WebProNews

While Facebook and MySpace are dominating the mass audience social networking space, the niche network—and eventually, I think, networks of niche networks for some great ad targeting—will increase in popularity as people fan out into their respective areas of interest. One such network that caught my attention this morning was DreamJournal.net.

Site creator Kelly Matthews, CEO of KLM Techniques, announced via URLwire that her site dedicated to recording dreams is celebrating a milestone of 100,000 dreams uploaded.

Free to join, members have the option of setting their dreams to private, public, or viewable by friends only, and can track recurring themes, keywords, and symbols. Very Web-2.0-ish, DreamJournal.net even provides tools like symbol and keyword clouds, and allows reader feedback and interpretations.

"When I launched DreamJournal in 2001," said Matthews, "it was mostly for my own enjoyment and fun. I had no idea the site would resonate with so many people."

This is a neat 21st Century spin on the old-fashioned paper and ink dream journal, though I'd imagine people would have to write it down and transcribe in the morning, unless they sleep at the computer.

I kept a dream journal once, the process of which involves training yourself to wakeup after a dream while it is still fresh and you can remember it long enough to write it down. Honestly, being faced with my own subconscious and the distorted reality of the dream world kind of creeped me out. Once I noticed that famous silver cord, I bolted.

There are many camps of people regarding dreams, including spiritualists and psychologists, those who like hearing or reading about dreams and those who don't. (After all, technically, the "true" story never happened—in literature especially dreams run the risk of breaking the reader's own dream by reminding the reader it is fiction.) But you gotta admit, dreams about keepers of Horned Bees and demon babies are always kind of interesting. 

What they mean is up to you and my guess is your interpretation is as good as anybody's, but one of the neat parts of DreamJournal.net is the availability of dream stats collected from the dreamers. The most common subject of dreams consistently over the past year?

Friends. All attached by a silver cord, I bet.