Try to approach it as a study of the mind, not a series of tales to be taken literally.

Ok.
One example is buddhist ideals.

They learn to concentrate on one thing until their mind is as sharp as a knife.
They meditate on simple impossible questions and explore their inner being.

Now thats a real mental workout.

You can apply similar reasoning to prayer – which is only really a meditation. Answers from ‘god’ may come from your inner being. But call it what you will.

Catholic Rosary beads remind me of meditation also, a way of training your mind to focus and not meander all over the place.

Dream interpretation is rife in the bible. Before we had microscopes and petri dishes this was a major science.

How many scientific discoveries benefit from ideas formulated in dreams? Lots I bet.

You’ll give me any examples I give because I am right, thankyou very much 😀 And given enough time and motivation I could fill pages with examples.

YES You can meditate without religion! I can see your getting the idea now. But without meditation to compare it to what would you call it? Religion has given us motivation and structure to hone these practices of self improvement. When I do my dishes I am meditating. If you look into zen buddhism you’ll see menial tasks are often sought after for the calming / focusing effect they have on the brain. We are daily overwhelmed with information, more so nowadays – but in the past peoples minds would have been forever troubled with fantastical ideas, and no way to properly explain themselves, mixed in with all the white noise of living in a enclosed society. To master the focusing of the mind was a quantum leap we can only dream about.

Now do me a favour, watch some you-tube pop sensations, watch a few hours of TV soaps and commercials, go spend some time with gossipy relatives – then try to do some analytical work.
Next exercise for an hour, then meditate for 4 hours. Calm your mind totally, see memories and random impulses form in your minds eye, but learn to let them dissapate and dissolve. All the time control your breathing and imagine the point of a knife. Thats your mind, that knife – the longer and more undisturbed you can hold that clear image the better. Now try that analytical work again. My moneys on the post-meditation work. No white noise. No distractions. Serenity. You use ‘scientific’ as a description of a way of thinking, but science is a word for describing proven facts. The total opposite of thought. Thought is about creating.

The point of:
“If a tree falls in the forest…”
Or a Koan as they are known, is to learn to think outside of your comfort zone, outside the box, it is to enhance and stimulate your creative thought patterns. You mind is a machine and it cannot become great without exercise.

Much dream enterpretation is murky Freudian psychology / on par with astrology. But there is some deep stuff there. I particulary like Jungs work around archetypes. In my experience dreams can only be interpreted by the dreamer. It is your subconscious after all – and if you are honest with yourself you know what your dreams mean. Of course you’ll have lots of dreams of random shit, but use your own judgement to find the important ones.

Then you’re an idiot and I give up.

You clearly have trouble identifying ‘new age babble’.