Dreams of Sabotage
Tjitske Wijngaard

1. Choose a dream in which you can see some kind of 'sabotage' going on, e.g.:

• something is missing: there is no piano to play on; the notes of your speech are not there; you have no food for your dinner guests; you've forgotten your lines or you've neglected to feed a child...
• you can't catch a bus, train, plane...
• you're too late for an appointment or poorly prepared
• you're inappropriately dressed or naked
• there are problems with a phone or your internet connection (dreams are catching up fast with developing technology): you can't get through or you've forgotten an address or a phone number...
• a staircase, door, road, lift...has gone missing
• problems around the toilet: it has disappeared or can't be used for other reasons: it's full, the door is missing...

Example dream:
I'm in a small room where a party is going on and there is dancing. The party is a somewhat formal do. There are toilets on both sides of the entrance. They are unoccupied. Clearly enough toilets for such a small party, I notice. To the right is another room with yet another toilet. I feel a need to visit a toilet. Just then both entrance toilets are occupied. I glance at the third one but I see a man lying in bed in the side room; he may be suffering or ill and I now realise that I won't be able to use that toilet at all as that must be this man's private toilet...

2. Rewrite the dream in an exaggerated way making things bigger and better and smaller and worse wherever you can.

Example dream:
I'm in this tiny room where a party is going on and there is a lot of dancing going on. The party is a very formal occasion. There are toilets on both sides of the entrance. They are unoccupied. Clearly more than enough toilets for such a tiny party, I notice. To the right is another room with yet another toilet. I feel a great need to visit a toilet. Just then both entrance toilets are occupied. I look longingly at the third one but I see a man lying in bed in the side room; he may be suffering terribly or really ill and I now realise that I will never be able to use that toilet at all as that must be this man's private toilet...

3. Allow this strongly expressed situation to sink in and then describe the situation from the point of view of the saboteur.

Example:
I just allow you to enjoy the feeling that you can go to a toilet any time you wish as there are so many for so few people, but when the moment has come I just make you sit tight and not give way to your desires. So that you know how to make do without things you desire.

4. You'll find that usually saboteurs are either very strict, parental-type figures that uphold norms and values to an excessive extent or they are kindhearted, even wise figures showing you an easier way of looking at things. If the saboteur appears to be the strict type, such as in the example, try to have the other kind appear and speak out, or vice versa. Usually, though, the first saboteur to appear will be the most relevant one for you.

Example:
I know you need to go to the toilet but just now that's not convenient. Better wait a bit until there is room for you. That way you won't feel pressed because of the queues waiting for you. And you won't feel that you're occupying a spot that a sick man may need.

5. If you have not done so far, make a connection to your waking life. In one sentence sum up what the saboteur stands for and give him/her a name. If your saboteur has come in both guises (strict parental-type and kindhearted figure), do this for both types.

Example:
Saboteur 1: Motto: You can't give in to your desires at any moment you want. Name: The Strict One
Saboteur 2: Motto: You sometimes have to protect yourself from showing your feelings or desires in the wrong place or at the wrong time. Name: The Protector

twjngaard@wxs.nl
www.droomcentrum.nl

The Connecting Process is Not Random; It is Guided by the Emotions and Emotional Concerns of the Dreamer.
I believe the dreaming process is not random. Some would agree that dreaming makes connections broadly but would say that dreaming makes connections all over the place, that is basically a random process. I do not think so, based on a great deal of research beginning with my own work on dreams and nightmares of people who have experienced an acute trauma and are now recovering from it. The advantage to studying dreams in such a situation is that we know what is on the person’s mind. We know what is really grabbing his or her attention - what the meaningful concerns must be.
I have been able to collect long dream series from a number of people who experienced a trauma such as barely escaping from a fire, being raped, or having someone killed next to them. These series clearly show that dreams make connections between the traumatic event and other material, such as old memories, including memories of past trauma. The connections appear to be guided principally by the emotions or emotional concerns of the dreamer.
After a severe trauma, the dominant emotions are obvious. A woman who was brutally raped had the following series of nightmares over the next few weeks:
I was walking down the street with a female friend and the woman’s 4-year-old daughter. A gang of male adolescents in black leather started attacking the child. My friend ran away. I tried to free the child, but I realized my clothing was being torn off. I awoke very frightened.
I was trying to walk to the bathroom when some curtains began to choke me. I was choking and gasping for air. I had the feeling I was screaming, but actually I didn’t make a sound.
I was making a movie with Rex Harrison. Then I heard a train coming right at us, louder and louder; it was just about upon us when I woke up.
The dream is all in color. I’m on a beach. A whirlwind comes and envelops me. I’m wearing a skirt with streamers. The whirlwind spins me around. The streamers become snakes which choke me and I wake up frightened.
Although this woman’s nightmares incorporate some details of the actual rape experience (the rapist, about 18 years old, entered her window through curtains and threatened to strangle her with the curtains), she is dreaming mainly about an emotion - terror (a child is attacked; she is choked; a train rushes at her; a whirlwind envelops her; snakes choke her).
Several people in my series who escaped from fires dreamed first about fires but then reported dreams of tidal waves or of being chase by gangs of criminals. Alan Siegel, a clinical psychologist in California, has reported similar findings in victims of the Berkeley, California, fire of 1991. Why dream about tidal waves or gangs of criminals when you have just escaped from a fire? Obviously the dream images do not come from the actual sensory input experienced in the fire but are guided by the dominant emotions of terror, fear, or vulnerability.
After trauma, I find there is often a progression in which dreams such as the above first appear to picture or provide a context for terror, fear, or vulnerability. Somewhat later they may deal with guilt or shame - for instance, survivor guilt.
In my dreams, most of the time I am getting hurt in some way by my brother or I get hurt in an accident while my brother is safe (in actual fact, the dreamer’s brother died in a fire from which the dreamer escaped).
This young man dreams of guilt, not directly of fires.
Contextualization of Emotion
I hope it is clear, at least in these very pure instances immediately after trauma, that dreams are by no means crazy. Though unexpected dream images may occur, they appear to be picturing, or as I would say, “contextualizing” (finding a picture context for) the dominant emotion of the dreamer.
My co-workers and I have found a large number of very clear “contextualizing images,” especially in dreams after acute trauma but also after a death or time of grief. For instance, here are some of the more dramatic examples we have found in our collection of dreams:
Fear, Terror:
A huge tidal wave is coming at me.
A house is burning and no one can get out.
A gang of evil men, Nazis maybe, are chasing me. I can’t get away.
Helplessness, Vulnerability:
I dreamt about children, dolls-dolls and babies all drowning.
He skinned me and threw me in a heap with my sisters; I could feel the pain; I could feel everything.
There was a small, hurt animal lying in the road.
Guilt:
A shell heads for us (just the way it really did) and blows up, but I can’t tell whether it’s me or my buddy Jack who is blown up.
I let my children play by themselves and they get run over by a car.
These examples indicate what I mean by “dreams contextualize emotion.” When there is a clear-cut powerful emotion present such as fear, vulnerability, or guilt, dreams find a context, a way to picture it. The situation is especially clear soon after trauma, but I contend that the same thing occurs in all dreams. I examine in the following pages, dreams in stressful situations (but without actual trauma) that lead, though less dramatically, to the same conclusion. Dreaming contextualizes the dominant emotion or emotional concern of the dreamer. We can see the same pattern in a situation such as pregnancy, which is not always stressful but certainly involves clear emotional concerns. Pregnant women, especially women in their first pregnancy, have dreams about their bodies or other things changing shape and size, dreams that contextualize their concerns that their shapes are changing and their worries as to whether will they will still be attractive. Later in pregnancy they picture small animals of all kinds, and then usually bigger animals as the pregnancy progresses. Toward the very end of pregnancy women often wonder, “Will I be able to be a mother?” They begin to have dreams and nightmares which picture this concern. For example, one woman reports:
I have some babies out in the garden. It’s kind of like they are plants and I suddenly realize I have forgotten to water them.
This same pattern can be seen in any number of other situations when the emotional concern is obvious. For instance, as a very simple example, which we examine in detail later, three different patients on beginning psychoanalysis or long-term psychotherapy had similar dreams that went approximately as follows:
I am walking along a mountain path with steep drop-offs on each side. It is a bit dangerous. There is a large, shadowy figure accompanying me - I am not quite sure whether this figure is good or evil.
These patients are obviously contextualizing the fear and concerns involved in beginning a long treatment with an unknown therapist or “guide.”
Physical illnesses are also sources of emotional concern. Dreams often portray these concerns very vividly, sometimes even before the waking patient is aware of the illness. A man awaiting vascular surgery on his leg, and afraid of losing the leg, has dream images of defective tools or other defective objects in 11 of 14 recorded preoperative dreams (see Chapter 3).
I suggest that this is the basic pattern for all our dreams but that we can see it most clearly after trauma or in one of the specific somewhat stressful situations in which we know just what is on the dreamer’s mind. Here, in the examples we have considered, the meaning is quite clear; no detailed “interpretation” is needed. I suggest that more typical “ordinary dreams” may sometimes seem confused because there is no one totally dominant emotional concern that clearly guides the formation of the dream; we are complex beings with a number of ongoing concerns, some of which we may not even be aware of. It is this factor that makes ordinary dreams difficult to understand and makes them appear to require detailed interpretation. When one does take the trouble, with or without a therapist, to obtain detailed associations, amplifications, etc., to arrive at the meaning of the dream, this process of interpretation often turns out to be a process of gradually arriving at an emotional concern of which we may not have been entirely aware.
What I am saying is quite consistent with what most of us who love dreams and work with them have always known: We dream about what’s important to us. I am trying to specify how we do this –i.e., providing a picture context for the emotion– and I am trying to place it in a framework involving the nets of our minds.

Ernest Hartmann, M.D., is a world-renowned authority on sleep and dreaming. He is currently Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and Director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachussetts.

He is the Author of the following books:
ADOLESCENTS IN A MENTAL HOSPITAL
with Betty A. Glasser, Milton Greenblatt, Maida H. Solomon, and Daniel Levinson
THE BIOLOGY OF DREAMING
BOUNDARIES IN THE MIND
THE FUNCTIONS OF SLEEP
THE NIGHTMARE
THE SLEEP BOOK
SLEEP AND DREAMING,
Editor
THE SLEEPING PILL
DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
The Origin and Meaning of Dreams
January 2001 - Perseus Publishing

Some of the most commonly asked questions about dreams are “What does it mean to dream in color” or “what does it mean to dream of a particular color”. A search for the answer to this question led me to a recent eight-year investigation of the nature of color in dreams.
We all have the “ability” to dream in color, one important factor here being recall and the method of waking. For “spontaneous” non-laboratory dream recall (normal daily dream recall) research indicates that from about 25% [VanDeCastle] to 29% [Hall] were reported as having color content (partial or full color). This increased for art students to 50% in one study [Van De Castle]. In laboratory testing where dreamers were forced awake during the dream and asked to recall the dream, some distinct color was present in 70% of the cases and vague color in another 13% [Van De Castle]. In my investigations, recall of dreams in full color are rare although a very small minority of subjects will say to me “all of my dreams are in color”. Most often color will be recalled in dreams attached to only one or a few images.
Aside from recall the conscious state of the dreaming mind when woken may have a lot to do with the color content of the dream. Hartmann reports in an early work that we dream about 25% of our night, in the “D” or REM dream state. Laboratory awakenings from this state report the more story like and colorful dreams. Reports form the deeper “S” state of sleep (75% of our night) are more thoughts than imagery with little story line or color. The color content of the dreams may therefore be a function of level of consciousness during the dream that was recalled. Lucid dreams (those where you know you are dreaming) are almost always reported to be full of color or in full color, and it has been shown [LeBerge] that the state of the mind during Lucid dreams is very like that of the conscious waking state. Also dreams that we recall in full detail will most often be recalled with some color content.
The other and perhaps most important aspect of recall of color in dreams is the color association with the emotional content of the dream. People will have a tendency to recall the most emotional or stimulating parts of a dream and not so much the rest. Colorless dreams occur simply because the perception of color was not stimulated by the dream process. Color is much like any other imagery in dreams. It appears in a dream because it is has a personal or physiological association attached to it that was stimulated by the emotional and mental activity that is creating the dream. This is the premise of what is presented below.

Color and the Nature of Dream Imagery
I first observed that color in a dream was much like other imagery in a dream, in that it appears to have a meaningful “symbolic” association to the dream. Similar to other imagery, Color also appears to combine with other image fragments to add additional “color content” to the final composite image we see in the dream (a process known as “condensation”). Exploring the “color content” was the challenge.
Many approaches to dreamwork are available that reveal the personal and cultural associations the dreamer may have with a dream image. The content is generally revealed and validated when the dreamer “connects” with the dream-to-waking life association (that “ah-ha” like response). My first experiences in the investigation indicated that there were indeed personal and cultural associations with color in dreams, but that there was much more to color in dreams than personal associations alone revealed. Quite often the personal or cultural associations did not correlate well with the rest of the dream story or the associated waking life situation.
Turning to the works of Jung, a dual nature to dream imagery is revealed, that was helpful in understanding a deeper role for color in dreams. Jung proposed that some of the imagery in dreams fall into a class, which he called “collective” imagery [8]. He claimed “collective” imagery to be part of the biological and evolutionary nature of the collective human consciousness, common in the dreams and waking mythology of all humans across cultures. Could color be largely a “collective” that brings “collective” content to the image fragments it combines with, and if so what is that content? This is what I designed my investigation to answer.
Unfortunately color is one area that was given little attention by most researchers of dreamworking. Jung and Perls discussed the four color grouping of red, yellow, blue and green (what they called the four “psychological primaries”) as representing a pattern for wholeness, or the presence of the inner balancing force [8, 9, 10]. Jung used color in both waking and dream related therapy, but he made only brief mention of what the human association with each color may be.
This lack of information on dream research of color, lead my investigation toward the waking human response to color, where there was more true test data and some established tools. I speculated that if I could establish a link between the human waking response to color and the color imagery in dreams, then I could better understand the “color content” behind color in dreams.

The “Collective” Human Response to Color
Over the last 50 years or so there has been a small degree but notable work in the response of animals and humans to color [1 - 7]. Much of this work has shown that color does evoke a similar “collective” physiological and physiological response between the human subjects, as attributed to: a) the common physiological effect of color on the human nervous system and b) our common evolutionary experience with color in nature. The results of this work have found its influence in our everyday lives in the fields of advertising, food packaging, art, style, decorating and such.
The response of the eye itself determines much about our associations to color. The eye has the highest visual acuity for illumination by yellow light, whereas with deep blue we have very low acuity and it is very difficult for the eye to focus [1,2]. Yellow illumination thus makes activity more possible whereas blue illumination makes it less so. Simply as a function of our optical receptors, our human association with yellow would naturally be more toward outward activity and with blue toward the more passive or limitation of physical activity.
Furthermore, the human physiological response to color can be tested. Colors have an observed effect on the various parts of the Autonomic nervous system that concerns itself with functions that take place below the threshold of awareness. Blue has been observed to have a calming effect on the Parasympathetic branch that regulates such automatic involuntary functions as heart beat, breathing, and digestion [3]. The color red has been observed to have the effect of exciting the sympathetic branch, causing certain processes such as heartbeat to speed up [3]. The experiments of Barbara Brown [4], which were designed to understand the associations between color and brain wave activity, supported these findings. She determined that the brain electrical response to red is one of alerting and arousal, whereas the response to blue is that of relaxation. In similar investigations Goldstein [7] concluded that red stimulation corresponds to the experience of being disrupted, thrown out and attracted to the outer world, inciting to activity, aggression, excitation and emotionally determined action. Green, Goldstein writes, corresponds to withdrawal from the outer world and retreat to ones own center, to a condition of meditation and exact fulfillment of the task. Henner Ertel [6] conducted a 3-year study on room color and its effect on learning with children. He found that yellow, yellow-green, orange and light blue increased learning while white, black and brown caused a decrease in learning; and orange improved social behavior.
Dr. Max Luscher’s research into the “collective” nature of the human response to color, lead to the introduction in 1947 of a psychological testing tool based on color preference, called the Luscher Color Test. It was supported by over 140 papers of other investigators in the field [3] and gained application in the 50’s and 60’s with therapists and physicians, and in industry as a screening tool for job applicants. The “full” test is based on making 43 choices against seventy-three different colors. There is a simpler version with eight colors. The tool correlates an emotional state to the person’s selection of colors in a preferred sequence. It gained its beginnings on some work by Hering who established a link between physiological change within the eye and color contrast [3]. It is these more physiological responses to contrast, our instinctive responses from the more primitive parts of the brain, which were used in the design of the Color Test.
I found the Color Test to be valuable in my investigation since it not only agreed to a good degree with the color response research, but it was the only “recognized” test tool that existed that related color to the human waking emotional response. I did not attempt to validate the test further, but rather decided to proceed on the premise that it represents a reasonable characterization of the human waking response to color, and determine whether there was a correlation between the Color Test and the appearance of color in the dream state.

The Investigation
I designed the investigation to find a relationship between the dreamers association with color imagery in dreams, and the human “collective” waking response to color. If a good correlation existed, then the “color content” of a dream image may be largely understood from the data on our waking response to that color. In order to obtain spontaneous responses from the dreamer about the colored imagery I used a modified Gestalt Therapy technique in which the dreamer role-plays the image and speaks from within the image. This technique I found to evoke the deepest most meaningful responses, while keeping the cognitive mind occupied and diverted from the interpretive process.
In order to establish the basis for the “human waking response to color” I worked with all of the research, but principally established the Luscher Color Test, augmented by the works of Jung, as the base. As previously discussed, these works appeared moderately well supported, and the Color Test was the only color psychology testing tool available. For simplicity I used the 8-color test.
• The Investigation Design:
The design was to bring the dreamer into the image using a common relaxation approach then ask a specific common set of questions to evoke the response. The waking life association with this response would then be determined. Both responses then are compared to the written statements of the Color Test tool for that color. The method is as follows:
1) Pick the Color Image you are most drawn to, most curious about or arouses the most feelings
2) Role Play - Close your eyes, relax, now see the image in your minds eye and move into it and become the image, (as if an actor playing the role).
a) As the image what are you and what is your purpose or function
b) How do you feel in that role?
c) As the image what do you like about who you are and what you do?
d) As the image what do you dislike about who you are and what you do?
e) As the image in the dream setting, what do you desire the most?
3) Checking out the Life Situation: After the role-play of the color image, the dreamers life situation is evaluated as to how it may relate to the statements made during the role play and to the dream story. The dreamer is asked:
a) Pick the responses from above that sounds like something you want to say in waking life, or sound like an argument going on in your head, and repeat it in your own words.
b) Describe a specific situation it brings to mind, and your feelings in that situation.
c) What is the relationship between this situation and the dream?
4) Statement Correlation - the statements from 2 and 3 above are recorded for subsequent correlation with the statements in the Color Test tool. Direct wording connections or direct theme connections are noted. In order to reduce the degree of subjectivity, independent “judges” can be used to vote on the degree of correlation (1 to 5) between the role play responses and the Color Test tool.
An optional approach uses a “questionnaire”, developed largely based on the Color Test tool (see web page: www.dreamgate.com/dream/hoss). The Color Test tool tables are converted as directly as possible to a series of statements, grouped by color, that may sound like a persons waking life situation or feelings. Based on the color of the dream image, the dreamer picks the statement for that color that relates most to a way they feel about life at the time. The life situation is then recalled. This is followed by a role-play image analysis similar to step 2 above in order to understand the correlation with the dream image content. While this approach is more difficult to control, it does provide some interesting results and a nice tool for augmenting one’s dreamwork.

Some Investigation Results
The cases below are a representative sample of the results. In addition to revealing a correlation between waking and dreaming associations with color, they also indicate some of the interesting ways in which the “color content” combines with the image, in order to tell the complete story.
• Correlation with Role-Play Statements
Case 1 - “woman in Red hat”
In the dream, the 3 women (one wearing a red hat) were walking along a road and suddenly sank into the ground (a common metaphor for suppression). During role-play of the woman in the red hat the dreamer stated “we are going out on the evening to have fun” and “I feel vibrant”. The Color Test statement for red is: “vital.... desire to live life to its fullest”. This correlated well with the role-play statement and also supported the suddenly animated nature of the dreamer as she acted out the woman in the red hat. Reflection on her life situation revealed that the dreamer was suppressing her desires to let go and have fun, in order to attend to family situation.
• Correlation with Role-Play Statements:
Case 2 - “blue man/red man”
Another case, investigated at the ASD Conference workshop in Leiden, revealed occurrences of what Jung, Pearls and Luscher called the “psychological primaries”. Jung theorized that the grouping of four and particularly the colors Red, Yellow, Blue and Green in a dream represented a pattern for wholeness and the presence of an unconscious unifying force.
The dream was of four men. The dreamer and two others were dressed in green and yellow, and were being chased by a blue man. During role-play of the blue man he stated that his purpose was to “keep us united”, which correlated well with the Jungian premise that the four men represented the pattern of wholeness and the unifying force. As the blue man he also emphasized the “need to belong”, feelings that he stated were common to those in his waking life. The statement for blue in the Color Test is: “desires a peaceful state of harmony and a sense of belonging”. This statement correlates well with both the role-play statements and the Jungian theory.
I then investigated the color red, speculating that with yellow, green and blue present in the group of four men, it was the missing element in the of “psychological primaries” needed for wholeness. I asked the dreamer to role-play a man dressed in red. As the red man he became suddenly more animated, assertive, and stated he felt “alive again”. The Color Test statement for red is: “intense, vital, animated.... a desire to live life to the full”. This was an apt description of his actions as well as feelings that he admitted were missing in his life. He realized that needed to let the red man side of himself come forth to establish a balance in his personality. Later that night at a party he came dressed all in red, very intense vital and animated, reinforcing that realization.
• Correlation with Dream Activity:
Case 3 - “anger over painting”
Sometimes the color of the dream imagery directly reflects the emotional state of the activity revealed in the dream. This was illustrated in a dream in which a woman was anxiously awaiting her husband so she could give him a painting she worked long and hard on. As the anxiety arose she exploded in anger and destroyed the painting feeling it was not satisfactory and he would not accept it. The painting flew up in pieces of black and red. The black and red combination in the Color Test states: “pent up over stimulation which threatens to discharge itself in an outburst of emotion”. This correlated well with the emotional outburst in the dream. It also correlated with the subsequent association with the waking life situation, a potential eruption of emotions associated with the meticulous writing of a book, pressured by the fears of rejection.
Case 4 - “phosgene gas”
Sometimes the color content and the image content complement each other and must be understood together to give a complete message. In this dream the imagery role-play work revealed a waking life effect, while the color work revealed the cause.
The man dreamed of a faucet containing “phosgene gas” with green and yellow stains around it. Role-play of the gas resulted in the statement; “I am invisible...and will sneak up on you by surprise. You can’t control me if you let me out”. The Luscher tables indicate yellow/green as “demand for appreciation and recognition”. There was no apparent correlation between the two statements that is until the life situation was revealed. The dreamer had a recurring problem with the control of a deep seated subconscious need for appreciation and recognition, which would surface on occasion and cause him to act in ways he regretted. This underlying need for appreciation (the cause) correlated well with the Color Test statements for yellow-green, while the role-play statements, relating to inability to control the resultant outbursts correlated with the waking life effect. The combination of the gas image, and the color meaning, revealed the whole story.
• Color Modifies the Image:
Case 5 - “gray Trucks”
The color of an image sometimes does not directly represent the feelings represented by the image itself, but rather acts as a compensation or modifier, “coloring” the image as one would paint over an object, possibly revealing conflicting or hidden emotions. This seems particularly true of the color gray.
A woman dreamed of a group of gray 4-wheel drive trucks. In role-play, she revealed statements and mannerisms of power and assertiveness, which she appeared to enjoy. To my surprise, when I asked what she liked about being gray trucks, she answered “nothing - I don’t like being that way (assertive and aggressive)”. It turned out that, while she appeared to become excited when playing the role of the trucks, she avoided acting that way in real life for fear that others would reject her. Consciously she wanted to avoid and distance herself from the “4 wheel drive truck” behavior. Gray, according to Luscher, is a color of “non-association, noninvolvement and shielding”. One might say she was “coloring” her powerful assertive side (with gray) in the dream, or painting over it with a mood of noninvolvement, in order to shield her from that part of herself.
• Correlation with Waking Life Situation:
Case 6 - “red/blue instrument”
In another dream the dreamer was looking all over a large facility for an errant work associate in order to convincing him to work with him as a team player. He sat down on a pile of something unidentifiable painted red and blue. He was confronted by four members of a band and was offered the choice of an instrument to play. He finally picked one of the instruments and woke.
His main anxiety in the dream was identical to his anxiety the day before, the need to be accepted by his coworkers and find a way to convince them to work in harmony with him on the team he was leading. He felt the choice of band instruments in the dream related to his trying to chose his “instrument” or “means” by which he could convince his coworkers to “play in harmony” with him. One of the Color Test statement for a Red/Blue sequence reads “wants to get along with associates to cooperate with them to the mutual benefit of the organization.....emphasis placed on harmony”.

Conclusions and Further Research
While reported here is only a sampling, I conclude that the results gained so far in my investigation provide a good indication that the human response to a color in the waking state is similar to the mental content represented by a color in a dream. I believe I have demonstrated adequate rationale for further research into this premise, to validate and to develop the results more fully.

BOB HOSS, M.S. is a writer,dream researcher and lecturer.
Robert Hoss: Robertjhoss@aol.com

References:
The dreams were taken from my own diary as well as from various investigations and workshops with other subjects. I wish to thank those who graciously provided their dreams to this work. Supporting literature references are as follows:
[1] Faber Birren, Color and Human Response, John Wiley & Sons Inc, New York, 1978.
[2] C.E. Ferree and Gertrude Rand, “Lighting and the hygiene of the Eye”, Archives of Ophthalmology, July 1929.
[3] Dr Max Luscher, edited by Ian Scott, The Luscher Color Test, Random House, 1969.
[4] Barbra Brown, New Mind New Body, Harpers & Row, New York, 1974.
[5] Charles A Riley II, Color Codes, University Press of New England, 1995.
[6] Henner Ertel, Time, 17 Sept 1973.
[7] Kurt Goldstein, “Some Experimental Observations on the Influence of Color on the Function of the Organism”, Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation, June 1942.
[8] C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Dell Publishing Co. NY, NY, 1973.
[9] C G Jung, Mandala Symbolism, Princeton Univ. Press, 1969.
[10] F. S. Perls, “Gestalt Therapy Verbatim”, Bantam Books, Real People Press, 1974.

Abstract
This study asked the questions, “Are there significant content differences between male and female dream reports obtained in dream seminars conducted in Brazil?” Each of the 240 (137 female, 103 male) research participants volunteered recent dream reports (one per person) during dream seminars that he or she attended between 1990 and 1998. Dreams were scored according to Hall-Van de Castle criteria. Comparative Cohen h - statistics revealed several gender differences. Further study is recommended because the dream reports did not represent Brazil’s social-economic diversity, and may not have been characteristic of the totality of participants’ dream lives.

Introduction
Most investigators realize that the dreams with which they work are simply reports; the actual dream as directly experienced can not be studied. The shaman, the psychotherapist, and the dream researcher all deal with verbal or, in some cases, pictorial dream - reports. These reports may be incomplete, poorly remembered, or completely fabricated; they may change or undergo revision depending on the social or temporal context. Not only does a dream report represent a dialogue between one’s waking and sleeping mentation, it reflects a discourse between the dreamer and the listener. Dreamers may provide one version of the recalled dream to family members, a second version to their friends, and a third version to their psychotherapist. What is disclosed about the dream may vary considerably, depending on how the dreamer forgets, embroiders, or reconstructs different portions of the report. In postmodern terms, dream reports are fluid texts rather than fixed texts; rather than remaining static, their meaning and even their words vary as they are told and retold at different times in different settings. Hence, dreamwork of any type needs to be done with care, with attentiveness, and with modesty.
The association between dream reports and the dreamer’s everyday activities and concerns has been demonstrated both for individuals (e.g., Winget, Kramer, & Whitman, 1972) and cultures (e.g., D’Andrade, 1961; Prasad, 1982). Dream reports have been used to study cross-cultural differences which have often yielded striking results (e.g., Heynick, 1993). The manifest content of reported dreams also has been used to study groups within cultures. Gender differences, for example, constantly have emerged in the literature (e.g., Soper, Rosenthal, & Milford,1994). Therefore, the question asked in this study was, “Are there significant content differences between male and female dream reports obtained in dream seminars conducted in Brazil?”.
Only one previous study on this topic has been reported. Luciano Ribeiro Pinto, Jr. (in Ludwig & Cristiane, 1999, pp. 66-67) of the Institute of Sleep, Federal University of Sao Paulo, queried 70 Brazilian men and women about their dreams. Overall, the most frequent content items reported were friends, family, travelling, and sex, in that order. Women recalled their dreams more frequently than men; men reported less auditory dream content as well as fewer vivid and repetitive dreams; women reported more dream content concerning family members, friends, work, and emotions.

Methodology
Content analysis is a research procedure, not a research method. However, it does employ an explicit, organized plan for assembling data, quantifying them to measure the concepts under study, examining their patterns and interrelationships, and interpreting quantitative comparison of verbal reports elicited by research participants (Riley & Stoll, 1968). In this case, Brazilian men and Brazilian women were compared. The research method utilized to obtain data on gender differences was J. Cohen’s (1977) h-statistic.

Research Participants
The 137 female and 103 male research participants for this study were members of dreams seminars that one of the authors (SK) conducted in Brazil between 1990 and 1998. These events were held in various Brazilian cities, specifically Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Sao Paulo.
The age range spanned people from their 20s to their 70s, with a few outliers on each end of the spectrum. Using Stephen’s (1997) classification terms, the “upper” and “middle” classes were over-represented as there were entrance fees for most of the seminars; however, a few scholarships were available for other individuals. Many seminars were held at colleges and universities; as a result, the educational level of the participants was higher than would have been found in the general population. A variety of ethnic groups were represented in the sample.

Research Instrument
Content analysis is a research procedure developed to systematically and objectively quantify textual characteristics and themes. It also identifies the relative extent to which these schema pervade a given communication, document, or other text. In 1966, The Content Analysis of Dreams (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966) was published; this book outlines a thorough coding system with which the authors investigated 1,000 dreams collected from 200 undergraduates from Case Western Reserve University between 1947 and 1952. Since that time, the Hall-Van de Castle system has been used to compare groups of varying gender, age, cultural background, and diagnostic category (e.g., Kane, Mellen, Patten, & Samano, 1993; Krippner, Lenz, Barksdale, & Davidson, 1994; Krippner, Posner, Pomerance, Barksdale, & Fischer, 1974; Lortie-Lussier, Schwab, & De Konick, 1985).
The Hall-Van de Castle (1966) system is one of several which has been developed over the years in an attempt to reflect the relation between a dream report and the dreamer’s environment, or, in the case as such scales as “ego strength” (pp. 208-210), a theoretical conjecture about the dreamer’s inner world. Reliability and validity concerns have been addressed by Van de Castle (1969) and the system’s utility has been evaluated by Winget and Kramer (1979). Hobson (1988), however, makes a distinction between dream-content and dream-form, holding that the latter (e.g., discontinuities, incongruities, uncertainties) are the most interesting features of a dream because this dream “architecture” more clearly differentiates it from waking consciousness (pp. 233-234).

Research Procedure
At the beginning of each seminar, participants were invited to write down “a recent dream,” providing no information on this report other than their gender, and to place it on a centrally located desk. Several of these dreams were used to illustrate concepts explored in the seminar, and a few dreams were explored in detail, with the donor’s participation.
Following a procedure approved by the Saybrook Institutional Review Board (for the protection of human subjects), participants were told that the entire collection of dream reports would be used for research purposes unless anyone objected. Those who did, were requested to withdraw their dream report at the end of the seminar. Following a procedure often used in the content analysis of dreams (Domhoff, 1996), all dream reports below 50 words and above 250 words were eliminated from consideration.
Four judges, working blind and independently, coded the dream reports following the rules outlined by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) as well as those more recently contributed by Domhoff (1996), whose book contains the complete HallBvan de Castle system. The Hall-Van de Castle categories coded were total characters, total aggressive interactions, total friendly interactions, total sexual interactions, total settings, total emotions, total activities, total successful outcomes, total failure outcomes, total outcomes ending in misfortune, total outcomes ending in good fortune, total objects, total modifiers, total negative descriptions, total temporal descriptions and dramatic intensity score (the sum of the categories aggressive interactions, friendly interactions, sexual interactions, successful outcomes, failure outcomes, outcomes ending in misfortune and outcomes ending in good fortune).
Many of these categories are subdivided in the Hall-Van de Castle system; those subcategories coded were male characters, female characters, strangers, family members and relatives, children, animals, dreamer as aggressor, dreamer as victim, dreamer witnessing but uninvolved in the aggression, aggression by a male, aggression by a familiar person, aggression by a stranger, dreamer as both aggressor and victim, indoor settings, outdoor settings, architecture, household objects, food and eating, tools and implements, travel objects and conveyances, streets and roadways, regions and land areas, nature, body parts, clothing, communication objects and money.
An Aggression per Character (i.e., A/C Index) score was determined; this index indicates the number of characters involved in aggressive interactions. In much the same way, Friendliness per Character (i.e., F/C Index) and Sexuality per Character (i.e., S/C Index) scores were derived. Finally the number of dreams with aggressive, friendliness, sexuality, success, failure, misfortune, and good fortune content was tallied. (See Figure 1 for a listing of these categories, subcategories, and indices).
Each of the 240 dream reports was coded for these 53 categories, subcategories, and indices. However in reviewing the data, it must be recalled that percentages of objects in each subcategory, characters in each subcategory, settings in each subcategory and aggression subcategories were calculated from the total number of objects, characters, settings and aggressive interactions. Hence when percentages are given, these are the percentages of the content item in their categories, not the percentages of the total dream reports. The exception, of course, is the final tally in which all dreams were assessed to determine aggression, friendly, sexual, success, failure, misfortune, and good fortune content.

Data Analysis
For 30 of the 53 content categories, subcategories, and indices coded, the mean frequencies were computed between genders and analyzed statistically. No correlations could be computed for the other categories (e.g., emotions) because there are no proportions involved in the total findings; the data simply represent numerical differences between one series and another.
For the data for which statistical tests could be performed, J. Cohen’s (1977) h- statistic was used for all percentage differences finding p by using a weighted N and doing a z -score transformation. Cohen’s h-statistic shows effect size and prevents one from regarding some statistically significant differences as containing important meaning.
A reliability check was made between the four coders, yielding intercoder reliability scores by the method of common agreement with a range between 90% and 100%. Table 1 presents the intercoder reliability report for two of these judges.

Results
For 30 comparisons, one or two would be significant at.05 by chance alone (i.e., “false positives”). Instead, 7 comparisons obtained significance (see Table 2).
In comparison with Brazilian females, dream reports from Brazilian males contained more references to household objects (p<.000), and fewer references to food (p=.008) and body parts (p=.001). Strangers appeared more frequently in male (37%) than in female (26%) dream reports (p<.008), while children appeared more frequently in female (6%) than in male (2%) dream reports (p<.028).
The A/C Index was about the same for males (12%) and for females (14%); this index measures how many dream characters engaged in aggression. The F/C Index was higher for females; more characters (23%) in female dream reports engaged in friendly interactions than characters (14%) in male reports. However, is it improper to apply Cohen’s h-statistic to these ratios, so statistical comparisons could not be made.
More female dream reports contained friendliness (p=.035) and had successful outcomes (p=.004). Female dream reports contained the same amount of sexual content as did male reports according to both the S/C Index which reflects the number of characters who engage in sexual interactions (6% vs. 6%) and a tabulation of the dreams themselves (12% vs. 11%).
The areas in which no differences were reported are also of interest. Both genders displayed about the same proportions of male characters (56% for female dream reports, 60% for male reports) and female characters (44% for female reports, 40% for male reports). There were no differences regarding aggressive interactions, sexual interactions, or the mention of tools and implements, or of travel objects and conveyances.
The average number of words per dream was 88 for females and 84 for males; therefore, gender differences could not be attributed to disparate word frequencies. Table 2 presents the content categories, subcategories, and indices, noting for which ones statistical analysis was possible.
An earlier analysis of Brazilian dream reports used a subset of these data (Krippner, Winkler, Rochlen, & Yashar, 1998). After comparing 60 female and 66 male reports, it was observed that witnessed aggression was more frequent in female dream reports (p=.024) and that there were more communication objects in female reports (p=.004), findings not repeated when the number of dream reports was increased. However, the other major gender differences were repeated in this study. Perhaps the two other differences were “false positives,” or perhaps the larger sample presented a more accurate picture of Brazilian dream content.

Discussion
Bateson (1972) has written a thoughtful perspective on the issue of “national character,” and several studies of dream reports in non - U.S. societies have been conducted in an attempt to explore this topic. Monroe, Monroe, Brasher, Severin, Schweickart, and Moore (1985) studied gender differences in dream content of 325 secondary school children who were members of the East African Gusli, Kipsigic, and Logoli tribes, observing that women’s dream reports included as much physical aggression and more verbal aggression than male dream reports. In other aspects of aggression, however, the data were similar to those reported by Hall and Van de Castle. Gregor (1981) studied Mehinaku dream reports, noticing a much higher amount of aggression, especially initiated by animals, for both genders than had Hall and Van de Castle. However, the gender differences emerging from Gregor’s study were virtually identical to those found in the U.S. sample.
These latter data, and data from studies in some 30 different social groups, support Hall’s (1984) suggestion that there was an “ubiquitous sex difference in dreams”, i.e., the percentage of male characters is higher in male dreams than in female dreams. This finding was not confirmed in this study, nor was Hall’s earlier report that women dreamed about indoor settings and family members more frequently than men, and less frequently about outdoor settings, tools and implements, and successful outcomes. However, some of our other Brazilian data resemble Hall’s earlier work: Women’s dream reports contained more references to children.
Hall’s “ubiquitous sex difference” was not found in six other groups outside the United States (Hall, 1984; Van de Castle, 1994, p. 320); therefore, our results are not singular. Of the Brazilian female dream reports, 38% contained friendly interactions as compared with 25% of the male dream reports, resembling the U.S. data. Sexual content was about the same for both Brazilian genders, as opposed to U.S. data where men report sexual interactions far more often than do women (Domhoff, 1996, p. 327). Some groups may be reluctant to share sexual dreams, even if their personal identities are withheld. However Hall’s (1953) and D. Cohen’s (1973) continuity view of dreams finds support in these data. Stephen (1997) has documented the growth of the women’s movement in Brazil, and the growing availability of birth control devices and family planning procedures, including sterilization.
Espinoza (1996), in reporting on sexual behavior in Rio de Janeiro, asserts that the average interviewee claimed to have sex 2 or 3 times a week, with 17% having sex every day. The amount of time spent per sexual encounter was 45 minutes for Brazilians in contrast to 8 for the Italians, 6 for the French and U.S. residents, and 3 for the British. In contrast to an estimated 27% of women worldwide who have orgasm during virtually every sex act, 55% of Brazilian women make such a claim (Espinoza, 1996).
The earlier study by Luciano Ribeiro Pinto, Jr., did not utilize a standard content analysis technique, but reported that women’s dream reports contained more emotional content. In our sample, the dramatic intensity of female dreams was stronger than in male dreams, reflecting Ribeiro Pinto’s notation that female dreams are more vivid. A number of Ribeiro Pinto’s dreamers noted that the dream they volunteered was repetitive; almost all of these dreamers were women. Travel was a common theme in these dream reports, as well as in ours; 6% of female dream reports and 7% of male reports contained references to travel objects and conveyances.
When Ribeiro Pinto checked the educational level of his dreamers, he found that those who had completed more years of education contributed more dream reports containing work settings and travel. Those with less education contributed more dream reports containing references to death and aggression. In other words, there seem to be class differences in Brazilian dream reports, and Ribeiro Pinto’s data helps inform the questions raised by our data. Stephen (1997) has described four classes of Brazilian women: upper class, middle class, peasants and rural workers, working class; future research would be advised to examine dream report content differences among these classes.
These interpretive comments reflect the perspectives of Mary Calkins (1893), Alfred Adler (1938) and Calvin Hall (1953), all of whom pointed out the congruence of dreaming life and waking life. Some dreams may rehash past traumas or fantasized desires (e.g., Freud, 1933/1965), others may rehearse future activities (e.g., Jung, 1956), and others may be a “knitting together” of images that occur during brain activation during sleep (McCarley & Hobson, 1979, pp. 124-125). However, there is a body of research that supports the idea that there is a basic continuity between dream content and the waking emotional concerns and cognitive style of the dreamer (e.g., Cartwright, 1986). Hendricks and Cartwright (1978) reported high correlations between subjects’ cognitive style during waking activity and cognitive style in dream reports. Foulkes (1981) found that the test-assessed cognitive development of children is mirrored in their dreams. Domino (1976) and Urbina (1972) attained significant correlations between dream analyses and data from both projective techniques (e.g., Rorschach) and standardized personality measures (e.g., MMPI). Winget and Kramer (1979), in summarizing research in this area, concluded that “the content of dreams has most often, but not always, been found to be continuous with, rather than compensatory to, waking life” (p. 23).
This concept of similarities and continuities between dream life and waking life is supported by cross-cultural research. Van de Castle (1971) studied the Cuna Indians in Panama, noting that their dreams included very few acts of aggression against other people - a trait observable in their daily lives. However, Punamaki and Joustie (1998) found that Palestinian children living in violent and dangerous environments recorded dream reports (in a 7-day diary) the contents of which “incorporated persecution and aggressive themes” in comparison with Palestinian and Finnish children living in peaceful areas. In all three groups, girls’ unpleasant dreams typically incorporated negative feelings, whereas boys’ dreams involved horror scenes, ventures, and actions. Gender differences were greater in both national groups from peaceful areas.
Monroe, Nerlove, and Daniels (1969) reported that East Africans living in areas of high-density population where food is often scarce, have an unusually low frequency of food consumption in their dreams. Kane, Mellen, Patten, and Samano (1993) used the Hall-Van de Castle scales to compare dream content of Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo American college women, finding that Mexican American college women were the median group insofar as similarities were concerned. For example, Mexicans and Mexican Americans did not differ regarding dream content but Anglos reported significantly fewer emotions.
Levine (1966) investigated three groups of male Nigerian students, finding that dream content differed in relation to their tribal values. For example, the Ibo culture has a value system and social structure favoring upward mobility of its members. The Hausa culture does not support social mobility and individual achievement, while the Yoruba culture takes an intermediate position. Dream reports from Yoruba students contained more achievement themes than those of Hausa students, but fewer than those of Ibo students, which is what one would predict if dream life reflects waking life.
Globus (1987) proposes that dream life and waking life share more similarities than differences, and that both are “thought” into existence in a manner not unlike the way in which the Upanishads described how Vishnu “dreamed” human beings and their world into existence. In the case of waking life, environmental information passes freely across a person’s sensory receptors. As these receptors match the “tunings” of neural filters, they constitute that person’s life world. In dreaming life, information from the preceding days, and from earlier life experiences, become reoperative. But the dreamer creates a specific life world out of many possibilities; “dream life is our own formative creation” (p. 173). Again, Globus echoes Hindu scripture’s description of dreaming sleep as an opportunity for human beings to create as the gods create, by emitting images. However, Hindu philosophy used a divine artisan as its model, while Globus’ mechanism is “a possible world machine” that creates by selection from a plenum of enfolded possibilities that includes genetic predispositions, life experiences, and the random stimulation of brain centers during sleep (p. 174).
In this manner, dreamers and their culture operate in tandem, “making each other up” (Shweder, 1993). To understand a person’s dreams, one must also understand his or her cultural milieu (Hall, 1991). To thoroughly describe and/or understand a culture, the investigation of dreams is a necessity. Dreams have social roots, and society not only reflects its members’ dreams but might be influenced and often changed by them. Unfortunately, psychology has too often ignored culture as a source of influence on human behavior (Segall, Lonner, & Berry, 1998, p. 1101).

Limitations
A number of limitations caution against engaging in overinterpretation of these data. A large number of comparisons were made, and some of the statistically significant results may have been artifacts, especially those hovering near the.05 significance level. Our sample was not representative of the general population of Brazilian males and females, under-representing the less affluent social-economic classes. A plethora of literature demonstrates the importance of class differences in Brazil (e.g., Stephen, 1997; Surratt & Inciardi, 1998; Wood & Magno de Carvalho, 1988).
Furthermore, the dreams submitted may have been selected because they were particularly memorable or provocative; mundane dreams, often more reflective of one’s daily attitudes and activities, may have been excluded. Hall and Van de Castle collected five dreams per person, tapping into each dreamer’s nighttime mentation more broadly than our procedure of asking for a single dream.
The time of year that dreams are collected could influence content, reflecting weather conditions (e.g., the indoor settings subcategory), holidays (e.g., the good fortune subcategory), or publicized behavior of celebrities (e.g., the sexual interactions subcategory). However, the dreams in this study were obtained at many different times of the year and never during holidays as no dream seminars were held at that time.
Nor was our research instrument without its limitations. In addition to the criticism already cited that more can be learned from the form of a dream report than from its content (Hobson, 1988), it is apparent that content analysis permits only a partial assessment of dream reports. Content analysis does not deal with the dream report as a whole, with the life context of the dreamer, or with factors in waking life that might underlie particular items. One dreamer may be the victim of an aggressive act in a dream because he lives in a dangerous neighborhood, another because she is being verbally attacked in the workplace, another because he engages in paranoid fantasies, and another because she saw a violent film before retiring for the night. Other research strategies could use the same collection of dream reports and discover important levels of meaning and application only hinted at in this study.
When such scales as that developed by Hall and Van de Castle are used in other cultural settings, additional problems emerge. The selection mechanisms that to into the act of volunteering a dream may be quite different from country to country. Translations, even when carried out by native speakers, may lead to distortions when subjected to an analysis originally designed for English language dream reports.
There are several Hall-Van de Castle measures (e.g., the psychodynamic scales) we did not utilize; there are other content analysis systems that have been developed by other researchers. Any and all of these may have produced results that would have been of interest to dream researchers. Finally, this project suggests the need to investigate such topics as how different cultures actually interpret their dreams, as well as the accompanying differences in attitudes about dreams.

Conclusion
Phenomenologically, dreams are a series of images that are experienced during sleep, and reported in narrative form during wakefulness. The dream report can be conceptualized as a text, hence its content is influenced by the linguistic style of the subject. Differences in dream content among individuals or groups may reflect their differences in verbal behavior more than any other measure (Winget & Kramer, 1979, p. 14). In one of the few studies relevant to this issue, people who were asked to make up a dream while awake produced accounts that judges could not discriminate from written reports of their nighttime dreams (Cavallero & Natale, 1988-1989).
There are dangers in accepting language as an accurate representation of experience. Instead, it exists in relation to its world; the ensuing back-and-forth communication makes it difficult to compare dream reports even from a single culture or group, much less between groups. Culture can be conceptualized as a shared reality or way of life around which people have developed values, norms, life-styles, and social roles (Kane, Mellen, Patten, & Samano, 1993); imperfect though it may be, the role of language is paramount in understanding the interaction between individuals and their cultural setting.
The use of dream reports may become an important research tool in the emerging field of cultural psychology, the discipline that studies interactions between individuals and their cultural environment. It is the premise of cultural psychology that there is no population, least of all urban, Euro-American males, whose activities, practices, and ideals can be presumed to be a universal normative base line for human development and mental health (Shweder, 1991). Dream reports can provide a glimpse into the variety of human worldviews and experiences.
Dream reports could be discounted as providing dependable data for the study of culture/person interaction as long as they were considered meaningless, on the one hand, or contradictory to daily experience on the other. In contradistinction to Freud, it was Adler (1938) who stressed the congruent relationship of dreams to the lifestyles of their dreamers. For Adler, the dream is not significantly different from waking thoughts; like all cognitive and emotional activity, the dream becomes part of the process of rehearsal for future behavior and achievements. Bonime (1960) also insisted that dreams are less disguised than uncensored and, therefore, authentic self-presentations that express the individual’s shifting motivations, attitudes, and actions. However, we agree with Tedlock (1987) that waking consciousness itself is not unitary but is constantly shifting between foreground and background, between the internal world and the external world, between arousal and dissociation. This paradox has not kept psychology from attempting to study waking experience. Why should the paradox of dream life present obstacles to disciplined inquiry into dream reports?

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Stanley Krippner Ph.D.
Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
450 Pacific Avenue
San Fransisco, CA 94133 B 4640 / USA
e-mail: skrippner@saybrook.edu

Jan Weinhold
Humboldt University of Berlin
Simon-Dach-Str. 7
10245 Berlin / Germany
e-mail: jan@nervenet.de

On the nature and functions of dreaming
Ernest Hartmann, M.D.

I will outline here my current thinking on the nature and functions of dreaming based on several pieces of new research, clinical work with dreams, and a developing view of the network characteristics of the mind.
I will make some relatively broad statements in outline form followed by an attempt to back up the statements with available research; when such research is lacking I will discuss the point using inferences from research in related areas.

The mind is a net. The cerebral cortex - which, with some input from underlying areas constitutes the substance of our minds - functions as a complex net
This is of course a model and cannot be proven by data. There is always a danger of picturing the mind according to our latest technological fashions; nonetheless since we think in terms of visual models I believe we definitely require some image of the mind on which to hang our thoughts and at this point I believe the best model involves a net or network of nets. Such network models have proliferated lately- sometimes optimistically called “neural nets” in hope that they would correspond with the actual structure of the cortex and more conservatively called “connectionist nets” described by computer models assuming a large number of simple “on/off” units with variable connections between them. Although these are tremendously over-simplified nets even a connectionist net of this kind containing only a few tens or hundreds of units have shown success in modelling certain human learning tasks - for instance the learning of regular and irregular verbs (1) or performance on the Stroop Color Naming Test (2).
I have previously postulated “connecting” and “reconnecting” as basic aspects of dreaming (3, 4, 5), without specifying any particular connection mechanism. It appears that the connections occurring in dreams can fruitfully be examined in such a neural net or connectionist net model.

Dreaming makes connections more broadly than waking in the nets of the mind
In this sort of net, all that can happen, during waking, dreaming, or non-dreaming sleep, is the lighting up of certain patterns and the strengthening or weakening of the weights on certain connections; we make connections all the time. I suggest that there is an important difference: dreaming connects more broadly and more widely than does waking; in this sense dreaming can be considered “hyperconnective”. Figure 1 illustrates part of what I have in mind. This is a highly simplified rendering in two dimensions of a few aspects of the net using a “spread of excitation” model. I suggest that in waking there is a tendency for linear development of specific imagery usually guided by a specific task or goal. For instance, in thinking of a house, my waking mind seldom pictures a generic house; rather it is looking for a particular house to answer a specific question: “Where did I live in 1980?” An entire pattern lights up representing not just house but very quickly a specific house in my memory, and in fact, the specific house in which I lived in 1980. The excitation follows a set pattern; it remains in a “groove”, with relatively little “spread”.
In dreaming, I suggest the progression is less specific and less focused. The pattern representing house may be lit up, but then rather than only moving to a specific house, the excitation process also spreads “laterally” to patterns representing other houses and other similar structures — hotels, institutions, etc. Waking — and for now I am speaking of focused waking thought, the sort of waking thought that is furthest from dreaming — tends to stay in a sort of “groove” or “rut” whereas dreaming thought tends to wander and combine. The setting for a dream can often be a generic house or a combination of several houses. In looking over 100 of my recent dreams in which I had very carefully noted details of the setting, I found that the most common settings (60%) involved a kind of generic house (or room or outdoor area); a house that was somewhat like my house, yet different, a room that was partly a lobby and partly a lecture hall, etc. Freud’s best known dream likewise starts with a generic setting: “A great hall...”. These common “generic” settings would be scored as either “unfamiliar” or “questionable” settings in Hall and Van de Castle’s standard content analysis (6); their norms in students are 57% (male) and 53% (female) for the sum of these two categories. Inge Strauch has recently found in a group of 11 - 13-year-olds that the setting for their home dreams as well as lab dreams (REM dreams) were most often unfamiliar or generic whereas their fantasies usually took place in familiar settings (unpublished).
This broader and less focused character of dreaming is consistent with some well-known facts on the biology of the forebrain in REM sleep, the state during which most though not all dreaming occurs. I suggested as early as 1973 based on pharmacological studies that dreaming represents the functioning of the cortex without the influence of norepinephrine (3). This has been confirmed and extended: REM sleep appears to be characterized not only by the virtual cessation of norepinephrine release at the cortex but by similarly reduced serotonin and increased acetylcholine (7, 8). The neuromodulatory action of norepinephrine at the cortex can be summarized as “increasing signal-to-noise ratio” and “inhibitory sharpening” (9, 10, 11). I view our hypothetical net as having some more tightly woven or over-learned portions and other looser portions. The more tightly woven portions refer to well-learned rapid-processing feed-forward activities which lead relatively directly from input to output. The less tightly woven looser regions are those further removed from these postulated pathways. In Figure 2, I outline, again very roughly, a model of the brain seen as a growing complexity of interconnections (interneurons) superimposed on the simplest “reflex arc” connection between sensory input and motor output. In this simplified picture I place “feed-forward” mental activities such as calculating (for instance plotting trajectories in hunting prey or in catching a baseball) as still relatively close to the “center”. All our verbal and mathematical abilities, which activate many different parts of the cortex according to recent imaging studies, are nonetheless placed relatively “centrally” in this diagram. The “outer reaches” consist of the memory nets more readily accessed in reverie, daydreaming, and dreaming. This is a land populated by moving pictures and by metaphor (by the potential for producing pictures and metaphor — see below) with relatively little direct connection to sensory input or motor output. In this sort of picture, focused waking is more a hunt and dreaming is more an exploration.
One postulate derived from this view is that certain activities of focused waking - rapid processing, feed-forward activities, etc. should be relatively neglected by dreams. This has led to a study of reading, writing, and arithmetic (the “Three R’s”) in dreams.

We do not dream of the three R’s
In a preliminary study two scorers simply examined 129 dreams from two other studies of 68 home dreams and 61 laboratory dreams. The two blind scorers agreed perfectly that in these dreams there were zero instances of writing, zero instances of reading, and one instance of arithmetic described in the dreams (12).
In a broader survey study a questionnaire was sent to 400 good dream recallers (a mean of 6.8 dreams recalled per month) asking about any dreams involving the Three R’s (12). In the first part of the questionnaire respondents were simply asked how often they had dreamt about reading, writing, typing, and calculating on a scale going from “never” to “very frequently”. Respondents were also asked how much time they spent in these activities during waking. The results were quite consistent for the four questions; in each case about 90% responded that they dreamt “never” or “almost never” about the activity in question, although these subjects reported spending a mean of six hours per day on these tasks during waking.
Respondents were then asked about the relative prominence of six activities - walking, writing, talking with friends, reading, sexual activity, typing - in their waking lives and in dreaming. The results were very clear-cut (see Table 1). Reading, writing, and typing were much less prominent than the three other activities (p <.0001). The activities “writing”, “reading”, and “typing” did not differ significantly from each other; nor did the three “other” activities differ from each other, though they were chosen to cover a wide range of “Non-three R” activities. All these results demonstrate that we dream very little of the Three R’s.

The broader connections in dreaming are not made randomly - the process is guided by emotion
I have outlined above some ways in which dreaming appears to make connections more broadly than waking, producing “generic” rather than “specific” imagery - in a more “peripheral” portion of the nets (further from rapid input-to -output processing such as the 3 R’s). But is this making of connections a random process? I think not. In terms of a net such as I have discussed above, there is a constant flow of excitation and shift of weights. One can see this as an equilibration, a smoothing out of peaks and valleys. In an auto-associative net this can be described mathematically as a settling into a pattern of reduced “computational energy” or increased “harmony” (13). We can visualize this roughly as a windswept sea which when the wind dies down tends to settle towards a relatively smooth surface. This settling occurs especially when there is less new input and when the net functions less in a feed-forward and more in an auto-associative mode — thus in dreaming. The process can be seen as “driven” by regions of “storm” and high waves — regions of the net with increased “charge” — or computational energy. But these waves and wind are not random or meaningless. I suggest that in everyday human terms they are the emotions and emotional concerns of the dreamer. The data I have collected (below) suggests that emotion — the dominant emotion of the dreamer — is the force which drives or guides the connecting process and determines which of the countless possible connections are actualized at a particular time and thus which images appear in the dream. Dreams “contextualize” the dominant emotion.
Dreams after trauma as the trauma resolves: dreams contextualize emotion
I have collected series of dreams from over thirty adults and adolescents who have experienced a severe trauma (14). We are beginning to analyze these in a quantifiable fashion (see below) but one qualitative finding leaps out immediately which I call the tidal wave phenomenon.
People who have experienced any kind of trauma - an attack, a rape, escape from a fire - in the weeks after the trauma usually dream to some extent of the actual event, but they also dream of being overwhelmed by a tidal wave or of being caught in the path of an onrushing train or being caught by a gang of thugs. What is happening here? Clearly in these very common dreams the person is dreaming not about his/her sensory experiences but about his/her emotional state. The dream seems to be picturing or finding a context for the emotional state; the dream “contextualizes emotion”. For instance in the period immediately after trauma, we have many examples such as the following which seem to contextualize fear or terror:
• A huge tidal wave is coming at me.
• A house is burning and no one can get out.
• A gang of evil men, Nazis maybe, are chasing me. I can’t get away.
There are also dreams contextualizing helplessness and vulnerability:
– I dreamt about children, dolls – dolls and babies all drowning.
– He skinned me and threw me in a heap with my sisters; I could feel the pain; I could feel everything.
– There was a small hurt animal lying in the road.
For some, guilt is especially prominent and in fact in the longitudinal series, after dreams that appear to picture fear and terror, there are dreams dealing with guilt, especially survivor guilt:
– A shell heads for us (just the way it really did) and blows up, but I can’t tell whether it’s me or my buddy Jack who is blown up.
– I let my children play by themselves and they get run over by a car.
– I leave my children in a house somewhere and then I can’t find them.
In cases where a recent loss - a death of someone close - has occurred, dreams seem to contextualize grief:
– A mountain has split. A large round hill or mountain has split in two pieces, and there are arrangements I have to make to take care of it.
– A huge tree has fallen down.
– I’m in this huge barren empty space. There are ashes strewn all about.
The above of course have been picked out as examples, simply “illustrating” rather than demonstrating.
To begin to quantify this difficult area we have recently developed a scoring system for contextualizing images and have reported some early results (15). For instance in one group of 135 dreams consisting of 68 dreams following trauma and 67 dreams without trauma, in the case of dreams with trauma there were 46 in which two (or in some cases three) scorers agreed perfectly. Of these dreams 39 were scored yes (there is a contextualizing image) and seven were scored no. In the 50 dreams without known trauma where there was perfect agreement 25 were scored yes and 25 were scored no (X_ = 13.0; p <.001). The images after trauma were also scored higher on intensity of the image (2.2 versus 1.8 on a scale of 1 - 3). In the most “severe” case where eight dreams were collected in the weeks immediately after a rape, raters agreed perfectly on scoring eight out of eight dreams. Seven of the eight were scored yes (definitely having a contextualized image) and the mean intensity was rated as 2.50. In another sample 42 dreams as well as 33 daydreams of students with no known trauma were scored on a blind basis by two raters. The dreams were scored as containing a contextualizing image in 57% of cases, whereas daydreams had such an image in only 21% (p <.002). Thus we are beginning to feel confidence that these contextualizing images can be scored.
Over a period of weeks or months as the trauma gradually resolves, the dreams often follow a discernable pattern. First the trauma is replayed vividly and dramatically but not necessarily in precisely the way it occurred: there is often at least one major change in the dream, something that did not actually occur. Very rapidly the dreams begin to combine and connect this traumatic material with other material that appears emotionally similar or related. Often, as we have seen above, a person who has been through one kind of trauma dreams of all kinds of other traumas that may be related to this same feeling of helplessness, terror or guilt. In some cases this connecting involves reactivating previous trauma and other emotionally important personal themes evoked by the trauma (“rekindling”). If the dreamer is a “survivor” while others have been killed or injured, the theme of survivor guilt almost always emerges. The themes of the dreams and nightmares are often “Was it him or was it me?” and/or “How come I survived and he/she didn’t?” (For instance: “... a shell blows up but I can’t tell whether it’s me or my buddy who is blown up”; “I get burned in the fire and my brother’s safe.”). If someone was injured there is often a theme of guilt in the sense of “did I have something to do with bringing this on, was I responsible for it?” (This can occur even if there is absolutely no realistic evidence that this was the case). The process of connecting the trauma with other emotionally related material from the dreamer’s life (and imagination, reading, daydreaming) gradually expands and takes in more and more other material; the trauma itself plays a smaller and smaller role and the dreams return to their pre-trauma state.
The process seems to consist of cross-connecting or interweaving — making connections with whatever related material is available in memory and imagination, guided by the dominant emotions of the dreamer, which gradually become less intense and change their character as the trauma is resolved or integrated. Although at the level of the neural net we are still talking of smoothing out peaks or waves or spreading excitation from over-excited zones, the process follows definite non-random paths which we can understand in terms of the dreamer’s emotions and past experiences.
There is often a typical progression of emotional concerns. First, as noted, the dreams deal with absolute terror and fear; then sometimes vulnerability and helplessness; then, quite often, the dreams deal with guilt, especially survivor guilt. Later still the dreamer deals with grief and loss and attempts to come to terms with a new reality, etc. These are now individual concerns of the dreamer and of course they become more complex; I can no longer give “typical” examples of the imagery used.

Post-trauma dreams are a paradigm - the same process occurs, though it is harder to discern, in all dreaming
I believe that dreams after trauma, as the trauma resolves (above), may be a paradigm and an excellent place to start since we know precisely what emotion must be on the dreamer’s mind. This is usually less clear in other situations.
I suggest that the same making of connections in pictures and contextualization of emotional concern can be found in other situations - probably in all dreams. If one examines dreams in “stressful situations” in studies such as the classic ones by Breger et. al. (16) one finds many very similar contextualizing images. The progression seems to be similar to that after trauma though without the initial step dealing directly with the trauma.
A huge body of literature on dreams in psychotherapy can be explored in the same way though of course we must be wary about the selection process: hardly anyone in therapy (or out of therapy) provides a complete record of his or her dreams. I have been able to obtain some relatively complete series - for instance the dreams of a woman who has recently been overcome by guilt about not being a good enough mother for her children, reviving a longstanding childhood guilt of never being able to do anything well enough to satisfy her demanding parents. I have a record of 35 dreams told to me by this woman and almost all of them are of the same kind:
– My children are lost in a storm; I can’t find them.
– I leave my son alone and a big cat is clawing him, killing him.
– I’m at a hotel by the seashore. My two children are off in separate rooms and the tide is coming up fast. I wake up panicked that they’ll drown.
In this very common kind of situation dreams appear to be neither crazy nor random. They are picturing (contextualizing) a very clear emotional concern.
Similarly, patients beginning long-term psychotherapy or psychoanalysis have an obvious concern: “what am I getting into?” or “what is going to happen to me?”. I am aware of three different cases in which very similar dreams were reported more or less as follows:
“I am walking along a mountain path with steep drop-offs on each side. It is a bit dangerous. There is a large, shadowy figure accompanying me — I am not quite sure whether this figure is good or evil.”
Dreams of pregnant women provide another situation in which there is a series of fairly predictable emotional concerns which can be traced. Any number of dreams early in pregnancy deal with body distortions, etc., clearly picturing “what is happening to my body or will I still be attractive?” Dreams later in pregnancy deal with small animals or other objects getting larger and sometimes looking weird and deformed, obviously dealing with the concern of “what is this baby going to be like”. Finally towards the end of the pregnancies there are dreams dealing with “will I be able to be a mother” and “will I be able to take care of him or her” (17, 18).
I am suggesting that though my recent data come mainly from dreams after trauma as the trauma resolves, this contextualizing of emotion may be a more general aspect of the nature of dreams. Dreams contextualize the emotional concerns of the dreamer. However I suggest that when one simply looks at a few dreams collected from a few college students, the dreams may seem confused and almost random since we know little about the true emotional concerns of the dreamer (even if we ask for a list) and furthermore the concerns at any time may be multiple and not very strong.

The form of dreams is metaphor. Dreams can be thought of as explanatory metaphor
So far, I have suggested that dreams make connections more widely, more broadly, than waking and that the connections are guided by emotion and emotional concerns. Dreams contextualize emotion. But what form do these connections or contextualizations take? Obviously they do not, or very rarely, take the form of verbal narratives or mathematical formulas. Though we are often forced to work with verbal dream reports, we need to keep in mind that these are only attempts to render the dream experience in a preservable and reproducible form. What is experienced generally is images and usually - in sighted persons - visual/spatial images in motion. The dream-world looks very much like the waking world. The visual/spatial form of dreams is a fascinating problem in its own right; for instance, David Foulkes and his associates have studied in detail how the visual/spatial imagery of dreaming develops gradually in children at about the same time such imagery develops in waking life (19).
I do not consider it surprising that dreaming takes the form of moving visual/spatial imagery because basically that is all there is. The nets in our minds are made of units and connection weights, which we cannot directly see or experience, but which represent the ability to construct, or approximately reconstruct, a visual/spatial “reality”. This view derives from the basic parameters of distributed processing: memory is not facsimile but reconstitution. It is also consistent with work from a totally different direction: Antonio Damasio (20), based on his clinical neurological work with brain-damaged patients speaks of knowledge as embodied in “dispositional representations”. “What ‘dispositional representations’ hold in their commune of synapses is not a picture per se, but a means to reconstitute a picture.” Dreams provide contextualizations in pictures. Another way of putting this is to say that dreams deal in metaphor. This may seem far-fetched if one thinks - as many of us were taught - that metaphor is a specific “trope” used as a rhetorical device. However, metaphor is ubiquitous. The work of Lakoff, Johnson, and others (21, 22) has recently demonstrated the ubiquity of metaphor in our thoughts as well as our language. We can hardly speak of important topics such as life or relationships without using metaphor such as a “I am stuck”, “our goals are in sight”, “we are spinning our wheels”, “it should be smooth sailing from here on”, “I have to bail out of this relationship”, etc.
In this sense metaphor is not a rhetorical trope, not even an aspect of language, but a basic way our thinking is structured. Admittedly not all our thinking is metaphorical. It becomes increasingly metaphorical as we move down our continuum from focused thought to dreaming. When we are calculating for instance or engaging in a straight-forward over-learned activity such as typing a manuscript (the 3 R’s), there is little metaphor involved. As we stop and let out thoughts drift we begin to think in metaphoric pictures; this occurs even more in dreams. Dreams as we have seen are deficient at calculating and reading, but they are loaded with (another metaphor - I can’t help it) pictured metaphor. In fact, this is not a new idea. Ullman for instance, wrote an entire paper, called Dreams as Metaphor in Motion, in 1969 (23).

Individual differences: some people function more “dreamily” than others
There are great individual differences related to dreaming but these need not concern us here unless they can shed some light on the connecting and contextualizing aspects of dreaming that we have discussed above. I believe individual differences relating to thickness of boundaries may be relevant in this sense. I have discussed elsewhere in great detail individual differences along a dimension known as thin versus thick boundaries (24). In general people with thick boundaries keep everything in their minds separate; they tend to be solid, well-organized, sometimes rigid; they have relatively little investment in fantasy; they think in black-and-white terms. People with thin boundaries have the opposite characteristics: they tend to merge thoughts and feelings; they have vivid fantasies not always kept separate from reality; they are less defended; they think in shades of grey, without black or white.
We have demonstrated that there is a highly significant correlation between the amount of dream recall and thinness of boundaries; and in fact persons with thin boundaries not only report more dreams but their dreams are scored as more vivid, detailed, emotional, bizarre, “dreamlike”, and with more interaction between characters compared to dreams of those with thick boundaries (25). Furthermore, those with thin boundaries have more “dreamlike” characteristics even in their waking lives. In a preliminary study a group of students were asked to write down a recent dream as well as a recent daydream. Reports were scored for bizarreness and for “dreamlikeness”. Overall dreams were scored as much more bizarre and more “dreamlike” than daydreams, but there was a shift between subjects so that those subjects who scored thin on the Boundary Questionnaire had daydreams that were just as bizarre and almost as “dreamlike” as the dreams of those with thick boundaries (26). In other words the continuum we have discussed running from focused waking mental functioning at one end to dreaming at the other end is somehow related to the continuum we have studied across individuals running from very thick boundaries to very thin boundaries. Those with thin boundaries live more on the “dreaming” end of the continuum.

Dreaming may have a function in cross-connecting or “weaving in” new material - not so much consolidating material but rather increasing the connections
The above is an outline of my views on the fundamental characteristics of dreaming and how dreaming differs from waking. But is this simply the way things are or does dreaming have a function? Starting again with my collection of dreams after trauma as the trauma resolves, it sometimes appears that the contextualization of emotion and making of multiple connections with past similar emotional material might have a function in terms of connecting or weaving-in new and difficult material. The initial reaction to a severe trauma may be something like “HELP! THE WORLD IS ENDING”, “THIS IS THE MOST HORRIBLE THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED”, “HOW CAN ANYONE SURVIVE THIS”, but then as connections are made there may be a gradual increase of “YES, THIS FEELS BAD BUT IT’S A BIT LIKE....”, “I’VE EXPERIENCED SOMETHING LIKE THIS, I’VE WORKED ON THESE FEELINGS”, or “I’VE DEALT WITH SOMETHING SIMILAR; IT’S HARD BUT IT’S POSSIBLE TO CONTINUE”.
In this sense dreaming may have a quasi-therapeutic function: the making of connections in a safe place. I have reviewed many similarities between dreaming (whether or not remembered) and the process of psychotherapy, especially after trauma (27). Both good psychotherapy after trauma and dreaming first provide a safe place for work to be done. In therapy the safe place is much more than the physical setting; it involves the safe “boundaries” of the therapeutic situation and the gradual trusting alliance formed between patient and therapist. In dreaming - especially in REM sleep - the safe place is provided by the well-established muscular inhibition which prevents activity and the acting out of dreams. Once a safe place is established the therapist allows the patient, especially the traumatized patient, to go back and tell her or his story in many different ways, making connections between the trauma and other parts of the patient’s life - overall making connections and trying to integrate the trauma. As connections are made between the terrible recent event and other material, the emotion becomes less powerful and overwhelming and the trauma is gradually integrated into the rest of life. Dreaming may perform at least some of these same functions. Dreaming and psychotherapy both can be conceptualized as “making connections in a safe place”. Thus dreaming may have a quasi-therapeutic adaptive function which can be seen most easily after trauma though I believe again that trauma is a paradigm and that dreaming has the same function, though less easily discernible, at other times.
In terms of the nets of the mind, the spreading out of excitation or reduction of “computational energy” is useful in presumably allowing the net to function better, in a more harmonious state. But the effect is not purely “energetic”; the spread of excitation forms increased connections and cross-connections which inevitably alter the future functioning of the net. The trauma, or any disturbance, is cross-connected, “woven in” by dreaming as numerous new connections and contexts are provided. This process is likely to be useful for future functioning since a new trauma or disturbance will be less serious, will produce less “storm-waves” since appropriate contexts and cross-connections are already present.
In this broad sense I see dreaming - making of broad connections and contextualizing - as having a function which can be seen both as restorative/adaptive in an immediate sense (spreading excitation, calming the storm) and as producing changes in memory networks which are adaptive for the future. This change in networks is not a consolidation of memory but a broadening of memory through cross-connections - an increase in connections, a weaving in of new experience.
This possible function of dreaming can be called quasi-therapeutic or adaptive and I would call it a contemporary theory of the function of dreaming rather than my own theory since others have suggested very similar functions starting from very different data bases. Thus French and Fromm (28) and Palombo (29) using clinical data, Breger, et. al. (16) studying acutely stressful situations, and Cartwright (30) in research on people under a prolonged stress (divorce), have all proposed versions of an adaptive function of dreaming. Jones (31) made an analogy between dreaming and effective psychotherapy. Koulack (32) has proposed a complex functional theory which at least in part involves “mastery of stress”. Fiss (33) has proposed that dreams function to maintain “self structures”. Greenberg and Pearlman (34, 35) have suggested several versions of an adaptive problem-solving function. Milton Kramer (36) has proposed a “selective mood regulation” function of dreaming which derives from very different studies but is similar to what I have been discussing in terms of a calming of stormy seas or spreading out of excitation.
Although dreaming should not be confused with REM sleep, since most dreams come from REM sleep any hypothesis on the nature and functions of dreaming should at the very least be compatible with what we know of the nature and functions of REM sleep. As we saw above, the present view of dreaming is very compatible with low norepinephrine availability at the cortex during REM sleep providing less “inhibitory sharpening”. Concerning function, although the functions of REM sleep are still unknown, the present views of the functions of dreaming in terms of cross-connections is certainly compatible with two related views on the functions of REM sleep. It fits well with the view by Roffwarg, et. al. (37) that REM sleep, especially in young organisms, helps to “develop the nervous system” - evidently by making new connections. It is also compatible with the view that REM sleep functions in the “repair, reorganization, and formation of new connections in amine-dependent forebrain systems” summarized as “knitting up the raveled sleave of care” (3).
Critics skeptical about any function of dreaming often question how dreams can be important if most of them are forgotten. I suggest that remembering or not remembering an individual dream image is not what is important in terms of function. What is probably most important is the making of broad cross-connections in the net, the redistribution of weights, etc., all of which can occur whether or not the actual dream content is remembered. Of course, when a dream is remembered, then in addition to this basic function, dreams can be useful in any number of other ways - in problem solving, self- knowledge with or without a therapist, and occasionally in helping with artistic and scientific discovery. And although I do not believe the essential function of dreaming requires recall, yet it must of course be admitted that all our conjectures about dreaming - including the present one - are necessarily based on examination of the subset of dreams that are remembered.

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Ernest Hartmann, M.D.
Tufts University School of Medicine; Sleep Disorders Center, Newton-Wellesley Hospital
Ernest Hartmann, M.D.
27 Clark Street
Newton, MA 02159
Phone (617) 965-5872
Fax (617) 965-6548

This paper agues that REM state dream experiences owe both their structure and meaning to chaotic self-organizing properties of the brain during REM sleep. Several lines of evidence support the notion that the REM dreaming brain can be understood as a process system that exists near the edge of chaos, one highly sensitive to internal influences. This sensitivity is due, first, to the fact that the dreaming brain gates out external input, thus operating without the stabilizing influences of waking feedback. Second, the pre-frontal cortex in REM sleep is only minimally activated, thus the brain operates with weakened volition, reduced logic, and diminished self-reflection. Third, there is a reduction of neuromodulatory inhibition during REM sleep, allowing the brain to respond to minuet internal stimulation. Finally, the REM sleeping brain is subject to powerful intermittent cholinergic PGO stimulation that may initiate creative patterns of dream activity. Taken in overview, this conception of dreaming offers a common meeting ground for brain-based studies of dreaming and psychological dream theory.
Key words: brain, consciousness, dream, chaos, self-organization, REM sleep.
Dreaming is the brain doing its typical thing in the atypical conditions of sleep.
David Foulkes (1999)

Introduction
Self-organizing dynamics are fundamental to processes at many levels of the organic as well as the physical world, an idea shaped by both empirical and theoretical research over the last thirty years (e.g., Kauffman, 1993; Laszlo, 1987; Maturana, Varela, & Uribe, 1974; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). Recent work shows the same self-organization in the brain (e.g., Freeman, 1991; Kahn, & Hobson, 1993; Pribram, 1995; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), as well as in the process structure of human experience itself (e.g., Combs, 1996; Combs & Krippner, 1998). This paper discuses self-organizing dynamics in the brain with the intention of understanding the REM dream experience alone and in relation to waking consciousness.

The Self-Organizing Brain
One way think of the brain is to view it as a self-organizing system comprised of self-organizing subsystems. First of all, how could it be otherwise? Though the brain is usually modeled in terms of neural networks and circuitry, this circuitry certainly is not static. It changes frequently due to influences from neurological development, daily learning, and encoded neuromodulations. In addition, both single unit firing and mass activity is widespread in the brain, implying that process itself is a feature of neural functionality that rivals the importance of anatomy. The electrical circuits in a house or a computer can endure extended periods of inactivity without suffering loss of function. However, self-organizing and self-creating (autopoietic) systems such as ecologies, weather, and living organisms, are constantly in motion, just as is the living brain.
The physiology of the brain reveals a wealth of process patterns, which taken as a whole suggest that any final accounting of the nature of brain activity will be made in terms of activities as much or more than in terms of structures. Many if not most of these activities seem fundamentally chaotic in form. For instance, the EEG rhythm is roughly cyclic in appearance, and different categories of activity, such as alpha, beta, theta, or delta, can be recognized on visual inspection. On closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that the actual waveform changes from cycle to cycle. Indeed, it is unlikely that any cycle of activity ever repeats itself exactly, and it is apparently impossible to predict with precision the shape of a future EEG wave. This situation of global familiarity combined with non-repetition and unpredictability defines a chaotic process, one whose action describes a strange attractor (Kellert, 1993). Such attractors appear to be a common if not universal feature of complex self-organizing systems such as living cells, ecologies, and evidently brains as well (e.g., Abraham & Gilgen, 1994; Basar, 1990; Freeman, 1995; Hardy, 1997; Pribram, 1995; Robertson & Combs, 1995; but also see Mandell & Selz, 1997).
Studies of the human EEG demonstrate a significant fractal structure, (e.g., Basar, 1990; Screenivason, Pradhan, and Rapp, 1999), suggestive of an underlying self-organizing process (Anderson & Mandell, 1996). The dimensionality of this structure appears to be higher in REM than NREM sleep, indicating greater complexity and a larger number of underlying influences, as would be expected if EEG activity even in part reflects the complexity of accompanying dream experiences. Anderson and Mandell (1996) have made detailed studies of the temporal structure of REM state electrical activity in fetal rats. They believe that such activity reflects self-organizing hierarchical integrative processes in the developing nervous system. Interestingly, there is a preliminary report which indicates that this integrative process may follow an abnormal developmental pathway in the case of autistic individuals (Tanguay et al., 1976).
That EEG activity exhibits fractal properties is consistent with the self-evident fact that the brain can be understood as residing in a condition of self-organized criticality (Bak, 1996). A system can be said to be in as critical state if a small perturbation sets it into fluctuation on all scales of length or time, that is, if the response is fractal. A commonly cited example of a critically poised system is a sand of pile ready to cascade into an avalanche when a single additional grain is dropped onto it. Bak points out that the brain is critically poised; otherwise it would not respond globally to the small amount of energy contained in a retinal image or a sound heard near the auditory threshold. However, the brain unlike the sand pile is not a static structure. It is an extremely complex dynamical process system, the product of its own self-organizing tendencies. Thus it can rightly be said to exhibit self-organized criticality. With regard to the importance of self-organized criticality in biological systems, Stewart Kauffman (1993) observed that “selection achieves and maintains complex systems poised on the boundary or edge between order and chaos. These systems are best able to coordinate complex tasks and evolve in a complex environment” (p.xv).
Organized criticality in a chaotic system is just another way of talking about the popularly termed butterfly effect, or “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” originally discovered by meteorologist Edward Lorenz (1963) while investigating models of fluid convection (e.g., Kellert, 1993; Peak, 1994). Its relevance here is that the smallest of influences active in the sleeping brain might have sizable effects after just a few cycles of activity. However, by its very nature the butterfly effect is unpredictable, and while it might add to the spontaneous creativity-read randomness-of the dream process, it does not help us understand how the brain might respond in an ordered way to subtle internal stimuli such as those discussed below. It is also helpful to understand activity in the dreaming brain in terms of stochastic resonance. This is a well known effect that has been studied in a variety of media, ranging from electronic circuits to nerve cells (Moss and Wiesenfeld, 1995), by which vibration or noise keeps a system in motion and on track, rather than allowing it to get caught in small groves or “minima.” A simple example of stochastic resonance is a cup that “walks” across the surface of an uneven vibrating tabletop, following the course of least resistance from higher to lower regions of the surface. The vibrations keep the cup from getting stuck along the way because of friction and small groves in the surface. Stochastic resonance can improve the effective signal-to-noise ratio in a communication situation. In the brain it may allow ongoing processes to “relax” into inherently natural patterns of activity, an important point to which we will return shortly.
Before doing so, let us consider the possibility that the brain’s activity, like that of other extremely complex systems such as the weather, can be understood as an exquisitely intricate strange attractor, one exhibiting an intricate array of “wings” or “compartments” (Goertzel, 1994). During wakefulness the shape of this attractor, especially in the sensory cortices, is powerfully constrained by sensory input, which itself is often highly patterned (e.g., Gibson, 1966, 1979). Freeman and his colleagues (Freeman, 1991, 1995; Freeman & Barrie, 1994) have mapped such attractors in a variety of different sensory cortices. They found that the sensory regions of the brain are critically poised to respond robustly and in an ordered fashion to even the smallest stimulation. In the REM state, however, such attractors are not constrained by sensory input. In this state the self-organizing dynamics of the brain are set into motion not by external stimulation but by its own internal situation. Interestingly, it is possible to find such self-organizational dynamics at work in the waking state as well. Freeman, for instance, discovered that new learning experiences actually modify previously established cortical activity patterns. For example, a rabbit’s original cortical response to an odor is altered when the odor is experienced in a new context, such as a classical conditioning situation. Freeman interprets such changes to signify that the meaning of the stimulus is as important in the production of the brain’s response as the physical structure of the stimulus itself. Speaking informally, Freeman (1997) once observed that if one sees Hamlet, then sees Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, returning to Hamlet one finds it to be a different play.

The Dreaming Brain
Tononi, Edelman, and Sporns (1998; Tononi & Edelman 1998) argue that the complexity of a living organism is not represented by a fully integrated system, as exemplified by the structure of a crystal, or by a differentiated and unconstrained system such as seen in an ideal gas. Rather the complexity of a living organism lies at an intermediate point where structural elements are sufficiently undifferentiated to engage in “unplanned” interactions, while at the same time sufficiently integrated to allow many of the relationships between them to be stable. The human brain, with its many interconnections and its many individual elements, is an example of a complex self-organizing system within a larger complex self-organizing system, the human body. It is a system that is capable of moving between very many states. Thinking is an example of a self-organizing action of the waking brain (Combs, 1996), and dreaming is an example of a self-organizing action of the sleeping brain, especially in REM sleep (Kahn and Hobson, 1993; Kahn et al., 2000).
During REM sleep, brain activity is not constrained by external stimulation as it is during waking. The brain is as active as it is during waking, 4 but information processing is inwardly oriented, occupied, for example, by memories and feelings, as distinct from extroceptive input which dominates waking life. In this state a number of factors combine to make it acutely reactive to internally generated influences. Not only are the stabilizing effects of external sensory input actively inhibited, but there is a shift away from widespread aminergic neuromodulatory inhibition, which dominates the waking brain, toward cholinergic modulation, predisposing it to easy activation (Hobson, 1994, 1988). To be more specific, during REM sleep norepinephrine and serotonin containing neurons cease firing while acetycholine containing neurons fire more actively. The loss of the aminergic neuromodulation (norepinephrine and serotonin) is associated with a decrease in signal reliability (Foote, Bloom, & Aston-Jones, 1983) and an increase in the error rate of neuronal firing (Mamelak and Hobson, 1989). The increase of cholinergic containing neurons is associated with the initiation of the rapid eye movement (REM) generator (Hobson and McCarley, 1977).
In addition to a changed neuromodulation, certain areas within the dreaming brain are connected functionally in a different way than in the waking brain, as recent PET studies have disclosed (Braun, et al., 1997, 1998; Maquet, et al., 1996; Maquet, 2000). Because the interconnectedness of the dreaming brain is different from that of the waking brain, it self-organizes differently. The brain has developed specific yet dynamically changing connections between groups of neurons for specific tasks. Active connections with and within the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) are necessary for short-term memory, planning, and volitional actions. For example, working memory for face recognition, and short-term visual memory for objects and faces, has been shown to involve the DLPFC in conjunction with areas in the ventral pathway in the inferotemporal cortex (Goldman-Rakic, et al., 1998; McIntosh et al., 1996). These PET studies have shown that the DLPFC is much less active in the dreaming brain than in the wake brain.
In addition, these PET studies (Braun, et al., 1997, 1998; Maquet, et al., 1996, 1997) show notable arousal of the extrastriate visual cortex, especially in the ventral processing stream. The fact that activation is also seen in limbic and para-limbic structures, most significantly in the anterior cingulate and the amygdaloid complexes, while at the same time activity in the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex is markedly reduced, point toward emotional arousal and at the same time suggest a reduction of memory as well as a diminished capacity for logic and self-reflection. All this is entirely consistent with many studies of the subjective qualities of REM dreaming (e.g., Hall & Van de Castle, 1966; Tonay, 1991). They are also consistent with the hypothesis that the dreaming brain self-organizes differently than the wake brain, not only because the dreaming brain is minimally receptive to outside stimuli, but also because of its changed functional activation patterns and its changed neuromodulation.
It is interesting that Braun et al. (1998) report decreased activation of the primary visual cortex during REM. This observation may seem surprising, since a deactivated primary visual cortex due, say, to a stroke, results in the absence of visual awareness. It is, however, consistent with the suggestion that the conscious experience of vision is more directly associated with the extrastriate association areas and their connections with the frontal cortex than with the primary visual cortex itself (Crick & Koch, 1992; Koch, 1998; Revonsuo, 1998). In line with this, lesion studies show that damage to the extrastriate cortex, as well as damage to the parietal operculum and to the mediobasal frontal cortex, result in decreased dreaming (Solms, 1997; Hobson, et al. 1998). Neurological patients who report a global cessation of dreaming typically exhibit damage in the parietal convexity, or have suffered disconnection of the mediobasal frontal cortex from the brainstem and diencephalic limbic regions (Solms, 1997; Hobson et al. 1998b).
Solms (1997) suggests that since the parietal convexity is important for sustaining the visual activity implicated by visual phenomenology, a crucial link exists between dreaming and some of the brain’s highest regulatory and inhibitory mechanisms. He found that REM continues even after patients report complete lack of dream phenomenology. Solms (1999) argues that if dreams completely cease when specific cortical areas are damaged, yet REM is preserved, there is no place for a passive, non-initiating, cortex in a robust theory of dreaming. The question of whether cortical structures are involved in initiating dreaming is, indeed, controversial and has been addressed in Hobson, Pace-Schott, and Stickgold (2000) on one side, and by Antrobus (1990), on the other.

PGO Stimulation, the Dream, and the Self-Organizing Brain
One of the most striking features of REM sleep is the bombardment of the optic cortex with large pontine-geniculate-occipital (PGO) spikes, which release powerful cholinergic stimulation (Callaway et al., 1987). These spikes originate in the lower brainstem, travel upward to the lateral geniculate bodies, and then on to the occipital lobes. Their discovery led Hobson and McCarley (1977) to offer the now classic activation-synthesis hypothesis, according to which dream experiences represent the efforts of the cortex to make sense out of this apparently random activity. In other words, this PGO activity is interpreted by the visual brain as sensory stimulation. The implication of this view was that dreams are meaningless from the perspective of high level cognitive or emotional process. Taken on face value this notion leaves relatively little room for dream experiences to be taken seriously as meaningful. Since then, however, Hobson and one of the present authors took the initial steps toward exploring the notion that the content of dream consciousness is the result of self-organizing dynamics in the brain (Kahn & Hobson, 1993). This idea was further developed in a recent paper authored by all three of the present writers, and is continued in the present paper (Kahn, Krippner, & Combs, 2000). The basic aim of all three of these papers is toward understanding how coherent dream experiences can arise in the context of seemingly unpatterned PGO stimulation, as well as other chaotic-like aspects of brain function.
We suggest that PGO activity has two effects on the dreaming brain. First, the bombardment of the cortex by PGO spikes might act as a perturbation to the dreaming visual cortex, creating stochastic resonance. This raising of the cortical “temperature” by PGO stimulation would allow the ongoing patterns of cortical activity to “relax” into natural forms (attractors) shaped by residual emotional and cognitive influences present from moment to moment. Thus, the dreaming brain, isolated from extroceptive sensory constraints, becomes subject to subtle influences that might exert sizable patterning effects on neural activity (Combs & Krippner, 1998). Such effects might be felt experientially as the conscious flow of the dream. This does not mean that dream narratives carry no forward momentum of their own. Indeed, the creation of stories seems to be virtually obligatory to the human mind and brain. Rather, the pelting of the cortex does not allow the cortical system to stagnate, but keeps it in a forward motion that is sensitive to the moment to moment changing psychophysiological state of the brain-in other words, keeps the dream narrative in motion. Approaching dreaming in the brain from a similar direction, Globus (1989, 1995) holds that dream narratives are not assembled from memories that combine according to syntactic rules, but rather are created de novo as underlying neural networks relax from moment to moment into natural minima. De novo creativity has no elementals. The whole product is fashioned at once and is not made of individual pieces. As an interesting aside, we note that PGO timing becomes progressively more coherent over the neocortex during periods of REM sleep, suggestive of an underlying self-organizing stochastic process (Amzica and Steriade, 1996).
Second, the effect on the cortex of the bombardment of PGO spikes might be to frequently disrupt ongoing patterns of activity, resulting experientially in abrupt plot or scenery shifts. At the level of cortical brain activity these can be understood as catastrophic bifurcations. Mamelak and Hobson (1989), for instanced, have argued that PGO stimulation is tied to the high rate of plot shifts experienced during REM dreaming. Such shifts are more frequent in REM dreaming than during dreaming reported from NREM sleep (Cavallero, Cicogna, Natalie, Occhionero & Zito, 1992). Such shifts are evidently essential to the “bizarreness” of REM dreams (Porte & Hobson, 1986). Abrupt transitions in dream content are made all the more effortless during REM sleep by a diminished short term memory and the loss of a continuous objective sense of self (e.g., see Purcell, Mullington, Moffitt, Hoffman, & Pigeau, 1986), both perhaps related to the fact that the prefrontal lobes are essentially taken off-line in the REM state.
As for other influences that mold the content of dreams, the presence of high activation levels in certain limbic structures during REM sleep is consistent with the idea that emotional factors play a significant role in dreams. The brain clearly does not receive such emotional influences passively, however, but incorporates them into complex self-organized attractor patterns that play themselves out as dream narratives (Combs & Krippner, 1998). Additional influences on dream content also include long-term episodic and semantic memories, “relaxed” into the dream narrative, as well as recent experiences whose emotional residues remain written on the mind and the brain for as long as a few hours to a few days (Globus, 1989). For instance, Freud (1900/1955) correctly pointed out that much dream content is directly related to events of the prior day, a view that has found general support ever since (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966).
According to Globus’ (1995) view, sleep states evolve naturally in a self-organizing brain that operates under mutable constraints. A particular dream experience relies on the pattern of organization operating at the moment. Influences such as emotions activate low threshold meanings in a way that is changed by the tuning of constraints. Learning is one such constraint, as are connection weights between neurons at the synapse level. The constraint structure defines a set of possibilities, which in turn dictates what input the cortical system resonates with. According to these constraints, the cortical system settles into an actual dream state. No rules are followed, rather the system flows according to emergent chaotic attractors.
Interestingly, the sensitivity instilled by the influence of stochastic resonance may be sufficient to release subtle influences including narratives and symbols laid down as Hebbian networks early in the development, perhaps through personal experience or even genetic patterning (e.g., Edelman, 1992, 2000). If such networks exist they could do much to give the interpretative views of dynamic psychology a grounding in the study of the brain.
The details of how the brain transforms each night’s constellation of emotional and cognitive influences into the rich fabric of dream life remains a deep mystery. However, these nocturnal productions in which reality is essentially preserved, but stretched, turned about, and parceled out into fragments, intuitively seems much more like the outcome of dynamical processes than of computational ones. Though dreams will remain a mystery, the authors hope that they will now become a mystery of the brain-mind system, from which a unified science and subsequent understanding can emerge.

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Stanley Krippner Ph.D.
Saybrook Graduate School
and Research Center
450 Pacific Avenue
San Fransisco, CA 94133 - 4640
USA
e-mail: skrippner@saybrook.edu

The question of whether dreams can be used for healing purposes is one that has intrigued many people throughout the ages. The Bible, folklore, another recorded elements of history recount many instances of the power of dreams, such as Joseph’s precognitive awareness of famine and pestilence in Egipt and his ability to convince the pharaoh to prepare for the same. Yet the question of whether dreams can be used for actual healing purposes remains.
Surely in the sense of self-healing dreams can be used and are often without the dreamer himself being aware of it it since science seems to show that dreaming itself is necessary for health, and the dream-deprived person can incurr serious illness.
However the question posed here is on an even broader scale than whether an individual can use his /her own dreams for healing purposes. Can dreams be used for the purposes of healing someone else?
The tales in the early Christian church of saints coming in form of dreams or vision for the purpose of healing are almost too numerous to mention. And there certainly does seem to be the propensy for some particurarly talented dreamers to select the desitination of their dreaming and unerringlly attend to some chosen task.
When I first moved to Virginia Beach met a woman –let us call her Andrea– a rather ordinary mother of three or four grown children who had returned to college to finish a graduate degree in psychology. At first she kept quiet about her ability to perform healings, but finally found her professors so interested that she began to talk an even submitted to a variety of psychological tests. Which proved she was normal. She had not medical training.
Two people with whom I was familiar went to Andrea with medical problems. One had a severe case of herpes, the other a tumor which doctors wanted to remove for fear of malignancy. In both cases the patients went to Andrea asking to be admitted to her”hospital”. Andrea, who seldom admitted when questioned that she was awared of the patients existence in her dream reality and would administer to her patients eitheir at their home or in her dream hospital.
In the case of the “herpes”, the individual seems to show improvement until he again began to produce the conditions which had created the disease itself. In the second case, the case of the tumor, the patient recovered completely. In addition to nightly treatments in the “hospital”, Andrea treated her patients regularly in the waking world with a method know in religious communities as “laying of hands”.
The primary modern definition of the method used by “holy” persons throughout the ages, is that “the spirit” of God directs energy through the healer to the patient of the individual being healed.
Examined by the same doctors who planned to perform surgery, the woman who had daily seen the desintegation of her tumorous growth was told her recovery was strange and miraculous. She did not inform them of her unorthodox treatment.
Another man, a Boston-bread healer who worked with Poseida Institute for a time, came to me one day with the question,”Do you think is possible to heal people from the dream state?
I asked him why the question.
The previous night, he said, his wife has been experiencing a severe pain in her leg. He had done what he could using ordinary relaxation techniques and then had himself gone to sleep.
During the night he had the following dream experience. He was examining his wife’s leg, looking at it almost if he has X-ray vision. Once having located the source of the pain, he said, it was seeing balls of energy. Points of light worked upon the pain until it dissappearred. When he awoke his wife was feeling fine.
There was no doubt in my mind that this man had a healing ability. Always relatively humble,and questioning, he told the story of his first healing experience which happened among dozens of witnesses. He had been attending a conference on healing where participants were taught and allowed to practice healing techniques on one to another.
At one point in the conference a woman had taken the role of patient while my friend played the role of healer. When he finished she said she felt much better, and since it was lunch time he suggested that they oo get some lunch together.
As they walked down the drive together talking, he noticed that they were being followed by a woman in a car but not give it much though until they arrive at the restaurant, a short walk away.The driver of the car was the woman’s sister who arrived with tears of joy on her face. It seems that the patient had for some time suffered from a debilatating heart disease and for years had not been able to walk more than a few steps without assistance.
And there again, the question of time, space and reality creation of our thoughts and feelings, is it ever possible to cure some one or make them sick?
This became a very central question in some research work jointly by two organizations in the Unites States, one of them the Poseida Institute. The process was quite straightforward. During a given period of time the next local person who came to Poseida Institute requesting a psychic reading would be offered the bonus of becoming involved in the Dream Helper Project.
This meant that, as well as the requested psychic reading, the individual would receive pre-sessions and post sessions counselling with one of the PI psychologists, would meet a dream team composed of seven members of both institutions, and for at least two sessions of
“dream helper” work, and that psychic readings as well would be done on the Dreams Helper process.
The purpose of the experiment what two fold: one to determine whether these dreams helpers could intuit what the target individuals’ problem was without verbal assistance.

Black Elk
The American Indians have always believed in in the healing power of dreams and one of the best-known Indian. Historical figures is Black Elk, an Oglala sioux immortalized by prize winning author John Neihardt.
When Black Elk was nine years old, he said, he became ill with sickness that started with a weakening of his legs and then his entire body became swollen and puffy. At first, when the tribe was moving, he carried in a ponny drag: and finally, when the tribe settled, he was sick in his family tepee. For twelve long days and nights he lay in a delirium and was not expected to live..
It was during this time that Black Elk had his greates vision of his tribe, one which would sustain him for the rest of his life. During this vision he perceived himself to be in his body, but his legs did not hurt him and his body was very light. In this vision Black Elk saw the Powers of the World. These Powers imparted their powers to him and he saw the history of the hoop of the indians nations, an event which led him to visionary historical predictions troughout lifetime.
Finally, his vision completed, he found himself alone on a broad plain. He could see his family’s own teepe village far ahead and began to walk toward it, finally entering his own teepe where he saw his parents bending over a sick boy who was himself. Someone was saying,” The boy is coming. You’d better give him some water”.
In typical Indian tradition, Black Elk had been attended by the tribal medicine man, Whirlwind Chaser, and Black Elk’s parents insisted that it had been Whirlwind Chaser who effected the cure.
The medicine man was given the family’s best horse and there was much talked about his power and ability.
“I knew it was the Grandfather in the Teepe (of his vision) who had cure me” Black Elk is quote that saying, “but I feel afraid to say so “.
An this bring us to the important question of who does the curing. Is it the healer, the doctor, the surgeon, the medicine man? Or is the patient? Ordinarly our answer would be, as it was in the case of Black Elk’s parents, the medicine man.Yet, according to Black’s Elk’s insistence, it was the curative power of the dream itself that made him well.
Once the individual, a young college girl, was selected the dream team met with her one evening for meditation. Introductions were made (Some of the dream team members were also previously unacquainted.) and the group meditated together for a brief period of time. Each member of the group was then asked to go home, write down any intuitive impressions of the target individual and then record whatever dreams came during the night’sleep.The next day being Saturday, the group, would again meet and discuss their dreams and impressions. Prior to dreaming at all, five picked up the problem involved a trauma or risk, out of the seven dream helpers recorded no intuitive feelings(The other two dream helpers recorded no intuitive feelings). Four felt that this trauma had to do with difficulties in the pelvic area and two saw this as having to do with children or the lost of a child.
The group was later to discover that the girl was facing a traumatic conflict of involvement with an older married man, about whom her family knew nothing and would certainly not approve; that she had indeed been experiencing difficulties with her reproductive organs for which she had been seing a physician; and that earlier, in high school, she had experience a traumatic abortion which very few people were aware of outside other immediate family
(including tha man in question). Bear in mind then that
even before hearing the dreams, the girl found herself somewhat surprised by their intuitive impressions the group forth.
During the discussions of the dreams (which were too numerous to report here in full) the dream team found their dreams centered around several themes which included:
1: cars with broken engined,
2:fires or explosions,
3: earthquakes or earth splits,
4: foreing objets,
5: other dream team members,
6: children at play or young people, and
7: energy in a circular motiion.
As the discussion of the dream proceeded, the dream team members also discovered that there were certain philosophical and emotional conflicts between them which were stimulated by the target individual’ problems and depicted in the dreams.
The Dreams Helper Project was about and what be accomplished in terms od healing; yet the project certainly reiterated what to me seem to be important concepts such as:
1. There is no healing exept self-healing.
2. There is no self except that which includes all of us. Pesonally self is, in the final analysis. illusory.
3. We exist in what is called here “the mind of God”, a timeless, spaceless universe where in all things available to us.
4. Working within this concept, within this approach to dreaming can aid in the healing not only of someone who consides himself/herself to have a serious illness, but in the whole universe since we inter-connected.
5. Projects such as this are a new and unique method of approaching the ills of the world.
I feel that something should be said about the problems of research within a structure such as the Dreams Helper Project outline here (and any similar project). This problem was encountered almost immediately by the scientific in the group, and it is the problem of how to statiscally record and analyse the results of such work.
First of all, from the pre- dream intuitions of the dream helpers, it was obviuos that many of them perceived upon first meeting, without dreaming and without conversation, some or all was troubling the target person. Secondly, may of the dreams semed to center around these focal themes, and the target person seemed to be helped, but how could one ever prove it?
The answer given to this question is that one cannot prove it.Further, one cannot “prove anything” by current statistical methods, that depend on the desires of the researchers and the participants.
In a psichic reading about the Dreams Helper Project, and example was given. Two dreams, the reading said, might talk about chairs. One of the dreams might symbolize the matter discussed in the healing project: the other might symbolized something entirely different. Later one of the directors of the project, reported a conversation with Dr. Rober Van de Castle of the University of Virginia Sleep Research Laboratory. The two had spoken for over half an hour, using quite different words to express the same concepts. The later agreed that, had their conversation been recorded and then analysed by a researcher for symbolic content, there search might not have been able to tell that they were talking the same subject.
Recognizing that this is some what distressing thought for researchers, the psychic went on to say in a further reading that, since scientific, methot is so respected, and indeed almost worshipped by many who feel nothing is reliable without it, it is certainly possible to devise research which proves scientifically whatever is desired.
The pragmatism comes off some what easier in this situation with belief that “if works use it”.Undoubtely the Dreams Helper Project and experiments like it are powerful tools for group interaction and for the healing which can result.

Jean Campbell is a moderator for the Association of the Study of Dreams online Bulletin Board - www.asdreams/org- and co-chairs the ASD Development Comittee. An educator, dream worker and writer. She conducts individual sessions and workshops in Dreams/Body Work.. She is a moderator of the World Peace Bridge and CEO of the Image Project.
www.imageproject.org.
JCCampb@aol.com

The basic foundation of the whole Buddhist tradition is known as the Four Noble Truths. What is the point of recognizing these Four Noble Truths? It is related with our basic longing concerning happiness and suffering, and with specific causal relationships. How does suffering arise? How does happiness arise?
The central themes of the Four Noble Truths are the issue of causality as it pertains to happiness and suffering.
This emphasis specifically focuses on natural causality, instead of suggesting an explanation that invokes some external creator or primal substance that controls the events in life. There are four statements pertaining the Four Noble thruths respectively: Recognize the noble truth of suffering; abandon the noble truth of the source of suffering; and cultivate the noble truth of the path. All of this is to be done by the individual who is seeking happiness and wishing to avoid suffering.
In this context, the self becomes something very important. The person who is experiencing suffering is one’self, and the one who needs to apply the means to dispel suffering is also one’self. And the cause of this is within one’self. When Buddhism first appeared in ancient India, a fundamental distinction between Buddhist versus non- Buddhist views concerned the self, when applied to the self as and agent and to the self as the experiencer, becomes very problematic. From the very beginning, there was a great deal of though and discussion concerning the nature of the self.
According to non-Buddhist treatises, a self does exist quite separate and autonomous from the aggregates of the body and the mind. In general, all four philosophical schools within Buddhism agree in denying the existence of a self that has a separate nature from the aggregates. However, these schools have different views concerning how the self exists among the various aggregates of the body and the mind.
Dream yoga
In order to train in the path that would allow us to transform death, the intermediate state, and rebirth, we have to practice on three occasions: during the waking state, during the sleeping state, and during the death process. This entails integrating the self with spiritual training. Now we have three sets of three:
1. Death, intermediate state, and rebirth
2. Dharmamakaya, Sambhogaya and Nirmanakaya
3. Sleep, dream, and waking.

In order to achieve the ultimate states of Dharmakaya, Shambhogaya and Nirmanakaya, one must become acquainted with the three stages of death, intermediate state, and rebirth. In order to become acquainted with these three, one gains acquaintance with the states of dreamless sleep, dreaming, and waking.
To get the experience during sleep and the waking state, I think is crucial to become familiar, by means of imagination, with the eightfold process of dying, beginning with waking conscious state and culminating in the clear light of death. This entails a dissolution process, a withdrawal. At each stage of the actual dying process there are internal signs, and to familiarize yourself with these, you imagine them during meditation during your daytime practice. Then in your imagination, from the clear light, you visualize your subtle body departing from your subtle body and you imagine going to different places; then finally you return and the subtle body becomes re-absorbed in your normal form. When you are experienced a visualizing this during daytime practice, then on falling asleep, an analogous eightfold process occurs naturally and quickly. That’s the best method for enabling you to recognize dreamless sleep state as the dreamless sleep state. But without deeper meditative experience of this in the daytime. It’s very difficult to realize this dissolution as you fall asleep.
In the Highest Yoga Tantra practice there are two stages for any sahana or visualization practice; the stage of Generation and the stage of Completion. In the stage of generation, the more basic of these two, this whole eightfold process of dissolution is experienced only by the power of imagination. You by means of Prana Yoga, including the Vase Meditation, you bring the vital dissolution into the central channel, and you actually bring about such dissolution, not just with imagination, but in terms of reality. You bring about such dissolution, and at certain level of this practice the clear light will manifest.
If you’ve gotten to that point in your experience and practice, and then it’s very easy for you to recognize the clear light of sleep when naturally occurs. And if you have gotten to the point where you can recognize dreamless sleep as dreamless sleep, then it’s very easy for you to recognize the dream as the dream. This discussion concerns the means of ascertaining sleep as sleep and dream as a dream by the power of vital energy. That’s one avenue leading to that result. Now going back to daytime practice, if one has not reached that level of insight or experience through the vital energy practice, then during the daytime you accomplish this by the power of intent, rather than power of vital energy. Intent means you have to strive very diligently, with a lot of determination. In such practice, recognizing dreamless sleep is harder than recognizing the dream as dream.
Different factors are involved in the ability to recognize the dream as dream. One is diet. Specifically, your diet should be compatible with your own metabolism. For example, in Tibetan medicine, one speaks of the three elements: wind, bile and phlegm. One or more of these elements are predominant in some people. You should have a diet have helps to maintain a balance among these various humorous within the body. Moreover, if your sleep is too deep, your dreams will not be very clear. In order to bring about clearer dreams and lighter sleep, you should eat somewhat less. In addition, as you’re falling asleep, you direct your awareness up to the forehead. On the other hand, if your sleep is too light, this will also act as an obstacle for gaining success in this practice. In order to deepen your sleep, you should take heavier, oilier food, and as you’re falling asleep, you should direct your attention down to the vital energy center at the level of navel or the genitals. If your dreams are not clear, as you’re falling asleep you should direct your awareness to the throat center. In this practice, when you begin dreaming it’s helpful to have someone say quietly, You are dreaming now. Try to recognize the dream as the dream.
Once you are able to recognize the clear light of sleep as the clear light of sleep, the recognition can enable you to sustain that state for a longer period.
The main purpose of dream yoga in the context of the Tantric Practice is to first practice you focus your attention on the heart center of your dream body and try to withdraw the vital energy into that center. That leads to and an experience of the clear light of sleep which arise when the dream state ceases.
The experience of the clear light that you have during sleep is not very subtle. As you progress in your practice of dream yoga, the first experience of the clear light occurs as a result of focusing your attention at the heart center of the dream body. Although the clear light sleep at the beginning is not very subtle, through practice, you’ll be able to make it subtler and also prolong its duration.

And excerpt from the book Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying.
Francisco Varela & J. Hayward
Shambala Publication. Boston, 1992.

Abstract: Shamanic practices provide a channel for basic human abilities to understand the world, describe this with language, and manage our knowledge of the limits of our lives. One expression of this is the shaman's function as mythmaker, a role in which he or she helps create the narratives that his society lives and dies by. Through this function, the shaman helps to provide stability and security to his or her fellows.

Keywords: myths, social stability, afterlife concepts, Mythen, Soziale Stabilität, Jenseitsvorstellungen.

Shamanism can be described as a body of techniques and processes by which practitioners access information that is not ordinarily available to members of the social group that gave them shamanic status, then use this information to meet the needs of that group and its members. Shamans' access to non-ordinary information sources depends on shifting their modes of perceiving, thinking, and feeling, in other words, altering their state of consciousness. The techniques and processes for making these shifts include drumming, dancing, drug ingestion, lucid dreaming, diet, among others.
Humanity's varied experiences with the external environment demonstrate the wide range of specific sensorimotor images and sensations available to constitute its ongoing understanding of "reality" (Newton 1996). Perception, cognition, and affect make use of the same physiological structures involved in sensorimotor activity, structures that take the form of analog models of "reality." These structures can be described as "neurognostic," i.e., neural networks that provide the biological contribution to humankind's ways of knowing (Laughlin, McManus, & d'Aquili 1990). Neurognostic structures provide the basis for human beings to initiate, control, and mediate everyday behavior.
The resulting images ground humankind's concepts, constructs, and intentions; they are probably reflected in what Jungians refer to as "archetypes" (Stevens 1982). When shamanic performance is described as "archetypal," the designated activities reflect biologically based states of consciousness -- the replacement of ordinary waking states through discharge patterns that produce interhemispheric synchronization and coherence, limbic-cortex integration, and integral discharges that synthesize perception, cognition, and affect (Winkelman 1992). In order to access these "archetypal" images, shamans might be "fantasy-prone" (Wilson & Barber 1983), endowed with capacities, probably genetic to some degree, that facilitate their use of imaginative processes.

MYTHMAKING
The organizing systems of primordial human beings began with sensorimotor experience and proceeded to practical implementation. Hence, mythmaking, a basic propensity of humankind, emerged from bodily functions as well as with environmental encounters (Mithen 1996). Language was highly adaptive, eventually providing early humans with the ability to reflect on their own and other people's mental states (Newton 1996; Mithen 1996). Language interacted with other human capacities, and the resulting cognitive fluidity enabled the production of symbolic artifacts and images. For the shaman, the totality of inner and outer reality is fundamentally an immense signal system. Shamanic states of consciousness yields information from a database consisting of dreams, visions, intuitions, feelings, as well as keen observations of the natural and social world.
As language moved from a social function to include a general purpose function, human consciousness shifted from a means to predict others' behavior to a mode of managing mental data bases of information relating to all domains of activity. The ability to use symbols and metaphors in story telling and mythmaking was adaptive because this ability helped to make sense of one's body, one's peers, and one's natural environment.
Shamans represent a specialization that involves social adaptations to utilize unique psychobiological potentials (Winkelman 1997). As a result, shamanism is a worldwide phenomenon in which altered states of consciousness play a fundamental role in mythmaking, healing, divination, and the like (Ripinsky-Naxon 1993). A natural result of the evolution of the human brain was the development of specialized subsystems that allowed environmental factors to shape neurognostic functions. Shamanic procedures may represent the first culturally institutionalized practices for the integration of these modules, both through altered conscious states and community bonding rituals (Winkelman 1997). These practices probably became codifed as the myths that insured a society's identity and worldview (Wiercinski 1989). Shamans were the primordial mythmakers, helping their community navigate through the contingencies of daily encounters and challenges.
Myths can be described as implicit narratives that serve as cultural or personal paradigms; they explain natural phenomena, guide individuals through life, assign them their place in society, and connect them with the spiritual forces of the universe (Campbell 1986). Myths are products of human imagination whose meaning lies not so much in their literal descriptions and explanations but in their metaphoric and metaphysical connotations (Ibid.).

TERROR MANAGEMENT
As cognitive complexity enhanced the self-awareness of humans, they became explicitly aware of their own existence. This phenomenon engendered a vast capacity for both awe and terror: awe, because knowing that one is alive, one recognizes the consequent possibilities of one's relationships to others; and terror, because the knowledge that one is alive necessitates the horrifying recognition of one's vulnerability and inevitable death (Greenberg, Solomon & Pyszczybski 1997).
This potential for incapacitating terror needed to be resolved if the species was to remain a viable contender for survival on a planet fraught with danger. The species used the same cognitive complexity that gave rise to the potential for terror to bring that terror under control by creating cultural myths. These conceptions of "reality" led to sophisticated ways for effectively assuaging these concerns. Myths provided narratives, concepts, and schema to organize human perceptions and to answer basic existential questions: How did the world begin? What is the purpose of life? What happens to people after they have died? The answers to these questions suggested that the universe is a stable, orderly, and meaningful place (Ibid.). A cultural mythology is a collection of interacting myths; in mythologically oriented societies, even the most insignificant happening can take on cosmic dimensions (Descola 1993/1996:68).
Cultural mythologies made it possible for people to feel significant and to manifest "self-esteem" through the adoption of social roles and the consequent satisfaction of associated standards of value. Meeting the standards of value in a society conferred literal or symbolic immortality, and countered the terror of certain death. Adherence to cultural myths serves to keep potential terror from becoming manifest, and reminders of one's mortality signal a need for securing that defensive posture (Greenberg, Solomon & Pyszynski 1997). Faith in cultural myths was maintained through spiritual teachings and the associated rituals and ceremonies, which can be conceptualized as mythic performances. The ability to perform well enhanced one's "self-esteem," whether one was a shaman, a chief, a midwife, a warrior, or played some other role in the tribe. According to TMT, the same can be said for persons in non-tribal societies.
Myths about death and dying vary from society to society, but their power to manage terror and to control, socialize, and harmonize human behavior is evident when one explores the attendant narratives. Community bonding rituals and ceremonies not only enacted mythic narratives but also provided opportunities for individual performances that reinforced social roles and provided for social support.

LIVING AND DYING
Western images of life and death infer that there is a straight line extending through time. The longer the line, the more successful one is thought to become in attaining longevity. If the line is short, there are myths that contain elaborate rationalizations, e.g., the dead youth was "called by God," "needed in heaven," or "paid a debt incurred by the parents' sins." Most American Indian traditions, on the other hand, did not view life in terms of a straight line but as a circle. One cycle was completed when a young person reached puberty; another cycle was completed when he or she had children. In another cycle, sometimes concurrent, the individual was expected to move outward, serving the community, the earth, and the Great Spirit. When death arrived, one hoped to die in wholeness. As the Ogala Sioux leader Crazy Horse commented, "Today is a good day to die, for all the things of my life are present" (Levine 1982:5).
Rites of passage during puberty often included a solitary journey into the wilderness for several days of fasting and prayer. In several tribes, both young men and young women participated in the journeys. These and other activities were geared to enable young warriors to receive a vision-inspired death chant that they could use throughout their lives to maintain contact with the Great Spirit during times of stress and danger. Upon falling from a horse, on being attacked by an enemy, or while burning with a fever, the death chant was a constant companion. It was available in times of need, creating a familiarity with the unfamiliar. As a result, it prepared a person for death. Hence, many Native Americans died with great clarity, already conversant with a mythology that integrated living and dying (Levine 1982:25-26).
Death and rebirth has been a common theme in the selection and training of shamans. The famed Polar explorer Knud Rasmussen described a Caribou Eskimo shaman named Kinalik who was "called" as a result of a dream and whose initiation involved death and rebirth. Kinalik had dreamed that a member of her tribe would become seriously ill. This dream was predictive, and was taken as a sign of her shamanic talent. As part of her initiation, Kinalik spent five days in the open air, tied to tent poles so that she would be noticed by Hila, a powerful mystical force. During those five days, it was believed that benevolent spirits protected Kinalik against the bitter cold and icy snowstorms. At the end of the time, her tutor, Igjugarjuk, threw a small pebble at her while other members of the tribe watched. Kinalik collapsed and lied unconscious through the night. It was believed that Igjugarjuk had "shot" her, and she was now "dead." When Igjugarjuk went to revive her the next morning, he discovered that she had regained consciousness of her own accord. Kinalik mentioned that the polar bear, one of her guiding spirits, had protected her during the night (Kalweit 1988:9). This ordeal raised Kinalik's self-esteem, guaranteed her shamanic status, and prepared her for shamanic duties -- many of which would deal with death and dying.
Igjugarjuk had another pupil named Aggiartoq. In his case, another form of "death" was chosen, namely death by drowning. Aggiartoq was tied tightly to a long tent pole and carried to a lake. A hole was hewn through the ice and Aggiartoq was lowered, fully dressed, into the lake and left for five days. When community members retrieved him, they claimed that he was as dry as if he had never been touched by water (Ibid.). Both of these cases reflect the ways in which shamanic initiation confront and manage the terror of death, in these instances in ways that other members of the tribe could not endure. The primary and most universal factor of human existence is the idea of a life-giving energy that is independent of the physical body and guides each individual. The shaman is the primary investigator of the domain of death; he or she explores the routes of travel to non-ordinary "reality" and often accompanies souls of the dead to an after-life domain. As such, he is considered a "psychopomp" who bridges ordinary and non-ordinary realms of existence.
When the shaman "dies," he or she has an opportunity to explore the realm of death. This is an extremely dangerous undertaking, and there are tales of apprentices and initiates who do not return. Malidomo Some' (1994), in describing his own month-long initiation in the wilderness of Burkina Faso, his home country, observes that a few initiates died during the ordeal. However, the concept of an immortal soul (or souls) sustains shamanic societies. The Cuna Indians of Panama describe the purpa, or soul, as an invisible "double" that is the essence of life. Canadian Tlingit Eskimos refer to the soul as Quatuwu, "that which feels"; when that "feeling" disappears, that person is dead (Kalweit 1988:23). Many cultural myths describe reincarnation; the Batak people of Indonesia believe that the Tondi, or soul, determines the good or bad deeds a person will carry out during a lifetime, and that the goddess Mula Djadi informs it of that destiny before it enters the new body. The Siberian Tungus use one word (chanjan) for a living person's soul and a different word (omi) for the soul after death. After death, the omi spends some time in the Abode of the Omi-Souls until it is escorted to the new incarnation (Ibid.).
In some shamanic societies, the soul (or souls) of the dead try to reenter the world of the living by "possessing" a human being. In the Jivaro tribes of the Amazon, a child sometimes incorporates the wakan, or soul, of the deceased because their capacities for observation are undeveloped, and thus unable to understand the danger involved. If this happens, the deceased gain temporary access to the world of the living, at least until such time as this coexistence brings about the child's death, whereupon the ghost is once again expelled into the twilight world (Descola 1993/1996:373). However, a shaman may temporarily be "possessed" if it serves a useful purpose. In some cultures, the souls of deceased relatives or tribal elders call the candidate to begin the training for shamanhood. The Yakut shaman Tusput recalls, "One day when I was wandering in the mountains up there in the north, I stopped by a pile of wood to cook my food. I set fire to it. Now a Tungus shaman was buried under the pyre. His spirit took possession of me." This spirit helped Tusput so intimately that during his work he claimed to speak Tungusic words (Eliade 1951/1974:82).
When the Aztecs sacrificed a prisoner, a rope representing the umbilical cord often was tied around the victim's abdomen symbolizing that the hour of death marked a rebirth into another world (Huxley 1974). The Tupinamba of Brazil could obtain immortality by dying in the lands of their enemies as cannibalized sacrificial victims (Ibid., p. 108). These are examples of cultural practices that manage the terror of death by making it a triumphant event. One of the links between shamanism and ancient Greek cosmology was the god Hermes, who as herald and messenger of the gods performed a shamanic function by conducting the souls of the dead to their final dwelling place. Hermes (who was renamed Mercury by the Romans) had a reputation for being as mischievous as he was clever. Centuries later, the so-called Hermetic sciences taught adepts occult practices to demonstrate and ensure their own immortality.

SOULS AND THE AFTERLIFE
Contemporary approaches to thanatology, the study of death, take several forms. An example is the contrasting positions of Ernest Becker (1975) and Ken Wilber (1981). For both scholars, evil is the result of human beings' attempts to deny their own insignificance. Becker thinks such fears are well-founded while Wilber understands them as the confusion of "ego" with essence. Wilber states that humans intuit Spirit as their true and prior nature. By attempting to achieve on earth a perfection that can only be found in the transpersonal "beyond," humankind has confused the finite and the infinite, producing a plethora of problems. For Becker, religion is based on the wishful longing for a realm beyond death; for Wilber, religion is based on the longing for an intuited realm that is, indeed, encountered after death.
This fundamental disagreement is important to understand when various cultural and personal myths about life after death are surveyed. Some religions do not rely on accounts of a literal afterlife or belief in an immortal soul. Others, however, glowingly describe entrance into the infinite as, variously, emerging from darkness into light, the slaying of dragons or the destruction of demons, the glorious opening of the heavenly gates, or the revelation of divine entities. The theme of Divine Judgment occurs in Judaic, Christian, Moslem, Zoroastrian, and some Mesoamerican traditions. Heaven may consist of celestial cities, paradisical gardens, radiant beings, erotic encounters, angelic music, sensual delights, and/or galactic visitations. Hells may be marked by terrifying monsters, inexorable suffering, instruments of torture, and/or fiery conflagrations.
Reincarnation is a tenet that is central to Hinduism, Jainism, certain Mesoamerican traditions, and many forms of Buddhism. Some cultural mythologies perceive passageways from one world into the next, vehicles to facilitate the journey, purgatories and other indeterminate states, and unitive bliss where self-identity is lost, and even schools of esoteric wisdom where a soul can continue to evolve spiritually under the guidance of a master instructor.

ASSISTING THE TRANSITION
In conclusion, this essay argues that language makes use of the same neurognostic structures involved in sensorimotor activities; these structures take the form of analog models of reality, and the resulting images ground humankind's concepts, constructs, and intentions, i.e., its mythologies. These images serve as schemas that reflect the brain's mapping systems, and eventually provide for a freedom beyond what was possible through natural selection. However, humanity paid a price for this freedom; individuals became aware of their own eventual demise. To manage the terror evoked by this awareness, myths were created that described reincarnation, survival of the soul, and transitions to the realms of the dead.
Shamans were key players in the creation of these myths, as well as their implementation. The rituals, ceremonies, and rites of passage that enacted cultural myths bolstered individual "self-esteem" and community solidarity in ways that assured the survival of human beings in a world that would otherwise be fraught with danger, unpredictability, and terror. Finally, it was the shaman as psychopomp who assisted the transition between life and death, assuring the soul of its survival once the physical body had served its purpose.

REFERENCES:
Becker, E.O. 1975. Escape from evil. New York: Free Press.
Descola, P. 1996. The spears of twilight: Life and death in the Amazon jungle (J. Lloyd, Trans.). New York: New Press. (Original work published 1993)
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Eliade, M. 1974. Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy (W.R. Trask, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. 1997. “Terror management theory of self-esteem and cultural worldviews: Empirical assessments and conceptual refinements”. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 29, 61-139.
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Kubler-Ross, E. 1975. Death: The final stage of growth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Laughlin, C., McManus, J., & d'Aquili, E. 1990. Brain, symbol, and experience: Toward a neurophenomenology of consciousness. Boston: Shambhala.
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Ripinsky-Naxon, M. 1993. The nature of shamanism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Stevens, A. 1982. Archetypes. New York: William Morrow.
Wiercinski, A. 1989. “On the origin of shamanism”. In M. Hoppal & O.J. von Sadovskzy (Eds.), Shamanism: Past and present (pp. 19-23). Los Angeles: International Society for Trans-Oceanic Research.
Wilber, K. 1981. Up from Eden: A transpersonal view of human evolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Wilson, S.C., & Barber, T.X. 1983. “The fantasy-prone personality: Implications for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena”. In A.A. Sheikh (Ed.), Imagery: Current theory, research, and application (pp. 340-387). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Winkelman, M. 1992. Shamans, priests and witches: A cross-cultural study of magico-religious practitioners. Tempe: Anthropological Research Papers, Arizona State University.
Winkelman, M. 1997. “Altered states of consciousness and religious behavior”. N S. Glazier (Ed.), Anthropology of religion: A handbook of method and theory (pp. 393-428). Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Author:
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco, California. He has observed and worked with shamans in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, presenting his findings in dozens of articles and in the book Spiritual Dimensions of Healing: From Tribal Shamanism to Contemporary Health Care.
e-mail: skrippner@saybrook.edu

This paper presents the results of the author’s experience in the use of personal dreams of power presented as guided meditations aimed to empower visualization skills of dream seminar students. I would like to share this experience, because of its effectiveness in the development of dreamworking skills in my students.

First, I would like to explain what dreams of power are to me. Dreams of power are a natural consequence of the shamanic initiation rituals in which I have been involved, and my own shamanic approach in personal dream work. There are no mystical secrets in this. I simply try to recognize and to solve (if possible) my personal problems, connected to health, relationships, work, and so on by moving the wisdom and energy of the dream space to my waking life. To support this work, I purify my energy and balance my emotional state through a simple ritual before sleep. If possible, I make these purification rituals for myself in natural settings. I’ve received a powerful initiation into this kind of dreamwork, and am further supported in it by communication with authentic shamans in their natural environment and in my dreams. Unfortunately, the city environment decreases human energy and suppresses dreams of power.

Dreams of power are dreams that need no interpretation. I am sure that I remember these dream stories from the very beginning to the very end. These dreams are clear, complete, and give important information concerning healing, rituals, inner transformation, life and death. Probably they awake a kind of deep archetypal memory and reconnect the dreamer to Nature. These dreams are almost photographic in their image quality and can be easily recalled and painted in detail. Sometimes a dream of power offers also a text (chanting) that completes a ritual revealed in the dream. Yet, even dreams that seem to be clearly for self-healing cannot be considered as just personal. They bring information that could be important for other individuals and a community. Another important quality of the dreams is that when I wake after such a dream I feel extremely healthy, energized, and creative.

The information that comes through these dreams can be used for the following purposes:

• The dreamer’s self-healing and self-development
• For the benefit of another (the dreamer’s client, patient, friend, or family member)
• For a group of people (a tribe or community)
• For Nature (the spirit of a place)
• For the whole Earth

After participating in shamanic work from the inside, I learned the real importance of my dreams of power, and how to use them for others. Now I consider my modern city reality to be a shamanic one, and this attitude greatly influences both my dream content, and my day awareness. It makes me more conscious about any opportunity, any danger, new people, new problems, and new places.

The story of my experience began when I decided to pick up and to input into my computer all my dreams of power. The next day I conducted my regular weekly dream group. Suddenly a student told me,
–“We always discuss our dreams, and we have never heard a dream of yours!”
–“I always felt that our class is for your dreams, –I replied, –But if you would like to listen to a dream of mine, then here they are,” –and I showed the printout of my dreams.
Conscious dreamer’s reality often offers this kind of synchronicity. At that moment I decided to offer one of these dreams as a guided meditation. I thought that it could be a good test for both my students and myself, whether I could teach them to ask right questions about dream content. An unexpected result was what they told me right after the meditation, –“We have never had such a bright and clear visualization before”.

Since then (for over a year) I have been using my dreams of power for teaching. I worked this way with three different groups of students:

1. My advanced group. Some of these students have begun to do dream work themselves, and I hope that the majority of them will do what I do now.
2. Students of the Baltic Academy of Pedagogical Science. They study Psychology as a second education. Dream work is an absolutely new course included in their official program this year. Some of them had never remembered their dreams before, and had no interest in it.
3. Psychologists and Psychotherapists who take two years certification program in Tanatotherapy. Some of them also had no interest in dreams and dream work before, but they had to visit my lecturing on Dreams and Death.

I use different dreams for different groups of students. Thus, for instance, I pick up a dream characterized by especially bright colors for beginners in dream work, especially if there are people who do not remember their dreams at all. I used my dreams connected to information on death for the students of the Tanatotherapy Institute. I offered all these dreams to the group of my advanced students, who are more and more becoming colleagues rather than just pupils.

An important part of my work with my dreams of power is painting them (I wish I had more time for it!). After guided meditation I offer students to ask me two types of questions:

– Questions concerning details of my dream picture, which were missing in my description of it.
– Questions aimed to check their precision of visualization.
I might purposefully skip mentioning a color of an important object from my dream story. One student might ask, –“What was the color of it?” –while another one more experienced in visualization asks, –“Whether this object was of bright yellow color?” It no longer surprises me when the guess of the second student appears to be quite right. I also shared a dream of mine that had very simple landscape, but super bright colors. After guided meditation I asked my students to paint this dream as their home task. I did not show my own picture of the dream until our next class.

Here I would like to describe in brief some of my dreams of power used for teaching dream work. I begin with the last dream mentioned above.

The rise

I am going to climb up a high mountain. I have to do it alone. My friends stay at the bottom and wait for me there. I walk up following a narrow path along a steep slope. Sometimes I rest on a thin walking stick. Daytime is nearly over. Sunset is coming. The colors of the sky and the opposite mountain remind me of Roerich’s painting: the rays of sunset give dark red color to the mountain, the sky is a bright intense blue, narrow white clouds are pink at the bottom. It is getting dark. I make a bonfire on a ledge (terrace) in order to give a signal to my friends left at the bottom that I am OK. Then I continue to walk up the mountain and reach the level of snow cover. It is dark at the bottom of the mountain, but here snow is shining in the sun’s rays. From this place the narrow steep path is changed to a wide sloping road that is easy to walk. I see skiers sliding down. It is dangerous but it looks like they do it because they like risk. I ask one of them how to get to the top of the mountain. He tells me that I am on the right path and indicates the direction with his arm. I continue to walk up along snow. It is very easy to walk. I feel that I am very close to the top.

Bird of death

It is a sunny summer day. I’m in a forest on the bank of the river. I am in a new wooden house with big windows. There are some other people in the house, but I do not feel connected to them. Suddenly it is getting darker like before a rainstorm. A huge bird appears and flies in circle over the house. Its shadow on the ground looks like the Egyptian falcon with widespread wings. I know that it is the Bird of Death, and it comes to take human souls. All the people leave the house in a hurry and run to the bank of the river. I feel no danger for myself. I walk slowly to the river to watch. I stay under the trees on the bank, and at the same time I watch the whole scene ‘from the top’. People rush about in panic. From time to time the Bird flies down and take one of them. I understand that these are not people but souls lost in panic. I feel no fear, no danger. I know that the Bird will not touch me. It is getting lighter.

Worshipping river

It is twilight. I am in the bank of a river. The river is wide, quiet, shining in moonlight. I and my friend stay with a group of other people between trees. We came to watch a ritual. A tall beautiful woman comes closer to the water. She is to play the role of the spirit of the river. She has deep beautiful voice. She begins to speak:
Look at me
I am the river in front of you
I am so wide that another bank is hardly seen
I am beautiful,
My surface is shining in the sun in daytime
It reflects moon and stars at night
My water flows sublimely as a powerful flow.
In her clothes (a coat over a long dress, a scarf covering her long hair) the woman walks into the water and continues to speak. Then she dives and swims beautifully under the transparent water along the bank. Following a sudden impulse I also walk into the water in my clothes, dive and swim after her. I feel wonderful freshness, purification, and health improvement. I get out of the water. My clothes and hair are nearly dry. I feel no wet stuff on me. After swimming I have only a pleasant feeling. I come to my friend and say, - “It is a pity that you did not do the same. This diving was the best thing to do. Now all my body and my head feel much better”.

Fire dance

It is a dark night in mountains. There are big bright stars in the sky. I walk alone and come into a huge cave. Inside it looks like a castle hall. It is so big that I cannot see its opposite wall. Numerous small ‘flames’ placed as two huge circles on the floor are the source of light. People are standing next to walls around the circles. There are probably hundred people or more, and I am one of them. A certain rhythm begins to sound, and we begin to move in two circles around lights. At first, two circles are moving independently in different directions. Then there is a moment when these ‘flames’ are not on the floor any more, but we keep them in our hands. Two circles of people create intersection, and we move in a giant ‘figure-eight’. People get from one circle to another moving one by one at the intersection. At the end I see the whole picture from the top. The movement recreates a giant symbol of eternity.

When I began to use my dreams of power as texts for guided meditations in my advanced group, it had the following effect. All the participants of this experiment said that they had never had such bright and detailed visions. They all had very good experiences of relaxation, and they reported more interesting dreams afterwards. During other experiments they painted their visions and compared them. The most productive work took place when they compared their visions to my picture of my dream used for the meditation. They immediately saw weak and vague spots in their personal processes of visualization that led to radical improvement of their dream recall and their skill to put questions to dream stories of others.

Common results of the use of these dreams as guided meditations are the following:

• opening dream memory for people who never remembered their dreams;
• improving memory and visualization of details of dream stories for advanced dreamers;
• students learn to see what they really accept from another person’s dream story, and what is nothing but their own fantasy and projection;
• they learn how to reconstruct a picture of a dream from the dream story;
• they see a possible future of their personal dream practice.

This work with dreams of power adds a lot to my private practice and my development. Each dream of power is of special content, and I see new aspects of it each time I use it again. In my case these dreams do not happen often, and are not a product of conscious tuning or intention. To me each of them is a gift, a priceless present from the Source of Dreams.

E-mail: socol_mv@hotmail.com

(Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Shamanism and Alternative Healing,
San-Raphael, 2002)

Our life is twofold. Sleep has its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed.
Death and existence: Sleep has its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
(Byron, “The Dream”)

There are several questions that I have asked myself for years. What is the dream space? Whether it is possible to explore the dream space? How is it possible? Where is the entrance to it, and how to open the door to this space? Till now I have learned about two possible ways to investigate the dream space.

1. It is lucid dreaming. If I become aware that I am dreaming and do not wake up but begin to control my dream reality, then it is possible to explore it. The origin of this practice is the Tybetan yoga of dreaming. The main goal of this dream practice is keeping consciousness at the moment of transformation from life to death as well as was taught during transformation from waking to dreaming state of consciousness. It is well described by Shri Auroibindo,

2. It is high level of awareness in the wakened state, when it is combined with a dream re-entry. Again we get memories of both dreaming and waken realities. Here we also get an expanded state of consciousness, and we can use it to explore some aspects of the dream space. At the highest level this practice is similar to a shaman state of consciousness, when a shaman takes his journey to another world and stays quite aware of what is going on in this world. Shamans and experienced dreamers practice contact with dreaming during the day in an awakened state of consciousness. A poetic term ‘twilight zone’ sounds a little bit inconvenient in this case, because they practice expanded state of consciousness, and it is connected to bright visualization and memory. One of important goals of this journey is communication with ancestors and departed people.

In both ways we have to take into account that we might face experience connected to death. In both cases we also use an expanded state of consciousness together with dreaming intuition, the waken state logic of reasoning, and day life knowledge. Here is an example of my experience of exploring my dream space in lucid dreaming. However it is not easy to become a conscious lucid dreamer in order to explore this space. Tibetan yoga is not an easy practice. One has to pass through a long-term everyday practice that includes a boring discipline. Yet, a lucid dreamer needs a good level of energy. It is one of the reasons why children are good at lucid dreaming.

Once I realized that I was in a dream because I had a phone talk with my friend and at the same time I saw him sitting at a tea table right opposite me. In my dream I decided to explore whether it is possible to get some information. I was going to ask my friend some simple questions, for instance, - “What are you doing now?” Then in the morning I could give a call and ask the same questions in day reality. As soon as I began to ask my questions, the reality began to change. My friend disappeared from his armchair and appeared at a different place. Then he became transparent, and at last he disappeared as well as his arm chair, the tea table, and the whole room. My too strong ‘day logic’ that I had used to put my questions drugged me from my dream space to my day reality and I woke up.

In the waken state one can try the following exercise. Put your watch on your other wrist, or put your keys to an unusual place, and see for how long you can remember this change. It is rather irritating exercise, but it helps not to bee too proud of your day awareness. In Gurdzhiev’s schools students call this exercise “an alarm clock”, and it really helps to wake up and to be here and now. Gurdzhiev also used lucid dreaming to develop day awareness of his students. Stephen LaBerge offers his students an exercise, which is similar to the ‘alarm clock’, because it helps to develop their skill of lucid dreaming. It looks like these two realities are much more connected than people used to think of them. There is a Russian saying, - "As in dreams so in waken life". The same exercise develops both dreaming and wakened awareness, because it develops the same awareness, which we have for any state of consciousness.

Thus, one can try the second way of conscious entering the dream space. Here the poetic term ‘twilight zone’ sounds a little bit inconvenient, because a dreamer's consciousness, memory, and visualization should be clear and bright. This way of exploring dream space was well familiar to people in old times. There are many ways, tools, and rituals to get to the dream space in a conscious way. They differ by form in different cultures, but have the same deep meaning and goal. Mostly I use Russian Slavic and Siberian tools. But the main stages of the dream space re-entry and exploration are the same for any tradition.

First of all, a safe, purified, comfortable place is to be created for this experience for one person, who is going to do dream work alone, or for a big group. The group itself is a part of the environment of each member of the group. Thus, the group is to be in a state when it gives safety and comfort to each member of it. We cannot go to a temple of the God of Dreaming, we cannot get to a powerful spot of Nature, but we can use special objects and our conscious intention to create the right atmosphere at the place where we are. When the dreaming soul is traveling, the body should not be disturbed.

Then the inner space is to be prepared for dreaming by rituals, for instance, by prayers. Russian pagan dreamers used special ‘strong’ days for tuning dreams. They did not practice yoga but they practiced prophetic dreaming. How could ordinary people do it? The main idea of all Russian pagan rituals for dreaming was the following. An object was used in a ritual in such a way that the object appeared in the following dream. Then it served as a key to the dream content, and also could remind the dream next morning. Despite the fact that in Russian tradition there is no direct description of the use of the elements of nature in dream rituals, the elements are used. First of all the water is used as a powerful tuning tool, and as a symbol of a river. River flow is compared to dreaming in many traditions. The fire is always present because dream rituals take place when it is already late and dark. Other objects that are used in many rituals are branches of tree, stones, food (both smell and taste of it), and clothes and so on. There were also symbolic objects, for instance, a sash (a protective talisman and a symbol of path), a key and a lock.

In my dreams I have traveled many times to a small town on an island. I usually get by train or by car along a bridge there. There is a mountain on the island, and a beautiful white building on the top of it. In my other dreams I have been swimming in the ocean, walking in a forest or along a river many times. I have found a secret path behind my grandparents' place in the very center of Moscow, and the path led me directly to a small town with old small houses and narrow curve streets. How could I get there in a conscious way?

There is a simple and powerful ritual used by both pagan Russians and Russian Gypsies. It is literal crossing the bridge from day reality to the dream space in order to find an answer to an important question there. A small ‘physical’ bridge is created and placed under a dreamer’s bed. This ritual can be used for daydream work as well, for instance, to explore the space of a recurring dream. Probably, a bridge is one of the oldest objects made by people, and its image is connected to a river, and to the river of dreaming. This ritual or this technique is very useful for city dreamers.

The next question is what is this place where a dreamer gets again and again over the bridge? My many years’ experience showed that dream painting is one of the most powerful ways of both exploring the dream space and developing expanded state of consciousness. It includes drawing a map of a dream space, painting a landscape, a room, and an image. When I use dream painting in teaching dream work, first of all I try to separate it clearly from painting fantasies. Only then it becomes a powerful dream work practice. The idea of one of ways of its exploration came to me from a shaman map of the world. Similar pictures of the map were found in Siberia and North America. When I tried to create the map of my dream space I realized that I drew something very similar to this shaman map. I offered this technique to my dream work students, and they got the same results. This map can show one of 'levels', 'dimensions', or 'aspects' of the dream space. Notions of three-dimensional waken reality cannot describe the variety of spheres of dream space.

Here is another area of it. Over twenty years ago I had a dream, which got me to begin everyday dream practice. This my old dream was so powerful, and its space was so strange that I had to paint it. In the dream I met my grandmother who had died already. Now I know that while exploring dream space I cannot avoid this kind of meeting.

Twenty years after the dream I learned from Tuvan shamans that for three years we should not disturb people who left for their journey through other worlds. If they appear in your dream space before this term, then something is wrong with their journey, and they need help. But in three years they might come back to your dream space as helpers and protectors. My grandmother left our world about two years before I had the dream, and in the dream she wanted help in order to overcome a long road across a dark, cold and sad place to a shining gate.

In course of the next twenty years some of my relatives and friend left, and I met them again in my dream space. Only much later I have learned that the nature and some aspects of scenery of these meetings are quite common for dreams of people of different cultures. For years I was sure that this my experience is absolutely unique, while it was quite ordinary and common. Sometimes the dream space appears to be not a private one. Once I read in a book that people often see their departed relatives or friends in a dream or deep meditation at a place that looks like a beautiful garden. I did not see all of my departed relatives and friends in the garden, but only those who left in peace, and it was their time to leave. I do not try to give any explanation of it. Is it another level, part or dimension of my dream space? Did I have a look through a 'window' from my dream space to another world? I do not know.

While traveling in my dream space I found one more area, which strangely looks like a place 'between life and death'. Following the title of this poem I called it the primal memory:

PRIMAL MEMORY

By Nikolay Gumilev

Translated by Robert B.Amacker

Here is all life! Whirling, singing
Seas, deserts, cities
A shimmering reflection
Of something lost forever.

Fires rage, trumpets blare
Rhone stallions take flight.
Then thrilling lips
Of happiness seem to repeatedly proclaim.

Here again, delight and sorrow
Again as before, as always
The sea shakes its gray mane,
Cities, deserts rise.

So when at last will I awake
From sleep, to be myself again -
That simple Indian, who dozed
Beside a creek one sacred night?

In the flow of my dreams I investigated this area of other lives for years while I did not become aware of it enough to do it in my waken state. And it is another long story.

Due to this experience first I began to accept my dream space as a multidimensional and a multilevel one. Then I realized that it is highly connected to day reality. In a book of a North American shaman I found the following definition that I liked a lot:
“Dream Wave. The intangible web of life, which is comprised of threads of energy, thought, emotion, intent, ideas, and life force; the connective tissues that exists in our universe as the unseen energetic pathways, forming a web that is connected to all solid matter, all levels of awareness, and all animate and inanimate life forms.” (Sams Jamie - Dancing the Dream: The Seven Sacred Path of Human Transformation. Harper, San-Francisco, 1999, p. 257)
I think that it becomes visible in our dream space.

Now I begin to understand why I could not get a simple answer in my lucid dream, while I got very deep experience in many non-lucid dreams. I begin to understand what is the space, or the level of my dream space, where I meet my departed relatives. But the more I explore and understand, the more questions I get. Here I would like to end up with one of them, - Why do I find more and more ‘coincidences’ between dream pictures and day life? And why can other people easily repeat my experience?

Tuvinian dreams
Maria Volchenko, Ph.D.

Dreams and Reality in TuvaVolchenkodream work appears to be more fantastic than the most unrealistic dream. Dream work in Tuva offers that kind of experience. Psychoanalysis and symbol interpretation in this context would look by comparison like a sophisticated electronic device, but one without a power source. There is no real material for dream interpretation, because such a word implies a theoretical analysis based on separation between dreams and reality which, in Tuva, simply does not exist. There, images that are considered by modern western consciousness as archetypes have not yet become such, but are instead simply a part of everyday life. Abstract separation of notions from their prototypes in reality is next to impossible. It would be comparable to talking to your mother and trying to treat her as the archetype of mother. Is a small republic in the Southeast of Siberia, which joined the USSR only in 1944. Some shamans, now into their nineties, are still alive there, hidden deep in the mountains of the taiga forest, their activity hidden and uncorrupted by communism and the repressive Soviet regime. After ‘perestroika’ a new generation of shamans continues this tradition in a more open way. In Kyzyl (the capital of Tuva) there are places where one can find shamans on daily duty as if they were therapists in an ordinary clinic. The main clinic of this kind is situated next to the “Center of Asia” monument. Many important rituals done by shamans are shown on local TV news. A shaman may be invited to a local hospital to help a patient who is close to death, and I witnessed that it really helped. I was invited to see Tuva and to share my methods of dream work, I packed my notebooks and colorful pencils. I was ready to meet a group of students, to give private sessions, to share my knowledge with others who also do dream work. However, Tuvan daily life and dream reality appeared to be completely different from what I was used to working with the nearly two weeks of my stay in Tuva I dealt with only one type of dream, and gave the shortest possible private sessions. The sessions were very short because Tuvans in general remember their dreams extremely well, and the content of the dreams is quite clear for them. In Tuva only a few people, too involved in modern life (business, watching western action films in TV, etc.), told me that they did not remember their dreams well. Right before and after my Tuvan experience I communicated with my students in Moscow. These people, although educated and rather experienced in dream work, had much more problems and obstacles in memorizing, understanding, and making use of their dreams than ordinary Tuvan shepherds. Only kinds of dreams that get Tuvans to look for help are those about meeting dead relatives. In Tuvan tradition a man has two souls: the main one, and the gray one. Death means that the man has lost his main soul. But the gray soul can stay in the yurt of the family of the deceased, and bring bad luck. A shaman is generally invited on the forty-ninth day after the funeral in order to drive the gray soul out of the yurt forever. Here is a translation of part of a shamanic chant during this ritual: When he left (died) it means he was lost completely Black-gray soul of a human being If it stays, it will be very bad for childrenTuvan tradition people should not visit the grave of a relative for three years following his death (in order not to disturb the soul). An appearance of a dead person in a dream is considered as important and dreadful as if it had happened in daily life. Dream work experience began shortly after I had been introduced to a group of people as a dream specialist. At that moment I had not yet realized that all these people were gathered in expectation of healing from strong shamans, who were also present. Soon after I was completely involved in communication with both these shamans and their patients. I forgot about my notebooks and pencils, about well-planned work and dream types. The only two really useful things came from my previous experience of twenty years of dream work. The first and most important was my deep personal experience of dream communication with dead people who were close to me while they were alive. The second one was my experience of using rituals for dream work. Some years ago I realized that it is one of the most powerful tools, and have used it for my own dreams and for my students. Now when I look back to all these rituals, which I read about or created myself, they seem, in light of my Tuvan experience, to be very weak and shallow are some typical Tuvan dreams, which greatly changed my idea of dream work. Highly educated and important official in his sixties suddenly asked me to listen to his dream when other people had left his office. In the dream his dead grandfather came to him and handed him some objects. The official was sure that it was a bad dream. He told me that there were shamans in both his father’s and his mother’s families, that his grandmother was a very strong medicine woman, and that he had watched many rituals done by her when he was a child. Probably she tried to teach him. The grandfather in the dream had also been a shaman. The official felt very uncomfortable because he was trapped in between the idea that his family predestination was probably to become a shaman, and the fact that he had received a good education, had a good job, and did not want a different life. I urged him to try to remember what the objects were exactly, but he could not. The dream had happened long ago, but it still bothered him. I felt that a ritual could help him to remember more of the dream, but I knew nearly nothing about objects that shamans can keep in their hands. I asked whether he had tried to appeal to a shaman. He did not answer, but the next day I saw a shaman leaving the man’s office, clearly having just completed a ritual. Man (over 40 years old), a high level engineer at a big company, said that he frequently communicated with his dead father in his dreams, ever since the father’s death over ten years before. His father had been a lama in the Tibetan Buddhist religion (in Tuva lamas are usually also shamans as well). He had lived with his family in a distant part of Tuva in the taiga, and helped people a lot as a spiritual teacher and as a healer. The man said that his father appeared in his dreams always dressed as a lama, and helped him. These dreams happened each time the man fell ill. He said also that while he lived in the taiga he was very healthy and happy, but now had various health problems, and bad luck in his private life. He himself explained it by the fact that he did not continue the family tradition and did not become a lama. Woman (36 years old) asked for a private session. She was completely scared by a recurrent dream, fearing that something bad could happen to her family (she had three children). In the dream she saw a gathering of all her relatives, a kind of a party. Her dead cousin was among them, a woman killed by her husband less than a year ago. In the dream the woman remembered that her cousin was dead, and asked, “Why are you here? You cannot be here because you died.” “I am alive,” replied the dead cousin. The woman told me that she was very close to her cousin, and now the old and sick parents of the murdered woman would like her to take care of the surviving three year old boy, whose crazy father was in prison. But she was not sure that she could handle the responsibility. Together we came to the conclusion that she should act out the scene of her dream. She should gather all the relatives in order to address the problem of adopting the little boy, and to invite a shaman for the family gathering. The shaman would communicate with the soul of the murdered woman in order to ask her about the best stepparents for her child. The woman had great release, and decided to implement this plan immediately young boy (sixteen years old) was brought to the shamans by his highly educated and atheistic parents after psychotherapy had failed. The parents told me that the boy was full of fears and had become aggressive during the previous year, and that he was too ‘closed’. His mother saw that I looked quite ‘civilized’ and yet communicated with the shamans at the same time. I told her everything I knew about the particular shaman that she wanted but was afraid to visit. The boy spoke perfect Russian, and I asked for permission to have a talk with him. When his parents had left, he became much more free and opened. He told me that when he was a child (probably before the age of six) he had wonderful colorful dreams, and could hear music in his dreams. Then something had happened, and his dreams became black and white. He also began to feel the presence of something disturbing, interfering in his life during the day. After his sixteenth birthday he decided to get rid of it, to fight it, but he could not. Probably, the consequences of this struggle scared his parents. I gave him my book of fairy tales about dreams. Soon after it he came to me smiling. “Look here, at this preface! It is written about me: ‘In fairy tales, as in dreams, anything is possible. One can walk through walls, fly, catch on fire and not be burned, fall down and not be injured, even die and rise from death, ready for new adventures_’” His parents watched the shaman work for a couple of days. At last they made their decision and invited her to their house. The next day I asked the shaman about the boy. “I had to clean the whole house,” she said. “Their close relative died when the boy was only a few years old. The soul of the relative did not leave but caught the weakest and the most sensitive member of the family. Now the soul is gone, and the boy will feel better.” The boy’s parents confirmed the shaman’s guess about the exact time of death of their relative. Two weeks after a Tuvan woman who knew the boy’s mother came to Moscow. I asked her about the boy, and she told that he became healthy, and his mother looked very happy little girl (5 years old) stayed with her grandmother in line to a shaman. The old lady stopped me when I was passing by, and asked, “Can you heal too?” I explained that I am not a healer. The grandmother wanted to tell me her problem in any case. She wanted the shaman to heal her grandchild who could not sleep well and often cried in the night. Unfortunately the little girl did not speak Russian, and I had to communicate via her grandmother. I asked whether the girl had nightmares. “Yes”, replied the old lady, “she says that her dead grandfather comes to her, and she is afraid of him.” I then asked the grandmother if she remembered her dreams. “I remember nothing, and do not sleep well,” she replied. At that time I was familiar with local traditions much more than at the beginning, and I took for granted that, sometimes, gray souls of the deceased have reasons to disturb their living relatives. I also knew that all the members of a family frequently sleep in one small bedroom, as in a yurt, and it was quite possible that the little girl often slept in the same bed with her grandmother. The sensitive child really could see the same dreams as the old lady, who did not remember them. “Maybe, the grandfather would like to tell you something but you do not hear him?” I asked the old lady. “Yes”, she replied, “I think you are right. I should ask the shaman to communicate with him”. I ask myself: what was my dream work in Tuva? It was certainly not research work or facilitation through private sessions. I was simply accepted by Tuvans as a part of their reality, which includes dream reality as well. I was used by them (or by this reality) as an appropriate tool to look for an action (a ritual) that will solve a problem. All of these were just real problems from real dreams, and very urgent for the reality of daily life. People came to see the shamans with their children, and I enjoyed communicating with them. Their dreams were bright, colorful, and joyful. By nature Tuvans are shy and yet open at the same time. Shyness is one of the most respectable features of character there. Openness is probably quite natural for people who have strong and clean energy because they are still strongly connected to nature (Currently Tuva is considered to be the cleanest ecological area on the Earth). While communicating with children I felt a little bit sad, because it was clear that in some years these wonderful dreamers might loose this skill because of TV and bad disco music. Primitive action and loud electronics will force out real deepness and natural energy. But it is not hopeless, because adults take their kids with them when they leave for the country to take part in shamanic rituals. There are different rituals for different purposes, but they all help to reconnect human beings to Nature, to the outside world and to the world inside. I asked a strong shaman about the tradition of dream work in Tuva. The shaman told me that people who work with dreams are not shamans, but are highly respected by them. Stay in Tuva was too short to learn the consequences of the rituals, but some people with whom I communicated will come to meet me again when I return there.
1999.