I’ve just joined REMcloud, a new social networking site devoted to dreaming. It’s an idea whose time has come. As a technophobic introvert it pains me to say this, but sharing dreams in a Facebook-like setting has a lot of appeal. It allows you to connect your personal dreams with dreams of countless other people all over the world. It’s quick, easy to use, and free, and it provides tools to explore recurrent themes in your dreams and the dreams of others.
The space for writing a dream is limited to 400 characters (about 70 words), which is enough for many dreams but inadequate for the ones that are really detailed and elaborate. Some of the dreams reported by other people are written in text-messaging style, making it hard to understand what the heck they’re talking about.
There’s an option to get interpretations for particular words based on typical dream dictionary meanings (e.g. a cellar means a subconscious place where problems are hidden). This kind of interpretation can be helpful if taken as one possibility among others rather than as definitive fact, a point that could be made more clearly somewhere on the site.
The most intriguing possibility opened up by REMcloud is the ability to observe in real time the macro-trends of collective human dreaming. The “Dream Mosaics” on the site bring together people’s dreams of celebrities, sports, news events, and potentially other subjects of broad social interest. Of course there’s no guarantee that people aren’t just making shit up when they type in a supposed “dream,” so this wouldn’t be good data for a scientific study. But as an entertaining mirror of the kaleidoscopic world of human dreaming, REMcloud is worth checking out.