Dream study
I was very interested in psychology, but specifically the psychology of dreams, in high school. I had (still have) stacks and stacks on various psychological topics, everything from abnormal psychology, childhood development, Sigmund Frued, anthropology, et cetera. I devised a dream study one day while bored. The question I sought to answer was: does music effect your dreams? I had the respondents record their dreams for one week with no music (the control group), then one week with music and another week with a different kind of music, lasting five weeks. I handed out pens and notebooks to everyone in my psychology class and to others who had agreed to help me. I handed out many sets of notebooks, pens and instruction sheets -- about twenty in all. I knew I wouldn't get every one of them back but I did count on at least a few. But I only got two back: one from a close friend of mine and one from a nerdy perverted kid that sat behind me in class breathing heavily, who would pass me notes asking for my bra size, a kid who just generally had shit luck with women. He had agreed to help me, having a crush on me, and handed back a journal diligently recording his dreams and the different types of music he listened to while sleeping. And while the nature of his dreams did NOT change based on whether he listened to country or rock (I had suspected they would change slightly), the notebook he handed back was so...interesting...it proved to be a different experiment in itself. It turns out that whenever the poor, bespeckled, horny teenager went to sleep, he was magically transported to the realm of RPGs. He had incredibly complex fights with large demons and dragons. He checked his item screen to equip weaponry. He rescued princesses and lovely maidens from certain doom and navigated lands that were so vast that he would not have been able to find his way through if it weren't for that handy map screen. He wielded swords and wore heavy suits of armor that he could change in and out of using the item screen. The whole book was such a warped display of a young man's imagination that I read it again and again, sometimes while tittering to myself, amazed at the video game world this poor boy constructed everytime he went to sleep.

It wasn't a pointless experiment for me: It was a genuinely interesting experience. I think I still have the journal somewhere. It was definetely a pointless experiment for him, however. He sent me an email the night he turned in the notebook asking me for a date, to which I promptly and unhesitatingly declined.
(BrainSurgerysFun, Fri 25 Jul 2008, 21:58, Reply)