Putin, fish & walnuts: What Russians dream of, according to online search engine
Russia’s largest search engine, Yandex, has used people’s curiosity about the meaning of their dreams to piece together an impressive map, showing what people see in their sleep in different areas of the country.
“Between 9 and 10am people ask about their dream before they forget. These inquiries are usually short summaries of dreams. They allow us to determine what people dream of most of all and how dreams differ from region to region,” Yandex stated in a press release, saying that millions of people ask such questions using the search engine.
The results came with some surprising trends: women look up the meaning of their dreams 10 times more often than men do, and the two sexes dream of different things.
While women tend to see ‘person’, ‘child’, ‘pregnancy’, ‘fish’ and ‘guy’, men across the country search for dreams about ‘snake’, ‘fish’, ‘person’, ‘girl’ and ‘tooth’.
Leaving aside the fish fixation, here’s a ‘fun fact’: the most popular action in an internet-savvy Russian’s dream is ‘death’. This may, however, be due to the fact that people brush off neutral or happy dreams and look up the meanings of frightening or downright odd dreams instead.
While the only existing human that Russians across the whole country dream of regularly is Putin, his image most often graces sleeping Chechens, Yandex says.
The world’s largest country boasts territories so diverse in nature that it also has a massive impact on nocturnal visions: Crimeans dream of the sea, dolphins and waves; people in Stavropol see walnuts and apricots: Altai and Tuva focus on mountains in search results; while people leaving in the country’s capital, Moscow, tend to ask about the Metro and the inter-urban trains…
Here’s a list of the top 10 most-popular words Russians use to describe their dreams
1. person
2. fish
3. child
4. snake
5. to die
6. alive
7. guy
8. pregnancy
9. water
10. tooth
The map consists of 540 words and is based on recent inquiries from September 1, 2016, to February 28, 2017.
