I have been thinking about this a lot the past few weeks actually. I will be off to college in less than a year, and what I will major in is always on my mind. It dawned on me in December how much I enjoy the subject of dreaming, so turning it into a profession is something I would like to do. A dream laboratory would be a great way. There are already some examples of current dream laboratories for example the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center founded by Montague Ullman.

Alundra brings up a valid point about having to use the claims of dreamers to support your findings. To some extent, having sufficient numbers of recurring data and using experimental designs could suffice as seen with the dream laboratory at Stanford University under Stephen LaBerge.

However, to really have research on dreaming be accepted by the scientific community, there would need to be a way of converting dreams into concrete data. A developing solution lies in technology that is being developed at UC Berkeley. While a lot of work is still required to be able to actually record dreams, they have made incredible progress. In short summary, they recorded the thoughts of subjects as they watched random videos and using that data were able to create clips that were remarkably similar to the original videos. It's really fascinating; you can read about it here.

I don't think it's too far off when oneirology becomes fully accepted by the scientific community. In the meantime, we'll just have to find ways to help reach that goal. I know that's what I want to do at least .