an atlas of the world's dreams
Terra Somnia is an atlas of the world's dreams: tens of thousands of real dream reports, collected by researchers over decades (and in a few cases, over centuries), placed on the Earth where their dreamers lived. Every light on the globe is one dream. Click it and read.
All reports come from two open research archives, used under the CC-BY 4.0 license:
Survey non-answers ("I don't remember") are filtered out. Person names in dream texts are automatically replaced with [name]; well-known public figures are kept, since entire collections study dreams about them. A small portion of the source archives is excluded from display for editorial reasons.
Dream archives rarely record precise locations, and this atlas does not invent them. Each dream is placed at the most honest level the source supports, whether that is a ZIP-code area, a city, a state, or only a country, and its card says which. Points at state or country precision are scattered across real populated places, deterministically, so a spot on the map is representative, not an address. The dreamt-of places layer is different: it marks places mentioned inside dream texts ("I was in Paris…"), found automatically and therefore imperfect.
Theme tags come from a transparent keyword dictionary over classic dream motifs (falling, flying, being chased, teeth…). The constellation and "dreams like this one" come from multilingual sentence embeddings computed offline. Dreams that sit together read alike, whether dreamt in 2nd-century Smyrna or 2020 Ohio. One caution for the charts: the mix of sources changes across decades, so trends portray the archive, not humanity.
Earth imagery: NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble (public domain), streamed from NASA GIBS. Geographic names: GeoNames (CC-BY 4.0). Built as a fully static site; no tracking, no accounts, no servers.
A way to add your own dreams to the atlas is planned. Terra Somnia is a personal project by a geographer who has always wanted to see the world's dreams on a map.