"It would seem to me that the real amnesia victim here is the psychology professor, who has forgotten that he was put on this earth to probe the psychological meaning and significance of psychological events."

Dr. Mark Marinella, clinical associate professor at Wright State University School of Medicine, reported the case of a 61-year-old man who developed temporary amnesia from the shock of dreaming that his son was killed in combat in Iraq. The skepticism that followed in the wake of the report is notable. Armed only with predilections (without any evidence), psychology professors immediately cited a stroke or "some other undetected physical event" as a more plausible explanation, with University of Cincinnati neuropsychologist, Robert Krikorian, going so far as to say the dream theory, though "not completely inconceivable," is "so far out there."

In this rather typical, insipid response to dream theory, psychology professors exhibit an attitude that is 1/3 laziness, 1/3 materialism, and 1/3 rationalism (caution: these quantities have not actually been measured). Also worth noting is that intellectual curiosity and development are stunted by the culture of professional training programs that mass produces PhDs like Dr. Krikorian vis-a-vis a form of natural selection. But I will postpone that thought a moment. The point I first want to make is that a dream theory like the one profferred by Marinella is not "so far out there" but quite within reach of intelligent persons whose scientific attitude is one of a healthy balance of open-mindedness and skepticism. If the psych prof contemporaries, who remain connected to their behaviorist mentors by an umbilical cord, can believe that a person can be affected by his experiences, then they should, with some mild strain, be able to leap far enough to entertain the hypothesis that dreams can influence the way a person thinks, feels, and yes, remembers. Dreams are not only experiences, they are pound for pound more potent and efficient experiences than their waking counterparts. Consider that dream events, like those that unfold on cinema's silver screen, are not nearly as diluted, not nearly as muted, by such conventions as space and time. Consider that the arbitrary and random elements of waking life are "edited out" of dreams, as they are in films.

Regardless of how we characterize the source of dreams (i.e., psychodynamic "Unconscious" or brain), dreams themselves may in most instances be "scripted" to achieve outcomes ranging from subtle to substantial, chronic to acute. Of what am I speaking? The foundations of conscious awareness itself and the cradle of everything from base motivations to personal identity. Dreams may restructure our cognitions, shaping the way we make sense of the stream of stimuli that will present itself the following day. How many I say this differently? Dreams may predispose us to interpretative styles and sensitivities. Dreams may recalibrate, reorient, or re-adjust our "settings," re-distributing values or resources across criteria for perception and judgment. Those who have a hand in our beloved Hollywood films labor over all phases of production, including but not limited to, writing, storyboarding, editing, casting, costuming, cinematography, and direction. All with the intent of maximizing a film's intended impact on an audience. "What should our audience feel?" "What message they should walk away with?" "What should they think about or think of doing after they leave the theater?" "What should they take to the water cooler with them the next day?" Given the intensity or extensity for which affect and imagery in dreaming is known, I would say that the effects of dreams on the dreamers warrants a more inspired review than "not completely inconceivable."

Anatomy of Negative Thinking in Psych Profs

Swiss psychiatrist and inspiration for the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, CG Jung, commented on a couple ways thinking can become stagnant or regressive, losing its vital, progressive energy. I think it applies to psych profs. "...It's habitual mode is best expressed by the two words 'nothing but'...above all it shows a distinct tendency to trace the object of its judgment back to some banality or other, thus stripping it of any significance in its own right. The trick is to make it appear dependent on something quite commonplace...The destructive quality of this thinking, as well as its limited usefulness on occasion, does not need stressing."

This thinking ("nothing but the brain"; "nothing but probability") is the primary weapon used by psych profs in their war against theosophical thinking (e.g., telepathy as "vibrations passing between people"; dreams as experiences "on another plane"), which oddly enough, Jung characterized as negative thinking, analogous in form, commensurate in destructiveness. Psych profs frequently project their own unconscious (and thus undeveloped) thinking on to the brain, which is apparent when they use such phrases as "the brain thinks." In the very presence of brains (or other physical source material and instrumentation), it seems their own brains "freeze up" and they become passive, unthinking observors of grey matter. This methodology is effective when informed or flanked by conceptualization at every phase, but alas, some of the most illogical and meaningless research produced by psychologists is dream research produced in a lab.

And then psych profs also entertain a second form of negative thinking. "Whenever a function other than thinking predominates in consciousness to any marked degree, thinking, so far as it is conscious at all and not directly dependent on the dominant function, assumes a negative character. If it is subordinated to the dominant function (Sensation in the case of most psych profs) it may wear a positive aspect, but closer scrutiny will show that it merely mimics [Sensation], supporting it with arguments that clearly contradict the laws of logic proper to thinking."

This is the case when psych profs, as ulta- or metaphysical empiricists, seek to explain a dream, coincidence, or unlikely relationship as a "probability," as if probability were itself a cause rather than a proxy for what is unknown about a thing's source or causal pattern.

It would seem to me that the real amnesia victim here is the psychology professor, who has forgotten that he was put on this earth to probe the psychological meaning and significance of psychological events. It is worth noting that the social pressures within these programs parse convergent from divergent thinking, reinforcing the former and punishing the latter. This is quite clear from the applicants they favor for admission to graduate programs, from the values expressed in the evaluation of their student's classroom attitudes and behavior, and from the curriculum and reinforcement of academic performance. It as if they have atomized the research project, for example, or the research paper, as another example, into artificially indivisible elements or units, to which they apply some template that imbues it with a standard of purity. All thinking must then flow backward from the product, exhibiting a pre-formatted quality so that it produces only what will fit the product. This "convergent thinking" impairs the positive thinking of the extravert, described by Jung as predicative: "The thinking of the extarverted type is productive. It leads to the discovery of new facts or to general conceptions based on disparate empirical material. It is usually synthetic too. Even when it analyses, it constructs, because it is always advancing beyond the analysis to a new combination, to a further conception which reunites the analysed material in a different way or adds something to it."

Statements by Jung taken from Psychological Types (1921, 1971) published by Princeton University Press.