Dreaming about crowd
A crowd in a dream is not a lot of individuals. Dreamers consistently report being unable to say who was there, and that vagueness is the most informative thing about these reports.
Also searched as: a crowd, lots of people, a queue, being in a crowd, a room full of people
Uncountability is the defining feature. Dreamers describe a great many people and cannot enumerate a single one unless they were attended to.
Movement against the crowd is the commonest narrative: trying to get somewhere and being carried, blocked or slowed, which belongs with the helplessness material.
Being looked at by a crowd is a second and quite different report, and it pairs with the exposure material rather than the movement one.
A crowd that is silent, or that turns as one, is reported by a minority and is described as one of the more unsettling images they have had.
Common associations
- Number without individuals, which is what dreams actually generate.
- Being impeded, in the movement reports.
- Being observed by many, in the exposure ones.
- Coordinated behaviour, in the unsettling minority.
Positive readings
Crowds at a celebration or an event are reported and are described with energy rather than distress.
The useful observation is again about construction: knowing that the crowd has no members is oddly reassuring to dreamers who have been trying to remember faces.
Difficult readings
The impeded-movement version is frustrating and shares its structure with the wider group of dreams where effort does not produce effect.
The silent or coordinated crowd is genuinely eerie and belongs near the Bestiary material.
Psychological perspectives
Dreams generate detail where attention goes and not otherwise. A crowd is a texture rather than a set of people, which is why it cannot be enumerated afterwards and why faces do not resolve.
That is one of the clearest demonstrations available that dreams are constructed as they are experienced rather than existing to be examined.
The movement difficulty is the standard effort-without-effect finding, and the exposure version is the standard social-exposure theme.
Cultural and historical
Crowds as a force, and the loss of the individual within one, is a modern preoccupation with a substantial literature behind it, and it is available to any dreamer.
There is little traditional dream material, which fits: dense crowds are largely an urban and modern experience.
What the sleep science says
Reasonably supported: dream detail is generated at the point of attention, which accounts for unenumerable crowds and unresolved faces.
Well established: effort without effect during REM.
Not established: any meaning for a crowd as such.
Your own context
- Could you name anyone?
- Were you trying to get through?
- Were they looking at you?
- Did they move together?
If this recurs
Split by version. The movement reports go with the effort dreams, the observed reports with the exposure dreams. They recur independently.
Emotions often reported
- helplessness
- unease
- panic
- frustration
- embarrassment
- excitement
Specific crowd dreams
Each of these is written separately, not generated from this page.
What happened
What state it was in
Questions for reflection
These are for your journal, not for us. Nothing you write is shared.
- Could I name a single person?
- Was I trying to get somewhere?
- Were they looking at me?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
4 references. What these labels mean
- 1.The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content AnalysisAcademic book
G. William Domhoff (2003) · American Psychological Association
Cited for: The continuity hypothesis (that dream content largely reflects waking concerns) and a sustained critique of symbolic dream interpretation as an evidential method.
- 2.Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical ResearchAcademic book
Jennifer M. Windt (2015) · MIT Press
Cited for: A modern philosophical treatment of what dreams are, including the immersive-spatiotemporal-hallucination account and the status of dream reports as evidence.
- 3.The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of DreamingPeer-reviewed research
Antti Revonsuo (2000) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Cited for: The threat-simulation hypothesis. That the over-representation of threatening content in dreams may be functional rather than incidental.
- 4.The Content Analysis of DreamsAcademic book
Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle (1966) · Appleton-Century-Crofts
Cited for: The standard coding system for dream content, and the normative frequencies that later studies are compared against. The reason claims like "aggression is more common in dreams than friendliness" can be stated numerically at all.
Dreamers’ accounts
How dreams of crowd have gone for other people, in their own words. Nothing here is an interpretation of anyone else's dream. It is a record of what happened and what it was like.
Nothing here yet. Be the first to say how this has gone for you.
Related records
- ActionBeing naked in publicOne of the small handful of dreams reported across every population studied, alongside falling and being chased. The consistent feature is not the nakedness but the indifference of everybody else, and the shame that persists anyway.
- PlaceCityCities in dreams are usually composites: a place assembled from several real ones, which the dreamer nonetheless names confidently as somewhere specific. That combination of accurate detail and impossible layout is the most reported feature.
- PersonFaceless personFaces are one of the things dreaming struggles to hold steady, so a figure without a clear face is common and mechanically unremarkable. It becomes significant when the facelessness is the point, when the dreamer notices and reacts to it.
- ActionBeing ignoredA widely reported and rarely written-about dream: the dreamer speaks, acts or arrives, and nobody responds. It is closely related to the dreams where the voice will not work, and the two are often the same experience described differently.
- PersonA colleagueThe purest demonstration of the availability finding in the database. People report dreaming about colleagues they barely think about, and are troubled by it, and the explanation is simply that they see them constantly.
- PersonA soldierFor most dreamers a soldier is a costume: a figure carrying authority and threat with no personal experience behind it. For people who have served or lived through conflict it is not, and those reports belong with the trauma material rather than here.
Records that mention crowd
These pages link to crowd, either as something reported in the same dream or as a related subject. This page does not point back at all of them, so the list is assembled rather than chosen.