Do Saudis have as many dreams of being naked in unexpected places as Americans do? What about Brazilians? It's a pretty interesting question. Also interesting is that it's being asked on the New York Times Freakonomics blog.

For years, the economics-themed Freakonomics blog has been running a "daily bleg." A "bleg," explains Stephen Dubner, is "blog + beg--i.e., using a blog to beg for information." Readers write in, get posted, get responses. The blegs don't always have to do with economics. This one's particularly far from the blog's field, though. Reader Josh Slavin writes about a friend's dream of being naked at a party. He, too, like many, has had these "naked dreams":

It's such a common trope in American culture that it made me wonder if people in other cultures have it too. Do more open/less prudish cultures like maybe Brazil have it as a common dream?  What about much more conservative cultures, like in the Middle East--do they have a much more reserved version of it?

The Freakonomics staffers are intrigued, tossing out a quote from Gustavus Hindman Miller's Dictionary of Dreams before opening it up to readers. It is, after all, a bleg.

Of course, the whole idea behind the Freakonomics enterprise (books and blog) was that the tools of the economic discipline could be applied to a variety of questions. If Freakonomics coauthors Levitt and Dubner wanted to rise to the challenge here and figure out a way to divine the nude-dream frequency of Brazilians with supply and demand curves, well, the Wire wouldn't complain.

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Heather Horn