You are in a classroom, an office or a street, and you suddenly realise you have no clothes on, or only your pyjamas. It is one of the classic typical dreams. In a 2003 survey of 1,181 Canadian university students, 32.6% said they had dreamed of being nude, and almost exactly as many, 32.5%, of being inappropriately dressed.

The folk reading. Felix Fontaine's Golden Wheel Dream-book (1862) has an entry for undressing: to undress in your room alone means secrets will be discovered, and to undress in the presence of others signifies slander. Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, reports that earlier writers blamed something simpler: the sleeper had kicked off the bedcovers. Freud's own reading was that these are "exhibition dreams" rooted in early childhood, a time when children were seen undressed by family and visitors and felt no shame. He paid particular attention to a detail many people recognise: the dreamer is mortified, but the onlookers show "an air of indifference". He even saw the same pattern in Andersen's tale of the Emperor's new clothes.

The Sleep Foundation notes that contemporary scientists tend not to comment on what this dream means, while online dream analysts read it as worry about being unprepared or a feeling of vulnerability.

What research says. Mostly that it is common and stable. A 2004 German study using the same questionnaire as the Canadian one found the rank order of the typical themes highly stable, and concluded that what the themes mean, and how they relate to waking life, had not yet been answered. In other words, the honest scientific position on naked dreams is: very common, meaning unknown.

If dreams like this are frequent, distressing or stopping you sleeping, talk to a doctor or a mental-health professional. This page is educational and is not a diagnosis.