The correlation between waking-life experiences and dreams could be rated by both dreamers themselves (the self-rating) and independent judges (the external-rating). Yet a problem was whether results of these ratings were meaningful. To address the problem, we compared results of the external-rating with a random condition for coincidental correspondence which instructed judges to rate similar elements between each participant's dreams with another participant's waking-life experiences. Ninetyeight participants recorded major daily activities (MDAs), personally significant events (PSEs), major concerns (MCs), and dreams. Then both the self-rating and the external-rating were adopted. The self-rating found that most of dreams were related to waking-life experiences of the same day, while the external-rating only found about half dreams were related to waking-life experiences. In addition, results suggested that the external-rating could identify meaningful incorporation for both PSEs and MCs being incorporated into dreams, but this was not the case for MDAs, which may indicate that nonemotional waking-life experiences were rarely incorporated into dreams.