Today, our guest, the Rev. John Price, looks at our
dreams. The University of Houston presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
I'm fascinated with the
tagline to this series: "...we're interested in the
way inventive minds work." I'm interested since I
teach and guide people in dream analysis. Dreams
serve such serious functions if you can just get
through the truly inventive metaphors that the
unconscious mind uses to explore the issues in
one's life. It's generally regarded in the field
that some ninety percent of the figures in our
dreams are metaphors for some portion of ourselves,
or an issue we're working on.
There are some general guidelines:
nightmares are simply dreams you've interrupted out
of fright before you got to the appropriate
resolution of the dream. A recurring dream is one
deal-ing with an issue you haven't resolved yet. A
dream in color is one saying "this is important:
pay attention!"
Advances in industry and science have often come
from someone paying attention to a dream. Einstein
said his entire career was an extended meditation
on a dream he had as a teenager. He dreamt that he
was riding a sled down a steep, snowy slope and, as
he ap-proached the speed of light in his dream, the
colors all blended into one. He spent much of his
career, inspired by that dream, thinking about what
happens at the speed of light.
Elias Howe was one of several people who worked
independently to invent a sewing machine. Howe went
to sleep late one night, after working desperately
on the problem, and had the following dream: that
the natives, in a jungle, threw him into a large
stew-pot. He was trying frantically to get out
while the natives poked at him with their spears.
Later in the day, as he thought about the dream, he
realized that all the spears had holes in
the point!
And that solved the problem because, 'til then, the
paradigm for a sewing needle was a hand-held one
with the hole as the last part to go thru
the cloth. But the machine needed the thread to go
through first, to work.
Francis Crick and James Watson won the Nobel Prize
for con-ceiving of the DNA double helix. I've heard
that, for Watson, the insight came from a dream of
two snakes intertwining in an ascending helix. If
so, it's ironic, because Crick later wrote a book
denigrating dreams as worthless -- stating that
they only deal with the detritus of the previous
day. Oddly, his assumption was correct, but his
conclusion was off: dreams do deal with the
detritus of the previous day, trying to make sense
of it. All dreams work to integrate the fragments
of our psyches -- to make us whole.
If you say you don't dream, it's because you
don't honor your dreams. Write in a journal
before bed, and leave it open to the next page with
a pen and soft light to capture the dreams when you
wake up. Program yourself to wake up earlier than
you need to, so you can capture the dream, before
you lose them in the chatty news broadcast that
follows. Later in the day you can think about the
symbols and sort them out.
I'm John Price and, as a spiritual director, I help
folks explore how dreams guide their inventive
minds to make them whole.
(Theme music)
L. M. Savary, S. K. Williams, and P. U. Berne,
Dreams and Spiritual Growth. New York:
Paulist Press, 1984.
J. Taylor, Dreamwork. New York: Paulist
Press, 1984.
The Rev. John W. Price, is an Episcopal priest and
Chaplain at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital. He is
also Assisting priest at Palmer Memorial Church,
Houston, Texas. http://www.frjohnwprice.org
The Elias Howe dream story is told in A Popular
History of American Invention. (Waldemar
Kaempffert, ed.) Vol II, NewyYork Scribner's Sons,
1924, pg. 385.
Three other tales about dreams and invention: the
benzene molecule, the circular saw, and the novel
Frankenstein. See:
Benzene: Episode 285
Circular saw: Episode
845
Frankenstein: Episode 853
Howe's sewing machine,
(from
Kaempffert, op. cit.)
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.
Lienhard.
