Queen Hillary? In Your Dreams!

"Dream research is like holding a Dixie Cup under Niagara Falls," says Kelly Bulkeley, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. He says that interpreting individual candidate dreams would be difficult without more context -- all posts to Metaphysical Poll are anonymous -- but he does notice some general trends.

Many of the Obama dreams possess the characteristics of mystical reveries: positive emotions, good fortune, magical occurrences. Clinton dreams are also positive, but occasionally with an edge: feelings of pity or fear or general nagginess.

None of which, given the stereotypes the public has cultivated surrounding the candidates, is in the least surprising.

Still, why? Why are we delivering Michelle Obama's baby, looking for a parking spot with her husband, and even -- as happened to Guy Vallance of Washington -- having a tea party with Ralph Nader and a bunch of plastic pink flamingos? ("I'll tell you one thing, the man does not take cream," Vallance reports.)

Celebrity dreams are not terribly common, Bulkeley says, but they tend to occur most frequently among people who are plugged into the culture via magazines, blogs and television.

In this campaign cycle, that describes . . . everyone. We are all watching Tim Russert talk about Indiana, we are all sending our friends another YouTube video lampooning the candidates.

Bulkeley isn't sure why there's a dearth of McCain dreams, but he speculates that his recent lower profile compared with the Democrats has something to do with it. Liberals do tend to have more active dream lives than conservatives, dream analysts speculate, with more instances of the bizarre.

Gretchen Grant is a Web designer, identified on Metaphysical Poll only as "Mother of Three and Democrat in Pennsylvania." She's one of the 12 McCain posters: She dreamed of walking through a demolished neighborhood and seeing the suit-wearing candidate standing knee-deep in rubble. He bent over, picked something up and shouted, "Look! I found a penny!"

"He was just delighted with himself," Grant says in a phone interview. "I wanted to say, 'Okay, that's nice, let's move on now.' It was odd to feel parental to someone so much older than me."

It gave her a moment of reflection.

Holly Silva also felt introspective after her therapy-themed fantasy. She dreamed actress Kathy Bates was her psychiatrist, who told her that her problems were all related to the glass ceiling. "I thought her analysis was a little trite, very Feminism 101," says Silva, a medical copy editor in St. Louis.

But then a parade of magazines began to float by on the movie screen of the dream, all featuring unattractive photographs of Clinton. "And I realized [the dream] wasn't about me at all. It was about Hillary."