Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You Something

Did anyone catch last night’s disappointing PBS Nova special on dreams? Where’m I going with all this? Conclusion: you should come and see some good inept dream interpretation at work in my Philadelphia show this September. And remember there will be prizes every night including free inept dream interpretation sessions with the man himself, me. You don’t need no stinking sleep scientists. I am the man who will help you. I am that person. Now go like Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead on Facebook.

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Did anyone catch last night’s disappointing PBS Nova special on dreams? I’d hoped it would be an update to the common scientific wisdom from when I was growing up (random neurons firing; the waking mind tries to make sense of it) but guess what? The new “advancements” tell us that dreams happen — are you ready for this? — when you’re worried about something; it’s you working something out that you feel anxious about.

Really? Really, guys? You mean like Freud said?  Or it might be that, as one scientist’s theory goes, “we’ve inherited nightmares from our ancestors,” which seems awfully collective unconscious and Jungian to me.

But none of these “brain scientists” will dare mention Freud and Jung in the same breath as their own research.  Apparently, they’d rather use the hocus pocus of fake science to arrive at the same theories as the psychologists they likely disdain. Or they’re just blatantly ripping psychology off because they have nothing new to tell us but perhaps they need to keep getting grant money to do sleep studies.  One scientist ineptly demonstrates that if you play a new videogame a whole bunch of times and aren’t very good at it, then leave it alone for awhile and go to bed, then get up the next day fresh and show a slight skill improvement, it must be because you dreamed about it.  (This phenomenon is also called practice.)

Maybe Matthew Wilson of MIT was good — he’s actually figured out what rats dream about (they have anxiety dreams about being stuck in mazes after being stuck in mazes all day in their waking life) — but he was the only one with any credibility. The others may as well just call themselves therapists and get it over with; not that there’s anything wrong with therapy. I’m just all for calling a spade a spade.  While this show pretended to describe new advancements to dream research we’re really back to square 1 with Freud, Jung and Native American shamans interpreting dreams based on folk beliefs (I’m all for that, too).

Where’m I going with all this? Conclusion: you should come and see some good inept dream interpretation at work in my Philadelphia show this September. And remember there will be prizes every night including free inept dream interpretation sessions with the man himself, me.  You don’t need no stinking sleep scientists.  I am the man who will help you.  I am that person.  Now go like Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead on Facebook.

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