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From: http://www.fireflysun.com/book/DREAM_FAQ.php
Date: 20 Dec 2004
Time: 08:09:23
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Quick Hits: The Dreams & Dreaming FAQ

source: http://www.fireflysun.com/book/DREAM_FAQ.php

Wyatt Ehrenfels Addresses Broad Categories of Common Questions

(A Work in Progress)

Q: What are Dreams?

JWE: First and foremost, I'd say dreams are experiences, like events in waking life, but with one critical distinction: dreams omit all the static from waking life that obscures life's hidden framework and meaningful signals. Neither random happenstance nor the arbitrary will serve as contributing architects to dreams. In their purity, dream experiences are quite potent and efficient in the way they affect us. To say they educate or inform us falls short of the fact that these ends are accomplished directly, not by appealing to our awareness, but by altering fundamental sources of awareness. Another way to say this is that dreaming re-distributes the value or energy across the various criteria that calibrate waking perception and orient waking judgment, which takes me to my next question.

Q: What If We Don't Remember Our Dreams?

JWE: Well, there's interpreting a dream. We can interpret a dream accurately, or we may fail to grasp the intended meaning of the dream, but the process of pondering the dream may change the way we think about something or re-direct the course of our thinking so that it takes on new objects. But this is all really beside the point if we consider the deepest level at which the dream operates. While there are changes we make to our life when we make sense of a dream, there is a fundamental effect of dreams that does not require that we interpret, or even remember, our dreams.

Q: Why Aren't We Doing More to Understand Dreams?

This gets to the heart of what I like to call "The Great Represssion" within Psychology, the intellectual equivalent of the economy in the 1930s. There, physiological psychologists and supplicating colleagues use the mystique of lab science and symbols of professionalism such as the brain and the EEG to disabuse the much-maligned man-in-the-street of his folk wisdom about dreams. In my view, they should not be arguing that it is not psychologically valuable to ask questions about the meaning, function, or language of dreams. Whenever they find evidence supporting yet another in a series of physiological functions for REM sleep, they get on their soapboax and shout that there is no evidence for the psychological value of dreams. Anyone want to guess why? Because they're not studying the psychological value of dreams, and there is only so much you could learn about the psychological value of dreams studying purely physiological processes. So when these savants say there is no scientific evidence to support the meaning of dreams, they do not mean they have evidence against it...because they never really explored it. Not Aserinsky and Kleitman. Not McCarley & Hobson. Not Robert Stickgold. Not even vaunted Nobel laureate Francis Crich and his sidekick Mitchison.

Dreaming is one of those mysteries that drive a wedge between the general public and the academic community. Dreaming has received so much attention from armchair philosophers and enthusiasts within popular culture. So much so that the psychological community, which is ill-equipped and ill-disposed to address dreaming, have exploited this fact to banish dreaming from science altogether into the charge of 'kooky' populists, mysticists, and paranormal investigators. Surely, in the hands of such individuals who do not adorn themselves in symbols of professionalism, the scientific status of a very real and human experience would be tarnished. Why do they do this? Why do psychologists want to use the mystique of science to malign the image of dreams?

Biggest reason. They don't know how to say "I don't know." Dreaming poses an intellectual challenge that exposes their weaknesses and impairs their ability to manage a facade of expertise. And why don't they study dreaming? Well, they have difficulty translating the phenomenon of dreaming into the methodological language on which they hang their reputations as rank-and-file scientists. When you're addressing big questions about a phenomena as complex as dreaming, you can't assimilate such a phenomenon into the methodological cookie-cutters; you actually have to meet the phenomenon halfway with some original, flexible, and modular methodologies. You may even have to suspend preconceptions, forgo unctiously formal hypotheses (that presume more knowledge than you have), anticipate various contingencies with respect to how the data will look, and build course corrections into the design like you're in the locker room prepping an NFL team down 21-0 at the half. Because just about every detective, real scientist, and project management planner would approach dreaming with a more effective scheme than the psychologist. Psych profs do not know how to assign numbers to characteristics of dreams in ways that productively address the function and language of dreams, or the meaning of any one dream to an individual. Due to a massive failure of imagination, and an urge to treat their own intuition as if it were inherently unscientific, psychologists have not envisioned the range of possibilities associated with the truth about dreaming. But even if you can't envision a single possibility, you can still discover the truth by designing exploratory methodologies that present a critical mass of data that compels imagination. But having dispensed with exploration altogether like M chiding James Bond for extracurricular conversation with Money Penny, psych profs cut themselves off altogether from vital sources of information about dreams and, in so doing, make their 'end-stage only' science no more substantive than a trip to the cosmetics counter. They treat exploratory research like pilot study, and even worse, like some extracurricular activity after 8th period Science. If only they'd take a good look in their own mirror, they'd see their own so-called 'discipline' for what it really is: institutionalized Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But dreams are not like most other topics in Psychology. Most constructs and material black boxes (e.g. brain) leave the individual member of the public out of the process, strictly to observe the end-products of the research. This allows psych profs to put on the lab coat like any Halloween costume. It occurs to me even as a 5-year-old that when my Tweety smock wasn't fooling anyone, not with the disembodied head of the bird stamped squarely on the chest. Even while the all-too-common psych prof wants you to believe all dream research performed outside a sleep lab takes place in a 'spirit cabinet,' it is he who approaches the plane of truth like he's communicating with the dead. A puzzle-like and natural phenomenon like dreams, which is challenging intellectually, and which is felt by most individuals in the public (in many cases more deeply than non-recalling psych profs), exposing the false backings and confederates behind the psych prof's scientific curtain.

Psych profs also need to devalue dreams because they know the public individualizes dreams like no other phenomenon. The first question about dreams usually takes a form like "what did it mean?...that dream I had this morning. The much-maligned man-in-the-street wants to figure out what an individual dream meant to him or her as an individual.

Abuse of statistics. Different terms have been used to designate the manner in which psychologists use numbers to collect and analyze data. Nomothetic statistics. Aggregate statistics. Psych profs collect as little data as possible about the phenomenon they study, but they collect instances of this data from so many volunteers (upwards of 200) so they can plug the data into a statistical formula. The conclusions drawn are tantamount to rules for which the vast majority of volunteers, as individuals, are exceptions. This method of statistical induction (i.e. partitioning variance across groups and assigning differences a level of significance based on its improbability) is simply not built to address meaning and not built to yield the kind of knowledge that can be applied to an individual anything. Psych profs don't mind that the vast majority of individuals are, to one degree or another, exceptions to the rules. As long as the deviation from the rule appears quantifiable, well, it still looks like they have their fingers on the pulse of a universe that is orderly and precise. In my research, I explored each individual indepth, rousing a member of my thesis committee to observe that I was "looking for ways to partition variance within individuals." The idea should not have been lauded for its novelty, at least not 120 years into the history of modern Psychology, nor should it be suspiciously regarded as something our field is "just not set up for." Psych profs have reduced to an unintelligent, rote exercise the use of numbers to capture and analyze the quantitative relations among aspects of a phenomenon. This is quite possibly the Achille's heel of a professor who doesn't understand the theory and phenomenology of numbers at the level of his counterpart in the Math Department.

Abuse of the brain. And no matter how hard you look inside someone's skullcap, you won't find the meaning of dreams there either. McCarley & Hobson embarrassed themselves in 1977 when they pronounced that dreams were nothing more than narratives of images synthesized by the dream to make sense of random surges of neuronal activation along a pontine-geniculate-occipital tract. Only now, decades later, are colleagues beginning to pressure them into admitting that they did not have the evidence with which to claim that dreams were not meaningful and that there was no psychological value in analyzing dreams. If it is true as they claimed that there is no scientific evidence for such meaning and value, it is only because their physical description of the brain never explored the issue. A professor of psychology at my undergraduate institution cited McCarley & Hobson's research to defend his efforts to discourage me from pursuing a senior thesis on dreams. To this day, I cannot estimate the extent to which junk science like that of McCarley & Hobson factored into that asterisk (*) admissions committees placed beside my application to doctoral programs. Since age thirteen I knew their research was slanted, but I continued to battle these dream-disenfranchising demons and others like them, including the vaunted molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Francis Crick and his sidekick Mitchison. Kudos to these fellows for giving it more of the old college try in 1983 than McCarley & Hobson, but the depiction of dreams as cerebral garbage is more than a few degrees off. A phenomenological translation of this theory, aided by bona fide experiential research, might have advanced our understanding of roughly one half the psychological value of dreaming. But 'garbage' is all cognitive neuropsychology is capable of. Half the truth is all Krippner & Combs is capable of when they opined "Even if the regularities that underlie the neurological events of dreaming become well understood, they may still look quite different than those that best characterize the experiential aspects of dreaming (e.g., Haskell, 1986), which in turn set the stage for a dream’s meaning in the context of an individual’s life. Finding the precise relationships that connect the neurological to the experiential levels of dreaming is future work for cognitive neuropsychology." They were right to question the value of neurological events for an understanding of dreaming, but once you crown cognitive neuropsychologists with the divine right to dreams, you disenfranchise a more diverse and intelligent group of empirical phenomenologists who understand that the meaning and function of dreams are not to be found in the relationship between dream and brain but between dreaming and waking experience.

The kind of statements facilitated by Statistics and Cognitive Neuropsychology just don't fly. The natural and mysterious phenomenon we call 'dreaming,' where the individual is the insoluble and indivisible vehicle for this experience, expose the weaknesses of these methodologies. People who actually experience this phenomenon on a daily basis want answers that affirm the meaning and functionality of what they actually felt to experience, of what stirred them to depths of feeling or moved them to heights of confusion. The fact is that dreams, while just like any other natural phenomenon, pose too great an intellectual challenge to psych profs. In other words, psych profs are neither willing nor able to invest the conceptual resources and creative acumen necessary to design scientific phenomenologies of dreams. And on the surface of it, without more than cursory, desultory, and perfunctory thoughts, dreams strike psych profs as inherently imprecise and thus as incompatible with their brand of science, which is not really true unless we include in a definition of their science their own intellectual laziness, logical sloppiness, ADHD attention to facts, and existential fears of irrational truths. Arguably, their brand of science, which is to say the policies and procedures that govern their day-to-day operations as teachers and researchers, is designed like a defense mechanism to negatively reinforce their hyper-rational world views. This is the appeal of Psychology. Among those interested in becoming psych profs, those who succeed in winning a position in Psychology are those who are most pliable to training (those who post the fewest obstacles to socialization) and those who are technically most adept at wielding a science that serves as a delivery device for psychological defenses. These are the people who elevate bastardized versions of precepts like Occam's razor to the level of supreme religious principle. When I examine a collection of students in a classroom, I am often moved by the rather remarkable fact that it is the most supplicating, structured, grade-conscious students -- 'man's best friend' to a teacher -- who are least interested in dreams. Some of these students naively place this implicit faith in their instructors. Some of these students couldn't care whether their professor said the earth was flat as long as they know that circling "D: flat earth" on their next exam will net them their points. These are the students who appreciate the social contract more than the truth, and these are the students who become psychology professors.

Q: Why Are Psych Profs Ill-Equipped and Indisposed to Advance Our Understanding of Dreaming?

I have attempted to broach the subject of dreams with many psych profs, and the mere mention of the word seems to bring out this curmudgeonly dispeptic side, conjuring the memory of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon in which this feeble mild-mannered scientist unwittingly consumes again and again this fizzling laboratory concoction that transforms him into this predatory red gargantuan.

Why is this? Well, you have to ask yourself why some people aspire to this profession in the first place. The psychological community attracts (and rewards) graduate students who want things from Science. I have met many graduate students who used Science to raise their self-esteem. They wished to bask in the reflected glory of Science. Science confers legitimacy on things. Science validates and disqualifies. And while they mouth off at the "man-in-the-street" for using Religion as a crutch ("people can't honestly believe there's a God, can they?"), these students turn to another institution for just about the same things: to secure their view of the world from opponents, to help their opinions prevail, and to join a winning team. Members Only status in a scientific community gives these students an authority, and some people could be forgiven for thinking these students, in disabusing the public of its folk wisdom and faith, are airbrushing over God an image of themselves toting a clipboard on the ceiling of the Cistene Chapel. They toss around words like 'objectivity' and 'validity' as if they were passwords, and only the correct dialect will get you through the Pearly Gates to an office in a university. But 'too many' of them feel their lives have no intrinsic meaning, and so they'll use all their resources to convince you your life has no more meaning than theirs. Properly hijacked, Science gives them the tool they need to gut dreams and other phenomena of their meaning and significance.

So, to sum up, I agree that when we consider your garden variety mysteries and frontiers (e.g., Space, our Oceans), dreaming is not that popular among those whose jobs give them the time, resources, and the credibility to explore this subject. By the time we make significant inroads into dreaming, Magellan, Columbus, and Lewis & Clarke could have re-discovered the world hundreds of times over.

Q: If Dreaming Is A Form of Thinking, Do Your Dreams React to Your Thoughts about Dreams?

Have you ever been to a barber shop where you have a mirror on the wall both in front of you and behind you? You can peer into a portal that stretches infinitely. Well, I get the sense something similar happens to persons like myself who not only thinks about what my dreams might mean but who thinks about what dreams do. Just how does 'thinking about one day's dream' factor into the dream I have the next day? I have to wonder if or when my dreams respond to my response to a dream. There is a dialogical quality to this banter between dreaming and waking thinking about that dreaming. If I set aside enough time during the day to thinking about the dream (and even other dreams), if I limit sources of stimulation and experience originating from outside the home, and if I sustain this lifestyle for a few days, the quality of the dreaming spirals down into something more structural and fundamental, incorporating more alchemical, geometric, religious, and ontogenetically (mythological) and phylogenetically (childhood) remote iconography. It's as if in stripping my life of stimuli and superficial variance, that I am accessing the bare framework of the mind.

Q: Why Don't We Know More about Dreams Than We Do?

I wish I could say the blame for that rests solely with the phenomenon of dreaming itself and its indefatigable complexity. But unfortunately, and as the people in this room are well aware, responsibility for our embarrassing lack of progress in this area is attributable to the unproductive and devitalizing attitude of psychology professors, who rush to covet the role as ranking authority over this phenomenon only so they can squeeze the life out of it and deceive the public into thinking the phenomenon has no value.

Psychology boasts among its ranks standard bearers and savants for whom Science is a defense mechanism. I think the psychological community appeals to such individuals. I think it favors such individuals for admission to gradute programs. I think it socializes this reductionistic attitude into its rising technical stars. So what does it mean for Science to serve as a defense mechanism? What I mean by this is simply that Science is used to produce the knowledge that gives oneself career opportunities and psychological comfort and to suppress or marginalize research that forces us to rethink our worldview or that puts us at a competitive disadvantage careerwise. And I am convinced psych profs use Science as a a tool of skepticism rather than a tool of exploration, and to negatively reinforce one's own ultra-rational world view, to selectively attend to those parts of the universe that will promote our biases and help our values prevail, and to cast palls of doubt over those with different ways of thinking about things. And Science can do all this even while wearing a mask of legitimacy that commands public trust.

You see, a psych prof might play dumb and respond publicly to this charge by asking how Science, which is after all Science, be anything other than something synonymous with trustworthiness and objectivity. And at this point, just about 60 percent of those within earshot will fall in line. But I am not arguing as someone anti-Science, which is what they'd have you believe. I am not arguing that Science is inherently corrupt. Quite the opposite. I am arguing that Science, like anything else, can be subverted or skewed for purposes for which Science was not intended and that psych profs have hijacked Science for such self-serving and institutional purposes, only one or two of which I'll entertain here. When we speak about the essential scientific method, we're talking about a process that does not impose on us much in the way of rules -- of prescriptions or proscriptions -- that is really synonymous with a small set of fundamentals, and then adorned by a host of techniques that are free to vary from one discipline to the next, one researcher to the next. But the criteria psych profs use to qualify or rank research suggests a preference for certain superfluous and arbitary elements -- what we call paradigms -- that advance institutional aims and preserve community traditions, but which have no real standing with respect to science and which can actually alienate the researcher from his or her own wits and the phenomenon under study. It's these elements psych profs demand of research and impose as conditions on the professional membership or standing of students and colleagues when it comes time to dole out the amenities bound up with the social and material context of their science. It's these elements they apply to themselves and their research as cosmetics that allows them to perpetrate the fraud of maximizing their own semblance of science while casting a campaign of doubt on the research of others whose methodology does not look all that ingrained or that does not employ the most complicated statistical analyses. I think they're trying to capitalize on a misapprehension among the public and their own students, which is the less you understand on the face of it, the more scientific it is. So people like me who accentuate the value of ideas and embrace the fundamentals of science in a low-gliding investigation of the phenomena under study, and those of us who like the challenge of writing our research in English without relying on jargon and formatting and other epistemological conventions...we stand naked before our readers. We do not create this static in which we can drown out otherwise obvious deficiencies in conceptualization, fact collection, and expression. But on the plus side, we're usually the ones whose work has more substance in spite of having less flash. If a psych prof wants to be judged according to his fireworks display in celebration of his field's independence from Science, than so be it. But that's not me. Unfortunately, when the psych prof is intimidated by your thinking or when your research topic or theory puts pressure on their worldview, then they have to do something. And while they can't rebut your ideas or discredit your methods, they can raise a number of spectres -- invoke a number of magical chants -- in the hopes of persuading others not to read your work or, failing that, to review your work far more critically than they would their own. I guarantee you...any standard failed by my research is failed by those calling on my readers to give me or the phenomenon I love a failing grade [in Science]. And for people who do not like ghosts, they sure raise a number of spectres. Let's take them up here:

Methodology-Based Criticisms

The idea here is that if I'm studying dreams, I'm doing metaphysics, unless of course I compensate accordingly by using only the most advanced and materialistic resources available to psych profs. Brains. Sleep labs. You see, there are a lot of psych profs out there to whom I can present my rather interesting findings. But without so much as a reference to these findings, they leap right into dismissive questions with almost rhetorical intonation, like the following: "How do you know the dream they reported is the real dream? How do you know your research subject didn't lie to you? How do you know the subject's brain didn't lie to him by distorting the dream before he could awaken? Unless you can put a camera inside a person's brain, you can't do any research with dreams that I would consider scientific." Of course, they conveniently overlook (if not downright repress) similar questions that dog their research. For example, when a research subject uses a questionnaire to rate his or her level of agreement with statements on a scale from 1 "Strongly Agree" to 5 "Strongly Disagree", how do we know the "3" he circled means the same thing on question 27 as on question 23? How do we know the person didn't get tired and, for lack of having a real opinion, didn't just circle a response to item 50 without really thinking about it? How do we know the subject isn't lying? Of course, the psych prof would respond to these questions by pointing to the results of research and prior pilot testing verifying the questionnaire's sound psychometric properties as proof his or her approach is meaningful. But I can produce comparable results about my methodology and I can produce complex and interesting patterns of results unlikely to have been obtained by chance alone. So why do we favor certain research subjects over others? Certain methodologies over others? Because some research, more obviously than others, projects to the public and to ourselves the image of science we want in Psychology's press junket. And phenomena like dreaming makes us look weak by challenging us to think and work, something at which we're not adept, and by bringing out in a field that wants to appear united all these diverse views. The more mysterious the phenomenon, the more it behaves like an inkblot and elicits different theories and methods. We don't like that.

Phenomena-Based Criticisms

These psych profs would rather believe my research subjects were lying to me than believe my research findings establish something as modest as "dream experiences serve a function within the human personality." There's a "no, no, no, no, no" quality to their reasoning that ranges from facetious distraction and evasive humor to hostile ideological rants. In either case you feel just to raise the topic of dreams this steel gate that drops in front of you, and you know that the curtain has just been raised on a campaign to minimize and disort the validity of dreams where it comes to dreams having a language, function, or meaning: "What?! You mean you have evidence of dreams that bear an indisputable resemblance to waking events that followed? Well that's just illusory correlation, self-fulfilling prophecy, or probability!!!" I like the way they sling from the side of their mouths these zombified psychological constructs whose meaning is no longer the point and which are not applicable here (e.g. illusory correlation, self-fulfilling prophecy). And I like how they invoke probability, which is not a real cause, but a proxy for some formal causation that is not yet known. ("With trillions of dreams and trillions of experiences worldwide every day, of course we'll find some people whose dreams match their subsequent waking events"). In any event, the evidence they require from you just to persuade others to drop their prejudices against dreaming is about 10 times the evidence they require to declare support for a research hypothesis about some other subject. Of course, the one way to avoid this is to adopt a research hypothesis that portrays dreams as meaningless, as random, as cerebral waste or byproducts of neuronal discharge. Technically, such a hypothesis should draw as much skepticism as any other hypothesis assigning a function for dreams, but alas psych profs let their biases hang out like fifteen pounts of abdominal flab over a speedo.

Q: Can Dreams Predict the Future?

JWE: I believe so. I like to think of two different types of prediction. There is what I call the point prediction, where a dream image across the history of a person reliably precedes some event or condition that does not resemble it physically. If it did resemble it physically, we'd have a literal prediction, and while many people report this kind of seemingly miraculous prediction, somewhere between the miraculous and the mundane is what interests me the most: the meaningful. The point predictions of which I speak are, well, let me favor you with an example:

Over the course of months I scattered muses about the torrent of tornado nightmares I experienced as a graduate student in Psychology. Having been a graduate student in multiple psychology programs ("move over, storm chasers"), I learned to expect within hours of the dream some threat or recrimination, delivered formally by letter or personally in a closed door castigation, stemming from some manner in which I behaved unconventionally or failed to behave in accordance with expectations. Just as tornadoes can take numerous forms (your "wedge," "rope," and "classic funnel" twisters), the ways I could deviate from expectations far outnumbered the deviations I could imagine...or predict. Even after a tornado dream warned me that a dizzying imbroglio was imminent, I was just as unable to anticipate the source of the "storm" as I am to anticipate the when and the where of a twister in a tornado watchbox. But the variety of storm shapes and sizes is really beside the point, the point being that you do not want to be caught in the path of a professor's peeve, penchant, or political peccadillo. In a nutshell, the moment a psychologist gets it in his or her head that this is appropriate or right, it becomes your business to know and to conform to that value. The consequences for failing to do so may include heavy rain, wind gusts in excess of 200 mph, withdrawl from your doctoral program, large hail...

Profile of Common Storms

......Theory. This is the rope tornado. These tornadoes are so gaunt as to appear harmless. But they cause some of the most severe damage known to careers. Do not include "Jungian" or "dream researcher" among the list of self-descriptive adjectives you provide during the "tell me a little about yourself" section of orientation. Some closet behaviorist on faculty may be taking notes. More broadly, beat down the urge to align yourself with any school of thought or identify your focus of research. It's not like any one else really wants to know anyway. You'd be better off steering clear of Psychology in your introductions to the faculty at large by referring to yourself as, well, anything from a "Buffy enthusiast" to a "good square dancer." Personally, I recommend "para-sailing." It shows you have an active life outside Psychology, which for some reason is very important to most clinical psychologists, who regard it as a prerequisite for mental health. What does that tell you? But most importantly, it's a hobby in which no one else, well, let's just say you won't have to worry about other students or profs requesting to join you, which brings me to my next storm.

......Participation. There is no such thing as a "request" or even a "suggestion." When a psych prof "suggests" you do something, especially when he or she "has a suggestion for you" in those words, you take it as you would any standing order from a drill sergeant. Choice of the word "suggest" is symptomatic of an attempt at managing an impression as a populist ("I'm a good guy, man of the people") and benevolent deity ("God of the New [most modern] Testament") as well as being symptomatic of the time-tested expectation that you will throw yourself on the suggestion like a selfless soldier on a live grenade.

This is the tornado you don't see because a dry, windy day produced a funnel with relatively little condensed vapor near the ground. In another, less metaphorical way, you don't see this tornado because it's rooted in deception and lack of communication. There is a lot of hard policy and procedures that live between the lines of anything written in a department handbook (even one written to resemble a Department of Defense Operations Manual). When the department head goes out of his way to let you know attendance at weekly colloquia is not mandatory, what he really means is that it is an opportunity to prove your devotion to the department. More often than not, the faculty are noting who's been naughty (not attending) and who's been nice, and come Christmas, you can find more than a few lumps of coal in your stocking. Just remember that if they had required attendance, they would have had no way of knowing for sure who is a team player and who is not. Some may call this 'entrapment.' But as far as meteorology is concerned, it's as ingrained a feature in the program climate as barometric pressure. Also, pay your graduate student association dues, even before your electric bill, no matter how little interest you have in this straw authority, no matter how little interest you have in the golf outings, and how little interest you have in watching the pet rat walk a tightrope for the department talent show. They want to know you like them. If you don't communicate to them that you view yourself as fitting in, they will most likely decide you don't fit in. And this includes letting them know how much interest you take in your professional development. You need to appear to be looking into joining extracurricular research teams in the hopes of becoming the sixth author on as many four-page publications as possible. I don't care how frivolous the research, how much it may wreak havoc with your thesis schedule, or how meaningless a role you play in the research. Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. And most grad students do not defend their thesis inside four years (or their dissertation in seven).

.......Politics. This conflict produces the classic funnel tornado. You'll know the damage when you see it! When a professor asks you why he did not see you at the election day poll he worked just outside your neighborhood, adding "we really could have used you," just say you cast an absentee ballot for you prior state of residence and leave it at that! For crying out loud, do not imply you may not have voted Democratic!

......Personality. This is the wedge tornado, because to violate this law of thermodynamics is to invite a storm event with the widest path of destruction. Do not get personal with your work! Do not get any bright ideas! You may be excited about teaching for the first time. But make no mistake, it's not really your classroom. You are a trainee, and you represent the department by proxy. It would help to think of yourself as the terrycloth equivalent of your practicum supervisor, even if the practicum supervisor is a wire-mesh pedagogue at best. (You remember the Harry Harlow experiment). If your teaching practicum supervisor is a physiological psychologist, do not write a syllabus that allocates only one lecture to physiological psychology while allocating four to personality. I don't care how expendable the structure of the ear, do not forget to teach it and test it if it's in all the textbooks. Do not recommend a textbook other than the most recent edition of Myers that comes standard in the department. And under no circumstances should you, even in jest, suggest forgoing a textbook in favor of a packet of original readings! This all goes in your file! Similarly, abort any claim to creative control, even on projects you presume to be your own. Indulge your thesis advisor when he tells you to abandon the exploratory analyses you want to implement in favor of the usual lineup of t tests, ANOVAs, and correlations committee members can comprehend on little sleep and even less interest (in your research). And count yourself lucky your advisor did not require under the terms of your assistantship that you propose a thesis that advances his or her own research.

The strongest tornados are those characterized by the greatest difference in barometric pressure inside and outside the funnel. Just remember that if the policies, procedures, and prejudices are exerting strong pressure from outside you, and you do not feel that pressure, conditions are right for the development of an F-4 or F-5.

Like most tornado victims, I feel very unlucky for having found myself at any point along a path of destruction as narrow as it is potent...as potent as it is narrow. A guy just can't help but feel singled-out. And just like a tornado has an internal anatomy of suction zones and vortices wrapped within the exterior funnel cloud, so this political adversity is wrapped inside a charged climate of latent personality conflict & professional training. The 'leading event,' which packs a condensed punch of verbal abuse, is wrapped inside a wider thermodynamic system. You have the latent rising heat, the personality conflict, that dismissably dim sense that maybe some of the profs would not like you if they knew more about you. Listen to that voice inside you! And then, in the path of destruction behind the tornado, there is a protracted period of probation marked by sustained tension and vigilance. This is when you assess the damages and determine whether your standing in the program can be salvaged (or whether you will drag out the inevitable to the tune of insoluble loan debt). Just where was this tornado on the Fugita scale? Then you take stock of faculty expectations and monitor your behavior, molding it to those expectations. It's a skill not unlike hand-eye coordination. You just have to play a lot of ball to develop the skill.

Dreams as Symbolic Blueprints of Future Events

Then there is another kind of evidence for prediction which I call the interval prediction. This is the dream that connects with, or maps to, a subsequent waking event across many points along their correspondence. The best example of this is the rather compelling synchronistic experience I relate in the first chapter of my novel. In this case an August, 1984 nightmare seemed to provide a symbolic blueprint for a series of events that took place over the course of an October, 1988 morning.

The opening chapter to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, which can be reviewed online at no charge, 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 Chapter 6 (Dead Center Field) the synchronistic journey introduced in the title chapter 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.

Remember that if dreams are capable of adjusting our awareness, our mental sense organ, without our awareness, then they are in effect symbolic precursors of future states of awareness. In some ways, future waking events grow out of a preceding dream like a plant from soil. Now this is seldom if ever an exact science because when I say 'waking event' I do not refer merely to a concete and observable collection of objects in space and over time, but throw into this mix the subjective meaning of this event for us. The dream is not the human eye. The dream is the inner eye. It sees what things mean to us and expresses that meaning in the language of experience. It is only natural that this dream experience should bare a resemblance to events that follow it in waking reality. The fact this correspondence is neither perfect does not rule out the dream's role as a contributor to the future as we "see it" (receive it psychologically).

Q: Do We Share Dreams?

JWE: I recount in the second chapter of my book a dream I shared with someone else in waking reality. But without having to resort to rare example of literal dream sharing, I'd like to say that an occasional architect or contributor to the dream is that preexperiential mind Jung called the "collective unconscious." Even before we put anything in our brains, any experiences or education, the brain has a structure and dynamic, an anatomy and physiology, and before that, it has the genetic seed for one. In other words, we can think of a mind as being an empty container at some point. Any fluid can be affected by the material of which the container is made and the fluid takes on the shape of the container. So unlike Locke's tabula rasa, this container can be said to contain meaningful built-in material in its make-up, in its walls, so to speak, and in its shape. I am speaking metaphorically of course, and I confess I am somewhat limited with respect to my ability to imagine all the contributing properties of a pre-experiential mind. Some people have referred to the pre-experiential material as inherited ideas. Some liken this material to templates like that used to determine the style and organization of our text in a word processing application. Some characterize this pre-experiential contribution as a predisposition to organize subsequent experiences in similar 'human' ways with perhaps some slight variations across individuals. Jung thought we were all born with a personal myth, which unfolded across an ontogentic timetable like so much psychological DNA. Occasionally, big dreams, big experiences, and synchronistic experiences connecting a big dream to a big experience like the kind in my chapter 1 give us an obscure glimpse of this myth. It manifests itself during periods in our life when some condition -- could be a crisis or rite of passage or state of personal reflection or self-indulgent devotion to our characterological imperatives -- cuts through that static I discussed earlier -- the arbitrary will, the random happenstances, the requirements of the external world -- and shows who we were meant to be. My August, 1984 nightmare occurred in the middle of a rather slow summer. Lulled into a boredom by the absence of grade school friends and schoolwork, my mental focus turned completely inward.

Dream Part of Synchronistic Tapestry with Mathematical Structure

(The following was written months preceding the release of my book)

"Some of you have asked me -- um -- have asked me -- well, when I'd like to see the thing out -- and I always maintained for reasons I will elaborate on shortly that I preferred February to January and March. Soon after the book is released, we can all enjoy discussing the book's many characters, storylines, and symbols, and I look forward to adding Fireflies to the reading lists of regional book clubs and libraries. The benefits of a coffee house discussion forum should extend to the author. Every once in a while, you come across a novel that defies classification. In answer to your question I think the book is classified as Fiction/Spiritual -- at least that's what the back cover reads -- even though it is based on too many actual events for comfort. The trans-genre Fireflies is part testament -- I witnessed many things that puzzled me over the years -- from the paranormal to the pathological -- so everyone, author included, can expect to learn a thing or two from a collaborative discussion of the work. In this way, Fireflies is unique. I present this dramatic expose as evidence of interventions in our familiar worlds of 'otherworldy intelligence,' the stirrings of ulterior things -- things living in its soil and its atmosphere, on occasion grazing the plane of our world to be glimpsed if only we'd look and at other times unseating us with guttural movements on a tectonic scale -- manifesting the random edges and extremities of an infrastructure unknown to us. In writing this book I seek not a classroom of students but partners in an investigative journey."

I had actually hoped the book would not be available before February, but there is no succinct and simple way to tell you why. For those of you who've read the first chapter of my book (available on my web site), you'd understand that there is a site here in the D.C. area, a nexus of coincidences which I worked into the plot of my novel. This site also happens to be about 2 miles from one of the psychology programs on which the book is based, ground zero for many of the actual events to which the book testifies. The following four dates present the cardinal points on a time-map of sorts. If the hypothalamus can be said to regulate such basic functions as body temperature, than I have to wonder whether there isn't an organ at work, analogous to a compass, sending me in and out of harm's way on a curious schedule. What follows is actually a very mild example of the patterns from the "You-just-can't-write-stuff-like-this" file. That's what I like about Fireflies. It provides an obscure glimpse of a script beyond imagination. Kind of gets you thinking about a psychological equivalent of DNA, perhaps not unlike Jung's "collective unconscious" and "individuation vis-a-vis a personal myth"

August, 1984: I awaken from an August nightmare I would never forget.

October, 1988: Nightmare is realized, unfolding across a sequence of events on a Saturday morning in October. I leave the city.

April, 1998: I learn that I would be returning to the city, as one of the few schools in the country offering clinical respecialization programs for research PhDs admits us. (I later withdrew from the program under political pressure, but my wife continued to finish her second doctorate).

February (?), 2004: This is when I am anticipating the formal release of my book. This would be spectacular. It would come at a perfect time if I consider the resources available to me in this month, and when I consider it would also mark the month in which my wife completes her licensing exam.

As you can plainly see, the February, 2004 date is pure speculation. (UPDATE: Book was released in February). Well, it's more of an educated extrapolation. My book is due to be released shortly, and I suspect it will be February; given the first three plotted points, February is the fourth and only missing set of coordinates in this square-shaped script. There seems to be a symmetry here. 1984, 1988, 1998, 2004.

Consider the following:

[A] INNER JOIN VS. OUTER JOIN

1988 and 1998 are 10 years apart 1984 and 2004 are 20 years apart

[B] If we consider the INNER JOIN months, April (98) and October (88) are six months apart (diametric opposite points on the calender). October (88) is when I decided I would be leaving D.C. April (98) is when it became clear I would return.

[C] If we consider the OUTER JOIN months, August (84) and February (04) are six months apart (diametric opposite points on the calender). February also happened to be traditionally the worst month in my graduate school career, hence the title of Chapter 5, "28 Days Till Tomorrow."

[D] The numbers corresponding to the months involved are 2 (Feb), 4 (Apr), 8 (Aug), and 10 (Oct), with 2 months separating February and April, and two months separating August and October.

[E] Something tells me that the numbers associated with the years themselves (84; 88; 98; 04) bare some sort of improbable similarity with the numbers associated with the months: (8-84), (10-88), (4-98), (2-04). An increase in 2 months separates the 8 (of 84) and the 10 (of 88), while a decrease of two months separates the 4 (of 98) and the 2 (of 04).

Some with metaphysical sensibilities, like a numerologist or alchemist, might be inclined to muse over the math involved here. Okay, so I will tell you that I am working on it and will leave it at that!

Without going into the details of Chapter 1 -- and its subsequent connection to Chapters 6 and 10 -- I will say that I was thinking of reconstructing the 'walk' featured in Chapter 1 (the October, 1988 realization of the August 1984 nightmare) and then from there continuing to the school (April, 1998), thus connecting the four points in this "synchronistic quad." (Paranthetical text added).

As for the book celebration, I am thinking of typing it into a mini-pilgrimmage, a walk retracing my steps from DuPont Circle to the Washington National Cathedral to a site that will forever live in infamy, the last straw from a straw discipline. The straw that broke this camel's back, inspiring a book so "large" that readers will be breaking its binding for years to come.

Dream Draws from Life's Unseen Mathematical Properties to Make Point

980205 (THE DREAM OF FEBRUARY 5, 1998)

I this dream, I observed from directly over the stadium a Yankees-Red Sox game. The Sox were batting in the bottom of the 9th, and with 2 out a batter by the name of Daniel Ishben stepped to the plate with a full count and the bases full, vying to break a 2-2 tie. Ishben surprised the Yankees by hitting a nubber up the center of the infield, trickling beneath the pitcher's 2 legs and between the 2 confused infielders on either side of the 2nd base bag. Two runs scored, including the runner who had occupied 2nd base, bringing the game to an abrupt end.

I'd like to impress upon you the dream's unique mathematical properties. Around the time I experienced this baseball dream, I was mindful of the some other peculiarity in the series of dreams surrounding this one: these dreams used a variety of my residences -- past and present -- as dream settings. I dreamed of my current home. I dreamed of my the residence I occupied just prior to this one. And I even dreamed of my childhood home. (Unusual for someone whose dreams contain a preponderance of fictitious settings, distorted settings, or real-life settings outside the home such as work or school). Some hunch compelled me to examine whether the numbers associated with these addresses could be mapped on the baseball diamond, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd base and, yes, it's "home" plate, point of both ORIGIN and DESTINATION in the pastoral sport of baseball.

It occurred to me that my childhood home - featured prominently in these dreams - may correspond in some way to home plate in the baseball dream. The address of my childhood home -- 121. Not only do we have the coinciding names home plate and childhood home, but the sum of the digits in the address 121 is equal to 4, suggesting the fourth point along the diamond. How could "121" fit the baseball diamond? Well, if you are a batter standing at home plate, 3rd base is 1 unit of distance away, second base is 2 units of distance away, and 1st base is 1 unit of distance away. "121" is an expression of the view of the infield from home plate.

I was inspired at this time to consider my residence at the time of the dream, which was 210. If I were viewing the infield from 3rd base, 2nd base is immediately to my left, followed by 1st base, and then home plate, to which we can assign a 0 because it is not a base and cannot be occupied, and yet comes before first base, i.e. before 1. 2 - 1 - 0. (And why shouldn't I consider mapping 210 from third base, given the fact the sum of the digits in the address 210 is equal to 3?). Little did I know at the time I would be moving to a city where I'd actually put down roots nearly as deep as those I put down as a child. By symbolizing my current residence as 3rd base, this dream is communicating that I will soon begin the next meaningful chapter in my life, bringing me full circle from a HOME OF ORIGIN to the HOME OF MY MAKING. For those of you who enjoyed reading the section of this FAQ titled "Dream Part of Synchronistic Tapestry with Mathematical Structure" (see above), you'd be interested to know the HOME OF DESTINATION in this case refers to the Washington, D.C. area that includes the Washington National Cathedral (site of the strangely-fulfilled 1984 nightmare) and also site of the "straw" doctoral program that "broke this camel's back," inspiring me to write Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun. So home plate, which once represented the home of origin (121 address) would soon come to represent the home of his destination.

Now if I plot the numbers on the bases, "121" from Home Plate plots 1 on 3B, 2 on 2B, and 1 on 1B. "210" from 3B also plots the 2 on 2B, also plots the 1 on 1B, and plots a 0 on home plate (which makes sense since home plate is not really a base but a point of origin that precedes 1B). These two addresses then give us numerical assignments for all four bases.

Home plate = 0 1B = 1 2B = 2 3B = 1

And then I took up the address just prior to his current address, which is 2025. Just how does the four-digit address "2025" express the view of the infield from 2nd base?

If we read the bases from the vantage point of 2B (and this is the same whether we read clockwise or counterclockwise), we read 1-0-1-2. If we double this number, we end up with 2-0-2-4, just one digit shy of the "2025" address! We do not have to just double 1-0-1-2 willy nilly without an explanation. There may be meaning in the fact 2024 (an approximation of the "2025" address) is derived from a doubling of 1-0-1-2. Unlike the other bases, 2B stares directly into that special place on the diamond that cannot be occupied and that serves as both point of origin and destination. (I am also reminded of the statement from Jung that one cannot directly see or know the Unconscious source of oneself, but only infer it indirectly, much like one only sees oneself in a mirror or much like astronomers have to infer black holes from its pull on nearby stars). So what does one see when one looks home from 2B? The four digits suggests that the view of 2B is included among the diamond viewed. This suggests self-awareness. At this point, I am inspired to think of the diamond as a representation of the human psyche, the structure and dynamics of which preoccupied us intellectually in a late-evening discussion. Then it occurred to me. This conversation may have still been on his mind as he slept. Many theorists equate dreaming to a form of sleep thinking. The dream may have picked up where we left off in our pre-sleep reflections. In this dream may be the answer to some important questions, or at least a useful perspective.

One of the things that really stood out as far as points to take away from this remarkable puzzle is the expression 'what we see is in the eye of the beholder.' Each address describes the view seen from that vantage point, as if the view itself is an extension of that vantage point. Crucial to understanding dreaming, which was my objective prior to falling asleep the night before I experienced this dream, is the idea that there is no world but for that which we filter through our mind's eye. We should think of consciousness as a mental sense organ and, like any other highly specialized tool or instrument (like the scope on a high-powered fire arm), this mental sense organ that puts a face on the real world, is something we routinely correct, calibrate, or re-orient when we sleep. Maybe consciousness as a mental sense organ is affected, possibly architected, by our dreams as much as they are by our waking events during the day. Might dreams, as potently scripted experiences, directly influence the sources of consciousness itself. Think about it. Dreams are experiences. But unlike waking events, which also influence our mental states, dreams do not get filtered through our waking awareness first. We're not conscious when we dream. Also unlike waking events, dreams are not determined by our arbitrary will. Whether we like it or not, when we dream, we're being carried along a current of events over which we have no control. And unlike waking events, dreams do not present us with the static of random happenstances that are not byproducts of our own natures, that do not originate within us, and that may not concern us.

Sometimes, I like to wait until the end of the day to start thinking about a dream I had early that morning. On the walk over here I was thinking about a dream I had this morning. I see in the dream a reflection of or a precursor to the ideas I developed later in the day. What's the idea? That dreams may be a view of the world from the inside out. The dream I experienced earlier in the day and prior to this course of thinking, was a dream in which I was 'changing' (my clothes) in the foyer of my childhood home (121). I was under enormous time pressure to reach the municipal police station on foot to report a bombing I witnessed. I noticed as I reached for the new T-shirt that it was inside out. I could see the label along the neck and the stitching along the seams. I considered turning the shirt around and inside out so that I would be properly oriented when I pulled it over my head. I did not want to walk out the front door and face the world with my shirt backwards and inside out. I then examined the shirt in the foyer mirror, and then looked at my face and into one of my eyes. As the dream turned lucid I marveled at how I was able to look into my eye (i.e. "I") when dreaming, the point here being is that that's what I do when I dream: I look into my "I," the internal conditions that will exert considerable pressure on how I perceive and approach the world.

A deeper interpretation of the dream points to a cross-winds within the human psyche marked by a tension between dual instincts to conserve and change the way our lives are organized. Our identity, and constraints and fixtures within our external world, collaborate to make our waking world relatively viscous. But the worlds that make up our inner life (mind-brain), those worlds not under direct control of our awareness, are considerably more mercurial in that they do not operate under constraints imposed by external fixtures and by the need for self-consistency. Developments in our inner life experiences, such as when we dream, are capable of softening the biases and other fixtures that make up our personal identity and routine. They work to reorganize life as we know it to maximize harmony within life as a whole. Dreams may breathe the psychological equivalent of oxygen into depleted and deteriorated sectors of our human inheritance and humanity, not unlike a low pressure system bringing storms to the mid-Atlantic states or an enterprise zone initiative bringing business to impoverished urban districts.

According to another view, human development, at both the micro (day-to-day dynamics) and macro (individuation across life span) levels, can be conceptualized as movement along the basepaths. At the point of origin, all thoughts originate from outside our awareness. Home plate refers to the spontaneous origin of psychological products into conscious awareness from some point outside conscious awareness. The batter symbolizes the hidden roots of all creative inspiration -- to the nascent ideas and personal qualities that are left at our doorstep and that we may choose to take in, raise, reify, and refine. The batter Daniel Ishben in the dream supports this interpretation, as "Ich bin" is German for "I am." If I trace back the evolution of all my thinking, I end up with a dimly perceived or spontaneous hunch, vision, or feeling. As we take control of the thought, subjecting it to our consciousness, it is refined to the point where we begin to think of it as our own product (1B, 2B). At some point, we may even identify with it, or if we're talking about our identity, we may become so foreclosed on our identity as to deny ourselves the freedom and flexibility necessary for further growth or adjustment. We are said at this point to be stuck on 2B, stranded on our own island to tend to our self-awareness. We may pride ourselves on our distance from our sources, developing a prejudice that causes us to frown on all things intuitive, spontaneous, undeveloped, or outside our control. (Actually, I have indicted the whole field of Psychology as being so stuck).

Now around the time I experienced this baseball dream – and indeed over my entire lifespan – I've dreamt of tornadoes. A tornado is this basic development structure – this coil – expressed in the substance of wind. The winds inside a tornado move in the same direction in which the runners round the bases – that is, counterclockwise – and debris that ascends in the funnel can be said to repeatedly visit all points but at a higher elevation. Even more coincidentally, scientists believe that inside the funnel – at its center – at its eye (or “I”) -- is a stillness – a space in which air travels calmly in a direct vertical path up into the atmosphere to help equalize global temperature. This fact has its counterpart in the baseball dream, when Ishben (“I am”) hits a nubber (a slow roller) directly up the center of the diamond inside a “whirlwind” of confused and crowded infielders. The connection between these two motifs, the baseball diamond and the tornado – may have been alluded to in 990110 – when he dreamed that a tornado raked over rocks in a dark room, transforming coal instantaneously into perfectly cut and polished diamonds. The tornado also halved a penny – a powerful image akin to splitting the atom. The penny is the indivisible unit of value in our economic system and its halving may refer to Ishben’s grounder, which halved the baseball diamond into two triangles. The triangle on the right containing the vertices HOME-1B-2B would form the symbolic equivalent of progression, while the triangle on the left containing 2B-3B-HOME would form the symbolic equivalent of regression. Both progression and regression form an indivisible unit of value in the sense that one without the other compromises development. In the development of an idea, there are ideas that never get off the ground -- that never find a utlity or application -- because no one rationally refines them beyond their intuitive rawness, and then there are dogmatic thoughts that lose value or meaning because they get polished to the point where no one wants to adapt or develop it further (i.e. stranded on second base). Similarly, I know people who've never 'left home' literally or figuratively speaking, and thus never really matured, and I know others whose professional successes encouraged them to foreclose on an identity beyond which they stop maturing as adults or individuating as persons (i.e. stranded on second base).

Q: How Are Dreams Related to Waking Events?

JWE: Many people attempt to make sense of a dream by matching images in the dream to familiar material from the prior day. While this may prove useful, I find as a scientist and detective that a disciplined, data-driven approach requires that I suspend the search for apparent dreaming-waking correlations until after I have discovered all the relationships within the individual dream first, not unlike what I did to uncover the hidden mathematical message in dream 980205. Here I concern myself with the language of the dream and hope to find the dream's alphabetic structure some clues to its meaning and possible even the function of dreams in general.

Dreaming illustrates the need for a science of oppositionality. In dreams we find a number of self-similarities and oppositionalities, the accounting of which goes a long way to dissecting the structure of the dream and framing its relevance for waking life. Where the similarities are concerned, we often find transcategorical patterns that express a common rhythm across otherwise disparate experiential categories (e.g. color, movement, music, shapes, etc.) that are random or unrelated in waking reality. Take for example the path of one's walk in a dream. Tracing that path may be produce a diagram that bares the same shape as a critical object in the dream. In the same morning, a person might dream of a tornado (which is known to move counterclockwise) and a baseball game (movement around the bases counterclockwise). Suspending the urge to superficially relate the dream to waking life prior to this kind of data-driven attention to the dream can lead to interesting insights like the kind of which I wrote in my post about the mathematical properties of a dream.

It is this language I want to explore further and it is more fundamental to the interpretable dream than the one-to-one mapping of dream images to latent verbal propositions or waking life entities.

Perhaps a cataloguing of various rhythms might correspond (and shed light on) various ways dreams, as experiences, alter the sources of consciousness itself to predispose us to changes in the way we perceive and interpret what we experience on a daily basis. At some level what we are getting a glimpse of when we dream is the expression of changes to structures at the root of consciousness and identity. (Much like what appears on a PC monitor is an expression of application scripts that run in the background).

Q: How Would You Go About Studying Dreams Scientifically?

The study of individual dreams, especially one of our own dreams, is known as a personological approach. It's considered pre-scientific, though I don't approve of the term because it implies that this kind of attention to dreams is not part of the scientific process. Not only would I argue that this kind of approach has a place in science, but that its contribution to the science of dreams is invaluable. It provides us with the questions worth asking and the ideas worth testing in more empirical (i.e. scientific) research. One example of a personological approach is to track and trend dream motifs across a searchable database of one's dreams. I create a file for each of my dreams, naming each file by its date such that 980205 refers to the dreams reported for the morning of February 5, 1998. The diaries also include extensive background on one's waking life. If you doubt whether this approach has any merit, just ask a friend of mine, who entrusted just such a diary to my analytical skills. I discovered that not only do two motifs covary throughout the diary such that where you see one image you see the other (i.e. binary motif), but I found enough similarities in the waking experiences proximate with this pair to say something wildly fascinating about the role of these objects in his life and personality. I'd like to elaborate, but I'd be infringing on Chapter 6 of my book.

The personological approach is part of what I call a self-science of dreams. By that I mean a data-driven approach to dreams where the data is the dream material of a single individual and where there is acute and structured attention to that data. The fleshing out of a dream's structure by playing connect-the-dots with points of oppositionality and self-similarity within the dream is another example of this data-driven approach.

The Empirical as a Series of Personological Studies

I devised a program of empirical research I call Experiography to broadly but empirically survey the relationship between dreaming and waking experiences. It's difficult to find a group of 30 individuals with diaries like those I described above under the personological approach, but the Experiographic methodology makes due with the diaries volunteers are able to put together over a two-to-four week period. On the positive side, the volunteers are instructed not to omit any material from their diaries, so the diaries contain insignificant dreams the self-styled personologists may not feel inspired to record. On the negative side, the diaries in an experiographic research study are not likely to include many of the most significant dreams in the life of the person. Experiography makes up for the relative lack of content at the individual level with a disciplined diary includes a level of detail you may not find in the naturalistic diaries. The research instructions also imposes a standard, a common denominator, so that all the volunteers provide categories of information that makes possible an analysis across individuals. But unlike contemporary scientific dream research, Experiography does not sacrifice depth for breadth, having been inspired by a personological analysis of naturalistic diaries to collect data that allows us to partition variance within the individual volunteer. Drawing conclusions within each volunteer about that volunteer's condition before describing the group of volunteers as a whole is indispensible to a proper science of Psychology. By treating the volunteers as a series of independent n = 1 experiments, maintaining the integrity of the individual and drawing conclusions at the individual level before abstracting and extracting commonalties across individuals is mission-critical, and it contrasts sharply with the contemporary method of throwing as many volunteers as possible into a statistical sausage grinder. The difference between my approach and that of modern psychology professors is clear. We're not playing between the 40 yard lines here. I maximize data within individual research participants, forcing me to manage the number of participants, while the modern psych prof maximizes the number of participants, forcing him or her to manage the collection of data to the few categories of information believed (i.e. hypothesized) to be relevant. In fact, in the case of the modern psych prof, it's the statistical analyses that is a priori. By beginning with a desired statistical analysis, all other research study parameters become constrained. When so many research volunteers become necessary, a hypothesis becomes necessary, which is not appropriate for the study of a phenomenon about which so little is known. In this approach, the procedures are determined beforehand and followed ballistically during the research. "This is my hypothesis. This is how I will collect my data. This is how I will analyze the data. Then I draw conclusions about the hypothesis." In fact, APA guidelines governing research style require research author commit to a hypothesis and plan of analysis and not deviate from it. And this creates a tunnel vision.

But good detectivework requires we design a study to collect data to address a question that reflects the actual level of knowledge about the subject. Admitting that we know little about dreams, some unctiously educated guess or expectation of outcome seems unproductive. Even if we're right, we don't have enough information to really know why we're right or whether some alternative explanation, which would have been obtained under a broader research design, is really the right one. But we use the study to validate not only the outcome but everything we believed about dreams when, in actuality, not enough data has been collected to even begin to make sense of the outcome. We only collected eenough data to process the hypothesis statistically. And yet we act as though the study certifies however we choose to make sense of the outcome. At this point the typical dream researcher claims that not only do dreams do "x", but that's all dreams do and no one else has anything to say on the subject. This creates an absurd state of affairs in light of the skeletal collection of facts about the highly circumscribed and uneducated hypothesis. You have psych profs out there claiming dreams are cognitive filing cabinets, cerebral waste products, or the brain's attempts to fit random images to narrative structure -- AND THAT'S IT! Check out Experiography.

Q: Is Dreaming A Product of the Mind or Brain?

JWE: Dreaming, like anything else, may have its roots in the brain, but this does not mean that brain research, and the biological construct of REM sleep, offer the best hope for the understanding of dream language, meaning, or function. In fact, I argue that they do not, especially the way these methodologies are perfunctorily deployed by most scientists better described as sleep lab technicians. I'd like to refer you to my report titled Newsweek Report Surveys Dream Research Wasteland . Then, when you've wandered long enough with your superhuman thirst for knowledge through the desert of modern dream science, I refer you to a rare oasis: my research with cancer patients.

Q: What Do Dreams Do?

JWE: One might as well ask what the human hand does. It would appear the dream, like the human hand, does many things, and we can define this function relative to various objects of importance to us. My work with cancer patients and my Experiography program of research explores the process by which dreams compensate for waking reality. It is natural, even adaptive, for us to fall into some routine ways of meeting the requirements of our external world. But when these habits outlast their usefulness, persisting long after their requirements have disappeared, held up by ideology or comfort, they become biases, and as biases, they can restrict our negotiation of both internal imperatives in the form of personal growth needs or myths and external demands in the form of new requirements for survival or new opportunities for success. It's a lot like the way we brush our teeth. We go to a dentist and the dentist measures the gumline beneath each of our teeth to determine where we have neglected to brush. We often think we brush all out teeth and every part of every tooth, and we're often surprised that our routine, often mindless, patterns of hand movements during the act of brushing find some teeth far more frequently and effectively than others. Well, think of dreaming as the dentist charged with the task of identifying and resolving biases in the way we live our life. Now unlike a full set of teeth which have been known to dentists and lay brushers since they could look inside anyone's mouth, it's not clear how we should characterize the full range of our needs or personality, and I study dreams, how they treat images from our waking life and how they treat dreamers who are biased for and against this or that part of their worlds, with the intention of gleaning the needs of the human personality. But compensation, as part of a broader goal of self-regulation, is certainly a part of it. Like I said: dreams do many things. But that does not mean we can't step back and take a high level view of all these things. The hand moves chess pieces, picks grapes, and provides self-stimulation to those of us who haven't gotten lucky in a while, across all these activities we can say that one overarching function of the hand is to grasp. The question 'what do dreams do?' can be approached in much the same way.

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Last changed: November 18, 2007