As the screensaver entertains the user, their computer is also used for rendering commercial projects, sales of which keep the servers and developers running.

[1] According to Mitchell Whitelaw in his Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life, "On the screen they are luminous, twisting, elastic shapes, abstract tangles and loops of glowing filaments.

The title mirrors the nature of the project: computers (androids) who have started running the screensaver begin rendering (dreaming) the fractal movies (sheep).

[4] The screensaver was created and released as free software by Scott Draves in 1999 and continues to be developed by him and a team of about five engineers.

It has switched to a freemium model in which the server software is not available and much of the computed data is not available under a free license, which led to its removal from Debian.