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The Dream as Nature's Methodology


In the late 19th Century, Structuralists used a technique known as introspection to help uncover the nature of conscious processes. This technique was abandoned. I rely on an analogous but different technique, in which I harness the natural and deeper (and more objective) introspection of the psyche, i.e. dreams, as the blueprints for the psychic infrastructure. Of the handful of people who continue to study dreams, the dream is an OBJECT of study ONLY, and it is ground through some independent procedure that is used as the method for gathering data about the dream. Here I use dreams as a source of information about dreams themselves, such that the dream is both the object AND method. Here, I use dreams like hypnotists use hypnosis. There are two different ways in which the dream method is deployed. First, I simply describe the structure of the dream that is apparent – or “manifest” – in its raw material. This is tantamount to a kind of observation by which I simply describe the dream and in which the facts of the dream and the data are one and the same. Second, I look for similarities and oppositions among the facts of the dream and among dreams within a series, which themselves are inferences from which I draw even bolder inferences about the structure and dynamics of the dream themselves. And from a collection of inferences about the structure and dynamics of dreams, I hope to draw inferences about the structure and dynamics of the psyche. There is an assumption here that the dream, as an extension of my own waking thinking about dreams, will help me to understand itself by completing my conscious depiction. Since dreams are produced spontaneously of their own accord and without conscious awareness or control, dreams contain unconscious material, and it is my assumption that the unconscious material will complement or oppose that of the content or approach maintained in consciousness. This is an approach I would never expect a whole field like Psychology to bank on, but I would hope that the field would encourage THIS among a DIVERSITY of approaches where something as mysterious as dreams is concerned.

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