The use of dreaming for the study of history (Funeral effigies, automata)

Celebration figures in a variety of intellectual fields have profited from paying attention to their dreams. Can a historian also gain something from dreaming? In my research into the significance of the automaton in the West ern imagination, I tried to explicate the reason the object has been such a potent and ambivalent symbol from ancient times to today. I felt there was a connection between its function and that of funeral effigies in the Roma n-Medieval-Renaissance context. But it was only through a dream I had that I was able to understand that correlation. Perhaps a coherent methodology o f Morphic history can be built.