Overview of Wyatt Ehrenfels's psychology exposé, Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun

Where the Imagination of the common novel ends, Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun begins. "Join me as I journey to a place where Imagination is anything but idle fiction," lures author Wyatt Ehrenfels, whose academic odyssey revisits the dreams he experienced during his struggle against Psychology's professors to pursue the truth about dreaming. This illuminating exposé, which draws from real dreams, real dream research, and real political drama to make the point that Psychology's policies, procedures, and prejudices are counterproductive to an adequate exploration of the human condition, has a rich night life! "Our dream experiences possess a capacity to teach and transform with a potency that surpasses that of our day time events. This book shows dreaming deepening our understanding of reality, but also shaping that reality by altering the dreamer and his sources of consciousness. And beyond that, the book shows dreams, with a touch of self-consciousness, scattering throughout the waking world the seeds of insights into dreaming itself." Whether vacationing or vocationing, Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun is a stimulating companion, transcending the limits of Imagination and offering obscure glimpses of truths with a capital "T." Where the walls between Science and Meaning, Imagination and Reality, crumble into folly, looms a book larger than the author himself.
Plot Summary
The faculty at The National School of Professional Psychology (NSPP) is expanding its nationwide network of campuses in an effort to make Psychology a household name and groom its graduates to shape federal social policy as lobbyists and consultants. But before it can fulfill its vision of a Psychology Nation, the fledgling program must first survive a visit from the profession's accrediting body. With a National Psychology Association inspection waiting in the wings, NSPP faculty turn inward to realize its vision of mental hygiene and scientific gravitas within its own walls. It was the perfect plan...
...Until the faculty cast a covetous eye on the careers of four graduate students whose superhuman curiosity and expeditionary spirit put them at odds with NSPP's fierce new science and professionalism: (1) Anton Mason, for aligning himself with the classical theory of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung; (2) Aniela Mason, for sharing his name; (3) Matthew Sykes, for developing original methodologies to understand why we dream; and (4) Angela Jewell, for requesting accommodations for her visual disability. These "imperfect fits," or "misfits," were perceived as threats to the school's efforts to manage its image for the National Psychology Association and to promote its vision of Psychology for legislators and the world at large.
Resisting intense pressure to betray their own natures, the subject they loved dearly and, by extension, the human psyche, four young scholars struggle to pursue the truth about dreaming in an academic culture inhospitable to the study of dreams. But the political groundswell that opened the earth beneath their feet threatened to consume more than their careers. More than their way of life. The struggle to defend their livelihood would place them in a wider and more insidious swath of destruction. As the students brave a perfect storm of politics, prejudice, and professional development, they brace for a mysterious flood of equal and opposite imperatives from within. It is along this trail of dreams and meaningful coincidences that these young visionaries learn their plight itself is symptomatic of a disturbance to structures beneath the crust of human consciousness. Now these students find themselves caught between the need to defend their careers and a higher call to preserve the human condition against a self-organizing insanity. Pathological and paranormal collide as a universe of possibilities is pared down to one fateful outcome: will the nature of the psyche survive the culture of professional Psychology?

A Chapter-Level View

Wyatt Ehrenfels gave staff members the green light to release additional descriptions of his chapters. The title track to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun 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 this opening chapter (originally untitled by the author but given the book's subtitle "You'll Never Trust a Psychologist Again" by the publisher), readers are introduced to the major characters and to the institution (the scheming and patrician National School of Professional Psychology) through which most of the plot will wind.

Chapters 2-5 (Benign Atrocities, Third Person, Degrees of Freedom, 28 Days Till Tomorrow) have been affectionately dubbed "the diary" or "testimonial" tracks by the book's enthusiasts. The chapters remain faithful to the acute events that plunged four real-life graduate students into saccadically deteriorating plights that prove as stubborn as they were, at their inception, startling. From here on, the book focuses on the school's increasingly inhospitable climate, as program officials enforce their better-than-20/20 vision of mental hygiene and scientific gravitas within their walls in preparation for an early accreditation review by the National Psychology Association. Throughout these chapters, the author relieves the tense pace by taking his readers through the dreams of many of the students.

Chapter 6 (Dead Center Field) is the last chapter in a fast-paced 556-page Volume I, setting the stage for what Volume II readers will find at the crossroads of Pathological, Political, and Paranormal. After a 4-chapter hiatus, the synchronistic journey in the title track 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.

Dubbed the "dream chapter" Chapter 7 takes place almost entirely within a dream shared by two characters. The dream is comprised of dreams from the real dream diaries at the point the real-life graduate students felt the brunt of the pressure from a pantheon of petty professors bearing false standards for science and ethics. In honor of Jung's obscure Mysterium Coniunctionus (translating to "mysterious conjunction") the title of this seventh dream chapter was patched together from Latin roots (Viatica Deflexionibus) to mean "journey by deflection." The characters in the seventh chapter are wholly determined by the will of ethe dream in which they are trapped, haplessly deflected by symbols whose meaning they must sense to survive till morning. The readers sense the characters are being carried along a current of logical necessity, symbolized by events architected to transform the dreamers. In some ways, this bold chapter provides readers with a break from a heavy political plot, and while it can be skipped without confusion, it is entertaining in its own right and provides the densest illustration yet of connections between dreams and waking events both past and yet to pass. It will enrich the reader's experience of chapters 8-10. "Viatica" remains the favorite chapter of the author's wife.

Chapters 8 (The Heart of Artifice) and 9 (Experiography) set up the readers for a relentlessly meaningful and thrilling conclusion that unfolds across the 100-page finale. Once the province of dreams alone, symbolized meaning crosses the line and finds incarnation in yet more waking events. The protagonists divine theories to make sense of what is happening to them, theories absorbed with coincidental ease into research for the protagonist's pre-existing masters thesis.

This epic's marquee coincidence comes full circle in Chapter 10 (A Cross Purpose), nicknamed the "action track" for its suspenseful and symbolic turn of events. The fates of many characters collide with lethal force as the universe willfully pares down its possibilities into one fateful outcome. One reader commented on the remarkable way some characters and some events appeared to be surrogates of others, with characters and readers sharing an obscure glimpse of experience's hidden infrastructure as it expresses itself (like latent dream meaning through manifest imagery) in the concatenation of conflicts that sends people toppling like dominos.