No Signs of Life on Dreaming's Desert Science
Have you ever wondered why programming types do not allow certain soap actors on television after 4 PM? Very simply, these actors look the part, but can seldom act the part, at least not at the level to which we've grown accustomed by film and prime time television. Network programmers realize not a lot of people are watching TV at these hours, so they court, compete for, and capture available viewers, as cheaply as possible, by dousing them with drama and appearances.
Would you be surprised to learn that the above statement would be no less truthful if I replaced 'soap actors' with 'dream researchers.' This point was hammered home rather unwittingly by journalists Barbara Kantrowitz and Karen Springen, whose Science report "What Dreams Are Made Of" for the August 9 (2004) issue of Newsweek attempted to portray a diligent pursuit of the mystery of dreams but ended up leaving dream enthusiasts unsatisfied and the rest of us more confused and disinterested than ever. Seriously, this magazine article reads like a coroner's post-mortem on a dismembered victim, depicting a fractured science that seeks a largely carnal knowledge of dreaming. The primitiveness of the research will likely cause no embarrassment for the researchers. Psychology is a young science. The public does not expect much from psychological researchers. But as I've demonstrated through my web site, book, and cable access itinerary, the much-maligned "man-in-the-street" does not take too kindly to the idea that the brain biologists currently carrying the banner and bearing the standard for 'dream science' have so little to offer for their exclusion of more able-minded explorers with a keener sense of science's fundamentals and a genuine (intrinsic) interest in the phenomenal experience of dreaming itself. I am about to make it painfully obvious just how much better we can do if we only used our own brains rather than improperly making the brains of others the objective of research purported to study an experiential phenomenon.
As one of the more challenging mysteries, dreaming has been embarassing the psychological community for decades. If a psychological researcher has any weaknesses as a detective and a thinker, dreaming will expose them. Dreaming, unlike any subject in Psychology's jurisdiction, separates the true scientists from the frauds, but as I will demonstrate, not in the way you think. Moreover, as an objective product of psychological nature, uncontaminated by our arbitrary will, dreams are for me a clear substance (analogous to water) which reveals the impurities in the science used to study them. The dream challenge, so to speak, provides a yardstick with which to measure the health of Psychology's brand of science and the health of the scientific attitudes of its purveyors. While true science requires a healthy balance of open-mindedness and skepticism, of playful exploration and disciplined formality, psychological researchers are bent on modeling the latter at the expense of the former. Their arbitrary and superfluous policies and procedures, their imitation of cosmetic features of other sciences, and their excessively, gratuitously, and precipitously formal approach to research are easily diagnosed where they are most counterproductive and out-of-place...in the study of dreams. While dream researchers are busy ministering to pretenses of focus, control, and confirmation, dreaming eludes them.
If you ever enrolled in a psychology course, no doubt at some point you were taught to believe that the royal road to excellence in science is the road of skepticism, precision, and materialism. The Newsweek article is replete with references to the brain, to 'tech-niques' and instruments (MRIs and EEGs), and to biological constructs based on the application of these instruments to the brain (wave forms and REM sleep). We've taken the biology of dreaming about as far as it could go and yet, as scientific as the biology of dreams appears to the much-maligned 'man-in-the-street,' we know even less now than we did when Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung penetrated the actual phenomena with case studies of the relationship between dreaming and waking experiences in what in today's scientific circles is ridiculed as a low-tech case study of a small number of patients.
Allow me to suggest that no one has labored more at the dream bench than I in my thirty-four year career as a human being. I have recorded thousands of dreams I experienced since the age of twelve, which is actually a far more useful starting point for a reconnaissance of dreams than the 17,000-record database of dreams amassed by William Domhoff. 17,000! It is a number. Neat. Large. In this business however, meaning is derived from relationships, and while Domhoff lays claim to 17,000 dreams, there is virtually nothing (oh, I'm sorry...'0') to relate! Without a diary of waking events and without adjacent dreams in a dream series, the individual dream samples offer no basis for comparing, tracking, or trending anything. Just about the most we can expect from this 'actuarial science' is whether women dream more frequently of weddings than men. This kind of demography may be useful if you're writing dream cards for the publishers of Trivial Pursuit, but in this database lies no potential for probing or penetrating the function of dreaming. I would have felt utterly harvested had I submitted a piece of my own soul to this database. Nevertheless, Domhoff should be credited for having at least scratched the surface of the actual phenomena (the dream). The research may suffer from 20/200 vision, but it is at least fixed squarely on the dream experiences, unlike the so-called 'dream research' for which the brain is the data, the method, and the objective.
Brain on my Mind: Dreaming a Casualty of Psychology's Unlikely Materialism
There is a condition known as institutional marasmus used to explain the death or developmental disability of institutionalized children who waste away for a lack of sufficient mothering (starved for attention, affection, and all-round human intercourse). Would you be surprised to learn that the above statement would be no less truthful if I replaced 'children' with 'science of dreams' and 'institution' with 'Psychology'? When we vested (sleep) lab technicians with the ultimate authority over the scientific record on dreams, we removed the 'science of dreams' from vital sources of dreaming and vital sources of thinking about dreams. These sleep lab techs, many of whom have not remembered a dream in their lives, are supposed to use the brain as a tool in the study of dreams. As little as we know about the brain, we know more about the brain than we know about dreams, and so naturally in what amounts to an algebraic equation with the brain on one side and the dream on the other, we seek to solve for x (dreams) in terms of the brain. Critics can be forgiven for pointing out that the cart outran the horse (the tail wagged the dog) when the brain began to supersede the dream as the objective of what began (or did not begin) as 'dream research' (hard to tell when so many 'dream researchers' are actually more interested in the brain). The problem with the current math is that there is something missing from the equation. How complete is our formula when we do not get our hands dirty in the characteristics of the dreams themselves and in the relationship between all that dreaming and the waking experience?! Most sleep researchers do not want to examine the dreams because they deem the dream a lesser reality than the brain. As much as they have come to view precision as synonymous with science, and as proud as they are of themselves as scientists, they cannot help but notice that while they have instruments for quantifying the characteristics of the physical brain (MRI, EEG), they lack physical tools for a quantification of the characteristics of the dream report. Quantifying the dream report is tedious and fraught with subjective decision-making, a challenge I relish as an independent thinker and explorer, but something which their skepticism will not permit them to tolerate. Moreover, many sleep lab researchers are acutely aware of the criticism that they can never be certain as scientists that the dream report is a 100 percent accurate account of the actual dream. In fact, just about every dream researcher concedes that the memory of research subjects for an experience generated in a wholly 'other' state of consciousness is likely to contain some holes, some filler (what Freud called 'secondary revision') and some other distortion. So over the years the so-called 'science of dreams' relied less on dream reports, but in so doing, has turned away from the very phenomena they seek to elucidate. So they rely on this mirror known as the brain. Airline pilots are similarly taught to trust their instruments more than their own vision in tracking the plane's altitude and orientation, but unlike cockpit instruments designed to do precisely that, we did not design the brain at all (let alone to study dreams) and should, if we evolved properly as a science, know less by this time about the brain, which we cannot experience directly, than dreams, which we do experience directly. Nevertheless, we still know so little about the brain that we could never solve for x. Under this scenario, we will always end up with other unsolved variables and a veritable cornucopia of dream theories based on which variable we want on one side of the unresolved equation. The kind of research recognized as 'dream science' by the psychological community, the journalist community, and the public suffers from self-imposed restrictions that alienate the researcher from his or her own wits and from the raw phenomena under study (the two sources of vital information and thinking about dreams). While 'dream science' should be a tree, it has cut off its roots (phenomena) and shed all its leaves (conceptualization), leaving a stump (or a dismembered torso with no way to think about its having no place to go). Even after a tree dies, it remains a fixture for years before someone realizes the 'thing is dead' and years more before someone finally decides to cut it down, and even then, unless the thing is pulled out by its dead roots, it stakes a territory where nothing else can hope to grow.
Where nothing else can hope to grow. This is precisely what happened when the likes of serviceable standard bearers Robert McCarley and Allan Hobson (Harvard) argued that dreams are meaningless. They argued that if the whole brain was being activated by signals originating in the primitive brain stem, and if this activation is so generalized -- so 'whole brain' -- as to betray efforts to discern any pattern, then the activation is random, and...if the activation is random, then by analogy, dreams must be meaningless.
I have another analogy for McCarley & Hobson. If a process performed by a PC is so CPU intensive as to require nearly 100 percent, is it possible the process is actually quite sophisticated? Is the highly refined but directed reasoning we consciously control and which requires about 3-5 percent of our brain (possibly less in the case of McCarley & Hobson) capable of understanding an activity that involves a considerably greater area of brain activation? Is it possible dreaming is a whole-brain activity because its resources and its functionality are that pervasive? After toiling for hours to dissect the structural anatomy of one of my own dreams (this dream figures prominently in Chapter 6 of my novel), it is quite apparent that we're talking about an advanced intelligence speaking by and for the entire system rather than something McCarley & Hobson dismiss as meaningless because it eludes their powers of comprehension.
The Newsweek article was right to point out that McCarley & Hobson "put a crimp in dream research," begging the question that "if dreams were meaningless nocturnal firings, what was the point of studying them?" Fortunately, like bellbuttoms and leisure suits, we moved beyond this product of the 70s. To the dismay of 'scienticians' seeking to disqualify dreaming as an appropriate subject for science by claiming it cannot be measured, and to the frustration of 'evangelical skeptics' seeking to reduce dreaming to a secretion of brain cells, the much maligned 'man-in-the-street' continues to pose questions about the meaning of his dreams and meaningful questions about the function of dreaming. Nevertheless, the likes of technical savants Robert McCarley and Allan Hobson continue to echo within their charmed circle (the psychological community) and to this day whenever I undertake a study of dreams, I field such questions from psych profs and students as "didn't we prove dreams are random? Or didn't we find the atoms in the brain that cause dreams?" Worse yet, when I relate the rather intriguing findings of my research into the dreams of terminally ill cancer patients -- an empirical study that relates the content and characteristics of patient dreams to their coping styles, symptomology, and blood chemistry -- I entertain, mind you without a trace of interest in the results, questions that compel me to admit that I could never be certain the patients were not lying when they reported their dreams. These questions were not sincere bids for information from the person to whom they were directed, but they were the kind of 'rhetorical' that rubbed in my face the preconceived opinion that dreaming and/or dream research is a second class, if not innately unscientific, activity. Perhaps this growing disinterest and skepticism around dreaming in Psychology pushed dream researchers into this hypertechnical observance of scientific liturgy.
What's the "Matter" with Dream Research?
I can understand the temptation to treat the dream as nothing more than a proxy for what is not yet known about the brain. For most dream researchers, when we say 'dream' we are actually referring to a network of neurological events in the brain. I say 'actually' because while I might define the dream in that way for 'operational purposes' so as clarify the sequence of procedures that comprise my research methodology (as is customary), many of these numbskulls actually do not find it meaningful to think of the dream as anything but physiology. For these materialists, the dream is actually a network of neurological events in the brain. This is the kind of research that addresses with very limited scope and depth (if at all) the properties of the dream as reported by the research subject to whose scalp we've attached all these electrodes. This is the kind of research whose purpose is to understand the brain rather than the dream and, at its best, to explain the dream in the context of the thinking brain. Capable of yielding only circumscribed conclusions about dreams, this kind of research might produce a report that compares dreams to 'cognitive filing cabinets' or 'information waste disposal units.' The facts on which the conclusions are drawn will be technically accurate, collected with impeccable and unassailable propriety, and related with impressive precision, which distracts its readers from the fact the facts are superficial and limited, and that conclusions based on superficial and limited facts are only likely to reveal only part of the truth. And yet, relying on their precision and instrumentation, the purveyors of such research tend to phrase their findings as if dreams are 'this and only this.' If an extraterrestrial anthropologist visited our planet with the purpose of assuaging the fears of lifeforms back home that humans are innocuous, they might conduct their study of the human hand in much the same way the all-too-common dream researcher might minimize dreaming for people like themselves who do not recall their dreams and fear they are missing out on something important or fear that the much maligned 'man-in-the-street' may be able to lay equal claim to authority with respect to a knowledge of dreams. The extraterrestrial spacecraft will restrict its reconnaissance, hovering over a vineyard (and maybe a vineyard in New Jersey rather than France), scrupulously documenting the activity so as to report with ostensible proof that the purpose of the human hand is solely to 'pick grapes.' University of Chicago emeritus Allan Rechtschaffen is right to claim "there's no reason dreams have to be any one thing...Is our waking consciousness any one thing?" (p. 45) but I wish to take this one step further by claiming that there is a high-level view of the function of dreaming within the dynamic personality or ongoing life of the individual. What sadly passes for the modern 'science of dreaming' is capable of only a fractured view of dream functionality, which presents as a multiplicity of functions depicted as contrary by a quibbling group of myopic researchers chained to the lab's EEG like a child to Joan Crawford's radiator. Scientists like to point out that each contributes a brick toward the construction of a house, but if the research is not thorough enough to present objects with four sides, no one will be able to figure out how all these bricks fit together. Dream researchers seem so offended by explanations offered as alternatives or revisions of their own findings, that is difficult to believe all these different views can be reconciled either to the whole or to one another. I'm sorry. But I think you can place twenty people, equipped with Nextel communicators, in different locations around a rock, but unless you actually have a guy who can view the thing from the appropriate distance or angle, no one will be able to characterize the features of the thing, and no one may know for sure that the object in front of them is in fact a mountain. I believe the mystery of dreaming could be settled, or at least reconnoitered, in a single study given adequate conceptualization and adequate fact collection. However, I wish to hold before any brain-based researcher a sign reading 'No Outlet.'
My critics will be motivated to misconstrue this report as an opposition to the widespread belief that the brain is the source of dreaming (or for that matter, any and all mental activity). I neither dispute this, nor would I regard such a fact as important. While all psychological phenomena can likely be traced to an organic substrate, psychological phenomena vary in the degree of differentiation and functional autonomy from this (biological) source. I find it valuable to play with the proposition that the mind-body distinction may be comparable to the software-hardware distinction. To understand the cause of the images we see on our PC monitors, we need to know something about the hardware (monitor and tower case) but also something about the logic of the software that PC is running. We cannot explain the logic of the software (i.e., mind) on the basis of the hardware (i.e., brain). Brain explanations ring hollow inasmuch as they do not account for a phenomenon in its own language (i.e., the language of experience). While a useful tool in our arsenal of complementary methodologies, the brain is all too often "the end masquerading as the means," a supposed statement on dreams that is really no more than a statement on the brain by a researcher interested primarily in that biological system and not in the logic of the dream. Using brain explanations to account for complex phenomena like dreams -- explaining a diverse and differentiated experience in terms of its source -- is tantamount to explaining the 2000-2001 recession in terms of the Big Bang.
While Baylor College of Medicine Glen Glabbard should be credited for at least claiming that "to have a truly comprehensive understanding of dreams, you have to be bilingual [mind and brain]" (p. 43), I respectfully disagree that the brain is essential to an understanding of dreams (unless of course your purpose is to understand the brain). But this kind of thinking is appropriate from an M.D., which makes his call for bilingualism even more salutary. And if the mind and the brain were two different expressions of the same underlying reality (as the materialists claim), why are they so quick to assign a higher status to one over the other, especially to the one which offers a logistically more difficult view of the underlying reality?
Adverse Impact for Phenomenological Dream Researchers
Regardless of where you're employed, you would be disenchanted, to say the least, if you were to learn that there was an obstacle field built specifically to undermine your career mobility. If you were required, as a person of color, to run this gauntlet, you would cry discrimination. I myself have learned over the years of an obstacle course designed to work specifically against the employment in departments of psychology of scholars who claim "dreaming" as their research interest. And now I know who and what is to blame.
Throughout my web site, I list the policies and procedures (those governing research, publication, and faculty appointment) that disparately, adversely, and unjustifiably impact my career development as a phenomenological dream researcher. The fine print (or space between the proverbial lines) on these largely unwritten policies and procedures would read "psychological researchers should sacrifice the God-given wits, passion inspired by Nature, and freedom allowed under (essential) Science for the sake of aims that relate more directly to the preservation, facilitation, and promotion of the academic community (Psychology) as a social institution." So what if the corners being cut so psych profs could imitate the cosmetic features of other sciences happen to be the cornerstones of Science and the fundamentals (conceptualization and fact collection) required to explore the complex phenomenon about which little is known (e.g. dreams) but which also complicates the day-to-day operations, competitiveness, and career development of the researcher. We measure the scientific merit of a researcher (and his work) by the degrees from which it falls off the regression line that defines the epistemology of the field to which he belongs. The problem with all this is that these policies and procedures have no real scientific standing or natural imperative. Some of these are tragic necessities run amok as unncessary tragedies, but all are social conventions, arbitrary and superfluous, that serve to constrain scientists, some tragically more than others depending on what they wish to study and how. Consequently, if we take a natural selection type view on the evolution of this social institution, we would be forced to concede that Psychology evolved into a homogeneous community of researchers who converge in their neglect or distortion of phenomena that does not help them advance their careers or promote Psychology as a rank-and-file science. Psychology has become a necrotic tumor, growing so large with its expansion into such career-promotable subjects as cockpit design, that vital nutrient-rich and oxygenated blood can longer reach the center of the field where we find psychologistic phenomena like dreaming. The center dies, and the tumors grows outward in misshapen directions to strangle other vital organs.
Purportedly a philosophy of science, upon close inspection, the sum of these policies and procedures resemble less a philosophy of science than any of the following: (a) a company's business model, (b) the sum of the by-laws in the constitution for the American Screen Actors Guild or Shriner's Club, (c) the missals governing the requirements of a Catholic mass, and (d) the U.S. foreign policy on Africa. While psychological researchers fashion themselves as functionally equivalent to a pharmaceutical company's clinical research department, upon close inspection, they resemble that company's regulatory affairs department. In ADHD Science, I discuss psychology's paradigm as a breach of science and an instrument of such functions as social control, community management, product development, gatekeeping, governance, socialization, salesmanship, and self-worship.
Naturally, over generations of training that favor the survival of those whose research lends itself readily to the policies and procedures, the psychological community will be repopulated with academics of increasing skepticism and materialism. The all-too-common psych prof harbors an attitude toward dreaming that ranges from disinterest and skepticism to utter contempt, and this should not strike as an overgeneralization anyone familiar with the policies and procedures and with the evolutionary principles that can shape a social community as well as any biological species. I'd like to illustrate this attitude with an exchange between me and a Ph.D. psychologist who moderates a psychology forum.
From where I live and breathe, the mind is more than just a perceptual illusion, more than just a secretion of the brain, and more than just a proxy for what is not yet known about the brain. Even if the brain is the source of all experience, it does not benefit psychological inquiry to maintain such an attitude toward that for which we seek a greater understanding. The problem with brain-based psychological research is a fundamental shift in which the brain is promoted, if you will, from the means to the end, with the concluding paragraphs of the research paper speaking of neurotransmitters and pathways. Much like modern-day psychologists minimize the mind by referring to it as a perceptual illusion, a secretion of the brain, and a proxy for what is not yet known about the brain, so do these same psychologists use what has been learned about the brain in their research lab to conceal, and compensate for, what has not yet been learned about the original target of the study, the psychological phenomenon. It is my view that while the brain is just a tool in our search for a greater understanding of the mind, psychological research is no longer performed for the sake of a greater understanding of the mind -- of the psychological phenomenon (e.g., dreaming) --but rather for the sake of the brain. A war is brewing between those for whom the mind is the end and the brain is the means, and those for whom the mind is the means and the brain is the end.
In a move that shows both a lack of imagination, poor critical thinking and theory construction skills, and an attempt to bask in the reflected legitimacy of matter itself, psychologists have adopted brain-based theories of human experience and behavior. Even when an explanation is not required, a brain-based explanation is often tacked on, as in Grey's explanation for introversion-extraversion and Linehan's explanation for emotional instability. In both instances, the theorists seem to reach far outside a perfectly stand-alone subject to add more legitimacy to what is an indisputable fact of life with which we all must and do reckon.
While we may assume the brain is the organic seat of all experience, and while I would be perfectly willing to concede that the brain may serve as an effective research tool, I find brain models very unsatisfying. First, I require that the grounds for explanation be expressed in the same language as that which I wish to explain, which is the language of experience. I suppose this is one of the hallmarks of a phenomenologist. I find the language of neurotransmitters and neural pathways a real conversation-killer. From the moment the word 'brain' is uttered, I lose control of the dialogue and lose interest in the phenomena we set out to explain. Perhaps this is precisely what brain-based theorists want -- to monopolize the conversation and control access to the tools and language of science -- in effect to monopolize legitimacy. No matter how elegant and empirically valid my explanations of dreaming, most people would not consider my research complete without corroborating evidence from the brain. This can be frustrating when we consider that a great deal of dream research performed in a lab does not even address the content or characteristics of the dream experience nor its relationship to that of waking experience. Despite the impeccable, formally unassailable deployment of methodology -- the laboratory setting, complete with white coats and gleaming metal instruments -- disguises intellectually lazy, existentially timid, logically sloppy, and uninspired thinking about dreaming. No amount of wires and EEGs can compensate for the lack of an interesting theory or adequate survey of the landscape of possibilities. At many points during the process of research, the researcher is required to think and make decisions, and those who are neither disposed nor able to draw constructively from their own wits or experiences will be severely handicapped in their search for the truth. Good research requires a disciplined deployment of logic and a free-wheeling, possibly even playful, indulgence in casual reflection. Most dream research is informed by neither.
Take for example an investigation into Jung's compensatory hypothesis of dreaming. Who is Jung, you ask? Well, according to Newsweek, Jung "thought symbols in dreams are shared and understood by all humanity." As a Jungian scholar who has read translations of nearly all Jung's original works (some 22 volumes), I can tell you this oversimplification of Jung is so misleading as to be practically inaccurate (not that those scholars recognized as rank-and-file 'scientists of dreams' are any more familiar with Jung). Jung believed our attitudes at any point in time are significantly determined by a need to adjust to the requirements of our environment (extraverted) and the requirements we place on ourselves to maintain a bounded and well-differentiated identity (introverted). Occasionally, due to routine requirements and/or ideological entrenchment, we can allow our attitudes (the complex of views, endorsed values & traits, and lifestyle goals) to become so rigid and exclusive as to threaten the freedom and flexibility we need to adjust (to new requirements) and grow (a personal myth, like characterological 'DNA' of sorts, that unfolds as we mature into individuated 'selfs'). Dream experiences exert pressure on us to change our attitudes. How? Jung emphasized that dreams are more than a language with a one-to-correspondence between a latent proposition and its encryption in a 'symbolic image.' The pressures to change are exerted through the language of experience itself. Like waking events capable of shaping us, dream experiences possess a power to transform. Under the cloak of unconsciousness, where we are powerless as dreamers to shape or even recall the events of our dream, dreaming surgically redistributes value across criteria for waking judgment and perception so that, upon wakening, we are predisposed to view or value the world a little differently than the day before, sometimes in light of events the dream anticipates (prospective function of dreams). It's all part of what Jung elegantly described as the "psyche's self-regulating system." I suppose this can be likened to the way weather events redistribute moisture, pressure, and temperature within a climate according to certain laws of thermodynamics.
Jung used the term 'compensate' to describe the aim of the dream with respect to the biases (deficiencies and excessses) that developed within the waking attitude.
The word 'compensation' has been floating in the culture of dream research, in many cases in the minds of researchers unfamiliar with Jung who wish to address themselves to the issue of whether the relationship between dreaming and waking experience can be characterized as one of compensation or one of reflection. As a dream researcher familiar with Jung's full-bodied and elegant concept of compensation, I find much of the research in this area founded on a lifeless conception of compensation that is unproductive in having stripped it from the broader theory of personality dynamics in order to pit compensation and reflection against one another in simple hypothesis testing. Blond or brunette? Boxers or briefs? Compensation or reflection? The manifest content of the dream is probed with a metal detector of sorts, which is my metaphorical way of saying that the researchers examine the dreams purely for references to some stimulus to which they introduced the subject in the hours before they went to sleep (like an ice cream cone perhaps). The issue of compensation or reflection is then resolved on the basis of whether the subject reports dreaming of an object with no innate or lasting value for the subject.
In my approach to this issue, I requested my research participants provide me with a list of activities of significance to them in their current life and then I have the participants complete questionnaires that help me to profile each activity with respect to what the participant gets out of it. I then collaborate with the participant (using detailed assessments of both the dream's imagery and affect) to carefully determine in what ways, if at all, each dream referred to each of the activities, having already assessed the extent to which the participant was able to derive the normal or expected benefits from those activities in waking life in the days before and after the dream. Even my research is admittedly superficial in its empirical agnosis of symbolism, but it is a reconnaissance mission. We don't enough about dreaming to focus on the specific questions that we are focusing on. (This is similar to the missions to Mars and Saturn, where our questions about Mars reflect a far greater understanding of the planet than our questions about Saturn). We need a methodology that provides a 'broad instrument panel' capable of generating questions worth asking about dreams. Until we actually take this approach, the demographic or materialistic research will fail to gather interesting data or fail to help us understand whether the data we are gathering is the important data.
Most dream researchers want to create a sleep lab environment for a subject to test a very specific hypothesis relating dreaming to the function of consolidating or integrating memories. An experiment by Harvard Medical School's Robert Stickgold demonstrated the relevance of dreaming for this functionality by having three groups of subjects (including short-term memory-challenged amnesiacs with hippocampal lesions [WOW!]) play Tetris in a lab prior to sleep. The conclusions are naturally framed as relevant for memory, as the experiment was designed in such a way as to limit itself to the language of this construct (memory). And the finding that the amnesias were able to report dreams of Tetris and were able to demonstrate gains in playing Tetris despite an ability to remember having played the game is significant. Dreaming is not as tied to the hippocampus as the researcher once thought and dreaming can have an unconscious effect on the sources of waking awareness, but someone needs to prod these researchers into broadening their conceptualization of effects beyond stilted tests of skills. I might be the only person to wonder what else dreaming is capable of influencing, and I am prone as a personality psychologist interested in the Big Questions to speculate that the effects of dreaming can be observed across a wide range of constructs (not just memory). Dreaming could care less whether someone like Stickgold is a subject matter expert in memory, attitudes, traits, skills, or values. As Stickgold's study itself intimated, dreaming is not tied to a single organ in the brain and his research gives dreaming far less credit than it deserves.
Another problem with brain-based researchers is suggested by a statement like the following attributed to Stickgold: “We think of our mind as being ours. But there are real ways in which the brain has a set of rules of its own." Stickgold believes that if we can't control it, it is no longer part of the "I" system, which is a view point typical of most psychologists today for whom there is a Will (which is us) and everything else belongs to a realm outside us, whereas classical psychologists thrived from viewing the unconscious and even the external world as part of an interactive system not of which the "I" is part, but alternatively, which is part of, and comes to define, the "I" system (psyche). Some brain-based researchers view the brain as a proxy for the "I," which I have already discussed as limiting, but just as problematic are the brain-based researchers whose very narrow view of the "I" (which includes only thoughts over which we have control at any moment) makes it impossible for them to view dreaming as part of an "I" system. Dreaming is, for them, a biological process that impinges on the "I" from without. What this essentially means is that brain-based researchers are using a language that is not even commensurate with (translatable to) to that of the phenomenological or psychodynamic dream researcher. For our field to assign precedence to the brain-based researcher is to grant sole custody of dreams to one parent after a divorce. This will leave a lot of people terminally unsatisfied in that no conclusions drawn from brain-based research will ever resonate with them. Brain-based researchers will every now and then claim that his or her evidence demonstrates this or that issue has been 'settled' and yet other researchers (and many within the general public) will continue to pursue questions as if the brain researchers were whispering in an obsolete Chinese dialect. Since science cannot settle the issue of what is and is not part of the "I," no scientific research can command the respect of consumers operating on different assumptions. I look for certain elements in a science of dreaming, and I will continue to be unable to discuss the matter of dreams with those who speaking the other language.
But the problem is that the researchers sells, and the public buys into, this image of science, the self-serving gloss which is complete with material measurements that adjudicate highly circumscribed, binary reject/fail-to-reject hypotheses formulated a priori. Despite all the standard disclaimers, the research appears polished and conclusive. We should care more than we do that the assumed relationship between mind and brain is not only speculative, but in most cases untestable. We should care more than we do that the phenomena under investigation, the dream itself, is not being explored and that the methodological proxy with which the phenomena is confounded, the brain, is not explored comprehensively or with more than one possibility or predilection in mind. We should care more than we do that our understanding of dreams could look very different when the small hypotheses that appear to be supported by research, that appear to be correct in their little wheelhouse, are subsumed -- recast -- within a more sophisticated theory that addresses a broader range of phenomenon. We should care that Occam's razor, otherwise known as the principle of parsimony, often undermines the adequacy of research and that, many materialists (whose own brains appear to develop paralysis in the presence of another) misunderstand or strategically misconstrue Occam's razor so that it refers to the most rational or most desirable explanation rather than the most simple. If you talk to some dream researchers, you'll discover many of them have never remembered a dream in their lives and dismiss the significance of dreams out of hand as a way of coping with the feeling they may be missing out. For these people, the simplest explanation is that dreams have no meaning, that dreams are secretions of brain cells with no inherent value, and that the similarity between a dream and a subsequent event is attributable to probability (as if probability itself is actually a cause rather than a proxy for a pattern we fail to comprehend). So why are these researchers (whose research is designed to negatively reinforce their fear of complex, irrational, or meaningful phenomena) permitted to frame this quaintly non-expeditionary discussion of dreams? Because they have the keys to the lab. In my educated opinion, the only knowledge advanced by these researchers is that any phenomena can be made simple if we neglect most of its facts.
Science as Tool of Skepticism
'Too many' dream researchers endowed with university jobs, lab equipment, and grants use science as a tool of skepticism rather than a tool of exploration, and in their hubris they attempt to cleave the much-maligned "man in the street" of his or her popular or 'folk' myths. Unfortunately for the materialist, none of the scientistic resources will pay dividends until it has something worthwhile to work with. Every hammer and chisel needs a good hunk of marble, a theory worth testing, possibilities worth exploring, a method worth deployment.
I enjoyed Rychlak's paper on complementarity in the American Psychologist in which he discussed the awkwardness of drawing from more than one of the following explanatory frameworks: Bios, Physicos, Logos, Socius. It is precisely this type of lazy mixing which causes us to make statements like 'the brain thinks.' The brain doesn't think. The brain secretes this or that
neurotransmitter along this or that neural pathway. Brain researchers can claim the 'brain thinks,' but then they're assigning the same kind of metaphysical meaning and metaphor that they find wretched in people who assign meaning to dreams. So much then hinges on a comprehensive set of correlations between aspects of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds (i.e. brain and mind). Brain research can and perhaps should take as much direction from phenomenological research as phenomenological research takes from brain research. Psychology can be advanced by a reciprocity here, but unfortunately a true reciprocity cannot exist as long as we accord a greater scientific status to the brain and as long as we elevate the brain as a research tool to the object or objective of research. In the end, we do not have a theory of dream experience. We have a theory of brain functioning.
Perhaps a brain has its uses in dream research and would actually pay dividends in the hands of researchers who actually USE their brains. But alas
there seems to be various bifurcations in psychology that prevent the intellectuals from learning how to work the tools and the technicians from a disposition to think. I'd like to see phenomenological research provide the framework for the direction and organization of neuroscience (i.e., how neuroscience would be further along if it were informed by psychologistic research). They attempt to use the indisputable matter of the brain to monopolize legitimacy and control access to the field. The bottom line is that the neuroscientists are the type of personalities who lack an appreciation for psychological life, and thus do not have personal experiences or (or records of them) to inspire or direct their research of the brain.
Why should psychological researchers who claim to value an attention to detail when collecting facts for research be swayed by brain-based statements about psychological functioning? While able to determine that a sleeper is dreaming by brainwaves consistent with REM, no measure of brain structure or activity can tell us what a person is dreaming. All dreams look the same to the EEG. Since gross measures of dreaming is all a physiological psychologist can muster, he or she can offer only gross statements. I have to wonder...does the knowledge that meaningful statements about dream activity are beyond his or her reach incite the brain researcher to a desire to discount the proposition that dreams are meaningful? Functional? Brain researchers treat the human brain like their own child, and does not wish to see his or her child bested by any other child on the block. They have already managed to persuade the world at the brain is the source of all experience, but this would prove no consolation if they had to concede that the brain is not always the best source of information about all experience. And yet they continue to issue brain-based statements about dreaming that pressure researchers working with home-reporting methodologies into feeling the only research worth performing is that which provides converging or corroborating evidence. This absolutely bemuses me, because a well thought-out experiential methodology is so much more sensitive and powerful an instrument than a sleep lab or human cranium could ever be. Brain-based statements are simply limited. Under a microscope, a flea viewed under 5x magnification hardly resembles itself viewed under 100x. Dream researchers working in the lab tend to issue mythical generalizations about dreams based on research that addresses only one aspect of dream functionality. Consequently, we end up with these information-processing theories comparing dreams with 'filing cabinets,' and the researchers insist that there is nothing to add to our understanding of dreams. This is tantamount to extraterrestrial anthropologists concluding that the function of the human hand is to "pick grapes," "signal applause," or "masturbate the male sex." Broader experiential research into the 'cognitive waste dumping' function of dreams may reveal that what appears to be 'waste material' (for lack of a better conception) is in actuality experience intended to ping the waking mind so as to predispose the dreamer to make decisions that broaden his or her waking routine. Like extraterrestrial research into the human hand, dream research requires extensive reflection on the nature of the personality and the nature of experience. Because brain researchers are technicians, they tend to be disinterested in launching muses into the psychological universe (i.e., big picture). Their work is largely actuarial or epidemiological and produces a macroscopic body of knowledge comparable in scope to the DSM.
Materialism is also at work in the clinical psychologist, otherwise known as the practitioner or therapist. To compensate for their lack of a psychologistic education and sophistication, psychologists have lobbied for a privilege currently enjoyed by psychiatrists, the authority to prescribe medication (even though psychologists lack medical training). But psychologists have no other choice. They do not value the psyche, only the brain and statistics. Over the years, their clinical training in psychopathology has been increasingly geared toward the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a manual of disorders that likely have an organic basis because of the typicality with which their symptoms cluster within the general population. The DSM is a PSYCHIATRIC manual. The DSM is published by the American PSYCHIATRIC Association (trained physicians with a background in medicine). Aided by what managed care will reimburse, the first generation of psychologists were forced to assign DSM codes to patients to receive payment from insurance companies. Ultimately, they abandoned the psyche for the implicit medical and epidemiological model at the root of the DSM. Now they have little knowledge of the psychological life and turn to the pills for aid. Now, to win the right to prescribe medication, psychologists have a stake in treating the mind and brain as interchangeable, and in their MATERIALISM fail to understand how evolving mental processes can gain a functional autonomy or individuality with respect to the organic basis from which they originally sprung. Consequently, the reliance on the brain as an explanatory principle and on pharmacology as a treatment has homogenized if not neglected the intrinsic value, richness, and integrity of psychological life. Moreover, they fail to consider the possibility that when they exorbitantly manage a 'disorder' with a 'psychopharmacologic agent,' their patients are robbed of the potential for personal growth. Rather than living through the problem, the problem is isolated from life and altered or numbed with medication. This is just another example of how the materialist is all-too-willing to take his or her patient or research participant outside the phenomenon and outside life itself.
As a badly miscast actress attempting to pull off the role of scientist, Psychology lacks both elegance and stage presence, it's scientism and professionalism are behaviors emblematic of over-acting. Perhaps in attempting to imitate science, it has adopted some practices that are just not appropriate for the study of human nature -- superfluous distractions like bodacious gestures or facial acne -- most notably all the norms predicated on the belief that its members have to help one another work toward the same version of the truth (i.e., the same ideas spoken in the same tongue). I approach the psyche as if multiple conceptualizations were possible, and thus believe that the glimpse of the psyche afforded us by the truth on which we foreclose at any point in time, regardless of how 'validating' the evidence, may be a limited if not distorted view. Unfortunately, critics of the DSM have restricted themselves to the argument that DSM diagnostic categories lack experimental evidence, failing to note that in using the DSM to organize our research, clinicians limit the fruits of experimentation to the evaluation of this classification scheme. By virtue of its role in organizing research, the DSM is promoted from its pragmatic role in facilitating communication with managed care companies to one of theory. The recriprocal determinism here may mean we have a two-way street, but it also means we have restricted access to all crossroads. I recall an advocate of the DSM balking at my statement: 'the problem with beginning with a classification scheme based on superficial clusters of symptoms is that once the classification becomes part of a professional canon, it gets stuck at that level of depth. Change can only occur in baby steps. We are all forced to work from the same hunk of marble and granting agencies requiring research speak the language of the DSM (and use DSM disorders as subject variables) promote a culure of mindless materialistic madness.' My adversary thought he had delivered the coup de gras to my argument when he cited massive deletions and additions across the second and third editions of the DSM, to which I replied in saying that the perceived magnitude of these distances proved only that he were living in a DSM universe. No amount of evidence that points to the reliability and validity of the DSM diagnostic categories could discourage me from seeking more adequate, accurate, aesthetic, and authentic conceptualizations of psychopathology.
A Broader Conceptualization of Materialism
When I claim that an academic is materialistic, I mean that he or she relies on sensations as a source of data and tends to confine the scope of legitimate data to physical material (accessible to the senses). In Jung's psychoanalysis of Nazi Germany, the suppression of the religious function meant that ultimately the State assumed certain spiritual properties. The Fuhrer became 'the Father' and certain secular practices were observed almost liturgically). Similarly, the brain assumes the properties of experience itself for materialists who come to speak of the brain as the 'universe within.' Eventually, the 'within' is emptied of meaning and the brain is treated as if it were the 'universe.'
The attitude of the materialist is such that he or she is indifferent to those things that cannot be adequately explained on the basis of the brain, and intolerant of the representations of the world offered by theories that, in the least, claim to be proxies or stand-ins for facts that will later be born out by brain research. They are perfectly content with the picture of the phenomenological world presented by research into the brain (and I cannot even be sure if the discrepancy is lost on them, i.e., if they do not know what
they are missing because their phenomenological world is less populated than those with more normally developed intuition). Many of them treat a public indifferent to the notion that a 'rose is not really red' as fools who cling to their myths and illusions. Phenomena is a hoax and only brain research can save or liberate the public from incarceration within their own folk beliefs. Haven't you heard? A rose is not really red.
Can a brain tell us the meaning of an individual dream? No. GOOD brain research (i.e., not applied by a materialistic attitiude) may offer leads about the general functions of dreams (something in which I am very interested). However, it cannot offer insight into the dream of an individual. For this, we know to rely on our wits (the same wits from which the methods were fashioned from raw material). For this reason, the materialistic brain researchers find
it necessary to debunk dreaming altogether as a meaningful phenomena (and have made such bold claims based on slipshod inferences from poor data).
But bare in mind that there are brain researchers who are NOT materialists, as we should not confuse the tool with the rather severe attitude that results from elevating the tool to the level of supreme principle. Luria is a well-known example of a brain researcher who knew the difference. I am charging that materialism among physiological psychologists (or neuropsychologists) is not as
problematic as materialism among non-physiological psychologists, i.e. those who just assume that brain research is the first and final word on the subject of human nature and treat their own work as requiring the corroboration of brain research for legitimacy. Brain researchers are not much of a problem because they tend to stick to themselves. They are not responsible for most of the proselytizing and indoctrination. Most of the (evangelical) materialists do not even use the tools (or specialize in the use of the materialistic tools), but envy the tools so much that they end fashioning other constructs after their precision and formality (i.e., rationalizing or manualizing the process of training, selection, evaluation [committees, policies, and item discrimination of multiple choice responses scanned into computer], and instruction [textbooks]).
Thus it doesn't get published and the people who don't publish don't move forward in their careers. Thus dreams are either ignored entirely or else
researched in a way (usually in a lab with an EEG) that distorts the
phenomena or makes it conform to some bias or predilection (i.e., that dreams have no meaning or are correlated with activity in structure A or B of the brain, as if this tells us much of anything).
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