"How could I illustrate the dream's handiwork? With a novel that portrays the relationship between dreaming and waking experience in a dream researcher whose waking experience is all about his struggle to research dreaming scientifically against the biases of his professors." -- Wyatt Ehrenfels

Comments are trickling in from individuals who have reported reading the introductory chapter to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, which has been available to the general public for a few months now. Most comments praise the author for his ability to, in the words of one reader, capture the dehumanization or stifling patrician style (in the words of another reader) within contemporary departments of psychology. Other positive reviews can best be summarized by the reference of one individual to the author's depiction of an 'urban wilderness.' Author J. Wyatt Ehrenfels, who was unavailable for comment Monday, had spoken in previous interviews of his efforts to depict various environments, most notably topographical features of the dreamscape. "I wanted my readers to re-live the feelings or residues experienced in their most important or memorable dreams," remarked Ehrenfels. "I challenged myself as an author to tell a story that represented the perfect union, in dreaming, of reality and imagination. I think that what really matters to a person, what speaks to his or her soul, is on the one hand the meaning hidden in reality (the untapped potential, the unpacked implications, the unformed futures) and, on the other that part of myth or fantasy that is attempting to tell us something about the way we live our lives. People like reality-based films or books, and they also enjoy searching contemporary culture or current events for a deeper understanding of myths and fantasies (most notably Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings) deemed clairvoyant, prognosticating, or insightful. I think that potentially the most compelling work is the one that seamlessly depicts the dynamic interplay between reality and imagination, and for me, that work is the dream. As a genre of experience, the dream, as a truly indigenous experience, is in a class by itself, surpassing every other medium (even waking reality) in its capacity to educate and transform by using symbolism to weave experiences out of the stuff of our innermost being. By melting self and world (subject and object) into a single language synonymous with experience. If you attuned to the many ways in which we learn from experience, and ways in which experience influences us, you should marvel at the potential of an experience designed by and for us from the raw material of our lives, without the arbitrary and random static of a waking reality shared and shaped by others. By virtue of our active participation in myths individually tailored to us as dreamers (i.e. individualized myths), the dream possesses the power to alter vital sources of awareness and alter components of the "equations" by which we organize waking life (i.e. perceive, value, judge, interpret). How could I illustrate the dream's handiwork? With a novel that portrays the relationship between dreaming and waking experience in a dream researcher whose waking experience is all about his struggle to research dreaming scientifically against the biases of his professors."

The Washington National Cathedral in Wyatt Ehrenfels's Personal Myth

"At the time, I knew it only as the Episcopal Church on Wisconsin Avenue. I had no idea that I had been led to the nation's flagship cathedral, site of state funeral services, and beacon of Protestantism." -- Wyatt Ehrenfels

Ehrenfels is quick to point out that this work is an extension of himself, and speaks of it almost as a congenital imperative. "Early on in my life, I was interested in the blueprint of human personality, and in dreaming I believed I found the psychological DNA. It was in the midst of this initial scholarship that I experienced a nightmare so moving that I would use it as the subject or lead-in for a number of high school speeches. But 4 years after the dream, as a college freshman living away from home for the first time and in an urban environment, that cirumstances beyond my control made me re-discover this dream in a very concrete way. The circumstances seemed almost intelligent in the way they conspired against me. There was clearly a pattern here, like of stars in a constellation named after a dream." Ehrenfels is very cautious not to give too much away, but he did speak generally of the events in question. "I got lost. I got lost in a city I did not know very well at all. I did not have money for cab fare. And I never seemed to have more than $40 in my bank account at any time. I was living off weekly checks from my parents, about 95% of which paid my off-campus rent. I had about $20 a week to play with, and it never would have occurred to me to splurge on a cab just to find my way home. Not that I thought it was that necessary. I always felt like I was a block away from discovering my whereabouts. My whereabouts at any given point along this walk perched precariously on the tip of a pedestrian's foot like a word or a name on the tip of the proverbial tongue. I could never seem to decide whether or not I was lost, for everything seemed just as familiar as it seemed unfamiliar. When I finally realized there was no reason for me to think of any of these familiar things as familiar, I realized there was a mind other than my own operating through me. For you trigger-happy diagnosticians out there, which is most of you young psychologists, I am being metaphorical and not referring to some other highly organized but dissociated identity within me. I was utterly in the grip of some cosmic unconsciousness, and the events that took place unfolded like the dream of some cosmic mind. This day was a work-in-progress, like a painting. The canvas? Washington, DC. After the events had unfolded unto their natural conclusion, the memory of the 1984 dream regurgitated into my awareness, and with an analytic and deliberate thinking, as if testing a hypothesis, I found connections between points along my journey and the old nightmare. I had found climactic clarity on a cloudy day. And the timing could not have been more significant. That very morning, before I left the house, I had arrived at the decision to withdraw from this university and seek admission to some state college within two hours of my home town. Within a month of having started the Spring semester at my new school, I was surprised by an overwhelming nostalgia for this urban landscape. I had not anticipated pining for DC because, rationally speaking, there was no reason for me to be there. My parents could hardly afford the bloated tuition of any DC college, I was compelled by a university housing shortage to live off campus in my first year, which did not make it any easier for me to build relationships with fabulously wealthy and, in some cases, drug addicted, peers. But in moving out of DC, I could literally feel the walls of my world shrinking to some cloister I could manage but which lacked all meaning for me. A rational decision had cut me off from a source of meaning and humanity so wonderful as to seem divine. However, in my career as an undergraduate, the dull, ordinary, all-too-familiar campus provided an environment in which I could focus free from distraction on the requirements for my BA. Oddly enough, where there is a dull ordinary world, my dream life picked up the difference, and provided me with fanciful experiences which inspired original hypotheses for my first empirical dream research. During this year, anticipation surrounded the collection of data as my research provided me with a bridge to others who would serve as research participants or as an interested audience. I never did find people who found my work as fascinating as the students of this small liberal arts college. The prospect of interesting data and the fascination of my peers fueled fantasies for graduate school life, where I anticipated meaningful relationships with others who shared my interests and activities. I often took long quiet walks after midnight, looking up at the sky knowing that in its stars were something I shared in common with people and places far away from here. I applied to a number of graduate schools around the country, but I fantasized about a cross-country drive to Southern California. As the months transpired, I became romantically involved with the idea of life in Los Angeles as a student of UCLA. However, that fantasy was rather rudely dispelled when I learned over the course of a number of rejections that my profile, and my bid for admission, had been drowned in a sea of applications by students wishing to avoid the workforce during the 1992 recession. Secondly, I learned of a number of hidden political requirements or strategies I had not observed over the course of my applications. And last, but certainly not least, I learned that one of these requirements, what some call a 'perfect fit,' is one I could never meet due to, of all things, my interest in dreaming. All in all, this college would be the final resting place of some rather amazing dreams. One thing of lasting value did occur however, which led me to believe I may have been meant to be here, something which made this place in particular a peculiar extension of my experiences in DC. Here, a guest lecture by an English professor and administrator of the school's honors program added yet another chapter to the synchronistic connection between the 1984 nightmare and my waking life.

Eventually, I did get into graduate school. 10 years after my first DC experience, I received my PhD in Social Psychology from a most un-DC like part of the Great Plains. 10 years after my first DC experience, I returned to the DC area in pursuit of a second doctorate in Psychology, a practitioner's degree. I thought that as long as my research was already clinical in its nature, this doctorate would help to inform my clinical research. In a unbiquitously saturated university job market, and I learned that finding permanent work as a university professor is twice as hard as winning admission to graduate school, I thought that I lacked the credentials (i.e., publications, affiliations, teaching experience) needed to compete for a tenure-track assistant professorship, and therefore that a second doctorate might plug the gaping hole in my vita. It was supposed to be a triumphant return to DC, but after just a few short months, the meaning of the whole 'coincidence complex' climbed a steep pinnacle when I was compelled to withdraw from the doctoral program. What is this meaning exactly? Well, if it were a simple matter for me to summarize it, then it would not require symbolism through dramatic dreams and synchronistic experiences. As best as I can put it, it refers to a growing pain in the evolution of our civilization, an opposition to those aspects of our natures by those which pretend to transcend them. Opposition to God by Man, to Truth by Excellence, to Scholarship by Professionalism, to Vocation or Calling by Career. Specifically, within the science purported to study human nature, Psychology, it refers to the abandonment of adequacy for parsimony, of worth for expediency, of authenticity for amenity, of discovery for membership, of the semblance or cosmetic appearance of science for much of its substance. In this brave new field, the study of dreaming is discouraged, and dreams themselves, the sine qua non of the human condition, neglected, homogenized, or warped like something caught in the reflection of a fun house mirror. Symptomatic of this rift is the reaction of many of Psychology's denizens (academics and professionals) to the idea of my novel and its broader campaign. How they see me depends largely on whether they are friends of the bride or the groom in the unholy marriage of science and professionalism. To look at me the academics see 'sour grapes,' someone who could not cut it trying to destroy people greater than him. The practitioners see in me a hostile and thought-disordered individual, someone whose tension represents something less than optimal well-being. Not that anything they call a 'standard' is truly a 'standard' grounded in nature, which is to say something other than sheer opinion, but I suppose, if your 'standard' is success or even 'mental hygiene' (to use their term), I, and everything I produce on this subject, would have to seem inferior or maladjusted. But I answer to higher ideals, -- 'soul,' 'spirit,' 'individuation' -- and by these 'standards,' it is clear that what I am doing represents a level of health and sanity and even achievement they will never reach.

Thus it was important for me to tie together within my novel three different types of environments, including a dreamscape, an urban landscape, and a professional culture. For it is at the intersection of these roads where we will find precisely what we've lost and, at that point, realize for the first time that we have left something behind."

Despite some early praise, whether readers will find it in Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun remains a question. There is always a chance that this light is too heavy for readers. One has to wonder what meaning Ehrenfels would find in that?