Are dreams really meaningful? … For many years, researchers (including me) have been using quantitative methods of analysis to study the content of dreams. The findings from these studies provide compelling evidence that dreaming is not meaningless “noise” but rather a coherent and sophisticated mode of psychological functioning.
Furthermore, recent advances in digital technology are expanding this approach, potentially boosting by many orders of magnitude our ability to understand the statistically recurring patterns in people’s dreams. You could say that we are learning how to data-mine dreaming. [cont.]
Kelly Bulkeley, New York Times