mondays, or during the waning crescent Moon phase? I don't know. Maybe I'll figure this out someday. I'm also curious to see how these results change as I add more entries for future years. By the end of 2021 I will be adding approximately 500+ more dreams so it will be really interesting to see what changes.

 In the next article I'll share my results for the more astrological findings. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!