Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work With Them - Book Review

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Dec, 2002 by Douglas G. Richards

EXTRAORDINARY DREAMS AND How TO WORK WITH THEM by Stanley Krippner, Fariba Bogzaran, and Andre Percia de Carvalho. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. ix 201. $20.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-7914-5258-1.

Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work With Them bridges the fields of dream studies and parapsychology in a scholarly forum while providing practical guidance for understanding and working with dreams. The material is accessible to general readers and to psychologists not familiar with dream research, and it contains enough documentation to be a useful resource for those wanting to pursue particular topics in more depth.

Stanley Krippner, professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School, is well-known to the parapsychology community and has had extensive experience in dream research, going back to the Maimonides dream telepathy studies in the 1960s. Fariba Bogzaran is the founding director of the Dream Studies program at John F. Kennedy University. Andre Percia de Carvalho is a Brazilian clinical psychologist. Notably, this book is part of a series in Dream Studies published by SUNY Press, edited by Robert Van de Castle, who is also experienced in the parapsychology of dreams.

The authors begin by distinguishing extraordinary dreams from ordinary ones. Ordinary dreams usually reflect our recent daily experiences. Extraordinary dreams have a creative component: "They seem to help us prepare for the future, generate a new idea, or provide helpful insights to our waking life. They may provide the breakthrough that is needed in articulating a new personal myth, rather than reflecting myths that already exist. We have referred to these dreams as 'extraordinary' because they are strange and unusual, yet precious and beautiful" (p. 4).

The organization of the book is straightforward: "Each chapter focuses on one type of extraordinary dream. It provides a definition, a historical perspective, and a way in which dream practitioners can appreciate, understand, and/or work with the material in the dream" (p. 6).

The authors illustrate the complexity of extraordinary dreams by beginning with a dream by "Dolores" that blends precognition with literal information and meaningful, helpful symbolism. There are no clear boundaries among a variety of experiences beyond the ordinary that include but are not limited to the types studied by parapsychologists (i.e., those apparently requiring a paranormal explanation). The categories of dreams range from pregnancy dreams to past-life dreams. As possible evidence for psi, dreams in the categories of telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive are most relevant, but the striking characteristic of many dreams is the mixture of material that could possibly be evidence of psi with other literal and symbolic material.

One of the book's strengths is its cross-cultural approach, drawing on dreams from a variety of cultures as illustrations. Throughout the book, the authors bring in the results of Krippner's survey of 1,666 dream reports, collected between 1990 and 1998 from participants in workshops in Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. In each chapter the authors note the relative proportion of that chapter's category of dream in this cross-cultural sample.

Another strength of the book is that it emphasizes a diversity of perspectives in interpreting dreams. The initial historical chapter covers the ground from Freud's and Jung's approaches emphasizing the unconscious mind and symbolism, to the recent neurophysiological approach of Hobson and McCarley, to the humanistic approach that sees dream analysis as a collaborative effort between people. The authors draw on all these sources to help the reader arrive at a personal approach to extraordinary dreams.

The major weakness of the book is that, in this brief format, it is able to only provide a very brief overview of some of the methods of working with dreams, relying on brief summaries and references to the work of other authors. This is probably a consequence of trying to be both a scholarly work and a practical guide.

In three of the chapters, those on telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive dreams, the authors concisely review the literature on psi in dreams, ranging from historical accounts and surveys to experimental studies. They use as examples dreams from their own surveys and students. They highlight the extensive Maimonides Dream Laboratory research and mention replications and follow-on studies such as Persinger and Krippner's (1989) finding of geomagnetic correlates with successful dream experiments, and Krippner, Vaughan, and Spottiswoode's (2000) study of geomagnetic correlates with Vaughan's precognitive dreams. Although the reviews of the parapsychological literature are not extensive or critical, there are sufficient references provided for anyone wanting to explore the literature in more depth. Particularly interesting are the discussions and references that provide links outside the parapsychological literature, for example, the discussion of how clairvoyant dreams are interpreted in the culture of the Mapuche Indians of Chile.