01What the Dreamometer is
The Dreamometer™ is a private record of the dream themes most commonly reported by people who submit dreams through In Your Dreams. Every reading produced through the service includes a brief, optional question asking whether the dreamer is willing to contribute their detected symbols to the visible record. Those who consent add anonymised rows to the underlying table; those who decline contribute nothing.
The dashboard at dreamometer.app displays the resulting symbol frequencies in aggregate. It is updated continually as new readings are submitted.
The Dreamometer is owned and operated by In Your Dreams. The dataset, the visualisation, and the methodology behind it are proprietary. The name Dreamometer™ is a trade mark of In Your Dreams.
02What is collected
From every consenting contribution
For each consenting reading, the following anonymous fields are recorded:
- Detected symbols — the dominant symbols identified in the dream text (e.g. Falling, Water, House)
- Country — derived from the contributor’s IP-geolocation at time of submission, then discarded
- Age band — self-reported in broad ranges
- Pronouns — self-reported
- Mood at submission — selected from a small list
- Felt quality of the dream — selected from a small list (e.g. strange, peaceful, urgent)
- Emotional tone — a positive, negative, or neutral classification
- Timestamp of submission — date and hour, no finer precision
What is never collected
The full dream text, the contributor’s name, email address, IP address, payment information, or any other identifier is not recorded in the Dreamometer record. The dream text itself remains private to the contributor and is never published.
03How symbols are extracted
When a consenting reading is processed, the dream text is read by an automated symbol-extraction step that identifies the most dominant themes present. The extraction returns a short list of canonical symbol names — for example, a dream about pursuit through a corridor might return Being chased and House. These canonical names are what appear in the dashboard counts; the original dream text is not stored alongside them.
Interpretive context shown elsewhere in In Your Dreams draws on four public-domain texts available via Project Gutenberg, but the Dreamometer page itself shows only the aggregate symbol frequencies, not interpretations.
04The atmospheric readings
The dashboard displays two atmospheric values alongside the dream-symbol counts: a Schumann resonance reading and a geomagnetic activity reading.
Schumann resonance
The Schumann resonance is the natural electromagnetic frequency of the Earth-ionosphere cavity, with a documented fundamental of approximately 7.83 Hz. It sits at the boundary between alpha and theta brainwave bands — the same band associated with REM-stage dreaming. The Dreamometer displays this baseline value as ambient context. It is not a real-time measurement of any individual reading.
Geomagnetic activity (Kp index)
The Kp index is a 0–9 scale of global geomagnetic disturbance, published by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Peer-reviewed research has proposed an association between elevated geomagnetic activity and dream bizarreness via the pineal gland’s response to electromagnetic conditions and its effect on melatonin secretion during sleep. The Dreamometer surfaces the current Kp reading as ambient context. It does not claim a causal relationship with any specific dream.
05Experimental research metrics
The dashboard surfaces four additional readings — Lunar Tidal Pull, Attention Tide, Collective Dream Weather, and Noosphere Drift — in the flanking Cosmic Pulls and Collective Currents panels. Each of these is framed as a research question rather than a validated finding. They appear on the dashboard so that the underlying inquiries are visible to anyone reading along, not because any of them has been established as a dream driver. Each draws on a single peer-reviewed reference, and each has known data gaps that limit what can presently be tested.
Lunar Tidal Pull
The research question is whether lunar phase, illumination, distance, or tidal alignment correlates with measurable changes in dream recall, vividness, emotional intensity, sleep disruption, or specific symbolic themes. The reference paper is Cajochen and colleagues, Current Biology, 2013; subsequent replication attempts have produced mixed and partial results and the finding is not settled.
The dashboard’s lunar reading is computed from the present moment and is suitable for ambient atmosphere only. A genuine match between dream and lunar state requires the date of the dream itself, the dreamer’s local timezone, and an approximate sleep window — none of which are currently captured at submission. Until those fields are added, any lunar correlation is exploratory at best.
Attention Tide
The research question is whether sharp concentrations of global attention on a topic are followed, within roughly 24–72 hours, by measurable increases in related dream symbols, themes, words, or emotions. The reference paper is Nghiem and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2016, which establishes search-trend data as a normalised measure of public interest and notes that online news itself shapes search patterns.
Most of the dream-side data required for this comparison — daily symbol counts, daily emotional tone, country code — is already collected. The principal gap is a single optional question at submission asking whether the dreamer had encountered news or social-media coverage of a major topic before sleeping. Without that control, any correlation between attention spikes and dream content cannot be cleanly separated from direct media influence.
Collective Dream Weather
The research question is whether major shared emotional events — disasters, celebrations, periods of widespread grief or fear — correlate with shifts in dream emotional tone and recurring themes across geographically dispersed dreamers. The reference paper is Gorgoni and colleagues, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2022, which documents pandemic-era increases in dream frequency, intensity, and distressing content.
This is the most research-ready of the four experimental metrics, because the dream-side fields it depends on — the daily feel distribution, country-level submission counts, and AI-extracted symbols by date — are already in place. What remains to be wired in is a structured external event feed and the same event-awareness question identified under Attention Tide.
Noosphere Drift
The research question is exploratory: whether dream-pattern clustering across users shows any relationship with external experimental anomaly datasets — specifically, the random-number-generator deviation archive maintained by the Global Consciousness Project. The reference paper is Nelson and Bancel, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 2011, which describes that project’s hypothesis. The interpretation of the underlying anomalies remains controversial and the literature is not a validated dream-research signal.
The Dreamometer’s posture on this metric is deliberately reserved. The reading is framed as a comparison against an external experimental dataset that already exists, not as a measurement of collective consciousness. Symbol co-occurrence patterns are derivable from data already collected; deeper analyses would require semantic-similarity measures or additional submission fields (lucidity, déjà vu, precognitive-feeling flags) that are not currently captured.
A complete field-level mapping — including which data points are currently collected, which are recommended additions, and the references with DOIs — is maintained internally and available on request for researcher review.
06What the Dreamometer is not
The Dreamometer is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument. It is not a peer-reviewed research dataset. It is a private, ongoing record of the symbolic vocabulary that the people who use In Your Dreams report, in aggregate. Its purpose is descriptive and personal — a way for the wider community of dreamers to see themselves reflected in the patterns of human dreaming.
07Launch period — transparency note
✦ Launch period
In Your Dreams launched publicly in April 2026. During the launch phase (April – July 2026) and the early growth period that follows, the public archive includes seed data drawn from public-domain dream corpora (Miller 1901, Fontaine 1862, the 1894 fortune-telling pamphlet) to illustrate the dashboard’s interpretive depth from day one. All seed rows are tagged in the database with contributor_type='seed' and remain filterable from any research export.
During the launch phase the displayed archive counter is held steady by a dissolving formula that progressively neutralises the seed layer as real submissions accumulate, so the counter is monotonically non-decreasing. By 31 July 2027, the seed layer will be reviewed: if real submissions have grown to the point where they fully cover the seed contribution, the seed rows may be retained as historical record (filterable) or removed; if not, the sunset is deferred or bridged so the counter does not drop. Full provenance — including source corpora, batch identifiers, and the dissolving mechanism — is published in the project repository.
No actual person is represented by any seed row.
08Contact
General questions about the Dreamometer or In Your Dreams: [email protected]