The DreamWell Dream Dictionary has data on over 1,200+ dreams symbols from over 200,000 dreams. Each of these symbols is created manually. This post describes the process of creating just one of these symbols.

Building the dream symbol of “Loops”

I absolutely loved the show Dark. It is one of the best time travel shows that I have ever seen. The show, in three seasons, shows a world that’s slowly created out of a time loop. 

Loops capture my imagination. One of the reasons why is that, seen from a certain life, we are all caught in a daily loop. I think a lot about sleep. Sleep and behavior is partly determined by the circadian rhythm which is based upon the sun. Each day I want to sleep at a certain time. Each morning, I want to do certain things. The daily cycle repeats and things slowly change.

Within dreams, loops can be interesting. The actions can repeat over and over. More interestingly there is a concept of a “false awakening” in dreams. This is the classic “dream within a dream”. You wake up from a dream only to find yourself in a dream. 

These false awakening dreams can occur in two different ways. In the first way, you wake up from a dream into another dream that is dreamlike. In the second way, you wake up from a dream into a dream that is realistic and similar to your own waking life. 

In any case, I’m curious about how loops show up in dreams. What are the different types of loops within dreams? The DreamWell Dream Dictionary is based upon over 200k dreams. We’ve built a lot of tools to be able to explore such a large database. 

Words used frequently with “loop”

The first thing I do is to look at how the word “loop” appears with other words. The graph above shows the most frequent words that appear with the word “loop”. So, 10% of the time the word “loop” is used within a dream, it is used as “time loop”. 

Already, we can see that there are several different types of “loop” dreams. There are time loops, dream/waking loops (which are probably false awakenings), infinite loops, and nightmare loops. 

This is alright because the next step is always reading a lot of dreams.

Reading dreams of loops

I try to read as many dreams as possible about whatever dream symbol that I’m researching. Data is wonderful, but it is only one view on the world. In addition, data will always be biased. So I want to approach my dreams with an open mind. 

One of the things I do is to identify words that are phrases that aren’t really related to the concept. Right now, I’m interested in “loops” which, for me, are these repeating events from which the dreamer cannot escape. Generally, I’ll just look at the language. Read the dreams. Sit with them a bit. 

About 0.85% of the dreams (or 1,810 dreams) contain the word “loop”. I’ll just highlight a few of the dreams that I’ve seen. These are selected more or less at random. I’ve tried to highlight a few different usages of the word “loop”.  

Loop Example 1

“I close my eyes to fall asleep and i see something, like a spreadsheet, and i feel like i’m really trying to concentrate on something, like a formula, but it never gets solved and it’s on loop.”

This wasn’t really what I was thinking about in terms of loops, but I think it counts. The dreamer is trying to solve a work problem, but there is no solution. The events and actions repeat.

Loop Example 2

“this is when i realise that the flight crashes and i die in it and apparently i am looping back to the time when i picked that watch. no matter what i try to do, i can never exit that airport. that is as far as i go in this life.”

This was interesting to me too. When I first read it, I saw the use of the “loop” as a way to describe movement. “I am looping back to…” I’ve used this phrase in waking life when describing returning to a store to buy a forgotten item. But this dream, in which the dreamer cannot escape an airport seems to correspond to the idea of “loops” that I’m investigating.

Loop Example 3

“i look down to see what i’m wearing and i’m in full santa gear. me being the stupid person i am i decided to do some loops in the air, which causes me to drop my icy into the guys snow covered bushes.”

In this dream, the dreamer is describing doing “loops” in the air. This isn’t at all the idea of a loop as a repeating cycling of events. Rather this is describing movement. 

This highlights the difficulty of doing data analysis on dreams. Even though I know that this dream isn’t related to the concepts of loops, I am unsure of how to actually identify it in a way to be able to ignore it in this analysis. 

Potentially, I could use “do some loops” as a way to ignore this dream, but It is unlikely that this phrase will be repeated in other dreams.

Loop Example 5

“In fact she’s one of the most caring people in my life, so this nightmare definitely threw me for a loop”

This is clearly not related to the concept of loops as a repeating series of events. “Threw me for a loop” is an expression to indicate that something inspired confusion. 

Summarizing “loop” language

I’ll continue to read other dreams that contain the word “loop” to understand how people talk about this concept in dreams. While I’m doing this I’ll create a list of words or phrases that are used when people use the word “loop” but not in a context of a repeated series of events. This list will include:

• “Threw me for a loop”
• “Bus loop”

Unfortunately, I’ll probably never be able to identify all of these false loops. This frustrates me, but this is just the nature of working with data. As George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.

Finding other words

The biggest problem of this step is if people use different terms than “loop” to describe this concept of a repeated series of events. I ultimately don’t know what I don’t know. 

Just reading a lot of different dreams helps with this. I could be researching “cat” dreams and find a dream that perfectly describes “loops” without using the word of “loop”. I’ll also use GPT and Google to identify words related to loops. I’ll also just think about it.

Starting the cycle search

The show Dark was all about time loops, but they never used the word “loop”. They used the word “cycle”. So I’ll explore that word. 

About 0.59% of dreams (1,258 dreams) contain the word “cycle”. I immediately see that a lot of these refer to “sleep cycle”, “REM cycle”, “life cycle”, “moon cycle”, “motor cycle”, “night cycle”, “news cycle”, or “menstrual cycle”. I will ignore these words. 

Removing these words brings the total down to 0.51% of dreams (1,083 dreams) that contain “cycle” but without the phrases I want to ignore. 

Cycle Example 1

“there was about 5 others so the cycles continue with me being them and getting killed over and over again just with a new body.”

The dreamer here is watching people be killed within a dream, but while each person is being killed, the dreamer takes the person’s perspective. This definitely seems like repeated events that the concept of “loops” is trying to cover. There is also language “over and over” that I want to investigate further.

Cycle Example 2

“in the dream i am awake in my bed, i get up, go to my door, and then wake up in my bed again. it is darker than normal, so i will try again, only to find myself waking up in bed again. sometimes i will wake up and feel something touch me or feel like someone is watching me, then i wake up. this cycle repeats for what feels like ages. in the dream i recognize that i am asleep, but will keep trying to wake up with no luck.”

The dreamer describes a cycle of false awakening. Again, this is part of the concept of “loops”.

Cycle Example 3

“dreamt i was cycling through my lives had this very vivid dream where i could see the intersections between my life and my other versions of it”

This is an interesting dream. The dreamer is describing viewing possible lives. They later describe that “if i could find one at an intersection i could reach my full potential. but in order to do that i had to cycle through memories to get there”.

So this does seem like a repeated series of events like a loop, but there is an aspect of control and choice in repeating these events. 

Cycle Example 4

“my childhood repetitive dreams as a kid (me) i had the same dream for like a year, i was six years old during that time and the dream was about that it was night i was in a maze and a talking carrot was chasing me i ended the cycle by eating the carrot.”

This dreamer is describing recurring dreams of being chased by a talking carrot. In order to end the cycle, they ate the carrot. 

Cycle Example 5

“inception style dreams hi all! so i have these horrible inception-style dreams. basically at some point i’m aware i’m dreaming and i “wake up” only i’m just in another dream. i’ll cycle through up to ten of these before i wake up for real.”

This dreamer is describing the dream within a dream / false awakening. 

Summarizing “cycle” language

Overall, the word “cycle” does seem to relate to this concept of “loops”. There are cases where it implies more volition and free will. Considering, “I was stuck in a loop” against “I needed to break this endless cycle”. 

In anycase, I will then include the use of “cycle” within the words that identify the concept of “loops”, but I’ll ignore the cycles like “news cycle” or “moon cycle”. 

Investigating “over and over”

There are phrases like “over and over” that can indicate this concept of “loops”. 1.68% of dreams (3,586) in the DreamWell Dream Dictionary contain this phrase. However, a quick reading of some of these dreams shows that this language is more general. Additionally it can be used as an expression like, “I keep making the same mistakes over and over”. 

The same is true for the phrase “again and again”. This is in 0.25% of dreams (539) and can be used in a variety of contexts.

As a result, I won’t include these phrases to identify the concept of loops.

Researching “loop” dreams

I’ll also do some research on this concept of loops to see if there is anything in the scientific or general literature.

I checked the Typical Dream Questionnaire which is a list of 55 typical dream themes. This contains one theme of “trying again and again to do something” with 53.5% of survey respondents saying that they dreamt of this theme at least once in their lives. 

I know that “false awakenings” have been studied, so I’ll research this topic using Google Scholar. 

I found a paper by Michael Raduga that talks about the frequency of false awakening dreams. In total 53% of respondents said they never had one of these dreams, 28% said they have them sometimes, and 7% said that they have them often. These numbers help to ground the work on the DreamWell Dream Dictionary. These numbers are surprisingly similar to what one would expect based upon the Typical Dream Questionnaire. This idea of a “loop” is a somewhat common dream theme.

There is more I could research about “dream within a dream” or “false awakenings”, but that’s about it. There is nothing about the concept of time loops or dreams repeating within the same dream (though there is research on recurring dreams or repeating elements of a dream across dreams). 

Overall, this highlights the need for the DreamWell Dream Dictionary. Dreams are so rich, complex, and varied across human experience but they really haven’t been studied. There are so many open questions. 

The data of loop dreams

With all of the revisions and precision of how “loops” are identified we can see the frequency of these types of dreams:

• 1.2% of dreams that contain “loops”
• 0.9% of dreams contain words related to false awakening (dream loop, false awakening, dream within a dream, etc)
• 0.7% of dreams contain mazes (shown here for context)
• 0.1% are of time loops
• 0.1% are of endless loops
• <0.1% are of nightmare loops
• <0.1% of dreams use the phrase “thrown for a loop”

The graph above shows percent of each category of loop dreams that have confusion within the dream. The results make sense to me. 28% of “thrown for a loop” dreams have confusion while only 7.4% of nightmare loops have confusion.

Time loops and endless loops have the most amount of death in the dreams. Over 40% of these types of dreams contain words related to death. 

A better way to look at this is to look at some core metrics of the dream for the symbol of loops. The graph above shows how related the symbol of loops is to the other dream symbols. For example “loops” is more related to “lucid dreams” than 95% of all other dream symbols. I’m struck by the fact there are few characters, places, and events in these dreams. It seems like the loop is the major focus.

Seeing this chart for mazes puts loops into contexts. Mazes are related to far more other things in a dream than loops are. For example there are more places and characters in dreams of mazes.

Conclusion about loop dreams

It does look like this “loop” symbol, this idea of being forced to do events over and over in dreams is something that people dream about. This is 1.2% of dream reports. 

Within this general concept, there are a few types of “loops” which include:

• False awakenings / dream within a dream / dream loops where the dreamer wakes from a dream into another dream
• Time loops where there is a sense of time travel
• Nightmare loops which is just a nightmare happening again and again

It is important to note that these things are different from recurring dreams. Recurring dreams are when the same events happen again and again across many different dreams. This symbol of “loops” happens within a dream.