Defense Department’s advanced weapons arm funds dream interpretation research

The Department of Defense is stretching its budget into a strange new combination of science and psychology — dream interpretation.

The department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding the work of two Indiana University professors using network science to study similarities in dreams shared by English, Arabic and Chinese dreamers, Medium reports.

Results will be aimed at establishing cross-cultural links shared between different groups of people across the globe.

Network science has become an incredibly useful tool in research projects like Indiana’s, thanks to the emerge of online social media. The science has uncovered global cultural links in ancient literature, myths, recipe ingredients, brain regional connectivity, biomolecules and disease.

Dreams have become an area of research budding with analyzable information thanks to the wide availability of dream interpretation websites, with the University of California’s Dreambank database describing some 1,400 similar symbols shared by some 20,000 English dream reports alone. Arabic and Chinese websites have similar databases, all of which share common themes like “love,” “quarrel” or “voices.”

---------- NDC Announcments -----------

Don’t miss our daily DreamBot run which shows a brief status of the collective unconscious.