I was looking at the dream center site this morning and have gotten much more interested in the whole thing. I will look even more closely tomorrow when I will have more time.

A few questions came to mind which I couldn't find answers to in my first extended visit so I thought I would ask them since others may be interested...

I guess most of my questions fall in the "nuts & bolts" category, the technical stuff. As a programmer of the "hobbyist" variety it is natural for me to wonder "how does it work?"

E.G.

1. I understand that there is all this (growing) data of the dream descriptions. What exactly is a "bot-run"? I'm guessing it is some kind of analysis.. but that raises the questions:

2. What software is being used in a "bot-run"? Who wrote the software? What does it do?

3. For some time I became very interested in a (now famous) software package called "NLTK" (Natural Language Tool Kit) written in Python language. Do you use this package at all? I noticed some charts that look very like what NLTK does, like word frequencies, perhaps common bigrams, and so on.

4. Other than going from dream to dream and copying and pasting, is there any way to get a hold of larger chunks of the database (text) for doing one's own analysis with a tool like NLTK?

In NLTK such bodies of text are called "corpora" and it occurred to me that you are gradually building what could eventually be a very valuable "corpus" which would be of interest to all manner of linguists and students of linguistic analysts. Will you eventually offer your corpus as such for others to study?

Examples of corpora which come with NLTK:

Brown Corpus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus

[many others]
see: NLTK Corpora
http://www.nltk.org/nltk_data/

Text corpus
In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules within a specific language territory.

much more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_corpus

Today this all finally "struck" me when I realized that you are gradually building a large and potentially VERY VALUABLE English text corpus of DREAM LANGUAGE and I am hoping you will eventually release this to the world as such.

Since you have in a database it would be easy and trivial to just "spit it out" into one or more large text files. Have you thought of this?

I would also love to hear more technical details about a "bot-run" and what it does.

Thanks, billym

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P.S.

An example of a fun corpus which readers can play around with themselves see Google Ngrams here:

Ngram Viewer
https://books.google.com/ngrams

This is an incredible and fun page that will chart the use of words and phrases over a timeline. Try it!