DREAM GALAXY

Research case · People & kin

A Back Rub

Not stated · Date unknown · contemporary study

There was lots of stuff going on I don't remember which one, like what to think about. Umm I was thinking about my girlfriend giving me a backrub, it was good.

Original text — Zhang & Wamsley 2019 dream EEG reports — krank curated text-only release v1, Jing Zhang and Erin J. Wamsley (research); Erin Wamsley, Jing Zhang and Megan Collins (archive); Remington Mallett / krank (text curation)

Open this dream in the galaxy →

Source
Zhang & Wamsley 2019 dream EEG reports — krank curated text-only release v1 — Jing Zhang and Erin J. Wamsley (research); Erin Wamsley, Jing Zhang and Megan Collins (archive); Remington Mallett / krank (text curation), 2019 study; 2025 curated release. Curated text-only release, de-identified report 244
Rights
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Record type
Research case
Place
Not stated · American
Date
Date unknown · contemporary study
Uncertainty
Moderate — De-identified sleep-mentation report; the source does not establish a calendar dream date. Chinese title and translation are AI-generated editorial drafts, not human-verified.
Imagery
Partner · Child

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

Partner

Was it your partner now, someone from the past, or someone you have never met? Was the distance between you the same as when you are awake?

Jung · Anima and animus — after the real person

Jung would first read a dreamed partner as your actual partner and relationship. Only then might the figure carry what he called the anima or animus — an inner image of the other — a framing that reflects his era’s ideas about gender.

C. G. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, “Anima and Animus””, Collected Works 7

Homeric epic Classical text

After twenty years apart, Penelope tells how a likeness of Odysseus lay beside her that night, “such as he was when he went with the host”, and how she took it for real.

Homer, Odyssey XX

Han-dynasty poetry Literature

In one of the Nineteen Old Poems, a wife sleeping alone through the long nights dreams she sees her husband’s face, and he comes for her in a carriage — then is gone.

Nineteen Old Poems, “Cold, cold, the year draws to its end”

All perspectives on partner →

Child

Whose child was it — yours, someone you know, or yourself when young? What did the child need?

Jung · The child archetype

Jung described the “child” in dreams and myth as an image of what is not yet — a beginning, small and easy to overlook, that carries a future.

C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype”, Collected Works 9i

Psychoanalysis Depth psychology

Freud began his theory with children’s dreams, which he found to be plain, undisguised wishes — a trip promised, a treat withheld.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ch. III

East Asian custom Folk saying

In China and Korea (where it is called taemong), “conception dreams” before a birth are a living custom, often retold within families.

East Asian folk custom

All perspectives on child →

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images