Dream Research & Education
Written by Dan Kennedy of the Elsewhere.to team, this is a very thoughtful survey and evaluation of current apps available for recording and analyzing your dreams.
Best Dream Journal Apps of 2025
I’m partial to Elsewhere, of course, but I admire and respect the efforts of every one of these projects. A rising tide of collective interest in dreams will lift all our journaling ships!
Houses and homes are among the most frequent elements appearing in dreams, with a wide range of literal and symbolic meanings.
According to the Baseline frequencies of the Sleep and Dream Database, 47% of women’s dreams and 42% of men’s dreams include at least one architectural reference, with house, room, and home being mentioned the most often. These references are much more frequent than mentions of food and drink (14% women, 12% men), clothing (14% women, 11% men), and sexuality (4% women, 6% men). Among the vital necessities of life, the need for shelter seems to make the biggest impact on our dreaming experience. (Big Dreams, 104-105)
The frequency of houses in dreams surely reflects the large amount of time that many people spend in their homes. In literal terms, a house provides its occupants with safety, privacy, comfort, and warmth. As an enclosure built of durable materials, it separates inside from outside, domestic from public, family from stranger. For many homeowners, their house is their most valuable asset, a physical repository of their financial resources. This is why dreaming of a threat to one’s house, such as from fire or flooding, can be so disturbing. Especially in an era of rapid climate change, these kinds of worrisome house-danger dreams are likely to increase.
Dreams of houses also carry important symbolic meanings, in at least two different ways. One is the house as a symbol of family relations and childhood experiences. Dreams often cast us back into the homes we lived in as children many years ago, reminding us of how those experiences still shape and influence us today. A house can embody deep memories and formative events, both joyful and scary. What makes a house “haunted” in waking or dreaming is the uncanny presence of residents whose energies are still living even if they physically died long ago. When you dream of a childhood home, there may be a symbolic connection between something important that happened in that house and a difficult or challenging situation you are facing right now.
House dreams can also symbolize aspects of your mind and body. For instance, Carl Jung once dreamed of exploring a house with many different levels; as he descended from one floor to another, the décor changed from modern to ancient to paleolithic. Jung interpreted his dream as a symbolic portrayal of the human psyche, with modern consciousness at the “top” of the structure, and the depths of the collective unconscious at the “bottom.” Other psychologists treat house dreams as metaphors of the human body, with its various openings/orifices, its outer façade (“curb appeal”), secret inner spaces, plumbing and wiring, etc. If you have a house dream, it is worth considering how the condition of the building in the dream compares to the condition of your mind and body in waking life. Perhaps you discover the house needs maintenance or repair; maybe something especially tasty, or horribly nasty, is being cooked in the kitchen; you might find whole new rooms you have never explored before. Such dreams can use the familiar features of a house to help you better understand subtle, easily overlooked aspects of yourself.
House references in dreams can have both literal and symbolic levels of meaning, and the two levels often overlap. In American society, many people aspire to private home ownership in order to satisfy their literal need for shelter and also to mark their symbolic achievement of the “American Dream.” The common association of home ownership with the American Dream reflects an admirable striving for a good, settled, independent life. However, narrowly reducing the ideal of the American Dream to owning a private home can lead to an excessive focus on material gain and social status.
Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on January 6, 2025.
What’s it like to keep a long-term dream journal? These days I’m doing everything I can to help in developing and promoting the new app Elsewhere, an excellent resource for dream journaling. Also, my new book The Scribes of Sleep is about the history of dream journals. Thus, I’m thinking a lot about how to describe the value of keeping a dream journal to people who might be unfamiliar with the practice. How can you begin to understand the wild wonder and serendipitous magic of dream journaling if you have never tried it?
As I learned primarily from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, the power of metaphors is their capacity to use what we know to help us understand what we do not know. Here, I’m thinking that keeping a dream journal is metaphorically like being a Bald Eagle. (It could be any high-flying bird, but this is the one I saw earlier this afternoon.) We know several things about eagles that can also be accurately said of dream journaling.
When you track your dreams over time in a journal, you are able to rise above the occurrence of single dreams to see the flow of your dreaming in its entirety. From this altitude the whole of your oneiric terrain becomes visible. You can recognize large-scale patterns, shapes, and features that are simply impossible to perceive from the ground level.
As a dream-journaling eagle, you can easily move back and forth across the verdant territory of your dreaming self, soaring in whatever direction you please, circling over some places, swooping down for a closer look in others. Your perception in incredibly sharp: you notice subtle movements, hidden connections, and curious forms of life. Your consciousness expands to encompass everything you can see–the sky, the land, and the farthest horizons.
Beyond the specific insights that are possible from the eagle’s view, the summum bonum of dreaming journaling is the emergence of a more dynamic spiritual awareness and presence in the world. Perched on the top branch of the tallest tree in the forest, you can gaze over the bounteous vitality of your own personal realm of dreaming and reflect on the contours of your life from a uniquely wide-ranging perspective.
And who knows, maybe you’ll meet someone else who’s perched up there…
By Anne Underwood
Newsweek Magazine
July 25, 2005 issue
As a hospice chaplain for 10 years, the Rev. Patricia Bulkley confronted the raw emotions of the dying-their terror at the approaching end, their unresolved family problems, their crises of faith. They were people like Charles Rasmussen, a retired merchant-marine captain in his mid-80s who was dying of cancer. He was consumed by fear until, in a dream one night, he saw himself sailing in uncharted waters. Once again, he felt the thrill of adventure as he pushed through a vast, dark, empty sea, knowing he was on course. “Strangely enough, I’m not afraid to die anymore,” he told Bulkley after that dream. Death was no longer an end, but a journey.
As Bulkley reveals in a slender but powerful new book, “Dreaming Beyond Death,” many people have extraordinary dreams in their final days and weeks. These dreams can help the dying grapple with their fears, find the larger meaning in their lives, even mend fences with relatives. Yet all too often, caregivers dismiss them as delusional or unworthy of attention. Not Bulkley, who often discussed dreams with patients at the Hospice of Marin in California. Her experiences were the inspiration for the book, which she coauthored with her son Kelly Bulkeley, a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. It is the first volume devoted to the (paradoxically) life-affirming power of pre-death dreams. And though the research is still preliminary, the authors inject level-headed analysis into an arena often dominated by seekers of the paranormal.
Accounts of prescient or meaningful pre-death dreams span religions and cultures, from China and India to ancient Greece. The last dream that psychologist Carl Jung was able to communicate to his followers, a few days before his death, was of a great round stone engraved with the words “And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness.” To Jung, it showed that his work in this life was complete. Socrates and Confucius also spoke of significant dreams they had shortly before their deaths.
Yet there has been little systematic study of such dreams in modern times. The inherent difficulties are obvious. You can’t enroll people with a week or two to live in formal studies-and they’re hardly going to walk into a sleep clinic and volunteer. By default, hospice workers and family members have collected more of these stories than dream researchers. No one even knows what percentage of people ultimately experience such dreams. Still, scientists recognize that they can be deeply meaningful.
There are certain overarching themes that emerge-going on journeys, reuniting with deceased loved ones, seeing stopped clocks. Often the imagery is straightforward. In one woman’s dream, a candle on her hospital windowsill is snuffed out, engulfing her in darkness-a symbol of death that scares her, until the candle spontaneously relights outside the window. A man struggling to find meaning in his life dreams of a square dance in which the partners leave visible traces of their movements, like ribbons weaving a pattern. “There really is a plan after all, isn’t there?” the man asked Bulkley after that dream. “Somehow we all belong to one another.”
But not all pre-death dreams are comforting. They can also frighten the dreamer, who imagines being chased through crumbling cityscapes or hurtling in a driverless car toward a freshly dug ditch or entering the sanctuary of a cathedral, only to have a tornado break through the roof and suck the visitor up into the whirlwind. “I’ve had patients who woke up pounding on the mattress, very agitated, struggling with the idea that they’re going to lose this battle,” says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of behavioral sciences at Rush University Medical Center. These dreams are warnings of unresolved issues. But by forcing attention to the underlying problems, nightmares may ultimately help the dreamer find peace. “Ignore them at your peril,” says Cartwright.
It is hardly surprising that pre-death dreams are more urgent, more vivid and more memorable than the run-of-the mill patchwork of dreams. “Throughout life, at acute stages of crisis and transition, the need to dream is intensified,” says psychologist Alan Siegel of the University of California, Berkeley. The more dramatic the event, the more the dreams cluster around solving related emotional issues. Pre-death dreams can be so intense that the dying mistake them for waking reality-especially when the dreams feature dead relatives.
Yet despite the power of these dreams, caregivers often miss the opportunity to explore their meaning. It’s a loss on both sides, according to Bulkley. Talking about end-of-life dreams can give family members a way to broach the uncomfortable topic of death, she says. For the dying, discussing such a dream can provide a simple way to articulate complex emotions-or, if the meaning of the dream is unclear, to fathom its purpose. And to the extent the dying person finds comfort in any such dream, so do surviving relatives. “These are the stories that get repeated at funerals,” says Bulkley. “They become part of the family lore.”
The authors resist the notion that pre-death dreams prove the existence of God. Yet the dying often interpret them as affirmations of faith. On her deathbed, a female cancer patient of Bulkley’s was stricken with doubts about the nature of God. For three nights in a row, she dreamed of huge boulders that pulsated with an eerie blue light. To her, they represented a divine being that was unidentifiable, but very real. “I don’t need to know anything more than that,” she told Bulkley. “God is God.” But she had one final dream. In it, the boulders morphed into steppingstones. In the distance a golden light glowed. “It’s calling me now, and I want to go,” she told Bulkley that morning. She died the next day-at peace.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
Pictures and Scans of original article 2005 Newsweek
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Below is a chapter about the history of snake dreams, using psychology and religious studies to explore their meanings. It comes from my book Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey.
If you are interested in how to interpret a dream of a snake, you might take a look at this post.
If you’d like to know what Carl Jung said about snake symbolism in The Red Book, read this post.
To learn more about actual snakes, check out the East Bay Vivarium.
Chapter 2: Snakes
Animals of various kinds appear in spiritually meaningful dreams. Birds, dogs, bears, wolves, fish, and even insects have come in people’s dreams to deliver important messages from the divine. But the animal that makes perhaps the most powerful spiritual impact in dreams is the snake. People from cultures all over the world report dreams in which they have intensely vivid encounters with snakes. Content analysis studies performed by Robert Van de Castle indicate that even in the dreams of modern Americans, who presumably have little direct contact with snakes, these animals appear with surprising frequency. [i] Many reports of snake dreams emphasize their strange, uncanny quality; the dreamer feels both attracted to and yet repelled by the serpent. As the following examples suggest, many people through history have regarded snake dreams as deeply spiritual experiences–for these dreams reveal the ambivalent nature of the sacred, its capacity to be a force of joyful creativity and violent destructiveness in human life.
1) A fifty year-old woman named Rosie Plummer, of the Paviotso people living on the Walker river reservation in Nevada, told anthropologist Willard Park of her shaman father. Rattlesnakes frequently came to him in his dreams and told him how to cure snake bites and other illnesses. Eighteen years after his death, Rosie started to dream about her father. “She dreamed that he came to her and told her to be a shaman. Then a rattlesnake came to her in dreams and told her to get eagle feathers, white paint, wild tobacco. The snake gave her the songs that she sings when she is curing. The snake appeared three or four times before she be lieved that she would be a shaman. Now she dreams about the rattlesnake quite frequently and she learns new songs and is told how to cure sick people in this way. [ii]
2) Lilias Trotter, a Christian missionary who worked in Algeria in the early part of the twentieth century, had these two dreams reported to her by Muslims who were converting to Christianity. A) Trotter says that an Algerian she knew named Boualem had been involved in an angry conflict with a neighbor. She wanted to help Boualem, but didn’t know how; then she says, “now God has dealt with the matter. Boualem told us that a dream had come. ‘I dreamed that a great snake was coiling round my foot and leg, and you [Trot ter] were there, and in horror I called to you. You said to the snake: “In the name of Jesus, let go.” It uncoiled and fell like a rope, and I woke almost dead with joy.’ And the shining of his face told that his soul had got free.” B) Trotter says, “Blind Houriya came this morning with ‘I want to tell you something that has frightened me very much. I dreamt it Saturday night, but I was too frightened to tell you yesterday. To-day my husband told me, “You must tell them.” I dreamed that a great snake was twisting round my throat and strangling me. I called to you [Trotter] but you said: “I cannot save you, for you are not following our road.” I went on calling for help, and one came up to me and loosened the snake from off my neck. I said: “And who is it that is saving me, and what is this snake?” A voice said: “I am Jesus and this snake is Ramadan [the Muslim ritual fasting period].”‘” [iii]
3) Henry Shipes was the son of an English father and a mother from the Maidu Indians of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Califor nia. He grew up at the end of the nineteenth century, during the gold rush era, when the indigenous Maidu culture was coming into conflict with white culture. Henry told anthropologist Arden King of various dreams in which he fought against native shamans who were jealous of his power. In one of these dreams, Henry “had a dream contest with a shaman who was also the headman at Quincy [a Sierra Nevada town]. In this dream Henry and the shaman were contesting with each other to see who had the most power. This was a fight to the death. The shaman acted first. He loosed a snake which pursued Henry Shipes, but was unable to catch him. Henry then tried his white power. This was stated by him to be specifically white. By ruse he caused the shaman to attempt the lifting of a bucket. The bucket exploded and the dream ended.” [iv]
4) The Egyptian Pharaoh Tanutamon is reported to have had the following dream experience in the first year of his reign, as presented by philologist A. Leo Oppenheim in his work on dreams in the ancient Near East: “His majesty saw a dream in the night: two serpents, one on his right, the other on his left. His majesty awoke, but he did not find them. His majesty said: ‘Why has this happened to me?'” His interpreters told him that the dream means that both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt now belong to him. “Then his majesty said: “True indeed is the dream; it is beneficial to him who places his heart in it but evil for him who does not know it.” [v]
5) In Carthage in 203 A.D. Vibia Perpetua, a newly married woman of twenty-two years, and mother to an infant son, was imprisoned and sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. As she waited in prison for the day when she and other Christians would be cast into the arena and killed by wild beasts, her brother came and told her to ask God for a vision to reveal her fate. Perpetua agrees, and says she’ll tell him what she learns tomorrow. “And I asked for a vision, and this was shown to me: I saw a bronze ladder, marvellously long, reaching as far as heaven, and narrow too: people could climb it only one at a time. And on the sides of the ladder every kind of iron implement was fixed: there were swords, lances, hooks, cutlasses, javelins, so that if anyone went up carelessly or not looking upwards, he would be torn and his flesh caught on the sharp iron. And beneath the ladder lurked a serpent of wondrous size, who laid am bushes for those mounting, making them terrified of the ascent. But Saturs [a fellow martyr] climbed up first… And he reached the top of the ladder, and turned and said to me: ‘Perpetua, I’m waiting for you–but watch out that the serpent doesn’t bite you!’ And I said: ‘He won’t hurt me, in Christ’s name!’ And under that ladder, almost, it seemed, afraid of me, the serpent slowly thrust out its head–and, as if I were treading on the first rung, I trod on it, and I climbed. And I saw an immense space of garden, and in the middle of it a white-haired man sitting in shepherd’s garb, vast, milk ing sheep, with many thousands of people dressed in shining white standing all round. And he raised his head, looked at me, and said: ‘You are welcome, child.’ And he called me, and gave me, it seemed, a mouthful of the cheese he was milking; and I accepted it in both my hands together, and ate it, and all those standing around said: ‘Amen.’ At the sound of that word I awoke, still chewing some thing indefinable and sweet.” Perpetua tells her dream to her brother, and they both understand that she is to die for her faith. [vi]
John Adams and Benjamin Rush: dream-sharing among the Founding Fathers, told in Joseph J. Ellis’ Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
John Adams-Benjamin Rush 1: Dream-Sharing of the Founding Fathers
“Rush set the terms for what became a high-stakes game of honesty by proposing that they dispense with the usual topics and report to each other on their respective dreams. Adams leapt at the suggestion and declared himself prepared to match his old friend ‘dream for dream.’ Rush began with a ‘singular dream’ set in 1790 and focusing on a crazed derelict who was promising a crowd that he could ‘produce rain and sunshine and cause the wind to blow from any quarter he pleased.’ Rush interpreted this eloquent lunatic as a symbolic figure representing all those political leaders in the infant nation who claimed they could shape public opinion. Adams subsequently countered: ‘I dreamed that I was mounted on a lofty scaffold in the center of a great plain in Versailles, surrounded by an innumerable congregation of five and twenty millions.’ But the crowd was not comprised of people. Instead, they were all ‘inhabitants of the royal menagerie,’ including lions, elephants, wildcats, rats, squirrels, whales, sharks….At the end of the dream, he was forced to flee the scene with my ‘clothes torn from my back and my skin lacerated from head to foot.’”
Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 214-215.
I haven’t yet had the opportunity to study these letters between John Adams and Benjamin Rush myself, so I’m relying on Ellis’ reading of this remarkable correspondence (which began in 1805 and continued for many years). Adams was the country’s second President (1979-1801). He played a central role in the country’s revolutionary birth but found himself brusquely pushed aside by Thomas Jefferson, his erstwhile friend and compatriot who defeated him in the 1800 election. Rush was another “Founding Father,” a Pennsylvania doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence and who made it his personal mission to reconcile Adams and Jefferson. He acted as an intermediary between them, writing letters to both men and trying to persuade them to restore some sense of political unity with each other, for their own sake and for the welfare of the young American republic, its visionary system of government still fragile and uncertain of long-term survival.
Why Rush made his dream-sharing proposal to Adams, where he got the idea, what made Adams so quickly agree—these are questions to which I don’t know the answer. But it’s fascinating to discover evidence that the country’s earliest leaders evinced an enthusiastic willingness to share and discuss the insights revealed in their dreams. Rush’s “singular” dream reflected the distaste he and Adams both felt toward the political demagoguery of their opponents, whose seductive fantasies were threatening to destroy the federal government’s ability to function as originally intended. Adams responded with an elaborate nightmare (his reporting of the animals goes on for several paragraphs) in which he’s overcome by the tremendous power and riotous diversity of the animal kingdom. Ellis suggests, plausibly I think, that Adams’ dream symbolized the angry emotions aroused in him by the split with Jefferson.
John Adams-Benjamin Rush 2: The End
“Rush reported his most amazing dream yet. He dreamed that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson, congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life. Jefferson had then responded to this magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness….Then the two philosopher-kings ‘sunk into the grave nearly at the same time, full of years and rich in the gratitude and praises of their country’….Adams responded immediately: ‘A DREAM AGAIN! I have no other objection to your dream but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.”
Ellis, Founding Brothers, 220.
In 1809, when Rush described his dream, Adams and Jefferson were still estranged. However, both men had expressed to Rush a willingness to overcome their differences and bury their hurt feelings for the higher cause of national unity. Ordinarily I would raise the skeptic’s question myself—Rush’s “dream” sounds too smooth, too allegorical, too conveniently supportive of his conscious goals to be believed. But as a matter of historical fact, the dream came true in a way I doubt anyone could fabricate. Adams and Jefferson resumed a cordial, respectful friendship in 1812, and for the remaining years of their lives they wrote each other detailed letters analyzing their roles in the country’s founding and articulating their best understanding of the Revolution’s core ideals and purposes. In uncanny obedience to Rush’s dream, Adams and Jefferson died on same day—July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.