Unless you're somehow involved in it, there's arguably nothing less boring than someone telling you about a dream they had.
No matter how many weird things happened in it, at the end of the day, you weren't there, you can't really experience what it felt like and you don't know what the dream looked like.
Except, what if you did know what it looked like?
Advert
A video titled 'places you've seen in your dreams' has been praised for revealing 'exact' locations viewers have seen for themselves, including abandoned playgrounds, shopping malls and rolling countrysides.
There's a whole range of scenes put forward, but they all have one thing in common - there's not a soul in sight.
The eerie video has been viewed almost two million times from baffled and creeped out YouTube users, with many praising the creator Doctor Doggo for managing to capture the scenes from inside their brains, indicating we might not be so clueless about each other's dreams, after all.
One viewer drew attention to one picture in particular, writing: "Oh boy. I so vividly remember this one dream I had in this exact setting. I was just chilling with my friend in that exact same room. The one thing is though, in the dream that tv wasn’t there, nor the two power outlets on the wall, everything else though is the same.
"My friend in the dream was anonymous, with their face and body all blacked out, almost as if they were just a shadow," they added.
Another viewer shared their own recognition of one of the scenes, commenting: "I have seen this exact weird layout of townhomes in a dream I had years and years ago as a child. I recognize it so much. It was about my aunt living in one of these, and we were packing the car to go to target but something was terribly, terribly wrong.
"Something was horrifying. I remember waking up in a panic. I remember this exact scenery though."
Behavioral sleep medicine expert Michelle Drerup has previously explained to Cleveland Clinic that we have 'far more to learn about what’s going on psychologically' when we dream, and while most people dream every night, we often don't remember them 'unless you’re awakened during or just after them'.
One theory about why we dream is that it helps us consolidate and analyse memories, while another suggests dreams stem more from our imagination than real-life experiences.
As for the images that we recognise from our dreams, well, maybe we're all more connected than we thought.
Emily Brown