Most common dream is about first love: Israeli-American AI study

JERUSALEM - The most common dream of human beings is about their first love, an Israeli-American artificial intelligence (AI) study revealed on Tuesday in the Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

People's dreams of their first love include the pains of separation and memories of the love that has passed and will never come back, according to the study.

The researchers, Dr. Jonathan Schler of Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) in Israel and Dr. Kate Niederhoffer of the University of Texas, the United States, relied on a huge database from dreamscloud.com website.

In second place are dreams about actions performed by the dreamer itself, such as running, walking or searching.

In third place are nightmares about something chasing the dreamer without being able to escape.

Other common dreams deal with shopping and money, pregnancy and babies, food, functioning at work, violence and family.

Another popular theme is "meta-dreaming," which means a dream about a dream, or dreamers who are preoccupied with the meaning of their dream while dreaming, said the study.

Dreamscloud.com, a kind of social network where people around the world write their dreams, has collected more than 150,000 of dream descriptions, of which 10,000 have been analyzed by the two researchers.

Analysis tool developed by Schler isolates keywords from the dreams, and in this way the dreams can be characterized.

"AI reads, understands and categorizes all the dreams, takes out the emotions and shows the connections," said Schler, adding that performing such an operation manually is almost impossible.