The Dreams & Dreaming FAQ:

Answering Questions, Laying Out Science of Dreams for Psychology

Q: What are Dreams?

JWE: First and foremost, I'd say dreams are experiences, like events in waking life, but with one critical distinction: dreams omit all the static from waking life that obscures life's hidden framework and meaningful signals. Neither random happenstance nor the arbitrary will serve as contributing architects to dreams. In their purity, dream experiences are quite potent and efficient in the way they affect us. To say they educate or inform us falls short of the fact that these ends are accomplished directly, not by appealing to our awareness, but by altering fundamental sources of awareness. Another way to say this is that dreaming re-distributes the value or energy across the various criteria that calibrate waking perception and orient waking judgment, which takes me to my next question.

I find that the all-too-common psych prof, at least those who do not categorically dismiss the functionality and meaning of dreaming, will often play small ball with dreams, using some highly circumscribed *mini-study* as the basis for claiming that dreaming does x and only x. These are usually physiological and cognitive psychologists who might say something to the effect that dreams serve as 'cognitive filing cabinets' and they will abruptly add, 'and that is all they do.' Even within their own wheelhouse they fail to see more advanced theories of dream functioning. I am not a cognitive psychologist, but if I were to propose a theory of dreams for cognitive psychology, I would liken dreaming to the process of defragmenting a hard drive, the major difference being that I understand human beings are not 'hard drives.' The analogies of the all-too-common psych prof are intended to conclude or confine thinking, whereas my analogies are intended to make thinking more productive. (The meaning of my analogy will become more apparent as you read through this report). Moreover, the analogies of the all-too-common psych prof often reveal just how estranged they are from the phenomenology of the dream (and life itself for that matter). And for the all-too-common psych prof, science is nothing more than a cookbook of standard operating procedures followed mindlessly from hypothesis ---> formatted article for submission to trade journal. Speaking in an *operational terminology*, they drone through the methodology with as much liturgical observance as a pastor through the Mass, bleeding vital meaning and individuality from the phenomena they confound with methodological constructs (e.g. *stimuli*, *response*, *variables*, and *dependent measures*). Philosopher of science Rychlak referred to this fallacy as the theory-method confound.

Q: What If We Don't Remember Our Dreams?

JWE: Well, there's interpreting a dream. We can interpret a dream accurately, or we may fail to grasp the intended meaning of the dream, but the process of pondering the dream may change the way we think about something or re-direct the course of our thinking so that it takes on new objects. But this is all really beside the point if we consider the deepest level at which the dream operates. While there are changes we make to our life when we make sense of a dream, there is a fundamental effect of dreams that does not require that we interpret, or even remember, our dreams.

Q: If Dreaming Is A Form of Thinking, Do Your Dreams React to Your Thoughts about Dreams?

Have you ever been to a barber shop where you have a mirror on the wall both in front of you and behind you? You can peer into a portal that stretches infinitely. Well, I get the sense something similar happens to persons like myself who not only thinks about what my dreams might mean but who thinks about what dreams do. Just how does 'thinking about one day's dream' factor into the dream I have the next day? I have to wonder if or when my dreams respond to my response to a dream. There is a dialogical quality to this banter between dreaming and waking thinking about that dreaming. If I set aside enough time during the day to thinking about the dream (and even other dreams), if I limit sources of stimulation and experience originating from outside the home, and if I sustain this lifestyle for a few days, the quality of the dreaming spirals down into something more structural and fundamental, incorporating more alchemical, geometric, religious, and ontogenetically (mythological) and phylogenetically (childhood) remote iconography. It's as if in stripping my life of stimuli and superficial variance, that I am accessing the bare framework of the mind.

Q: Can Dreams Predict the Future?

JWE: I believe so. Most people think of the idea as something on the order of divine intervention. Miraculous. Incredible. But if we accept the idea that consciousness is a mental sense organ that puts a face on the world (that constructs a view of things), and if we accept the idea that dreams as experiences can influence this sense organ directly (uncontaminated by the static of random happenstance and our arbitrary will), then why wouldn't future mental states bare the imprint of its cause/creator? In dreams we're getting a glimpse of future states of consciousness in which dreams themselves have a hand in creating!

The things I suggest dreams routinely accomplish do not violate natural laws. The time will come when our culture of understanding will be such that these things will strike us as a natural extension of what we already know.

I like to think of two different types of prediction. There is what I call the point prediction, where a dream image across the history of a person reliably precedes some event or condition that does not resemble it physically. If it did resemble it physically, we'd have a literal prediction, and while many people report this kind of seemingly miraculous prediction, somewhere between the miraculous and the mundane is what interests me the most: the meaningful. The point predictions of which I speak are, well, let me favor you with an example:

Over the course of months I scattered muses about the torrent of tornado nightmares I experienced as a graduate student in Psychology. Having been a graduate student in multiple psychology programs ("move over, storm chasers"), I learned to expect within hours of the dream some threat or recrimination, delivered formally by letter or personally in a closed door castigation, stemming from some manner in which I behaved unconventionally or failed to behave in accordance with expectations. Just as tornadoes can take numerous forms (your "wedge," "rope," and "classic funnel" twisters), the ways I could deviate from expectations far outnumbered the deviations I could imagine...or predict. Even after a tornado dream warned me that a dizzying imbroglio was imminent, I was just as unable to anticipate the source of the "storm" as I am to anticipate the when and the where of a twister in a tornado watchbox. But the variety of storm shapes and sizes is really beside the point, the point being that you do not want to be caught in the path of a professor's peeve, penchant, or political peccadillo. In a nutshell, the moment a psychologist gets it in his or her head that this is appropriate or right, it becomes your business to know and to conform to that value. The consequences for failing to do so may include heavy rain, wind gusts in excess of 200 mph, withdrawl from your doctoral program, large hail...

Profile of Common Storms

......Theory. This is the rope tornado. These tornadoes are so gaunt as to appear harmless. But they cause some of the most severe damage known to careers. Do not include "Jungian" or "dream researcher" among the list of self-descriptive adjectives you provide during the "tell me a little about yourself" section of orientation. Some closet behaviorist on faculty may be taking notes. More broadly, beat down the urge to align yourself with any school of thought or identify your focus of research. It's not like any one else really wants to know anyway. You'd be better off steering clear of Psychology in your introductions to the faculty at large by referring to yourself as, well, anything from a "Buffy enthusiast" to a "good square dancer." Personally, I recommend "para-sailing." It shows you have an active life outside Psychology, which for some reason is very important to most clinical psychologists, who regard it as a prerequisite for mental health. What does that tell you? But most importantly, it's a hobby in which no one else, well, let's just say you won't have to worry about other students or profs requesting to join you, which brings me to my next storm.

......Participation. There is no such thing as a "request" or even a "suggestion." When a psych prof "suggests" you do something, especially when he or she "has a suggestion for you" in those words, you take it as you would any standing order from a drill sergeant. Choice of the word "suggest" is symptomatic of an attempt at managing an impression as a populist ("I'm a good guy, man of the people") and benevolent deity ("God of the New [most modern] Testament") as well as being symptomatic of the time-tested expectation that you will throw yourself on the suggestion like a selfless soldier on a live grenade.

This is the tornado you don't see because a dry, windy day produced a funnel with relatively little condensed vapor near the ground. In another, less metaphorical way, you don't see this tornado because it's rooted in deception and lack of communication. There is a lot of hard policy and procedures that live between the lines of anything written in a department handbook (even one written to resemble a Department of Defense Operations Manual). When the department head goes out of his way to let you know attendance at weekly colloquia is not mandatory, what he really means is that it is an opportunity to prove your devotion to the department. More often than not, the faculty are noting who's been naughty (not attending) and who's been nice, and come Christmas, you can find more than a few lumps of coal in your stocking. Just remember that if they had required attendance, they would have had no way of knowing for sure who is a team player and who is not. Some may call this 'entrapment.' But as far as meteorology is concerned, it's as ingrained a feature in the program climate as barometric pressure. Also, pay your graduate student association dues, even before your electric bill, no matter how little interest you have in this straw authority, no matter how little interest you have in the golf outings, and how little interest you have in watching the pet rat walk a tightrope for the department talent show. They want to know you like them. If you don't communicate to them that you view yourself as fitting in, they will most likely decide you don't fit in. And this includes letting them know how much interest you take in your professional development. You need to appear to be looking into joining extracurricular research teams in the hopes of becoming the sixth author on as many four-page publications as possible. I don't care how frivolous the research, how much it may wreak havoc with your thesis schedule, or how meaningless a role you play in the research. Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. And most grad students do not defend their thesis inside four years (or their dissertation in seven).

.......Politics. This conflict produces the classic funnel tornado. You'll know the damage when you see it! When a professor asks you why he did not see you at the election day poll he worked just outside your neighborhood, adding "we really could have used you," just say you cast an absentee ballot for you prior state of residence and leave it at that! For crying out loud, do not imply you may not have voted Democratic!

......Personality. This is the wedge tornado, because to violate this law of thermodynamics is to invite a storm event with the widest path of destruction. Do not get personal with your work! Do not get any bright ideas! You may be excited about teaching for the first time. But make no mistake, it's not really your classroom. You are a trainee, and you represent the department by proxy. It would help to think of yourself as the terrycloth equivalent of your practicum supervisor, even if the practicum supervisor is a wire-mesh pedagogue at best. (You remember the Harry Harlow experiment). If your teaching practicum supervisor is a physiological psychologist, do not write a syllabus that allocates only one lecture to physiological psychology while allocating four to personality. I don't care how expendable the structure of the ear, do not forget to teach it and test it if it's in all the textbooks. Do not recommend a textbook other than the most recent edition of Myers that comes standard in the department. And under no circumstances should you, even in jest, suggest forgoing a textbook in favor of a packet of original readings! This all goes in your file! Similarly, abort any claim to creative control, even on projects you presume to be your own. Indulge your thesis advisor when he tells you to abandon the exploratory analyses you want to implement in favor of the usual lineup of t tests, ANOVAs, and correlations committee members can comprehend on little sleep and even less interest (in your research). And count yourself lucky your advisor did not require under the terms of your assistantship that you propose a thesis that advances his or her own research.

The strongest tornados are those characterized by the greatest difference in barometric pressure inside and outside the funnel. Just remember that if the policies, procedures, and prejudices are exerting strong pressure from outside you, and you do not feel that pressure, conditions are right for the development of an F-4 or F-5.

Like most tornado victims, I feel very unlucky for having found myself at any point along a path of destruction as narrow as it is potent...as potent as it is narrow. A guy just can't help but feel singled-out. And just like a tornado has an internal anatomy of suction zones and vortices wrapped within the exterior funnel cloud, so this political adversity is wrapped inside a charged climate of latent personality conflict & professional training. The 'leading event,' which packs a condensed punch of verbal abuse, is wrapped inside a wider thermodynamic system. You have the latent rising heat, the personality conflict, that dismissably dim sense that maybe some of the profs would not like you if they knew more about you. Listen to that voice inside you! And then, in the path of destruction behind the tornado, there is a protracted period of probation marked by sustained tension and vigilance. This is when you assess the damages and determine whether your standing in the program can be salvaged (or whether you will drag out the inevitable to the tune of insoluble loan debt). Just where was this tornado on the Fugita scale? Then you take stock of faculty expectations and monitor your behavior, molding it to those expectations. It's a skill not unlike hand-eye coordination. You just have to play a lot of ball to develop the skill.

Dreams as Symbolic Blueprints of Future Events

Then there is another kind of evidence for prediction which I call the interval prediction. This is the dream that connects with, or maps to, a subsequent waking event across many points along their correspondence. The best example of this is the rather compelling synchronistic experience I relate in the first chapter of my novel. In this case an August, 1984 nightmare seemed to provide a symbolic blueprint for a series of events that took place over the course of an October, 1988 morning.
The opening chapter to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, which can be reviewed online at no charge, launches into a mysterious event in which one character's dreaming and waking experiences coincide. The coincidence is narrated by the character's spouse, an adjunct instructor who presents her husband's nightmare as a tantalizing lead into a lecture on dreams. The chapter moves back and forth between the instructor's lecture and the husband's mysterious journey through the urban wilderness of Northwest Washington D.C., where events connected to the nightmare unfold even as the instructor relates it to her students. In Chapter 6 (Dead Center Field) the synchronistic journey introduced in the title chapter is deepened by a revelation that embeds the dreaming-waking hybrid experience in an enduring human problem intent to make readers believe similar 'coincidences' are actually a natural condition of the planet. By this time the readers are dogged by a nagging sense that the characters are being controlled by a group mind and that the foundation shared by our deceptively personal lives is beginning to surface, revealing itself for the first time as it begins to crack.

Remember that if dreams are capable of adjusting our awareness, our mental sense organ, without our awareness, then they are in effect symbolic precursors of future states of awareness. In some ways, future waking events grow out of a preceding dream like a plant from soil. Now this is seldom if ever an exact science because when I say 'waking event' I do not refer merely to a concete and observable collection of objects in space and over time, but throw into this mix the subjective meaning of this event for us. The dream is not the human eye. The dream is the inner eye. It sees what things mean to us and expresses that meaning in the language of experience. It is only natural that this dream experience should bare a resemblance to events that follow it in waking reality. The fact this correspondence is neither perfect does not rule out the dream's role as a contributor to the future as we "see it" (receive it psychologically).

Q: Do We Share Dreams?

JWE: I recount in the second chapter of my book a dream I shared with someone else in waking reality. But without having to resort to rare example of literal dream sharing, I'd like to say that an occasional architect or contributor to the dream is that preexperiential mind Jung called the "collective unconscious." Even before we put anything in our brains, any experiences or education, the brain has a structure and dynamic, an anatomy and physiology, and before that, it has the genetic seed for one. In other words, we can think of a mind as being an empty container at some point. Any fluid can be affected by the material of which the container is made and the fluid takes on the shape of the container. So unlike Locke's tabula rasa, this container can be said to contain meaningful built-in material in its make-up, in its walls, so to speak, and in its shape. I am speaking metaphorically of course, and I confess I am somewhat limited with respect to my ability to imagine all the contributing properties of a pre-experiential mind. Some people have referred to the pre-experiential material as inherited ideas. Some liken this material to templates like that used to determine the style and organization of our text in a word processing application. Some characterize this pre-experiential contribution as a predisposition to organize subsequent experiences in similar 'human' ways with perhaps some slight variations across individuals. Jung thought we were all born with a personal myth, which unfolded across an ontogentic timetable like so much psychological DNA. Occasionally, big dreams, big experiences, and synchronistic experiences connecting a big dream to a big experience like the kind in my chapter 1 give us an obscure glimpse of this myth. It manifests itself during periods in our life when some condition -- could be a crisis or rite of passage or state of personal reflection or self-indulgent devotion to our characterological imperatives -- cuts through that static I discussed earlier -- the arbitrary will, the random happenstances, the requirements of the external world -- and shows who we were meant to be. My August, 1984 nightmare occurred in the middle of a rather slow summer. Lulled into a boredom by the absence of grade school friends and schoolwork, my mental focus turned completely inward.

Dream Part of Synchronistic Tapestry with Mathematical Structure

(The following was written months preceding the release of my book)

"Some of you have asked me -- um -- have asked me -- well, when I'd like to see the thing out -- and I always maintained for reasons I will elaborate on shortly that I preferred February to January and March. Soon after the book is released, we can all enjoy discussing the book's many characters, storylines, and symbols, and I look forward to adding Fireflies to the reading lists of regional book clubs and libraries. The benefits of a coffee house discussion forum should extend to the author. Every once in a while, you come across a novel that defies classification. In answer to your question I think the book is classified as Fiction/Spiritual -- at least that's what the back cover reads -- even though it is based on too many actual events for comfort. The trans-genre Fireflies is part testament -- I witnessed many things that puzzled me over the years -- from the paranormal to the pathological -- so everyone, author included, can expect to learn a thing or two from a collaborative discussion of the work. In this way, Fireflies is unique. I present this dramatic expose as evidence of interventions in our familiar worlds of 'otherworldy intelligence,' the stirrings of ulterior things -- things living in its soil and its atmosphere, on occasion grazing the plane of our world to be glimpsed if only we'd look and at other times unseating us with guttural movements on a tectonic scale -- manifesting the random edges and extremities of an infrastructure unknown to us. In writing this book I seek not a classroom of students but partners in an investigative journey."

I had actually hoped the book would not be available before February, but there is no succinct and simple way to tell you why. For those of you who've read the first chapter of my book (available on my web site), you'd understand that there is a site here in the D.C. area, a nexus of coincidences which I worked into the plot of my novel. This site also happens to be about 2 miles from one of the psychology programs on which the book is based, ground zero for many of the actual events to which the book testifies. The following four dates present the cardinal points on a time-map of sorts. If the hypothalamus can be said to regulate such basic functions as body temperature, than I have to wonder whether there isn't an organ at work, analogous to a compass, sending me in and out of harm's way on a curious schedule. What follows is actually a very mild example of the patterns from the "You-just-can't-write-stuff-like-this" file. That's what I like about Fireflies. It provides an obscure glimpse of a script beyond imagination. Kind of gets you thinking about a psychological equivalent of DNA, perhaps not unlike Jung's "collective unconscious" and "individuation vis-a-vis a personal myth"

August, 1984: I awaken from an August nightmare I would never forget.

October, 1988: Nightmare is realized, unfolding across a sequence of events on a Saturday morning in October. I leave the city.

April, 1998: I learn that I would be returning to the city, as one of the few schools in the country offering clinical respecialization programs for research PhDs admits us. (I later withdrew from the program under political pressure, but my wife continued to finish her second doctorate).

February (?), 2004: This is when I am anticipating the formal release of my book. This would be spectacular. It would come at a perfect time if I consider the resources available to me in this month, and when I consider it would also mark the month in which my wife completes her licensing exam.

As you can plainly see, the February, 2004 date is pure speculation. (UPDATE: Book was released in February). Well, it's more of an educated extrapolation. Given the first three plotted points, the fourth would have to be February, 2004 if the dates associated with the series of events are to satisfy requirements for an improbable mathematical equation. February is the fourth and only missing set of coordinates in this square-shaped script. There seems to be a symmetry here. 1984, 1988, 1998, 2004.

Consider the following:

[A] INNER JOIN VS. OUTER JOIN

1988 and 1998 are 10 years apart
1984 and 2004 are 20 years apart

[B] If we consider the INNER JOIN months, April (98) and October (88) are six months apart (diametric opposite points on the calender). October (88) is when I decided I would be leaving D.C. April (98) is when it became clear I would return.

[C] If we consider the OUTER JOIN months, August (84) and February (04) are six months apart (diametric opposite points on the calender). February also happened to be traditionally the worst month in my graduate school career, hence the title of Chapter 5, "28 Days Till Tomorrow."

[D] The numbers corresponding to the months involved are 2 (Feb), 4 (Apr), 8 (Aug), and 10 (Oct), with 2 months separating February and April, and two months separating August and October.

[E] Something tells me that the numbers associated with the years themselves (84; 88; 98; 04) bare some sort of improbable similarity with the numbers associated with the months: (8-84), (10-88), (4-98), (2-04). An increase in 2 months separates the 8 (of 84) and the 10 (of 88), while a decrease of two months separates the 4 (of 98) and the 2 (of 04).

Some with metaphysical sensibilities, like a numerologist or alchemist, might be inclined to muse over the math involved here. Synchronicity is the term most frequently used to describe both the realization of the dream in waking life and the trans-temporal mathematical pattern of associated events. How to wrap our arms around a concept like synchronicity is a problem addressed by philosophers and physicists.

I am not sure whether we are dealing here with that psychological DNA to which Jung referred as a "personal myth" that drives individuation or whether we are dealing with the cognitive structures (and possibly archetypes) that support waking awareness in the same way templates underwrite the functioning of computer applications. But at these critical moments, the microeconomics of the psyche (proximal day-to-day fluctuations in value of criteria for waking judgement and perception) takes a back seat to the macroeconomics (ripples from foundation of psyche addressing issues relating to individuation across the life span). The effect of the arbitrary will and random happenstance (static) is minimized and the signal, which may have always been present, not only becomes apparent but confronts us from the outside as our decisions and perceptions put us in situations to which we were predisposed by changes in our inner life. The normally subtle influence on consciousness by sources beyond consciousness spikes dramatically, at which point we catch a powerful but obscure glimpse of the infrastructure beneath that mental sense organ we call consciousness (which gives the world its face). The otherwise routine redistribution of value/energy across criteria for waking judgment and the otherwise routine maintenance or recalibration of sources of perception suddenly all converge to promote an experience we're supposed to have or a perspective we're supposed to take. Who knows how we should be characterizing the Architect of all this, and the purpose for its paroxysmal (fitful) reshuffling through synchonicity. We are tempted to finger "our core character" or we're tempted to characterize the sychronicity as a rare expression of the system (psyche) as a whole.

Concepts like stochastic resonance and the butterfly effect have been invoked to make some sense of a routine process whereby connectionist networks (not unlike Jung's final-energic model of the psyche as a closed system) re-organize themselves to maximize harmony with both its own internal conditions/signals and with external perturbations. Perturbing a system in a chaotic or near-chaotic state with random noise causes the system to assume its inherent configurations (such as when vibrations of a tabletop cause sand to arrange itself in a finite set of patterns on the tabletop) and causes life events to flow with less viscosity (more volatility) between happenings that are likely to draw our attention because they jump from one to another (as opposed to flow) and because they share some quality or meaning.

It is presumably in states of crisis or critical developmental periods (or cultural rites of passage) when archetypes and synchronicities often manifest. A remarkable aspect of the synchronistic tapesty that impresses itself upon us is the confluence between internal and external, physical and psychological. The transcategorical pattern (or common rhythm) that I described in reference to the language and structure of dreams seems applicable to a description of the synchronistic experience. So one has to wonder whether it would be fruitful to revisit synchronicity from this systems perspective.

Without going into the details of Chapter 1 -- and its subsequent connection to Chapters 6 and 10 -- I will say that I was thinking of reconstructing the 'walk' featured in Chapter 1 (the October, 1988 realization of the August 1984 nightmare) and then from there continuing to the school (April, 1998), thus connecting the four points in this "synchronistic quad." (Paranthetical text added).

As for the book celebration, I am thinking of typing it into a mini-pilgrimmage, a walk retracing my steps from DuPont Circle to the Washington National Cathedral to a site that will forever live in infamy, the last straw from a straw discipline. The straw that broke this camel's back, inspiring a book so "large" that readers will be breaking its binding for years to come.

Dream Draws from Life's Unseen Mathematical Properties to Make Point

980205 (THE DREAM OF FEBRUARY 5, 1998)

I this dream, I observed from directly over the stadium a Yankees-Red Sox game. The Sox were batting in the bottom of the 9th, and with 2 out a batter by the name of Daniel Ishben stepped to the plate with a full count and the bases full, vying to break a 2-2 tie. Ishben surprised the Yankees by hitting a nubber up the center of the infield, trickling beneath the pitcher's 2 legs and between the 2 confused infielders on either side of the 2nd base bag. Two runs scored, including the runner who had occupied 2nd base, bringing the game to an abrupt end.

I'd like to impress upon you the dream's unique mathematical properties. Around the time I experienced this baseball dream, I was mindful of the some other peculiarity in the series of dreams surrounding this one: these dreams used a variety of my residences -- past and present -- as dream settings. I dreamed of my current home. I dreamed of the residence I occupied just prior to this one. And I even dreamed of my childhood home. (Unusual for someone whose dreams contain a preponderance of fictitious settings, distorted settings, or real-life settings outside the home such as work or school). By some hunch I wondered whether the numbers associated with these addresses could be mapped on the baseball diamond, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd base and, yes, it's "home" plate, point of both ORIGIN and DESTINATION in the pastoral sport of baseball.

It occurred to me that my childhood home - featured prominently in these dreams - may correspond in some way to home plate in the baseball dream. The address of my childhood home -- 121. Not only do we have the coinciding names home plate and childhood home, but the sum of the digits in the address 121 is 4, suggesting the fourth point along the diamond. If you are standing at home plate, 3rd base is 1 unit of distance away, second base is 2 units of distance away, and 1st base is 1 unit of distance away. "121" is an expression of the view of the infield from home plate.

Now what of my residence at the time of the dream: 210? The sum of the digits in the address, 3, makes me wonder whether my current address does not correspond to third base. Viewing the infield from 3rd base, 2nd base is immediately to my left, followed by 1st base, and then home plate, to which we can assign a 0 because home plate, in one manner of speaking, is a zero base, cannot be occupied, and precedes first base (i.e. before 1). Little did I know at the time of the dream that my next destination after 210 would bring me full circle to a city where I'd put down roots as deep as the ones beneath my childhood home. Little did I know my next destination would bring me full circle from a HOME OF MY ORIGIN to a HOME OF MY MAKING. For those of you who enjoyed reading the section of this FAQ titled "Dream Part of Synchronistic Tapestry with Mathematical Structure" (see above), you'd be interested to know the HOME OF DESTINATION in this case refers to the Washington, D.C. area that includes the Washington National Cathedral (site of the strangely-fulfilled 1984 nightmare) and also site of the "straw" doctoral program that "broke this camel's back," inspiring me to write Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun. So home plate, which once represented the home of origin (121 address) would soon come to represent the home of my destination.

Now if I plot the numbers on the bases, "121" from Home Plate plots 1 on 3B, 2 on 2B, and 1 on 1B. "210" from 3B also plots the 2 on 2B, also plots the 1 on 1B, and plots a 0 on home plate (which makes sense since home plate is not really a base but a point of origin that precedes 1B). These two addresses then give us numerical assignments for all four bases.

Home plate = 0
1B = 1
2B = 2
3B = 1

And then I took up the address just prior to his current address, which is 2025. Just how does the four-digit address "2025" express the view of the infield from 2nd base?

If we read the bases from the vantage point of 2B (and this is the same whether we read clockwise or counterclockwise), we read 1-0-1-2. If we double this number, we end up with 2-0-2-4, just one digit shy of the "2025" address! We do not have to just double 1-0-1-2 willy nilly without an explanation. There may be meaning in the fact 2024 (an approximation of the "2025" address) is derived from a doubling of 1-0-1-2. Unlike the other bases, 2B faces the symbol of duality. That special place on the diamond that serves as point of both origin and destination. The place that cannot be occupied. It's like staring into a purely reflecting surface that inverts as well as reflects the image of any object in front of it, like a mirror. (I am reminded of the statement from Swiss psychiatrist CG Jung that one cannot directly see or know the Unconscious source of oneself, but only infer it indirectly, much like one only sees oneself in a mirror or much like astronomers have to infer black holes from its pull on nearby stars). This would also explain why the address that corresponds with 2B is a four-digit address. Included in the view of the infield from 2B is 2B itself! This suggests self-awareness. An examination of where one is in reference to alpha and omega.

At this point, I am inspired to think of the diamond as a representation of the human psyche, the structure and dynamics of which preoccupied a friend and I in a late-evening discussion. Then it occurred to me. This conversation may have still been on my mind as I slept. Many theorists equate dreaming to a form of sleep thinking. The dream may have picked up where we left off in our pre-sleep reflections. In this dream may be the answer to some important questions, or at least a useful perspective.

One of the things that really stood out as far as points to take away from this remarkable puzzle is the expression 'what we see is in the eye of the beholder.' The addresses describe the view of a whole as seen from each of its parts, as if the view itself is an extension of that vantage point. Crucial to understanding dreaming, which was my objective prior to falling asleep the night before I experienced this dream, is the idea that there is no world but for that which we filter through our mind's eye. We should think of consciousness as a mental sense organ and, like any other highly specialized tool or instrument (like the scope on a high-powered fire arm), this mental sense organ that puts a face on the real world, is something we routinely correct, calibrate, or re-orient. It is my belief that this mental sense organ we call consciousness (or waking awarness) is corrected, calibrated, and re-oriented on a daily basis when we sleep and, more specifically, as we dream. Maybe consciousness as a mental sense organ is affected, possibly architected, by our dreams as much as they are by our waking events during the day. Might dreams, as potently scripted experiences, influence consciousness at its source? Think about it. Dreams are experiences. But unlike waking events, which also influence our mental states, dreams do not get filtered through our waking awareness first. We're not conscious when we dream. Also unlike waking events, dreams are not determined by our arbitrary will. Whether we like it or not, when we dream, we're being carried along a current of events over which we have no control. And unlike waking events, dreams do not present us with the static of random happenstances that are not byproducts of our own natures, that do not originate within us, and that may not concern us.

Sometimes, I like to wait until the end of the day to start thinking about a dream I had early that morning. On the walk over here I was thinking about a dream I had this morning. I see in the dream a reflection of or a precursor to the ideas I developed later in the day. What's the idea? That dreams may be a view of the world from the inside out. The dream I experienced earlier in the day and prior to this course of thinking, was a dream in which I was 'changing' (my clothes) in the foyer of my childhood home (121). I was under enormous time pressure to reach the municipal police station on foot to report a bombing I witnessed. I noticed as I reached for the new T-shirt that it was inside out. I could see the label along the neck and the stitching along the seams. I considered turning the shirt around and inside out so that I would be properly oriented when I pulled it over my head. I did not want to walk out the front door and face the world with my shirt backwards and inside out. I then examined the shirt in the foyer mirror, and then looked at my face and into one of my eyes. As the dream turned lucid I marveled at how I was able to look into my eye (i.e. "I") when dreaming, the point here being is that that's what I do when I dream: I look into my "I," the internal conditions that will exert considerable pressure on how I perceive and approach the world.

I was then reminded of a mild childhood anxiety. I had been wondering why my bedroom mirror could elicit anxiety in me. Something about the shape of the thing. (Reflection in mirror has been altered by stained glass effect).

Then a nightmare in 1984 provided a horrifying glimpse of how I apperceived the mirror.

The nightmare created a caricature of the waking mirror by exaggerating its natural curves and angles.

More Math

The great lesson in the solution to the baseball dream (980205) is that the critical symbols we need to interpret a dream are not always the observable images. The numbers 121, 210, and 2025 do not appear in the dream in the same way the diamond, the fielders, and the batter did. Images like the diamond and the fielders ... like the tacit understanding of the situation (i.e. a full count to Daniel Ishben with two out in the bottom of the ninth in a 2-2 game) ... and like the movement along the basepaths ... provide the puzzle structure and the clues needed to fill in the blanks. Making sense of this dream felt a lot like solving a crossword or assembling a puzzle. And once everything pieced together into a coherent statement, I was overcome with insight.

Not to be outdone, the dream of 990410 (April 10, 1999) also presented a mathematical problem. I don't want to call these dreams 'numbers dreams' because the numbers are not always an explicit part of the surface imagery. In 990410, I ascended a building in an elevator. I stepped off when I reached the 3rd floor, a full five floors short of my destination (the top floor), because I was overcome by a feeling something terrible was about to happen. Not long after the door closed behind me, I heard the elevator lose its grip inside the shaft. There was an understanding that the elevator plummeted to the basement upon passing the 7th floor, killing its occupants. A cloud of dust rose through the shaft and puffed between the 3rd floor doors.

This was only one episode in a much longer dream sequence. I remember the way the numbers appeared on the red digital display inside the elevator. When I awakened, I felt compelled to count the number of illuminated bulbs making up each number in the series (1 thru 7). While I only observed numbers 1 through 3 (I got off on the third floor), this was all I needed to see to know how the remaining numbers would have displayed. One clue to the significance of this method is that the top floor in the dream, the 8th floor, would have illuminated every bulb in the digital display. When I realized that, it occurred to me I was doing more than just playing around with an idea. I was tackling a living symbol and quite possibly the primer.

I then arranged the numbers according to the number of illuminated bulbs. The numbers 5, 3, and 2 each contained 5 illuminated bulbs, so I jotted them down beside one another on a horizontal plane. Above this plane I centered the number 6, because it was the only number containing more illuminated bulbs (6 to be precise). Beneath the plane of 5, 3, and 2, I centered the number 4, as it was the only number to contain one less illuminated bulb (4 to be precise). Beneath the 4, I placed the 7, because it would have been illuminated by 2 bulbs. (Note that none of the numbers is made up of exactly 3 illuminated bulbs. Also note that I stepped off on the 3rd floor in the dream). And beneath the 7, I placed the 1, because the 1, even though logic dictates it should be comprised of two illuminated bulbs, was clearly 1 unbroken light in the dream.

The diagram immediately conjured up the image of a crucifix. The 5 and the 2 are analogous to the right and left hands, because there are five illuminated bulbs in each number and five digits in each hand. While there are five illuminated bulbs in the 3, I put the 3 in the middle because the 5 and 2 are, like a left and right hand, mirror images of one another. The 7 is analogous to the feet, because there are two illuminated bulbs in the 7 and two feet in the human form. The 1 beneath the 7 suggests how the feet were nailed together at the ankles during the crucifixion. Also interesting is the way the numbers are related on the horizonal and vertical. The 5, 3, and 2 are all related by simple additive and subtractive operations (3 + 2 = 5 ; 5 - 2 = 3). The 3, 4, and 7 are similarly related along the vertical. The number 3, which is the only number in both sets of numbers, corresponds to the floor on which I stepped off in the dream. The 3 also occupies the place in the diagram that would be closest to the heart of Christ.

And there's more. The diagram also breaks down into other sets of numbers, all of which equal 7. If we examine the endpoints within the boxes, we have the numbers 5, 2, and 7. These numbers are all related by additive and subtractive operations. 6 and 1 on the fringes of the diagram also add to 7. And the only two numbers remaining, the numbers occupying the landlocked or innermost areas of the diagram (3 and 4), add to 7. In the dream, 7 is the last floor anyone elevator occupant could have reached before plummeting to his or her death. The wholeness or completeness suggested by the figure 8, which also happens to be the apex of the building in the dream, cannot be reached by human occupants (i.e. cannot be occupied). What might this mean? Well, now we reach that point in the analysis where we begin drawing inferences from the facts of the dream but, in the process, we know the inferences are not corroborated by other facts. This is a point we reach in most scientific projects. The data has served its purpose, and the scientific and intellectual process has done its job in organizing the facts, but we have reached a point where we deal purely in that to which the facts are pointing. The meaning or message of the always transcends the facts of the dream. We need the facts to reach the meaning, but if we stop at the facts, we fall short of our one indivisible purpose.

And perhaps this statement is also being suggested by the elusive 8th floor. The 8th floor corresponds to the stage in the scientific analysis of a dream that just can't be reached due in part to the limits of science but more so the way dreams are structured. Dreams do give us the whole meaning, but the whole is inherent in the parts and in the emergent property that is the way these pieces fit together. We just won't find that single corroborating fact that is a statement or encapsulation of the whole. The images are considered the facts of the dream, and the images exist to point to some transcendental meaning for which a single images does not exist.

However, it is possible the elusive 8th floor, and the dream as a whole, refers to a psychological state we cannot experience or apprehend in conscious awareness. There was a sense in the dream that the basement floor is also not a place that would be visited. People enter the building through the lobby and travel only upward in this structure. The basement may refer to a psychological structure or hardware of foundational importance, but which is also not something we can experience directly. Such psychological structures have been addressed in psychological theory. Jung referred to them as the archetypes and, like black holes, their existence cannot be observed but can only be inferred from their effects on other observable entities. Nature and physics is rife with such realities. No one sees wind, gravity, or magnetism, and yet these inferred realities illuminate, so to speak, the global structure.

The dream may also suggest that there is a point in a psychological economy when we can no longer sustain our state of affairs (i.e. lifestyle, identity) and we end up having to return to the foundation of our conscious waking lives for sources of new vitality or direction. In phenomenological terms, this means we set ourselves up to experience a major change that presents itself as a shock to our system. Our lives are reshuffled, we may look upon a new set of circumstances or upon old ones through a new lens. Either way, something changes within us. The latter mode of change may seem more insignificant to those of you reading this essay who are not currently in the throes of it, but it should not be underestimated. Much of it gets attributed to changes outside us. "It's a Monday (a new week)," "a new semester," "a new business project," or "it's a new climate pattern." And sometimes we wake up with a new way of feeling -- some kind of residue -- and as odd an after taste as it might leave for a few hours -- it does not necessarily burn off with the morning fog. We adapt to it like eyes to darkness. The psyche itself may have cycles -- seasons and weather of sorts, complete with full moons, changes in the color and density of trees, and wind gusts in advance of low pressure systems. We may not know them because they may not occur at regular time intervals, they may never occur twice the same way, or in some cases they may accompany or cause changes in our outer circumstances (so they never stand out in their own right). They are also unique to our condition, or are out of sync with comparable cycles in other persons, and so they tend to get overlooked, impertinences that we push down beneath our awareness and treat as part of life's white noise. This is where Psychology needs to go to be Psychology.

Also, at the time I experienced this dream, I was writing my novel. My novel turned out to be quite a record of self-sacrifice. I was bringing together into one story a litany of bad experiences resulting my putting other things ahead of what was required to curry favor with those who determined the course of my career. It was a classic struggle between professional development and personal growth, and I also thought scientific progress was on my side, but that's not the point of basic training (i.e. graduate school). Jung might say that the exercise of writing this book triggered in me the figure that symbolizes in persons whose psyche is conditioned by Christianity the psychological symbol of suffering, sacrifice, and selfhood. And the dream itself may have 'programmed me' in ways that were ultimately responsible for changes in the direction of my writing. This is not something I would notice until I reached the final chapter (i.e. top floor) of my novel, at which time the memory of this once marginally significant dream was sparked. I re-examined the dream, and in one final and most explicit influence, I wrote the dream itself into the plot of the chapter.

The Significance of Dreaming within the Psyche as Self-Regulating System

JWE: Now I don't have to tell you that life is full of competing motivations. If life is a fabric, then dilemmas are part of the weave. "Do I sleep with her or do I salvage the friendship?" "Do I work this weekend or do I go to the cape?" "Should I look good for the photo shoot or do I order the scoop of French vanilla to garnish my chocolate chip cheesecake?" "Do I use the contraceptive or do I remain a Catholic in good standing?" "Do I take advantage of the chance to kiss her or do I come clean about my influenza?" Career versus Family. Work versus School. Sex versus Self-respect. A night out on the town or some good alone time. Conflict is everywhere. Do we even really know what we need? Do we even really know what is best for us?

The founding fathers of Psychology Freud, Jung, and Adler, portrayed the psyche as a dynamic and eternal tug-of-war between conflicting personalities devoted to this or that side of questions each thought was most fundamental to mental health and human development. Freud's topographic model of the psyche and its id, ego, and superego structures gave primacy to conflicts between sexuality and morality. The founding fathers viewed everything from symbols to symptoms as a process of conflict and compromise within us as we coped with and continually worked through our ambivalent natures. Today, rare is the clinical psychologist who thinks of human beings in such broad terms and even rarer is the clinical psychologist who has read one of these founding fathers in the original. Throughout our 100-plus year history of Psychology, little to no scientific research is developed to validate or develop such conflict and compromise models. Sure, occasionally someone published research claiming no or mixed support for Freud's theory. But the derivation of hypotheses from theory and other failures of comprehension and conceptualization plague the research. And then there are failures of objectivity. Most psychology professors today flog Freud before gullible Psych 101 students as nothing more than a charlatan chauvinist bound to Victorian culture and limited by case studies. And I agree that Freud's was not a comprehensive model of the human psyche, but more of a technical theory of the vicissitudes of the sex instinct. And Adler did for power what Freud did for sex. But when did Freud become synonymous with all psychodynamic theory and thinking? And why did we use Freud as an excuse to abandon the ambivalence and multifacetedness of the human personality? Not only do we not ask the questions anymore, but our research seldom allows for our dynamism, duality, and complexity. Jung actually presented us with just such a model of the human psyche, claiming the psyche is a dynamic system of all sorts of oppositions between life principles, most notably the urge to adapt to the requirements of the external world (extraversion) and the urge to put our own growth needs (and inner life) first (introversion). But despite the fact Jung is Freud's most direct descendant, less than 5% of psych profs are familiar with Jung's theory and only a fraction have read any of Jung's works. We reduced interpersonal attraction, a dynamic complementarity of similarities and differences, to the spuriously simplistic issue "Is it similarities or is it opposites that bring people together?" And it's a non-issue given our agenda to disabuse the much-maligned man in the street of all his folk wisdom, including the idea that opposites attract. Biological psychologists in sleep labs advance our understanding of REM sleep but they have yet to really roll up their sleeves and plunge their hands into the content and characteristics of the dream experiences as reported by their research subjects. But my main point here is that human nature is a dynamic interplay of opposites, and we as human beings often find it necessary, even functional, to be consistent with respect to the choices we make. We fall into some routine ways of thinking and being and approaching the world. Certain stylized ways of perceiving and presenting ourselves to the world. Certain criteria for making decisions. A certain pattern of endorsements and skills. It's necessary for us to negotiate the common and consistent features of our daily routine. It's also necessary for a sense of personal identity. We as conscious human beings develop some semi-permanent fixtures that make our waking lives relatively stable, viscous. Problem is: there is much in our world that changes. This is also true of our natures.

Well, over time some things become fixtures that really shouldn't, and other fixtures out-stay their welcome: their founding impetus and necessity. Long after they outlived their usefulness we cling to them. We depend on them and they continue to define us, because we find our routine way of living or thinking convenient, consistent, predictable, easy, or just expressive of who we have come to think we are. We imbue these things with value and may even elevate them to a level of supreme principle. Problem is: such values, when applied indiscriminately across all situations, or when embraced for their own sake, can limit the freedom and flexibility available to us, freedom and flexibility we need to adjust to new circumstances or to unfold as maturing personalities. Because our world changes. Even we change. Some thinkers emphasizing innate factors in human nature have come to think of us as being born with the equivalent of psychological DNA that unfolds according to an ontogenetic timetable (against whatever friction and inertia our personal identities throw at it). Remember the 1984 nightmare strangely fulfilled four years later at the Cathedral (see Chapter 1 of Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun)? Jung would claim that I was predisposed to a series of conflicts with certain institutions by the personal myth with which I was born, a myth hard-wired into the walls of my pre-experiential psyche-container, a myth which would direct my individuation across the life span.

But as I implied, there are plenty of friction and inertia we can throw at our capacity for growth and adjustment. Plenty of biases. Biases can up to a point be quite functional. But where we engage in undue effort to withhold value from something or when we imbue something else with excessive value and this interferes with our basic needs to adjust or to grow, these biases become prejudices. Our dream experiences provide us with a mercurial fluid of sorts, presenting us with different worlds each night, none of which are bound to any laws, so we could temper the artificial coherence and consistency of our waking lives. Tenderize some of these biases. While our dreams normally work WITH us to help us achieve our waking goals, an antagonistic relationship between dreaming and waking minds could develop automatically when one or more prejudices limits our psyche's degrees of freedom and flexibility. Then we become subject to all kinds of normal psychopathology: slips of the tongue, accident proneness, a habit of putting ourselves in situations for which we're not prepared. Of course, all this feels like a run of bad luck or gets exported in such explanations as "it's the other guy's fault." And of course there are nightmares. Nightmares are interesting. They take material against which a person is prejudiced, and from this material is created the setting, plot, and character that strike fear into a dreamer and thwart his every effort and expectation. In effect, the dreaming mind turns the tables on the dreamer, using the nightmares to subject the dreamer to an equal-and-opposite prejudice. Take dreams of falling for example. Such a dream may be experienced occasionally by a person who attempted to preserve his successes as a high school quarterback by never leaving town and by surrounding himself only by individuals who remember that TD pass as time expired. Such a person may put himself only in situations in which he knows he will be in complete control, never growing and risking disaster should be find himself in a situation requiring skills or attributes that have not been refined as part of his human repertoire. Dreams like these, and classic saboteur dreams in which the plot is a trail of thwarted wishes and expectations (finding one has run in circles when desperate to escape some animal), seek to relax the system and bring humility and temperance to an inflationary ego/attitude.

Conversely, a regulatory mechanism known as lucid dreams work the opposite end of the spectrum by bringing empowerment, energy, and tolerance to a person sagging after an acute blow to the self-image and a life replete with duress and constraints, yet lacking in opportunities to fulfill personal growth or hedonic needs. The settings in lucid dreams are often quite realistic, providing a familiar setting in which to make your own rules.

So dreams work to reorganize life as we know it to maximize harmony both within ourselves and with the requirements that perturb us from the outside. Dreams may breathe the psychological equivalent of oxygen into depleted and deteriorated sectors of our human inheritance and humanity, not unlike a low pressure system bringing storms to the mid-Atlantic states or an enterprise zone initiative bringing business to impoverished urban districts.

So dreams, like other normal psychopathology, can serve as both the symptoms of systemic disharmony and the symbols (irrational experiences) through which they will seek corrective action and restore freedom and flexibility. In this way dreams have both a diagnostic and therapeutic significance. But they comb the knots out of hair. It's a lot like the way we brush our teeth. We go to a dentist and the dentist measures the gumline beneath each of our teeth to determine where we have neglected to brush. We often think we brush all out teeth and every part of every tooth, and we're often surprised that our routine, often mindless, patterns of hand movements during the act of brushing find some teeth far more frequently and effectively than others. Well, think of dreaming as the dentist charged with the task of identifying and resolving biases in the way we live our life. And depending on just how much tangle or tartar we're talking about, the process can be as imperceptibly routine as a quarter point rise in interest rates, or it could feel like root canal. But there's an economy here, and the scholar who identifies the system's key parameters, assigns values to those parameters, and studies their relationships will probably merit the first genuine Nobel Prize for Psychology.

All this talk of regulation within a closed system, harkening such classic constructs as homeostasis and equilibrium, is actually not that far afield of where some dream researchers, phenomenologists or those with dual degrees in psychoanalysis and sleep medicine, want to take dream psychology. Globus and Kavey speak of harmony principles in connectionist networks and approach the brain as a system that is continually self-organizing to maximize harmony with inner signals and external perturbation. Krippner resorts to concepts like stochastic resonance and butterfly effects to address the brain's "natural internal configurations." The only problem is that we are trying to understand what we no more of in terms of what we know less of. If I remember my algebra correctly, not the best way to solve for x. We know so little about the brain. And both dreaming and waking experiences are more available to us. If only we'd turn our attention to understanding the relationships within and between these sets of experiences, we'd not only understand dreaming better, but we'd give our brain research meaning and direction.

Now unlike a full set of teeth which have been known to dentists and lay brushers since they could look inside anyone's mouth, it's not clear how we should characterize the full range of our waking experiences, nor how we should characterize the needs of our psyche, nor the structure of our personality. An empirical phenomenology like the proposed Experiography or like the work with cancer patients may do just the trick. There's still room for pioneering in dream psychology. Don't let the access-only lab technicians, and their nearly voyeuristic fetish for the brain and fetish toys like the EEG, lead you astray.

According to another view, human development, at both the micro (day-to-day dynamics) and macro (individuation across life span) levels, can be conceptualized as movement along the basepaths. At the point of origin, all thoughts originate from outside our awareness. Home plate refers to the spontaneous origin of psychological products into conscious awareness from some point outside conscious awareness. The batter symbolizes the hidden roots of all creative inspiration -- to the nascent ideas and personal qualities that are left at our doorstep and that we may choose to take in, raise, reify, and refine. The batter Daniel Ishben in the dream supports this interpretation, as "Ich bin" is German for "I am." If I trace back the evolution of all my thinking, I end up with a dimly perceived or spontaneous hunch, vision, or feeling. As we take control of the thought, subjecting it to our consciousness, it is refined to the point where we begin to think of it as our own product (1B, 2B). At some point, we may even identify with it, or if we're talking about our identity, we may become so foreclosed on our identity as to deny ourselves the freedom and flexibility necessary for further growth or adjustment. We are said at this point to be stuck on 2B, stranded on our own island to tend to our self-awareness. We may pride ourselves on our distance from our sources, developing a prejudice that causes us to frown on all things intuitive, spontaneous, undeveloped, or outside our control. (Actually, I have indicted the whole field of Psychology as being so stuck).

Now around the time I experienced this baseball dream – and indeed over my entire lifespan – I've dreamt of tornadoes. A tornado is this basic development structure – this coil – expressed in the substance of wind. The winds inside a tornado move in the same direction in which the runners round the bases – that is, counterclockwise – and debris that ascends in the funnel can be said to repeatedly visit all points but at a higher elevation. Even more coincidentally, scientists believe that inside the funnel – at its center – at its eye (or “I”) -- is a stillness – a space in which air travels calmly in a direct vertical path up into the atmosphere to help equalize global temperature. This fact has its counterpart in the baseball dream, when Ishben (“I am”) hits a nubber (a slow roller) directly up the center of the diamond inside a “whirlwind” of confused and crowded infielders. The connection between these two motifs, the baseball diamond and the tornado – may have been alluded to in 990110 – when he dreamed that a tornado raked over rocks in a dark room, transforming coal instantaneously into perfectly cut and polished diamonds. The tornado also halved a penny – a powerful image akin to splitting the atom. The penny is the indivisible unit of value in our economic system and its halving may refer to Ishben’s grounder, which halved the baseball diamond into two triangles. The triangle on the right containing the vertices HOME-1B-2B would form the symbolic equivalent of progression, while the triangle on the left containing 2B-3B-HOME would form the symbolic equivalent of regression. Both progression and regression form an indivisible unit of value in the sense that one without the other compromises development. In the development of an idea, there are ideas that never get off the ground -- that never find a utlity or application -- because no one rationally refines them beyond their intuitive rawness, and then there are dogmatic thoughts that lose value or meaning because they get polished to the point where no one wants to adapt or develop it further (i.e. stranded on second base). Similarly, I know people who've never 'left home' literally or figuratively speaking, and thus never really matured, and I know others whose professional successes encouraged them to foreclose on an identity beyond which they stop maturing as adults or individuating as persons (i.e. stranded on second base).

Q: How Are Dreams Related to Waking Events?

JWE: Many people attempt to make sense of a dream by matching images in the dream to familiar material from the prior day. While this may prove useful, I find as a scientist and detective that a disciplined, data-driven approach requires that I suspend the search for apparent dreaming-waking correlations until after I have discovered all the relationships within the individual dream first, not unlike what I did to uncover the hidden mathematical message in dream 980205. Here I concern myself with the language of the dream and hope to find the dream's alphabetic structure some clues to its meaning and possible even the function of dreams in general.
Dreaming illustrates the need for a science of oppositionality. In dreams we find a number of self-similarities and oppositionalities, the accounting of which goes a long way to dissecting the structure of the dream and framing its relevance for waking life. Where the similarities are concerned, we often find transcategorical patterns that express a common rhythm across otherwise disparate experiential categories (e.g. color, movement, music, shapes, etc.) that are random or unrelated in waking reality. Take for example the path of one's walk in a dream. Tracing that path may be produce a diagram that bares the same shape as a critical object in the dream. In the same morning, a person might dream of a tornado (which is known to move counterclockwise) and a baseball game (movement around the bases counterclockwise). Suspending the urge to superficially relate the dream to waking life prior to this kind of data-driven attention to the dream can lead to interesting insights like the kind of which I wrote in my post about the mathematical properties of a dream.

It is this language I want to explore further and it is more fundamental to the interpretable dream than the one-to-one mapping of dream images to latent verbal propositions or waking life entities.

Perhaps a cataloguing of various rhythms might correspond (and shed light on) various ways dreams, as experiences, alter the sources of consciousness itself to predispose us to changes in the way we perceive and interpret what we experience on a daily basis. At some level what we are getting a glimpse of when we dream is the expression of changes to structures at the root of consciousness and identity. (Much like what appears on a PC monitor is an expression of application scripts that run in the background).

Q: How Would You Go About Studying Dreams Scientifically?

The study of individual dreams, especially one of our own dreams, is known as a personological approach. It's considered pre-scientific, though I don't approve of the term because it implies that this kind of attention to dreams is not part of the scientific process. Not only would I argue that this kind of approach has a place in science, but that its contribution to the science of dreams is invaluable. It provides us with the questions worth asking and the ideas worth testing in more empirical (i.e. scientific) research. One example of a personological approach is to track and trend dream motifs across a searchable database of one's dreams. I create a file for each of my dreams, naming each file by its date such that 980205 refers to the dreams reported for the morning of February 5, 1998. The diaries also include extensive background on one's waking life. If you doubt whether this approach has any merit, just ask a friend of mine, who entrusted just such a diary to my analytical skills. I discovered that not only do two motifs covary throughout the diary such that where you see one image you see the other (i.e. binary motif), but I found enough similarities in the waking experiences proximate with this pair to say something wildly fascinating about the role of these objects in his life and personality. I'd like to elaborate, but I'd be infringing on Chapter 6 of my book.

The personological approach is part of what I call a self-science of dreams. By that I mean a data-driven approach to dreams where the data is the dream material of a single individual and where there is acute and structured attention to that data. The fleshing out of a dream's structure by playing connect-the-dots with points of oppositionality and self-similarity within the dream is another example of this data-driven approach.

Q: Why Don't We Know More about Dreams Than We Do?

I wish I could say the blame for that rests solely with the phenomenon of dreaming itself and its indefatigable complexity. But unfortunately, and as the people in this room are well aware, responsibility for our embarrassing lack of progress in this area is attributable to the unproductive and devitalizing attitude of psychology professors, who rush to covet the role as ranking authority over this phenomenon only so they can squeeze the life out of it and deceive the public into thinking the phenomenon has no value. And in addition to the steroid-enhanced skepticism, there are materialists for whom neurophysiological activity is the only acceptable data about dreams. For reasons I will explain later in this presentation, neurophysiological activity should be accepted cautiously as one piece of information about the purpose of dreams. Unfortunately, most within the academic community would rather reduce the phenomenon itself (i.e. dreams & dreaming) to the size of this neurophysiological datum, and the result is a caricature of the truth.

Psychology boasts among its ranks standard bearers and savants for whom Science serves largely as a psychological defense mechanism. If we critically examine how Science (and their role as scientists) serves them -- what Science does for them -- how they leverage it as a tool of skepticism more than a tool of exploration -- we begin to get a clearer picture of the psyche of the scientist and its possible innervation of the scientific process. More than any other discipline, the Science of Psychology selects for (as well as attracts) persons who would abuse the "pulpit." ... persons who need authority over the "facts" of other people's psyches ... persons who need the support of an authoritative community to justify and reinforce a rational view of the world ... persons who need their opinions to prevail and whose status as scientists gives them a national stage on which to sound off about politics ... persons who need to bring order (even if it is a false or artificial order) to the most indefatigably complex and mysterious phenomenon on earth: human nature.

The darkest and most disorderly and uncooperative material we know continues to be the "stuff" closest to us ... the stuff of which we're made ... the material that fills our hearts and minds. Those among us who cannot peacefully co-exist with this ambiguity and ignorance need to impose some structure over it (preferably shared structure), and what better way to do that than to become a member of a community with jurisdiction over the mind and body. Not only does the psychological community appeal to such individuals, but I also think the the psychological community favors individuals with such motivations for admission to gradute programs. And I think the broader culture surrounding the training & professional development process socializes this reductionistic attitude and skeptical ideology into its "junior colleagues." The other, more destructive side, of this authority is the way it's used to suppress or marginalize research that forces us to rethink our worldview or that would put them at a competitive disadvantage careerwise. And Science can do all this even while wearing a mask of legitimacy that commands public trust. If we bear in mind that everything evolves according to principles like natural selection, we can ask ourselves what decades of surviving competitive publishing does to the pool of skills and ideologies that make up our academic departments.

You see, a psych prof might play dumb and respond publicly to this charge by asking how Science, which is after all Science, can be anything other than an unimpeachable beacon of trustworthiness and objectivity. And at this point, just about 60 percent of those within earshot will fall in line. But I am not arguing as someone anti-Science, which is what they'd have you believe. I am not arguing that Science is inherently corrupt. Quite the opposite. I am arguing that Science, like anything else, can be subverted or skewed for purposes for which Science was not intended and that psych profs have hijacked Science for such self-serving and institutional purposes, only one or two of which I'll entertain here. When we speak of the scientific method, we're talking about an essential process that does not impose on us much in the way of rules -- of prescriptions or proscriptions. When we speak about the scientific method, we're talking about fundamentals like conceptualization and fact collection, adorned to varying degrees by a host of techniques that are free to vary from one discipline to the next, one researcher to the next. But the criteria psych profs use to qualify or rank research suggests a preference for certain superfluous and arbitary elements and techniques -- the sum of which we could call a 'paradigm' -- that advance institutional aims and preserve community traditions, but which have no real standing with respect to science and which can actually alienate the researcher from his or her own wits and from the phenomenon under study. They'd have you believe these are the rules of Science. But they're not the rules of Science. They are the rules of psychological research as a social institution. It's these elements psych profs demand of research, yes, even if it means overlooking a gross inattention to the fundamentals. These are carrots they dangle before us as conditions for professional membership when it comes time to dole out the amenities bound up with the social and material context of their science. It's these elements they apply like cosmetics to themselves and to their research that allows them to perpetrate the fraud of maximizing their own semblance of science while casting a campaign of doubt on the research of others whose methodology does not look all that ingrained or that does not employ the most complicated statistical analyses. I think they're trying to capitalize on a misapprehension among the public and their own students, which is the less you understand on the face of it, the more scientific it is. So people like me who accentuate the value of ideas and embrace the fundamentals of science in a low-gliding investigation of the phenomena under study, and those of us who like the challenge of writing our research in English without relying on jargon and formatting and other epistemological conventions...we stand naked before our readers. We do not create this static in which we can drown out otherwise obvious deficiencies in conceptualization, fact collection, and communication. But on the plus side, we're usually the ones whose work has more substance in spite of having less flash. If a psych prof wants to be judged according to his fireworks display, that's all well and good, but he's really celebrating his field's independence from Science. That's not me. Unfortunately, when the psych prof is intimidated by your thinking or when your research topic or theory puts pressure on their worldview, then they have to do something. And while they can't rebut your ideas or discredit your methods, they can raise a number of spectres -- invoke a number of magical chants -- in the hopes of persuading others not to read your work or, failing that, to review your work far more critically than they would their own. I guarantee you...any standard failed by my research is failed by those calling on my readers to give me or the phenomenon I love a failing grade [in Science].

And for people who do not like ghosts, they sure raise a number of spectres. Let's take them up here:

Methodology-Based Criticisms

The idea here is that if I'm studying dreams, I'm doing metaphysics, unless of course I compensate accordingly by using only the most advanced and materialistic resources available to psych profs. Brains. Sleep labs. You see, there are a lot of psych profs out there to whom I can present my rather interesting findings. But without so much as a reference to these findings, they leap right into dismissive questions with almost rhetorical intonation, like the following: "How do you know the dream they reported is the real dream? How do you know your research subject didn't lie to you? How do you know the subject's brain didn't lie to him by distorting the dream before he could awaken? Unless you can put a camera inside a person's brain, you can't do any research with dreams that I would consider scientific." Of course, they conveniently overlook (if not downright repress) similar questions that dog their research. For example, when a research subject uses a questionnaire to rate his or her level of agreement with statements on a scale from 1 "Strongly Agree" to 5 "Strongly Disagree", how do we know the "3" he circled means the same thing on question 27 as on question 23? How do we know the person didn't get tired and, for lack of having a real opinion, didn't just circle a response to item 50 without really thinking about it? How do we know the subject isn't lying? Of course, the psych prof would respond to these questions by pointing to the results of research and prior pilot testing verifying the questionnaire's sound psychometric properties as proof his or her approach is meaningful. But I can produce comparable results about my methodology and I can produce complex and interesting patterns of results unlikely to have been obtained by chance alone. So why do we favor certain research subjects over others? Certain methodologies over others? Because some research, more obviously than others, wraps itself in the symbols of science, projecting to the public and to ourselves the ambience of legitimacy we want in Psychology's press junket. And phenomena like dreaming makes us look weak by challenging us to think and work, something at which we're not adept, and by bringing out all these diverse views in a field that wants more than anything else to manage an appearance of unity and solidarity. The more mysterious the phenomenon, the more it behaves like an inkblot and elicits different theories and methods. We don't like that.

Phenomena-Based Criticisms

These psych profs would rather believe my research subjects were lying to me than believe my research findings establish something as modest as "dream experiences serve a function within the human personality." There's a "no, no, no, no, no" quality to their reasoning that ranges from facetious distraction and evasive humor to hostile ideological rants. In either case you feel just to raise the topic of dreams this steel gate that drops in front of you, and you know that the curtain has just been raised on a campaign to minimize and disort the validity of dreams where it comes to dreams having a language, function, or meaning: "What?! You mean you have evidence of dreams that bear an indisputable resemblance to waking events that followed? Well that's just illusory correlation, self-fulfilling prophecy, or probability!!!" I like the way they sling from the side of their mouths these zombified psychological constructs whose meaning is no longer the point and which are not applicable here (e.g. illusory correlation, self-fulfilling prophecy). And I like how they invoke probability, which is not a real cause, but a proxy for some formal causation that is not yet known. "With trillions of dreams and trillions of experiences worldwide every day, of course we'll find some people whose dreams match their subsequent waking events". (See this report for a more complete and amusing rebuttal to skeptics). In any event, the evidence they require from you just to persuade others to drop their prejudices against dreaming is about 10 times the evidence they require to declare support for a research hypothesis about some other subject. Of course, the one way to avoid this is to adopt a research hypothesis that portrays dreams as meaningless, as random, as cerebral waste or byproducts of neuronal discharge. Technically, such a hypothesis should draw as much skepticism as any other hypothesis assigning a function for dreams, but alas psych profs let their biases hang out like fifteen pounts of abdominal flab over a speedo.

Q: Why Aren't We Doing More to Understand Dreams?

This gets to the heart of what I like to call "The Great Repression" within Psychology, the intellectual equivalent of the economy in the 1930s. There, physiological psychologists and supplicating colleagues use the mystique of lab science and symbols of professionalism such as the brain and the EEG to disabuse the much-maligned man-in-the-street of his folk wisdom about dreams. In my view, they should not be arguing that it is not psychologically valuable to ask questions about the meaning, function, or language of dreams. Whenever they find evidence supporting yet another in a series of physiological functions for REM sleep, they get on their soapboax and shout that there is no evidence for the psychological value of dreams. Anyone want to guess why? Because they're not studying the psychological value of dreams, and there is only so much you could learn about the psychological value of dreams studying purely physiological processes. So when these savants say there is no scientific evidence to support the meaning of dreams, they do not mean they have evidence against it...because they never really explored it. Not Aserinsky and Kleitman. Not McCarley & Hobson. Not Robert Stickgold. Not even vaunted Nobel laureate Francis Crich and his sidekick Mitchison.

Dreaming is one of those mysteries that drive a wedge between the general public and the academic community. Dreaming has received so much attention from armchair philosophers and enthusiasts within popular culture. So much so that the psychological community, which is ill-equipped and ill-disposed to address dreaming, have exploited this fact to banish dreaming from science altogether into the charge of 'kooky' populists, mysticists, and paranormal investigators. Surely, in the hands of such individuals who do not adorn themselves in symbols of professionalism, the scientific status of a very real and human experience would be tarnished. Why do they do this? Why do psychologists want to use the mystique of science to malign the image of dreams?

Biggest reason. They don't know how to say "I don't know." Dreaming poses an intellectual challenge that exposes their weaknesses and impairs their ability to manage a facade of expertise. And why don't they study dreaming? Well, they have difficulty translating the phenomenon of dreaming into the methodological language on which they hang their reputations as rank-and-file scientists. When you're addressing big questions about a phenomena as complex as dreaming, you can't assimilate such a phenomenon into the methodological cookie-cutters; you actually have to meet the phenomenon halfway with some original, flexible, and modular methodologies. You may even have to suspend preconceptions, forgo unctiously formal hypotheses (that presume more knowledge than you have), anticipate various contingencies with respect to how the data will look, and build course corrections into the design like you're in the locker room prepping an NFL team down 21-0 at the half. Because just about every detective, real scientist, and project management planner would approach dreaming with a more effective scheme than the psychologist. Psych profs do not know how to assign numbers to characteristics of dreams in ways that productively address the function and language of dreams, or the meaning of any one dream to an individual. Due to a massive failure of imagination, and an urge to treat their own intuition as if it were inherently unscientific, psychologists have not envisioned the range of possibilities associated with the truth about dreaming. But even if you can't envision a single possibility, you can still discover the truth by designing exploratory methodologies that present a critical mass of data that compels imagination. But having dispensed with exploration altogether like M chiding James Bond for extracurricular conversation with Money Penny, psych profs cut themselves off altogether from vital sources of information about dreams and, in so doing, make their 'end-stage only' science no more substantive than a trip to the cosmetics counter. They treat exploratory research like pilot study, and even worse, like some extracurricular activity after 8th period Science. If only they'd take a good look in their own mirror, they'd see their own so-called 'discipline' for what it really is: institutionalized Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But dreams are not like most other topics in Psychology. Most constructs and material black boxes (e.g. brain) leave the individual member of the public out of the process, strictly to observe the end-products of the research. This allows psych profs to put on the lab coat like any Halloween costume. It occurs to me even as a 5-year-old that when my Tweety smock wasn't fooling anyone, not with the disembodied head of the bird stamped squarely on the chest. Even while the all-too-common psych prof wants you to believe all dream research performed outside a sleep lab takes place in a 'spirit cabinet,' it is he who approaches the plane of truth like he's communicating with the dead. A puzzle-like and natural phenomenon like dreams, which is challenging intellectually, and which is felt by most individuals in the public (in many cases more deeply than non-recalling psych profs), exposing the false backings and confederates behind the psych prof's scientific curtain.

Psych profs also need to devalue dreams because they know the public individualizes dreams like no other phenomenon. The first question about dreams usually takes a form like "what did it mean?...that dream I had this morning. The much-maligned man-in-the-street wants to figure out what an individual dream meant to him or her as an individual.

Abuse of statistics. Different terms have been used to designate the manner in which psychologists use numbers to collect and analyze data. Nomothetic statistics. Aggregate statistics. Psych profs collect as little data as possible about the phenomenon they study, but they collect instances of this data from so many volunteers (upwards of 200) so they can plug the data into a statistical formula. The conclusions drawn are tantamount to rules for which the vast majority of volunteers, as individuals, are exceptions. This method of statistical induction (i.e. partitioning variance across groups and assigning differences a level of significance based on its improbability) is simply not built to address meaning and not built to yield the kind of knowledge that can be applied to an individual anything. Psych profs don't mind that the vast majority of individuals are, to one degree or another, exceptions to the rules. As long as the deviation from the rule appears quantifiable, well, it still looks like they have their fingers on the pulse of a universe that is orderly and precise. In my research, I explored each individual indepth, rousing a member of my thesis committee to observe that I was "looking for ways to partition variance within individuals." The idea should not have been lauded for its novelty, at least not 120 years into the history of modern Psychology, nor should it be suspiciously regarded as something our field is "just not set up for." Psych profs have reduced to an unintelligent, rote exercise the use of numbers to capture and analyze the quantitative relations among aspects of a phenomenon. This is quite possibly the Achille's heel of a professor who doesn't understand the theory and phenomenology of numbers at the level of his counterpart in the Math Department.

Abuse of the brain. And no matter how hard you look inside someone's skullcap, you won't find the meaning of dreams there either. McCarley & Hobson (M & H) embarrassed themselves in 1977 when they used a lack of scientific evidence for the value of analyzing dreams as a reason to claim that dreams have no meaning. If no such evidence is produced by their research, it is only because they didn't design their research to explore the issue. M & H pronounced that dreams were nothing more than narratives of images synthesized by the dream to make sense of random surges of neuronal activation along a pontine-geniculate-occipital tract. The facts did not support this conclusion, at least not any more than a host of contrary alternatives. This same criticism applies to the vast majority of their colleagues, sleep lab specialists who never properly put the matter of dream meaning to the test. Only now are people beginning to listen to the likes of Tart, Krippner, and Kavey, who call for an adequate approach to the question of dream meaning & functionality. Too little, too late for some would-be scholars whose careers suffered within an academic culture inhospitable to dreams. Take my undergraduate institution as an example, where a psych prof cited M & H (and an excerpt from the New York Times Science News), to discourage me from pursuing a senior thesis on dreams. Fortunately, I never took what he said to heart. He is so disinterested in dreams, so put off with the idea that dreams may be interpretable, that he doesn't remember his own dreams and that he couldn't bother to read the original sources. My interest in dreaming is indigenous to me as a person and entrenched in my lifestyle. I have been recalling vivid dreams since the age of five and documenting them since the age of thirteen. By the time I enrolled in my first psychology course, I had already invested hundreds of hours in reading & reflection on this subject. I could not be swayed. But I have to wonder how many other undergraduate students with budding interests in dreaming were easily deflected by statements like those of my undergraduate advisor who, by the way, ran rats through mazes for his doctoral dissertation. I also wonder how much of a factor my interest in dreams played in the minimization or marginalization of my application to doctoral programs. My vital statistics were excellent, and my precocious independent study of dreams as an undergraduate showed I had a pulse of yet another kind. But I was admitted to only 1 in 40 attempts. After the dust and dismay settled, profs at my undergraduate college, who originally pegged me as a 'shoe in,' speculated that, owing to my interest in dreams, cherry-picking admissions committees upholding their lowest common denominator placed an asterisk (*) beside my name.

So I've spent the better part of my life battling those whose research is slanted toward devaluing dreams and disenfranchising others who may want to study dreams for a living. I am not saying this was the intention of vaunted molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Francis Crick and his sidekick Mitchison (C & M) who published their reverse learning theory in 1983. Unlike M & H, they set out to give the matter of dream functionality the old college try. But the depiction of dreams as cerebral garbage by the laureate credited with the decryption of DNA set back dream science even further than M & H. And I do think reverse learning theory has some merit. I believe a phenomenological translation of this theory, aided by bona fide experiential research, might have advanced our understanding of roughly one half the psychological value of dreaming. Broader interpretations of the neurological data obtained by C & M are not only possible, but downright illuminating. But "garbage" was all the tools & language of cognitive neuropsychology is capable of. And as pleased as I am to see Krippner & Combs restore conceptual freedom and phenomenological fidelity to the study of dreams, they are off by more than a few degrees if they think the answer is more cognitive neuropsychology:
"Even if the regularities that underlie the neurological events of dreaming become well understood, they may still look quite different than those that best characterize the experiential aspects of dreaming (e.g., Haskell, 1986), which in turn set the stage for a dream’s meaning in the context of an individual’s life. Finding the precise relationships that connect the neurological to the experiential levels of dreaming is future work for cognitive neuropsychology."

But then, to most academics, boxed in their universities, cognitive neuropsychology actually sounds both all-encompassing and integrative. They were right to question the value of neurological events for an understanding of dreaming, but once you crown cognitive neuropsychologists with the divine right to dreams, you disenfranchise a more diverse and intelligent group of empirical phenomenologists who understand that the meaning and function of dreams are not to be found in the relationship between dream and brain but between dreaming and waking experience.

The kind of statements facilitated by Statistics and Cognitive Neuropsychology just don't fly. Especially when we're dealing with a natural phenomenon for which the individual is the insoluble and indivisible vehicle. As such a phenomenon, dreaming exposes the feeble formula in Psychology's stock methodologies. People who actually remember their dreams want answers that affirm the meaning and functionality of what they believe they are experiencing, of what stirred them to depths of feeling or challenged them to heights of reflection. The fact is that dreams, while just like any other natural phenomenon, pose too great an intellectual challenge to psych profs. In other words, psych profs are neither willing nor able to invest the conceptual resources and creative acumen necessary to design scientific phenomenologies of dreams. And on the surface of it, dreams must strike psych profs, who give dreams no more than cursory, desultory, and perfunctory thought, as inherently imprecise and thus as incompatible with their brand of science. This is the kind of thinking that made M & H famous. But dreams are not the least bit incompatible with science. One does not need a special metaphysical adaptor to explore dreams empirically. Giving dreams the royal brush off is the habit of academics whose brand of Science is stunted by their own intellectual laziness, logical sloppiness, ADHD attention to facts, and existential fears of irrational truths. And when I say "brand of science," I refer to the policies and procedures that govern their day-to-day operations as researchers, SOPs designed like defense mechanisms to negatively reinforce their hyper-rational world views. This is the appeal of modern Psychology. Among those interested in becoming psych profs, those who succeed in winning a position in Psychology are those who are most pliable to training (those who post the fewest obstacles to socialization) and those whose disposition allows them to get lost in the field's distracting technical issues. All of which are completely beside the point when it comes to arguing against the meaning or exploration of dreams. Just like Psychology is very much beside the point where that other 800 pound gorilla is concerned, the human psyche. These are the people who elevate mangled versions of precepts like Occam's razor to the level of supreme religious principle. When I examine a collection of students in a classroom, I am often moved by the rather remarkable fact that it is the most supplicating, structured, grade-conscious students -- 'man's best friend' to a teacher -- who are least interested in dreams. Given the current constitution of the academic community, if you're a graduate student seeking the path of least resistance or seeking to diffuse across a gradient from freshman anonymity into favor, you must know that dreaming would threaten to tie your career path in knots. And some of these students naively place this implicit faith in their instructors. Some of these students couldn't care whether their professor said the earth was flat as long as they know that by circling "D: flat earth" on their next exam, they will earn their points. These are your hoop-jumpers, students who appreciate the hidden clauses in the social contract with their professors more than they appreciate the truth. Who appreciate the artfully crafted notions of "professional development" and "committment to excellence" more than they appreciate the requirements for individuation, adult maturation, and true scientific progress. These are the students who become psychology professors.

Q: Why Are Psych Profs Ill-Equipped and Indisposed to Advance Our Understanding of Dreaming?

I have attempted to broach the subject of dreams with many psych profs, and the mere mention of the word seems to bring out this curmudgeonly dispeptic side, conjuring the memory of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon in which this feeble mild-mannered scientist unwittingly consumes the fizzling laboratory concoction that transforms him into this predatory red gargantuan.

Why is this? Well, you have to ask yourself why some people aspire to this profession in the first place. The psychological community attracts (and rewards) graduate students who want things from Science. I have met many graduate students who thought Science was the tonic for low self-esteem. They wished to bask in the reflected glory of Science. And why not? Science confers legitimacy on things. Science validates and disqualifies. Science is an arbiter of merit. And while these students could be heard bitching about the "man-in-the-street" for using Religion as a crutch ("people can't honestly believe there's a God, can they?"), these students turn to the liturgy of Science for just about the same things: to secure their view of the world from opponents, to help their opinions prevail, and to join a winning team. Members Only status in a scientific community gives these students an authority to disabuse the public of its folk wisdom and faith, airbrushing over God on the ceiling of the Cistene Chapel an image of themselves donning a white lab coat and toting a clipboard. They toss around words like 'objectivity' and 'validity' as if they were passwords, and as if only the correct dialect will get you through the Pearly Gates to an office in a university. But 'too many' of them feel their lives have no intrinsic meaning, and so they'll use all their resources to convince you your life has no more meaning than theirs. Properly hijacked, Science gives them the tool they need to gut dreams and other phenomena of their meaning and significance.

So, to sum up, I agree that when we consider your garden variety mysteries and frontiers (e.g., Space, our Oceans), dreaming is not that popular among those whose jobs give them the time, resources, and the credibility to explore this subject. By the time we make significant inroads into dreaming, Magellan, Columbus, and Lewis & Clarke could have re-discovered the world hundreds of times over.

The Empirical as a Series of Personological Studies

I devised a program of empirical research I call Experiography to broadly but empirically survey the relationship between dreaming and waking experiences. It's difficult to find a group of 30 individuals with diaries like those I described above under the personological approach, but the Experiographic methodology makes due with the diaries volunteers are able to put together over a two-to-four week period. On the positive side, the volunteers are instructed not to omit any material from their diaries, so the diaries contain insignificant dreams the self-styled personologists may not feel inspired to record. On the negative side, the diaries in an experiographic research study are not likely to include many of the most significant dreams in the life of the person. Experiography makes up for the relative lack of content at the individual level with a disciplined diary includes a level of detail you may not find in the naturalistic diaries. The research instructions also imposes a standard, a common denominator, so that all the volunteers provide categories of information that makes possible an analysis across individuals. But unlike contemporary scientific dream research, Experiography does not sacrifice depth for breadth, having been inspired by a personological analysis of naturalistic diaries to collect data that allows us to partition variance within the individual volunteer. Drawing conclusions within each volunteer about that volunteer's condition before describing the group of volunteers as a whole is indispensible to a proper science of Psychology. By treating the volunteers as a series of independent n = 1 experiments, maintaining the integrity of the individual and drawing conclusions at the individual level before abstracting and extracting commonalties across individuals is mission-critical, and it contrasts sharply with the contemporary method of throwing as many volunteers as possible into a statistical sausage grinder. The difference between my approach and that of modern psychology professors is clear. We're not playing between the 40 yard lines here. I maximize data within individual research participants, forcing me to manage the number of participants, while the modern psych prof maximizes the number of participants, forcing him or her to manage the collection of data to the few categories of information believed (i.e. hypothesized) to be relevant. In fact, in the case of the modern psych prof, it's the statistical analyses that is a priori. By beginning with a desired statistical analysis, all other research study parameters become constrained. When so many research volunteers become necessary, a hypothesis becomes necessary, which is not appropriate for the study of a phenomenon about which so little is known. In this approach, the procedures are determined beforehand and followed ballistically during the research. "This is my hypothesis. This is how I will collect my data. This is how I will analyze the data. Then I draw conclusions about the hypothesis." In fact, APA guidelines governing research style require research author commit to a hypothesis and plan of analysis and not deviate from it. And this creates a tunnel vision.

But good detectivework requires we design a study to collect data to address a question that reflects the actual level of knowledge about the subject. Admitting that we know little about dreams, some unctiously educated guess or expectation of outcome seems unproductive. Even if we're right, we don't have enough information to really know why we're right or whether some alternative explanation, which would have been obtained under a broader research design, is really the right one. But we use the study to validate not only the outcome but everything we believed about dreams when, in actuality, not enough data has been collected to even begin to make sense of the outcome. We only collected eenough data to process the hypothesis statistically. And yet we act as though the study certifies however we choose to make sense of the outcome. At this point the typical dream researcher claims that not only do dreams do "x", but that's all dreams do and no one else has anything to say on the subject. This creates an absurd state of affairs in light of the skeletal collection of facts about the highly circumscribed and uneducated hypothesis. You have psych profs out there claiming dreams are cognitive filing cabinets, cerebral waste products, or the brain's attempts to fit random images to narrative structure -- AND THAT'S IT! Check out Experiography.

Q: Is Dreaming A Product of the Mind or Brain?

JWE: Dreaming, like anything else, may have its roots in the brain, but this does not mean that brain research, and the biological construct of REM sleep, offer the best hope for the understanding of dream language, meaning, or function. In fact, I argue that they do not, especially the way these methodologies are perfunctorily deployed by most scientists better described as sleep lab technicians. I'd like to refer you to my report titled Newsweek Report Surveys Dream Research Wasteland . Then, when you've wandered long enough with your superhuman thirst for knowledge through the desert of modern dream science, I refer you to a rare oasis: my research with cancer patients .

Q: What Do Dreams Do?

JWE: One might as well ask what the human hand does. If I were an extraterrestrial anthropologist parking my saucer over the vineyards of Ernest & Julio Gallo, I might return to my home planet with news that the function of the human hand is to pick grapes, and only to pick grapes. If I parked my saucer over midtown Manhattan, I might return with news that the function of the human hand is to pick pockets, and only to pick pockets. But we all know the hand does many things, and any effort to reduce the hand to this or that activity is worthless at best. But this is exactly how dreaming has been portrayed by certified technicians toiling in that black box known as a sleep lab (e.g. dreams are information filing cabinets and nothing else). But with all the evidence I have presented thus far in my book and on this web site, it's clear that the psychological value of dreams can be described in terms of many different functions. So, if we take our saucer to a higher altitude so we can frame in one visual mosaic all the things that dreams do, how then might we discuss the purpose of dreams? Can we provide an overarching framework to integrate or encapsulate the various functions of dreams?

The study of dreaming is complicated by its diversity. Diversity in the way dreams are approached. Dreams have meaning, function, and language. The relationships through which dreams fulfill this or that purpose also span the gamut. A dream image may across the history of a dreamer reliably precede events of a similar and specific nature. A dream as a complete narrative may serve as a symbolic blueprint for a future sequence of events or era. Dreams across the history of a dreamer may reliably juxtapose two or more images of things significant to the dreamer in waking life to shed light on a common role within the dreamer's personality. Dreams may express across seemingly disparate elements (e.g., movement, color, shape) a common or transcategorical rhythm such as when the path we walk in a dream creates a shape similar to that of a key object in the dream. And commonalties in the dreams of spouses or other kinds of partners may provide clues to the relationship.

I for one have decided to approach the function of dreams in terms of how dreams treat various objects of importance to us in waking life. My work with cancer patients and my Experiography program of research explores the process by which dreams compensate for waking reality.

NOTE
Ehrenfels is currently working to boost supplies of book to Barnes & Noble and Amazon, where it is selling out. For now, Ehrenfels recommends PublisherDirect (click here) for speed.

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Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Alice Andrews: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Psychotherapist Bill Arnott: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Doubling Down: Wyatt Ehrenfels
Wyatt Ehrenfels Gambles by Splitting Critique: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Authors, Scholars Unite to Support Wyatt Ehrenfels: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Dream Researcher Gail Bixler: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Exposes Our Fear of Exposure Therapy: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Interviews with Internal Correspondent: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Says Psychology Professors Suffer from Professional Analogue of Borderline Personality Disorder: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Student Defies Psychology Professor's Warning Not to Correspond with Wyatt Ehrenfels: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Chides Daniel Dennett for Evangelical Atheism in Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Argues Psychology Graduate Education Not Worth the Money: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Psychology Professors Acknowledge Student Complaints about Curriculum: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Answers Critics, Campaign of Diversionary Tactics: Wyatt Ehrenfels

American Psychological Association

The Dreams & Dreaming FAQ:Answering Questions, Laying Out Science of Dreams for Psychology

The Dreams & Dreaming FAQ:

Answering Questions, Laying Out Science of Dreams for Psychology