By the time he died in 1985, Hall had synopses of more than fifty thousand dreams from people of all age groups and nationalities. From this large database, he created a coding system that essentially treated each dream like it was a short story. He recorded, among other things, the dream's setting, its number of characters and their genders, any dialogue, and whether what happened in the dream was pleasant or frightening. He also noted basics about each dreamer as well, such as age, gender, and where the person lived.
Hall introduced the world of dream interpretation to the world of data. He pored through his dream collection, bringing numbers and statistical rigor into a field that had been split into two extremes. He tested what was the most likely outcome of, say, dreaming about work. Would the dreamer be happy? Angry? And would the story hew close to reality or would the people in the dream act strange and out of character? If there were predictable outcomes, then maybe dreams followed some kind of pattern. Maybe they even mattered.
Hall's conclusion was the opposite [of] Freud's:
far from being full of hidden symbols, most dreams were remarkably straightforward and predictable. Dream plots were consistent enough that, just by knowing the cast of characters in a dream, Hall could forecast what would happen with surprising accuracy. A dream featuring a man whom the dreamer doesn't know in real life, for instance, almost always entails a plot in which the stranger is aggressive. Adults tend to dream of other people they know, while kids usually dream of animals. About three out of every four characters in a man's dream will be other men, while women tend to encounter an equal number of males and females. Most dreams take place in the dreamers' homes or offices and, if they have to go somewhere, they drive cars or walk there. And not surprisingly, college students dream about sex more often than middle-aged adults.
Now that we've entered the era of smartphones and big data, dream research looks more promising than ever. Taylor Beck describes a new campaign that aims to create "the world's largest database of dreams":
Shadow: Community of Dreamers is a mobile app, crowdfunded with 50,000 on Kickstarter, which will wake people, collect dream reports by typing or talking, anonymize them and beam them into a searchable, analyzable online set. "We can measure how global events affect mankind's unconscious," says Shadow adviser and Spanish neuroscientist Umberto Le'on Dom'inguez, PhD, a researcher in the sleep and circadian rhythms lab at the University of Madrid School of Medicine's Psychiatry department. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, elections, and the World Cup are examples of events Dom'inguez thinks impact people's dreaming. Data collected on Shadow will show scientists how events like births, deaths, celebrity marriages, and pop cultural breakthroughs like documentaries or marketing campaigns affect global dreaming, too.
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