I should point out at this time that I understand this model may not literally "map" the infrastructure of human experience or even the infrastructure of a psyche through which a "structure" for experience is organized and interpreted. I present and organize these six motivations largely as a methodology for exploring the relationship between dreaming and waking experience. Similarly, in positron emission tomography (PET), a substance necessary for brain function (such as oxygen or sugar) is labeled with a radioactive molecule and for spiral CTs, a radiopaque dye, which can be seen on x-rays, may be injected intravenously to enhance abnormalities in the images. The color of that dye may not matter, at least as far as I know (I am not a neuroscientist). The motivations in my model serve as a high level coding device to track relationships between waking activities and dream life, and they also offer a lens by which to detect (and a yardstick by which to measure) any special concern dreams may show for a particular motivation. Much like meteorologists predict the weather based on an analysis of dynamic systems of moisture, pressure, and temperature, I am interested in identifying the principal contributors to a dynamic system that is dreaming and that is the relationship between dreaming and waking life. No skeptic worth his salt as a scientist should question this approach, even as he or she draws from the biology of sleep to easily (though not always accurately) cast doubt on the validity of parapsychological claims of "entering alternate universes" during dreaming.

Dreaming & Waking Life: The Common Climate

My research design generates a number of statistics, and I am eager to explore the potential value of these statistics as indices analogous to the role of humidity, temperature, and pressure in recipes for weather. This exploration would not be easy. A research participant would have to give me the time so that I could track and trend these values as they vary across the weeks and even months of his or her life. For this kind of psychological research, you can't use categories distilled from factor analysis of questionnaires administered to large samples of volunteers. To truly understand the dynamic patterns within the human psyche, you have to induce from the individual to the human race. You can't measure the person and the phenomena of his life against common categories defined by the sample and by you the researcher. You have to go grassroots or you'll never be able to say anything meaningful about what really matters in Psychology. You may be able to say something meaningful about what doesn't matter, or something meaningless or fictitious about what does, but you'll never have both. Science demands both. A science of Psychology should demand both. Examples of indices I would explore longtitudinally in individuals include:

• Polarization. Take the proposed dimension that pits Sensuousness at one end against Tension Reduction at the other. Across the meaningful waking activities listed by the participant, do they seem to be high in one and low in the other? What is this average differential across all three of the proposed dimensions (i.e., Sensuousness-Tension Reduction; Adjustment-Self-Assertion; Transcendence-Self-Actualization).
  

• I-E Differential. What is the difference between the extent to which the introverted (i.e., Tension Reduction, Self-Assertion, Self-Actualization) and extraverted (i.e., Sensuousness, Adjustment, Transcendence) value of the meaningful waking activities?
  

• Motivation Specificity. To what extent is the value of the meaningful waking activities concentrated in one or two motivational constructs? Conversely, how evenly distributed is the value of the activities across the motivations?
  

• Sample Variability. Do we have the sample of activities where, for example, two are clearly introverted and another two extraverted? Where the value of two are concentrated or high in Sensuousness (and not Tension Reduction) and where the value of two other activities are concentrated or high in Tension Reduction and not Sensuousness?
  

• Activity Specialization. Identify activities high in one motivation (e.g., Sensuousness) but low in that motivation's proposed opposite (e.g., Tension Reduction).
  

• Activity Equipotentiality. Identify activities high in one motivation (e.g., Sensuousness) as well as in that motivation's proposed opposite (e.g., Tension Reduction).
  

• Benefit Factor. Is the variance of values across activities significantly greater than that of values across the motivational constructs?
  

• Activity Factor. Is the variance of values across motivational constructs significantly greater than that of values across the activities?
  

• Fulfillment Index. To what extent is each motivation being fulfilled? To what extent is each activity operating at full capacity and without delay or restriction? Is there a gap between what the activities as a whole can provide, and what the previous day allowed?
  

• Modus Operandi Vivendi. Looking at the value of the activities across the motivations, is there a clear method (activity) by which the person pursues a focal need (motivation)? Just how independent are the activities? Are we talking about a division of labor here in fulfillment of multiple needs, or are we talking about a concerted effort by multiple activities to fulfill one need?
  

All the indices above will likely evolve as the person reorganizes his or her life to maximize harmony with new circumstances and new needs and to maintain an efficient system for addressing needs on an ongoing basis. The goal of the research is to identify the needs of the individual and develop a way of conceptualizing the needs of persons considered collectively. The goal of the research is also to identify the processes by which persons (and persons as a whole) shuffle his or her life to better meet these needs.

One way to think of the activities is as incarnations of motivations. The activity serves as a tool or as a conduit for what it provides us. We may have found ourselves attracted to an object because it provided what was lacking or perhaps because of its efficient fulfillment of multiple needs simultaneously. Over time, the fascination may wear down as the need becomes trapped within its incarnation, which is to say, we looked to this activity for satisfaction long after the need has been satiated or long after the need could be fulfilled through this activity. Life has a way of falling into routines or biases. We may at this point act to mold or adapt the activity to restore some of its potential as a means to the fulfillment of a need, we may look for another activity, or we may endure the rapidly stagnating status quo. What I've just described are a few ways one's life, as representing in my study by the list of 6 meaningful waking activities, can dynamically evolve. A good research design captures this flux.

By capturing the dream life of the person, in reference to the motivations and meaningful waking activities and on its own terms (participants use the same questionnaires to profile each dream as if it were an activity), we can begin to generate meaningful and testable questions about the needs of the psyche. When designing the questionnaires I will use for this study, I am inspired by the act of comparing the resulting motivational profile of each activity to a CBC (breaking down the chemistry of ones blood into values for critical proteins and enzymes like hemoglobin, white cells, platelets, and creatinine). It is my aim to determine whether in conceptualizing the six motivational constructs, I have been effective in identifying the most vital and dynamic elements of meaning and motivation. Certain relationships between dreaming and waking life, whereby the dreams appear to regulate or reflect a particular motivation, suggests that the motivation is a primary need. Or perhaps the specific nature of the relationship between dreaming and waking life may suggest a primary process at work (e.g., compensation for a particular kind of bias).

Psychology's Biases: Why Something Like Experiography Is New to Psychology

Psychology managed to lose itself in a tunnel. Oh, like most tunnel-dwellers, psych profs do not know they're lost. They're in a tunnel! They can't see anything outside the tunnel and their steps are pre-ordained by the walls of this narrow enclosure. By this I mean that psych profs fell into the habit of throwing a list of common variables (e.g. birth order, stress, everything including the kitchen sink) into popular research designs such that all their research can be easily summarized as a "study of the effect of x on y." Anything which does not fit that model, which is more complex or conceptual is regarded as unparsimonious, labored, bizarre fat to be hacked by the skeptical blade of Occam's razor. In my opinion, psych profs suffer from a "failure of imagination" and are doomed to keep spinning their wheels until a serious erosion of tread requires a wholesale change in paradigm (which is ego-syntonic for most psych profs as long as everyone switches over in unison to a relatively simple and singular system of expectations). I, for one, could not be more bored with the whole notion of paradigm shifts in science, believing as I do that science should not elect paradigms in the same way electorates choose Presidents. Science should resemble a participatory democracy relatively free of paradigmatic elements. In a single implementation of my broad exploratory method, I hope to examine not only the issue of prospective dreaming, but the broader question of the compensatory relationship between dreaming and waking experience. Are dream experiences adjusting waking attitudes that have become too biased as a result of a persisting pattern of excesses and deficiencies in the waking experience of the individual? If so, is this compensatory mechanism addressing activities that fulfill some motivations and not others? Is the vehicle (the active agent) of compensation housed in the dream's imagery (nature of references waking activities) or in it's affect (feelings associated with engaging these activities)?

Very much like the statistical formulae, my metaphysical model will be humanized -- and thus will appear much less metaphysical -- during the actual research, when I fill the formula with phenomenology, i.e. when I plug into the model the activities and motivations of real people...activities each individual identifies as meaningful to current waking life. So like any archetype or statistical formula, this model is a template -- a form with no content -- which represents the general case or possibility. Such a creative metaphysical leap in the beginning may represent an investment of sorts in the future of the theory. And good investors know they may have to wait for the company in which they invested to report positive earnings. (It is quite unfortunate we have within the ranks of psychological researchers today too many day-traders looking for a sure thing and hope to compound earnings across a desultory series of frivolusly small, but risk-averse and immediate returns, with nothing lasting or leading to build on. Except their portfolio, of course, by which I mean the curriculum vita). Psychological researchers do not even understand the charge of metaphysics they levy so readily on theories like that of Jung. Metaphysics is a convenient term -- an apotropaism really -- reserved by psychologists who have nary an understanding of the field of metaphysics -- and they apply it to any theory they want to disappear and so they seek not to disqualify it with empirical refutation, but to disqualify it from the arena of scientific inquiry. And they use as additional evidence of a theory's 'unscientific-ness' their own inability or unwillingness to envision conditions under which the theory can be tested. More on the dream as methodology.

QUICK ASIDE II: Psychoanalyzing the Psychologists

What amazes me to this day is that the pursuit of law or noumena strikes me as an introverted endeavor, and yet I -- an introvert -- oppose this practice as it is administered by the preponderance of EXTRAVERTS in the field. And then I remember Jung's DYNAMIC theory of introversion and extraversion, in which the unconscious compensation is an INFERIOR form -- such that the expression of repressed and unconscious introversion by an extravert is an inferior and infantile form of introversion. In other words, the current state of Psychology is a collective compensation by extraverts for repressed introversion. Modern Psychology is an inferior and infantile form of introversion, which is why an introvert like myself can recognize the inferiority. Hypersensitivity and compulsiveness are indicative of unconscious compensations -- and that is what we see in the professionalism and scientism of modern academics and practitioners. Narcissism is also an inferior and infantile expression of unconscious introversion in extraverts. And we all know how rampant THAT ONE is among professors!

I will now turn to the nuts and bolts of the Experiography research, which is set in its historical and psychological context.

Rolling Up Our Sleeves: Research Past & Future
The Interview

*Responses are composite of statements pulled from interview with Kate Moyer

Ghost of Research Past

EHRENFELS: “I was required to – and quite anxious to – perform some research for a senior thesis. This was a capstone research project designed to demonstrate what you have learned in the program. I welcomed the challenge as an opportunity to prove that I was worth this major. At that time I was humbled before a field I knew very little about and I very much believed in its worth. I enrolled in all the research and statistics classes including an abstract mathematical introduction to individual differences and a technical class in the actual statistics of psychological measurement. I even enrolled in Statistics II, a course that was taught in the Statistics department so that my course background resembled that of a prospective graduate student. I knew since I stepped foot in Psychology 101 as a freshman that I would do graduate work four years later. In my third year, I took the initiative. Without any input from an advisor, I ordered catalogues and application materials from UCLA. I remember that it felt like my first official step toward graduate work, and that time, I was under the misapprehension that the graduate programs created an environment that fostered independent thinking and research and that in my first days as a graduate student I would be able to work toward my masters and continue the independent research I started under Waterman. I approached Waterman, and as a humanist, he was sympathetic with my intrinsic motivation for dream research. But he still wanted this capstone research project to be a learning experience for me, so he struck a deal with me. I remember his words: he asked me to find a ‘marriage’ between his research interest on happiness and my research interest in dreams. At that moment, it all seemed so abstract, but having confidence in my ability to find relationships, I assured him such a marriage was possible. He handed me some articles he had authored so I could familiarize myself with his research, and I took them to my apartment to read them. I learned that his research was intended to demonstrate that there are two forms of happiness – the hedonic enjoyment we feel when involved in certain kinds of social, material, and intellectual activities – in other words – and the personal expressiveness we feel when we lose ourselves in activities that advance our purposes in living and that help us extend and express the potentialities that reflect our unfolding character and perceived destiny. The first kind of happiness is the one we feel when we have what we want, and the second kind of happiness is the one we feel when we work toward what we believe is worth having. His research required participants to complete questionnaires in which they identified activities that were most meaningful to them and then, for each of these activities, completed a questionnaire that ultimately assessed the extent to which each activity afforded each of the two forms of happiness. Basically, there were four possibilities for each activity: (1) that it would afford both personal expressiveness and hedonic enjoyment; (2) that it would afford personal expressiveness but not hedonic enjoyment; (3) that it would afford hedonic enjoyment but not personal expressiveness; and (4) that it would afford neither personal expressiveness nor hedonic enjoyment. Without going into the details of the research, Waterman applied statistics – t-tests and correlations – to test various hypotheses that advanced the notion these two forms of happiness were related, but distinguishable. It was this basic research design that I adapted for my research. And I was grateful for this opportunity. By enrolling in three credits of independent research in the Fall, I was able to extend my Spring capstone research from one semester to a full year. And by enrolling in three credits of independent research in the Spring, I was able to invest 9 credits worth of effort in this project, as compared with the normal 3. And unlike other seniors, I chose an advisor who allowed me to choose my own research topic and design my own methodology. Normally, a senior selected a capstone research advisor on the basis of the research the professor was involved in, and the student assisted in that research. My first research experience was ambitious and independent and that may have caused me to establish expectations that got me into trouble down the road. It whetted my appetite for more of the same kind of independent dream research, and I wanted desperately to build on the research I already performed. In my applications for graduate work, I campaigned as an independent who had already established a record of original dream research. I even included information about my research in the application packets. Little did I know I was making myself less attractive to admissions committees. The committees seek applicants whose research interests match those of a professor on staff. Having delineated my interests – and my interests being non-mainstream – I was deemed incompatible, unlikely to make the best assistant in a professor’s research. Also, I demonstrated a level of independence that may have raised doubts about my trainability. That first year I applied to five traditional schools and one non-traditional school. I did not even reach the interview stage for any of the traditional schools. I was admitted to the non-traditional school, in a class of one hundred new students, none of which receive any financial support through assistantships -- none of which are even assigned a faculty advisor. One year later, I applied to 40 schools – it was part of what I affectionately called ‘the siege of higher education.’ I was a little wiser this time – this time feigning an intrinsic interest in the scientific methodology and downplaying my interest in dreams. I received three interviews and was admitted to one school by an eccentric and politically embattled professor who admired by independence. One year later, I withdrew from this university with political problems of my own stemming from a combination of my independence and that of my advisor, who had managed to piss off half the department with remarks he can personally get away with because he had an independent chair. But in my experiences in these three graduate programs, I found it ironic to learn that my most independent research would be performed as an undergraduate.”

MOYER: “And what did that research look like?”

EHRENFELS: “I proposed that participants complete the same questionnaires for me as they would if they had participated in research for Waterman, but in addition, I had them maintain a two-week diary of their dreams. Furthermore, I asked them to complete a questionnaire that rated the extent to which each of their dreams possessed certain characteristics. When I received all their completed materials, I scored each dream for hedonic enjoyment and personal expressiveness, summing across the hedonic enjoyment and personal expressiveness ratings for the activity or activities to which the dream made reference. So each dream received two scores, one for each form of happiness, that ranged between 0 and 35. The continuous nature of this data was retained for certain types of statistical analysis like correlations, which addressed the two forms of happiness separately. But when I wanted to treat a dream as a joint combination of the two forms of happiness that required I categorize the dream with respect to the four possibilities enumerated above. A score of 30 or above was used as an arbitrary cut-off point such that a dream with a rating of 26 for hedonic enjoyment and 31 for personal expressiveness was classified as a dream associated with LOW hedonic enjoyment and HIGH personal expressiveness, or (3). For the record, I realize now that there were other ways – and according to some views, more statistically appropriate ways -- I could have performed this classification. I then separated the dreams into four piles and analyzed the characteristics of the dreams as a function of their membership in this four-fold happiness taxonomy. For example, are dreams that make reference to meaningful waking activities that afford both types of happiness more bizarre than dreams that make reference to no meaningful waking activities? Than dreams that make reference to meaningful waking activities that do not afford a critical level of either form of happiness?”

MOYER: “What did you learn?”

EHRENFELS: “Not much. I had some interesting results, but they were so scattered and so small that it was quite a stretch to make any sense of them. I did propose that prolonged or extreme forms of each of these types of dreams amounted to a mobilization by the unconscious of forces needed to heal a particular type of waking imbalance. I will have to re-read my senior thesis to jog my memory, but I remember defining these imbalances in terms of the meaningful waking activities – as circumstances that adversely affect or complicate the engagement and/or enjoyment of the activities. In other words, if self or circumstances will not permit these activities to carry out their psychological role in the life of the person, the person will create experiences – dream experiences – in which these activities can carry on. This hypothesis is known as compensation. I think I named the attitudes or adverse circumstances routinization, fragmentation, hardship, and prejudice. I received a great deal of praise from Waterman for my originality and hard work. I am sentimental about this research and this period in my life, when I was hopeful and innocent. It was the last time I felt connected to the world and to a profession. In the years that followed, professors would make me feel guilty for demanding the independence to which I was accustomed and I would be dragged into one political imbroglio after another. I do not like harboring all this cynicism and all this resentment. It was quite a journey. I traded innocence for wisdom.”

Ghost of Research Future: Implications for Precognition

(This section is under construction)

MOYER: "Okay, so you mentioned that your methodology can be adapted to the study of what you called a 'subtle variation on precognition.'"

EHRENFELS: "Yes.

Dynamics and Development

Not soon after the Chinese Checkers configuration afforded me a clue to the structure of my motivational psyche, I was driven by subsequent dreams to adapt the model in ways that allowed me to address dynamics and development. The crucial clues came from an interpretation of a dream 980205 (February 5, 1998) about a game-winning single by Daniel Ishben that broke a bases-loaded 2-2 deadlock in the bottom of the ninth. An interpretation of this dream would require help from adjacent dreams in the series, a string of dreams threaded by common references to previous addresses in my life.

If we examine the diagram above, we see that it very much resembles the Structural model that preceded it. Only in this case, one of the triangles (in this case the one with the extraverted motivations) has been reduced in size and placed inside the introverted triangle to illustrate the psyche of an extravert. Plain in this Dynamic Model is 4 triangles and 3 diamonds. If we think of each diamond in this model as a baseball diamond, we will help ourselves to understand each diamond as a system in operation. In the extraverted psyche, the introverted benefits of Self-Actualization, Self-Assertion, and Tension Reduction are designated as home plate within each of their respective triangles. Each of these benefits is regarded as the unconscious source of the system's energy. For example, because Self-Actualization is an introverted benefit, it is not under the conscious control of the extravert -- and it does not describe the extravert's conscious aims -- and as such it colors and controls the unconscious component of all the extravert's actions. We are unaware of the unconscious energy and material at the very root of all mental phenomena as it is born into our awareness. There is a hidden alpha and omega -- cause and purpose -- source and destination -- to all mental phenomena of which we are unaware and over which we have little or no control.

Metaphors to the Rescue

Home plate -- and the unconscious it symbolizes here -- is like the invisible pure energy at either end of the MATTER that we see and feel. It is like black holes and quasars -- distant forces that exert a tremendous influence but which have no material substance in and of themselves. Another metaphor I like to use is the electromagnetic spectrum. Home plate and the unconscious is like the invisible X-rays, cosmic rays, gamma rays, radio waves, microwaves, U-V rays, and infrared waves on either side of the rays that make up the light we CAN see.

1B, 2B, and 3B correspond to the motivations with which we (in this case the extravert) identify. Unlike home plate, we can "occupy" these bases (reference to "Occupied Self" in dream), and as such, these bases collectively refer to states of conscious awareness whereby we contain, possess, process, or control mental material. Bases represent the reification of once-unconscious material into relatively sessile and saccadic structures that come to define the Ego. This interior and inverted triangle is the life the person (in this case the extravert) sees as synonymous with the whole world. Only if he were to pan out beyond the borders of this triangle would he or she take in a much larger triangle that is the entire Dynamic Model.

The larger triangle is oriented in the opposite direction, which suggests that is serves a principle -- namely introversion -- which is opposite that with which the extravert identifies. Thus -- in what is the irony of human mental life -- the opposite of one's conscious skills and purposes -- controls the original inspiration and ultimate fate of psychic material. This aspect of the model addresses the extraverted tendencies in introverts and the introverted tendencies in extraverts. This model is just another way of depicting that already offered by Jung, who portrayed behavior as a dynamic and dialectical confluence or interplay of opposite tendencies (including introversion and extraversion), such that identifying WHICH is the conscious orientation and WHICH the unconscious compensation can be difficult. I am inclined to doubt that the MBTI, as a questionnaire, can make these identifications. I suspect there are a steady proportion of MBTI respondents whose psychological type (i.e. extraverted or introverted) is misdiagnosed. And all the reliability and validity coefficients in the world cannot defend the MBTI in this matter.

The Diamonds

So now let us break this model down into its three constituent diamonds. To look at the diamonds, you would not think they were dimensions, but that is exactly what they are -- continua with opposites at their endpoints. The diamonds are meant to improve on the depiction of the way opposites are related in the simple continua. In the simplistic model, Sensuousness and Tension Reduction would be the opposite endpoints of a flat line. But in my model, the diamond reveals a more dynamic and substantive conceptualizion of oppositionality mediated by two other motivations. We see that Adjustment -- which corresponds with first base -- mediates the relationship between Tension Reduction and Sensuousness in a particular direction in the extravert. Adjustment may facilitate a progressive transition from Tension Reduction to Sensuousness in the extravert or it may simply characterize the stage in the transition. It is impossible for me to know at this time the nature of the mediating role of Adjustment here, but such a role, if any, should become clear in the research I will soon propose. Similarly, Transcendence plays an intermediary role in the regressive transition between Sensuousness and Tension Reduction. If you examine the other diamonds, you will note for the extravert the intermediary motivations in the opposition between Self-Assertion and Adjustment and between Self-Actualization and Transcendence.

It is my belief that the four-fold motivational conceptualization of 'opposition' will allow us to think of oppositions as productive and natural cycles in psychological life rather than as useless logical and categorical inventions. Any good theory of psychology must depict psychological life in a way analogous to how Meteorology depicts changes in weather and Economics depicts movement within markets. But while the stuff of Meteorology is pressure and moisture, and while the stuff of Economics is capital, the nature of the value depicted in this psychological model is motivation. And the research I will soon propose attempts to study these motivational forces within their natural experiential vessels, i.e. human activities. But before I discuss the research, I would like to present some more dream references as evidence for the model.

Some Theoretical Constructs

Now that we have a dynamic model in place, we can use that model to understand certain conditions that may or may not be dysfunctional or which may or may not be phases in the cycle, not unlike storm fronts.

ISOLATION: The psychological state is dominated by the opposition between two motivations. Whether the opposition between these two motivations is normal or antagonistic, the other two motivational dimensions are relative non-factors.

REIFICATION: The psychological state is characterized by a prejudicial attitude that favors one motivation in a pair to the other. May involve the favor of three motivations consistent with one psychological type (e.g., extraversion) to the exclusion of the other type (e.g., introversion).