Why Psych Profs, Researchers Learn Little about Dreams

[Wyatt Ehrenfels]

Why Psych Profs, Researchers Learn Little about Dreams (excerpt from Wyatt Ehrenfels book tour Q & A) Q: Why Aren\'t We Doing More to Understand Dreams? JWE: 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 (M & H) embarrassed themselves in 1977 when they used a lack of scientific evidence for the value of analyzing dreams as a reason to claim that dreams have no meaning. If no such evidence is produced by their research, it is only because they their research is not designed to explore the issue. M & H 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. The facts did not support this conclusion, at least not any more than a host of contrary alternatives. This same criticism applies to the vast majority of their colleagues, sleep lab specialists who never properly put the matter of dream meaning to the test. Only now are people beginning to listen to the likes of Tart, Krippner, and Kavey, who call for an adequate approach to the question of dream meaning & functionality. Too little, too late for some would-be scholars whose careers suffered within an academic culture inhospitable to dreams. Take my undergraduate institution as an example, where a psych prof cited M & H (and an excerpt from the New York Times Science News), to discourage me from pursuing a senior thesis on dreams. Fortunately, I never took what he said to heart. He is so disinterested in dreams, so put off with the idea that dreams may be interpretable, that he doesn\'t remember his own dreams and that he couldn\'t bother to read the original sources. My interest in dreaming is indigenous to me as a person and entrenched in my lifestyle. I have been recalling vivid dreams since the age of five and documenting them since the age of thirteen. By the time I enrolled in my first psychology course, I had already invested hundreds of hours in reading & reflection on this subject. I could not be swayed. But I have to wonder how many other undergraduate students with budding interests in dreaming were easily deflected by statements like those of my undergraduate advisor who, by the way, ran rats through mazes for his doctoral dissertation. I also wonder how much of a factor my interest in dreams played in the minimization or marginalization of my application to doctoral programs. My vital statistics were excellent, and my precocious independent study of dreams as an undergraduate showed I had a pulse of yet another kind. But I was admitted to only 1 in 40 attempts. After the dust and dismay settled, profs at my undergraduate college, who originally pegged me as a \'shoe in,\' speculated that, owing to my interest in dreams, cherry-picking admissions committees upholding their lowest common denominator placed an asterisk (*) beside my name. So I\'ve spent the better part of my life battling those whose research is slanted toward devaluing dreams and disenfranchising others who may want to study dreams for a living. I am not saying this was the intention of vaunted molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Francis Crick and his sidekick Mitchison (C & M) who published their reverse learning theory in 1983. Unlike M & H, they set out to give the matter of dream functionality the old college try. But the depiction of dreams as cerebral garbage by the laureate credited with the decryption of DNA set back dream science even further than M & H. And I do think reverse learning theory has some merit. I believe 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. Broader interpretations of the neurological data obtained by C & M are not only possible, but downright illuminating. But "garbage" was all the tools & language of cognitive neuropsychology is capable of. And as pleased as I am to see Krippner & Combs restore conceptual freedom and phenomenological fidelity to the study of dreams, they are off by more than a few degrees if they think the answer is more cognitive neuropsychology: "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." But then, to most academics, boxed in their universities, cognitive neuropsychology actually sounds both all-encompassing and integrative. 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. Especially when we\'re dealing with a natural phenomenon for which the individual is the insoluble and indivisible vehicle. As such a phenomenon, dreaming exposes the feeble formula in Psychology\'s stock methodologies. People who actually remember their dreams want answers that affirm the meaning and functionality of what they believe they are experiencing, of what stirred them to depths of feeling or challenged them to heights of reflection. 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, dreams must strike psych profs, who give dreams no more than cursory, desultory, and perfunctory thought, as inherently imprecise and thus as incompatible with their brand of science. This is the kind of thinking that made M & H famous. But dreams are not the least bit incompatible with science. One does not need a special metaphysical adaptor to explore dreams empirically. Giving dreams the royal brush off is the habit of academics whose brand of Science is stunted by their own intellectual laziness, logical sloppiness, ADHD attention to facts, and existential fears of irrational truths. And when I say "brand of science," I refer to the policies and procedures that govern their day-to-day operations as researchers, SOPs designed like defense mechanisms to negatively reinforce their hyper-rational world views. This is the appeal of modern 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 whose disposition allows them to get lost in the field\'s distracting technical issues. All of which are completely beside the point when it comes to arguing against the meaning or exploration of dreams. Just like Psychology is very much beside the point where that other 800 pound gorilla is concerned, the human psyche. These are the people who elevate mangled 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. Given the current constitution of the academic community, if you\'re a graduate student seeking the path of least resistance or seeking to diffuse across a gradient from freshman anonymity into favor, you must know that dreaming would threaten to tie your career path in knots. And 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 by circling "D: flat earth" on their next exam, they will earn their points. These are your hoop-jumpers, students who appreciate the hidden clauses in the social contract with their professors more than they appreciate the truth. Who appreciate the artfully crafted notions of "professional development" and "committment to excellence" more than they appreciate the requirements for individuation, adult maturation, and true scientific progress. 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 the 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 thought Science was the tonic for low self-esteem. They wished to bask in the reflected glory of Science. And why not? Science confers legitimacy on things. Science validates and disqualifies. Science is an arbiter of merit. And while these students could be heard bitching about 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 the liturgy of Science 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 to disabuse the public of its folk wisdom and faith, airbrushing over God on the ceiling of the Cistene Chapel an image of themselves donning a white lab coat and toting a clipboard. They toss around words like \'objectivity\' and \'validity\' as if they were passwords, and as if 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: 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/savants. 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 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 scientific method, we\'re talking about an essential process that does not impose on us much in the way of rules -- of prescriptions or proscriptions. When we speak about the scientific method, we\'re talking about fundamentals like conceptualization and fact collection, adorned to varying degrees 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. They\'d have you believe these are the rules of Science. But they\'re not the rules of Science. They are the rules of psychological research as a social institution. It\'s these elements psych profs demand of research, yes, even if it means overlooking a gross inattention to the fundamentals. These are carrots they dangle before us as conditions for professional membership 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 communication. 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.</span> source: <span style="color:darkblue">http://www.fireflysun.com/book/DREAM_FAQ.php

[Howie]

That was inedeed some insightful reading. I have always been discussed when you have to go to the paranormal and ghost etc. section to get a book on dreaming. And you would be lucky at times to find one at all about Lucid dreaming. I would guess that this is a very under resoursed topic. Without resourses nothing gets done. I would think thatthe study of dreams would greatly enhance their research on the brain itself. no answers

[recombinant]

Very interesting indeed. I do agree that alot of it has to do with apathy, lazyness and ubiquitous rigidity in professors. I consider my thought processes to be scientific and in a perfect world, logical in nature. I personally am very concerned with the progression of psychology beyond the metaphysic consensus for the application and use the interpretation of dreams. I would like to see more of the metrics for analyzation that Wyatt Ehrenfels has developed. Honestly, I can understand some of the resistance. It really is difficult to measure an interpretation of an event as opposed to the ability to compare your own interpretation against the subjects. The scientific community needs an accepted standardized method to translate a dream instead of interpreting it....... Im off to Google to read up on Ehrenfels work!

[O'nus]

The are several points within this excerpt that are grossly generalized. One point that nearly negates the entire context is that there is no proof as to what dreaming truly is. In addition to, interpretation is the next step. Keeping in mind that psychologists are the guide to dream interpretation and often make note that the individual of interest is the most suited person to interpret their own dream. Instead of going into a tangent of how dreams would still be considered evil and wrong were it not for psychologists, read Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. Both these men (and many, if not all, psychologists) integrate neurological and somatic reasoning to their interpretation. Also, there are countless cases in which dream interpretation has aided and cured hysteria. This post infuriates me.

[evangel]

It's not JUST the professors and researchers... It is also equally a funding problem. If the funding is made available, the researchers, scientists and professors will follow. It can get circular too: The less funding there is, the less "credible" or valid such research appears to those who have the money to fund these studies. The less "credible", the less many are willing to invest. The investors are looking for research that will result in returns and I think that if we can get the one's with money involved, the rest will jump on board the bandwagon of "dream science." That is some good reading, by the way. It's too bad that many leaders in the scientific community already have preconceived notions of what "good" science is. As a result, they hinder our progress on all fronts in terms of technology, science, and culture.

[Wyatt Ehrenfels]

<<In addition to, interpretation is the next step. Keeping in mind that psychologists are the guide to dream interpretation and often make note that the individual of interest is the most suited person to interpret their own dream.>> Modern psychologists do not acknowledge that it is psychologically or practically valuable to analyze dreams. Managed care companies would never pay for sessions of which dream interpretation is a component, and dream discussion is simply too time-inefficient. Consequently, the clinical training models adapted over the years to its fiscal milieu. Dreams were forgotten. Skills associated with dream analysis were not the skills being developed, and over the course of our evolving profession, psychologists became no more willing or able than the much-maligned "man in the street" to make sense of any given dream (or help anyone else to make sense of his or her dream). <<Instead of going into a tangent of how dreams would still be considered evil and wrong were it not for psychologists, read Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. Both these men (and many, if not all, psychologists) integrate neurological and somatic reasoning to their interpretation. Also, there are countless cases in which dream interpretation has aided and cured hysteria.>> Freud and Jung are dead to modern psychology. They are unfairly branded as culture-bound charlatan chauvinists by professors quoting secondary sources at best (and usually opinions of their own professors passed down in what amounts to a defamatory oral tradition in Psychology). Dreams are a lost resource, and dream analysis a forgotten art. Very simply, the attitude of modern psychologists and psych profs toward their field is this: if you can't manualize it and teach it to the masses as part of a training model, then it cannot be part of the field. If you have to be (or have the personality of) Jung to do Jungian therapy, then a manual of Jungian therapy can't be written and Jungian therapy can't be taught (because not everyone is expected to be able to teach or understand it). I have misgivings about this argument in that psych profs have not read these scholars. The scholars simply wrote too much for any modern to digest. (We don't read many books anymore, unless its textbooks. We deal in trade papers and practical exercises). And Freud and Jung were not casual bedtime reading. A load-bearing pillar in our network of shared expectations is that everything written should have a common format and be able to be read mindlessly (with minimum expenditure of energy, quite possibly by our grandmother in her sleep). Freud and Jung were not psychologists, and if they were psychologists in this era, nothing they wrote would pass the test of peer review. Wyatt Ehrenfels http://www.fireflySun.com/news.html

[Wyatt Ehrenfels]

<<It's not JUST the professors and researchers... It is also equally a funding problem. If the funding is made available, the researchers, scientists and professors will follow. It can get circular too: The less funding there is, the less "credible" or valid such research appears to those who have the money to fund these studies. The less "credible", the less many are willing to invest. The investors are looking for research that will result in returns and I think that if we can get the one's with money involved, the rest will jump on board the bandwagon of "dream science." That is some good reading, by the way. It's too bad that many leaders in the scientific community already have preconceived notions of what "good" science is. As a result, they hinder our progress on all fronts in terms of technology, science, and culture.>> Excellent point. You really seem to have your finger on the pulse of what's important here. The professors and researchers are the product (and symptom) of a system of requirements of which funding is a critical component. When a faculty search committee reviews applications for a tenure-track position, the committee favors professors with external sources of funding. Regardless of the nature or quality of your work, if you come connected to money, you are going to be favored for appointment. Knowing that, even graduate students are taught to seek out the money. Students interested in basic dream research are at a disadvantage, and thus dreaming itself becomes a target of systemic discrimination. The phenomenon is disproportionately underrepresented in psychological research, where it is either neglected or whether it is distorted through a process in which it is fit into fundable research methodologies. Wyatt Ehrenfels http://www.fireflySun.com/news.html

[evangel]

I'm not sure how dream anlysis and interpretation would be handled by hard science. I'm of the conviction that most dreams, especially LDs are pretty subjective. Though I find some value in some common/universal dream archetypes and symbols, I have yet to find a comprehensive "dream symbols/dream interpretation" book that is valid or worth reading. Part of the problem too is that the phenomena that are sometimes LD-related such as ESP and other paranormal or spiritual things are just too difficult to measure or study. I am hoping for more physiologiocal studies of people who are frequent LDers (what brains/other body parts look like after 20 years of frequent LDing and then social commonalities among LDers such as interests, lifestyles, beliefs, etc.). Any other ideas for good studies? Hmmmm. Maybe if there are a couple social scientists here on the forum, we could do some of these studies.

[Wyatt Ehrenfels]

Actually, I think of dreams, with the possible exception of lucid dreams, as having no less objectivity than any other phenomenon pursued by geologists (e.g. rocks) or biologists (e.g. plasma), owing to the fact dreams are not determined by our arbitrary will. I believe this is the reason why I was able to find so many relationships between blood chemistry and dream distortion in a study of cancer patients. If dreams were subjective, few relationships would exist and those that do would be difficult to find. I agree with you about the dream dictionaries. They are worthless. Even Jung did not believe in fixed and universal symbolism. Jung distinguished between the archetype and its manifestation (image). Even where we are dealing with archetypes, the phenomenology of the symbol varies across contexts as does the meaning of the archetype when it is applied to that individual's situation or his/her society. I believe the phenomena is best studied phenomenologically, which is to say, with an empirical (mixed qualitative-quantitative) study of the content and characteristics of the dream experiences as they are related to waking experiences. The biology of dreaming has always disappointed me, because in the interests of wrapping themselves up in the cosmetic "symbols" of science (sleep lab, EEG, white coats), the researchers seldom address the content and characteristics of the dream experiences. They mistrust the verbal reports. And they have no tolerance for the intellectual challenge posed by dreams. They think that they can solve the riddles of the world in a test tube called the cranium, and this research is fraught with so many black boxes and hard problems of their own as to raise credibility issues. I am currently analyzing data from an ambitious dream data collection project I call "experiography." It is time consuming and labor intensive, but I believe the results will be quite infotaining. Wyatt

[recombinant]

Originally posted by Wyatt Ehrenfels I believe the phenomena is best studied phenomenologically, which is to say, with an empirical (mixed qualitative-quantitative) study of the content and characteristics of the dream experiences as they are related to waking experiences. Sounds time consuming, and costly as well. Are you assessing that this is going to take several years of data collection? I just noticed below how you pretty much answered my above question. How are you collecting the data? Surveys? One on one interviews? mechanically? A combination of methods? It seems to me that the test group would be such a broad spectrum of ages, genders, and even mental states......

[Kaniaz]

Hint: Long posts manage to kill their own usefulness.

[bradybaker]

Sounds to me like the author just has a grudge against a psych prof who didn't share his views and interests.

[Alex D]

I agree there, my psychcology teacher is a long time lucid dreamer and you gan't go a lesson with him without it being at least mentioned once, and thats when he's teaching history.

[Wyatt Ehrenfels]

I use a series of questionnaires for some things, which allows me to express in quantitative terms the relations among various aspects of the dreaming and waking experiences. For other things I create forms for purposes of coding some aspects of the dream report myself. All this allows me to approach the phenomenon from the perspective of both my own theoretical constructs and empirically derived psychometric properties. <<Sounds to me like the author just has a grudge against a psych prof who didn't share his views and interests.>> I wish it was as simple as a collection of bad experiences in graduate school. Actually my research always ended up being well regarded and my doctoral dissertation (dreams of cancer patients) was considered wildly successful. But I still see too steep a competitive disadvantage for persons interested in dreams when it comes to winning external sources of funding and tenure-track positions in universities. I don't need $ to do my research, and I suspect most psychology profs don't unless they purposely design their research to justify the request for funds, all so they could put a grant on their CV. Faculty search committees give more weight to grants than to any other factor, which in the field of Psychology, has the effect of discriminating against many psychologistic research topics. Like a domino effect, this has a way of affecting the professional training model and what psych profs look for in graduate students and applicants to graduate programs. So, yes, I did not appreciate the prejudices of the all-too common psych prof, and this prejudice was far more prevalent than a single bad experience. Moreover, as pervasive as this is, it is not just politics, it is also professional training and professional development issues, which are universal. So before you chalk this up to "isolated thunderstorms", you should know that what we're really dealing with scattered thunderstorms and, possibly worse, to enduring climatological features. What I am doing is not a complaint. It is a critique. An organized body of educated opinions from a PhD in Social Psychology who decided not to pursue an improbable career in Psychology. (The career is improbable for many, not just for me. Hundreds of PhDs wander in the wilderness of gypsy adjuncting, fooling themselves into thinking they have bona fide employment and the respect of their "colleagues." The field has been, is, and always will be too saturated and under these conditions, faculty search commitees can afford to cherry pick the one applicant out of 80-200 who tows the company line and embodies the "average"). And before you buy the charge of "sour grapes" that many Psychology stakeholders like to use in managing a favorable image of their field against me (and others like me), you should know that even if there had been a revenge motive -- even if I went public because I was disgruntled -- you should know that the motivation to express an opinion cannot be used to discount that opinion. Why? Too many people out there have legitimate reasons to blow whistles, and what they are complaining about has a significance broader than their own plight/fate. If you want to dismiss an argument, that is easy. I could dismiss the moon landing if I wanted. But if you want to rebut or refute an argument, you have to address it on logical/empirical grounds. No evasive end runs. Wyatt Ehrenfels