I’ve just discovered the University of California Santa Cruz’s website Dreambank.net; a fascinating repository of dreams that’s also a research tool.
Developed by Adam Schneider and William Domhoff in the Psychology Department, the tool’s content of over 25,000 dream reports is drawn from a variety of sources and studies, capturing the memories of individuals aged from 7 to 74.
I’m sure there’s a lot of serious and not so serious fun to be had on this site, but for now I’ve just run a basic analysis to find the proportion of total dreams including the word ‘science’ at least once.
The results:
1. Of 25222 dreams, 86 mentioned ‘science’ (0.3%)
2. The group or individual with the highest proportion of dreams referencing ‘science’ was Bay Area Girls (4-6 graders). i.e. 13 of 234 dreams = 5.6%
3. The second highest proportion was reported by male Psychologist Melvin. i.e. 5 of 128 dreams = at 3.9%
- Dream search box (source: dreambank.net)
I then ran three other words that came to mind with stuff of dreams potential, and got these results expressed as the percentage of dreams in the total sample mentioning the word once or more:
– War 31%
– Sex 3.7%
– Science 0.3%
– Climate <0.1%
So what does it all mean for science? And if dreams tell us what’s really on our minds (do they?) – what are we in for?
Well, with this as a starter, I’ll leave you and the tabloids to draw your own conclusions; I’m sure there are some great headlines to be extracted. But I would say that as a whole we appear not to be losing too much sleep over science, and the future of Silicon Valley looks a lot more assured than that of the planet as a whole.
For myself I can’t remember having had any dreams specifically about science; but I’m sure I must have; so from now on I’m going to make an effort to track them. And of course if you’d like to share any of your own sciencey dreams – feel free to add them to the comments – especially if they include science, war, sex, and climate combined ;-).
Other Info
Here’s the detail for the science search. For more information on the groups and individuals, and the potential to perform more detailed statistical analysis, visit dreambank.net.
And, credit where due; I (@physicus) originally learnt of dreambank.net from a tweet by @christianbok via @rowanNS.
