Dream journals

Corey, E.J. (2004) Impossible Dreams. Journal of Organic Chemistry, 69, 2917-2919. 

To provide a firmer grasp of the distinction between form and content, I offer an example, taken at random from my own dream journal, which is one of hundreds that I have recorded over the years. To give a complete sense of how my journal reads and to allow the reader to compare his or her own notes on dreaming with mine I quote the entry in full. I know that you will dream of subjects quite different from mine, but I suspect that the form of your dreams is similar. 

These reports do, however, have corresponding deficiencies, which need to be overcome if dream science is to be universally valid. To test the generality of the findings and to be sure that I wasn t just making up dreams to fit my theory, we need to have reports from many other sources and individuals, collected under very different conditions. The dream data that we have analysed before arriving at our conclusions have thus been taken from other dream journals, sleep lab reports, and home-based reports. 

The best dream journal that I have found is called The Dream Journal of the Engine Man. Its author was a railroad buff. I like it because it was recorded in the summer of 1939 (when I was only six years old) and could not therefore have been influenced by my theories. I also like it because the descriptions are so detailed and so free of interpretation. Some are even accompanied by simple but expressive drawings. To control for the fact that the Engine Man, like me, is male, we have collected journalistic reports from our female colleagues and students. All show the same robust formal differences from waking consciousness that I have emphasized here. 

More than a year and a half before I began this Awareness Enhancement Training work, one of the people who would later become a student, Mary, had a dream. She had been keeping a regular dream journal at the time. The following dream made no particular sense to her when she had it, but she recorded it and forgot it for almost three years. Here is Mary s dream. 

Tart, C. A Possible Psychic Dream, with Some Speculations on the Nature of Such Dreams. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 42 (1963) 283-298. 

The uses to which ethylene and Its relatives are put are summarized in an article en titled Alkenes and Their De rivatives The Alchemists Dream Come True in the August 1989 issue of the Journal of Chemical Educa tion (pp 670-672)... 

Journal of Chemical Physics 43 (1965) S244—S247 Facts are better than Dreams — Winston Churchill... 

Selam, J. 1997. Management of diabetes with glucose sensors and implantable insulin pumps - from the dream of the 60s to the realities of the 90s. ASAIO Journal 43(3), 137-142. 

Soon after he became Professor, he also became the President of the Kyoto University Alpine Club (1961). The first plan that he scheduled was to conquer an unclimbed summit in the Himalayas. Whoever an alpinist might be, he wants to try once to climb Mt. Everest, and that was Ono-dera s dream from his youth. He went to the Himalayas as a leader with six members of the club, and was successful in conquering Indrasan and Deo Tibba. The results were published in the Himalayan Journal, 24 (1963) 90-95, entitled The Ascent of Indrasan and Deo Tibba, by Ono-dera. The expedition organized and sent made the first ascent of Indrasan (6,221 meters) on October 13, 1962. The party also climbed Deo Tibba (6,000 meters). Onodera stayed in the base camp, encouraged the members, and advised them to move carefully. This great achievement had an important effect not only on young students, including members of his Institute, but also on all Japanese youth, especially alpinists. Also in 1967, Onodera went on another expedition, to India and Bhutan, but, unfortunately, this time he was not successful, as he could not get permission to ascend a peak from Bhutan. 

Women s Dreams in Early Modern England , History Workshop Journal 49... 

On Mark, see H.F. Mark, "Polymer chemistry in Europe and America - how it all began, Journal for Chemical Education 58 (1981) 527-534 id., From Small Organic Molecules to Large A Century of Progress, Profiles, Pathways, and Dreams Autobiographies of Eminent Chemists (Washington, D.C. American Chemical Society, 1993) ... 

The reports that have been presented so far are all mine. They were recorded at home or on the road in my personal journal, which now runs to 116 volumes covering the last 25 years of my life and includes over 300 dream reports. Dream reports such as these have the great advantage of being easy and inexpensive to obtain, numerous, and, to me at least, undeniably authentic. Even though I have no recall of these dreams until I read the reports, I have the reports and I see in them the striking formal features that I have emphasized in this chapter. 

Smith, D. E., 8c Seymour, R. B. (1985). Dream become nightmare Adverse reactions to LSD. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 17, 297-303. 

Kingman, R. The green goddess A study in dreams, drugs and dementia. Medical Journal and Record, 1927, 126, 470-475. 

Fritz Haber might have continued at that pace for a lifetime, churning out research, filling the pages of scientific journals, cementing his reputation as one of Germany s most productive minds. He might even have been satisfied with that life it fulfilled his boyhood dream. 

S. Makino, T. J. A. Ewing, and I. D. Kuntz. DREAM++ Flexible docking program for virtual combinatorial libraries. Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design, 13 513-532, 1999. 

Kekole s snake dream inspired this figure that appeared in a spoof edition of ttie German chemical Journal, Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesefischaft in 1886... 

Before Kekule dreamed of his structure for benzene, Josef Loschmidt proposed the ring structure of the molecule. Unfortunately, Loschmidt did not publish his theory in a widely read scientific journal. As a result, the credit for this revolutionary theory is hotly debated today. 

---