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It
occurs to me that this approach to dreams may not
be
unrelated to REM sleep and all
of the exciting, and by
now popularly known, findings
about the ubiquitous
normality of dreaming. Until the
REM sleep findings
became commonly known, it was still possible for
even
the most healthy person to
regard his dreamsif he
remembered them, much less recorded them or reflected
on themas foreign mental bodies, to be assimilated,
if
at all, only by way of untutored private ramblings,
or by
way of subjecting one's self to the possibilities
of being
neurotic.
Not so, now; and this is
what I think has given me the
privilege of exploring dream reflection
as a possible
stimulus to scholarship. Almost everyone
now knows
that we dream more dreams than we can
remember, or
afford to reflect on. And if a normal,
educated person
does take the time to remember a dream, and then
takes
the additional time to reflect
on it, what else is
he
to say to his dream censor, but, "And what else?"
I have
recently been instructed
by my friend
Montague Ullman that it is only
modern Occidental
societies which have not
institutionalized the dream.
"The nearest we come to it," he
says, "is either in the
form of residual superstitious
interest or, at a more
sophisticated level, the sanction
the dream receives
within the confines of the consulting room."
Dr. Ullman
goes on to say something else of crucial importance
in
this sociological perspective:
As long as nothing of importance
is allowed to find
its way back to society from the dream, the individual
is
left to his own devices and has no choice but to absorb
its mysteries within his own personal consciousness or
unconsciousness. No room is left for any challenge
to
the social order. There is room
only for personal
demons and the transformation of social demons into
personal ones.
In suggesting
that something of
the dream's
importance has in the past and should in
the future find
its way back to society I think Dr. Ullman is
making his
pitch for Sinclair's dream poet. My
purpose here is to
make the same pitch. In order
to make it effectively,
however, I feel constrained first
to imagine Colleen
Coleman as a patient of Freud's, as a woman who may not
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