The best way to handle excessive information is to align actions with goals. This way, the explorers focus their efforts only on the data which is relevant for those actions and discard the rest.

juggler by Helico (Flickr)

For this strategy to work, we are allowed to choose the most convenient goal. We can deploy our creativity in search of the most entertaining target as long as it suffices two main constraints:

A). The goal must be subject of verification and B). It has to be as concrete as possible.

After spending some months exploring the realm of dreams, we went back to our notes from the dream territory in search for a new goal.

Most of the questions made during that stage of the exploration aimed to this main big question: «Why do we dream? ». The natural goal for our exploration was an attempt to answer that question.

Answering that implied to find a suitable explanation for the act of dreaming which doesn’t looked like a difficult task, based on the data we already had. The hard part was finding a way to prove the explanation.

In every exploration, the obvious choice is to travel directly to the territory and find evidence that could support the explanation. This was not easy to implement in our case since the targeted territory was of an elusive nature.

The trick we decided to use to turn around this inconvenience was o travel backwards: we would choose some of the evidence we already had found in our travels to the dream territory and we would try to find an explanation that fits the evidence.

Once we chose the evidence, we would use a traditional resource to build the explanation: the Law of Parsimony; also called «The Occam Razor» or simply «The razor».