Dear Mr Hobson,
I am a big fan of Yours. When I first discovered Your theory of dreaming I was really pleased to realize that there are dream researchers who do not sympathize with esotericism and unfalsifiable ideas.
I am a final year psychology student and I study at university where is no opportunity to do dream research or even to talk to someone who knows enough about dream theories. The only one lecturer who specializes in dreams writes about subconsciousness, dream interpretation and makes students read popular psychology books. I am sorry for complaining about this but it is the main reason why I write to You – a need to share with someone some of my ideas about dreams and understand if I am wrong or just discovering America.
Actually, the main idea is very simple and can be found in many writings. In the real world, when we are awakened, there are two aspects – the person himself and the outer world. The same rule is valid for dreams – in a dream there is the person himself and the hallucination of the outer world that is perceived by that person just as he would perceive the outer world when awake. The main difference between a dreaming person and waking person is that that dreaming person is quite inane because of hypoactivation of some cortex regions.
But that is nothing new as You were talking about the same thing although some novel implications can be done. For example, one might sometimes dream a person he knows, who looks like another person: "I dreamed T., but he looked like D.” In his book Freud tried to interpret this as some kind of subconscious wish or perceived subconscious similarity. But if the presupposition is made that in a dream the person is inane and the outer world is a hallucination, then we must conclude that "I dreamed T., but he looked like D.” is just a mistake that was made by the mind in a dream and that was uncritically accepted when person woke up. This means that the person actually dreamed D., but made a mistake and thought that it was T. There can be no such thing as T. looking like D. because a dream is only a hallucination of the world and not the person’s thoughts.
Although people can be honest when reporting their dreams they also are uncritical and perceive dreams like something that happened to them. They deny any responsibility for their dream actions and more importantly – their dream thoughts. They perceive dream thoughts as something that happened to them in a dream not like something they were really thinking. Because of this they can make misleading dream reports.
The example of a mistake ("T. looked like D.”) sounds very innocent, but there are mistakes that can absolutely change the dream. For example people can say that they dreamed someone chasing them but they could not see the chaser. This actually means that they have not dreamed any chasers. Dream content is only what they really saw in a dream, not something that they think or say they saw.
Probably this is enough to understand my basic idea. If You are still reading I greatly thank You and apologize for such a long letter. I understand that it is very unlikely that You are interested in what I just explained, but if You are I will be the luckiest person in the world to receive Your reply.
Yours sincerely, ...
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