You Choose

As for my background, I was trained as a physicist. I have worked as a physical chemist and research director before turning to writing. In that capacity, I worked as a senior technical writer at Argonne National Laboratory and now am a senior editor with two magazines: R&D Magazine and Drug Discovery and Development.

I too believe in a central organizer that operates continuously whether we are awake or asleep. Come to think of it, that notion is central to Control Mastery Theory, too, which postulates that a patient comes to therapy with an unconscious plan in mind--it being the therapist's job to discover the plan and then help the patient execute it as it develops over time.

Perhaps the most striking example of the kind of unconscious visual processing you speak of occurs when we look at the moon. I am referring to the apparent sizes of a full moon as it appears high in the vault of the sky and at the horizon. In both cases, the moon makes the same size image on our retinas. But we judge the vault of the sky to be closer to us than the horizon. Putting the two facts together as our brain does, they must mean that the moon is bigger at the horizon than it is when high in the sky. So that is what we see--a relatively big moon at the horizon. The illusion is irresistible because innate processing stands between us and what we see.

The idea of levels of unconsciousness is fairly straightforward when you think of the brain in terms of neural networks. When I say that stage 4 sleep is farther from the REM state than stage 2, I merely mean that stage 4 central processing takes place in such a way that there are relatively few neurons connecting it with the networks responsible for the REM state's simulation of experience. Stage 2 takes place in such a way that there are relatively many neurons connecting the two, with signals going back and forth between the two regions.

Psychologically speaking, I believe that many of "the answers are already within us." The main problem we face is mustering the courage to act in accordance with our insights. I don't quite know what you mean when you say that the body already knows how to play tennis without having played it. Certainly we know centrally, but skills still need to be instilled through practice.

As far as dreams are concerned, let me begin by saying that I don't believe that truly exhaustive dream analysis is possible. Dreams are too rich in content to be explained in words. The richness of dreams is one of the factors that lead to dreams being interpreted variously. People emphasize one aspect of the dream as if it were THE content of the dream, when all they have done is ignore many other aspects. I think that problem can be reduced by having people recognize that dreams deal with all aspects of a person's life, not merely one or two. Imposing that constraint will help, I believe, in reducing the variances in interpretation we now see.

Another problem of course is that there is a great tendency to impose one's own psychological viewpoint on the interpretation of a dream. In many cases, the interpretation becomes secondary to the task of validating the theoretical viewpoint. That is an important problem, but not necessarily as crippling as it may at first seem. The reason has to do with words.

Any psychological practitioner worth his salt is much wiser than the theory he espouses, and that extra wisdom gets expressed in his therapeutic interventions. When he tries to rationalize his interventions in terms of his espoused theory, what one gets is a dumbed-down explanation of what went on. The same sort of thing happens when the person interprets a dream. One gets a dumbed-down explanation, but because of the participation of the person's extra degree of wisdom, one does get some genuine--albeit garbled-- insight into what the dream means. It's sort of like the situation with sitting down a hundred monkeys in front of typewriters. If you give them an infinite amount of time, they will type all of the great books. Similarly, if you take a hundred psychologists and let them contemplate the meaning of a dream for a sufficiently long period of time with the understanding that their interpretations must encompass all of the important issues in the dreamer's life, you will probably get roughly the same set of interpretations from each of them, because their empathetic wisdom is not entirely constrained by their theoretical viewpoints.

As for how I meet this situation, the answer is very simple. I assume that the central organizer that operates during the day operates in much the same way during sleep. That means that every aspect of a dream must have a counterpart in our waking behavior. Is there a counterpart to dream images? Sure, words. So our use of the two must be similar. Are there counterparts to dreams per se in our waking lives? Sure, novels, movies, plays. So dreams must be plotted similarly to these, and the way we respond to dreams while dreaming must be similar to the way we respond to dramas while awake. In fact, our interest in novels, etc., must have its basis in our ability to dream. The notion that our thought processes while dreaming must be similar to those while we are awake is an incredibly stringent requirement. It leaves little room for ad hoc psychological hokum.

As for staying on one subject, fine. Choose one.

Replies:

Re:You Choose, by Doug W., 5/3/99 Clarification, by Vic Comello, 5/6/99 Ten Eye Witnesses, Eight Different Stories, by Doug W., 5/11/99

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