The Interpretation of Dreams: Dreams as Public Relations Measurement -- I Dream of Hillary, I Dream of Barack

Many public relations professionals find that media analysis or survey research are tools sufficient to measure their programs. The more adventurous bring in external data and more esoteric measures of success like donations or number of new memberships or even lives saved. In politics, KDPaine and Partners has recently used YouTube video counts to predict primary results, and our Ms. Paine has ruminated on the possibility of using the number of political lawn signs as an election predictor. Not until now, however, has anyone used dreams to measure political progress.

In this week's New Yorker, Ben McGrath writes about Sheila Heti and her new blog "I Dream of Hillary... I Dream of Barack." This blog, a repository of reader-submitted dreams about the candidates, can be interpreted as a rough poll of interest in those candidates. As Mr. McGrath says, "...what if the recurrences of Presidential candidates in people's dreams were meaningful in the aggregate?" As of the writing of the article, "..Obama's edge in the over-all dream count... was roughly equivalent to his lead in the latest Gallup poll."

Ms. Heti's blog has been so successful she plans to open an I Dream of McCain section, so in the future we will have bipartisan dream data to go on. --Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard