Host: Good afternoon, this is Kentyn for DreamsCloud. Today we are fortunate to have Dr. Robert Van de Castle with us. Good afternoon Dr. Van de Castle.

Dr. Van de Castle: Hello, how are you?

Host: I am well. Dr. Van de Castle probably doesn’t require an introduction, but he is the author of probably one of the founding books on dreaming and our dreaming mind, and a definite influence on my view of dreams in the dream world. Dr. Van de Castle, when I read through your book, I know you spent years looking at the history, the science, the art of dreaming, and now with DreamsCloud.com the science moves forward in a new dimension, being online with millions of participants. How do you see DreamsCloud.com continuing the work you put in for so many years?

Dr. Van de Castle: Well I think we now have access to a huge, huge volume of dreams. One of my interests in the past has been to try and look at a dream, and see what kind of content it consists of. So we would have within a dream different characters, they might be male or female, they might be a single character or a crowd, they might be familiar to us, they might be strangers, and we have different objects that we encounter. There could be cars, or trees, or buildings or money, we can have animals in there, and we can have a setting; so we could be inside, as I am inside, here in my office now, or I could get up and walk a few steps and I’d be outside, in my front yard. And so in the dreams we’ve tried to quantify those various elements, which are pretty consistent from dream to dream to dream. And now what we would love to do, what I would love to be able to do, with DreamsCloud as this huge base of global dreams out there, to try and take and see if we could quantify across these various cultures, so that in some of the earlier work that was done, it was found that like, in American dreams, fifty percent of them involve aggression, if we look at Dutch dreams, it’s only twenty percent. Why might that be? We could do a lot of speculation, as to is it that there’s a lot of marijuana available in Holland that makes them a much happier population, or is there something about the American culture, which is a much more aggressive one where we have so much more money devoted to our defense department and war activities then we do to any other kind of humanitarian ones. So I would love to be able to see how different sort of social patterns manifest over different cultures; how much is their friendliness, how much is there aggression? We could try and look at gender differences. If we look at American dreams we find that, for women who are pretty democratic, they dream about males and females pretty much the same, a little maybe heading more women than men, but almost identical. Where if we look at men there’s a real distinct bias. The bias is most of the dreams involve other males; two-thirds of all the characters in male dreams are other male characters, and I think that’s because generally males have been the one in positions of power. They are the presidents, the generals, the chief of police, they are the ones who have been the corporate managers and so forth. So men have always yielded positions of power. It’s now fortunately changing we’re beginning to empower women to have more positions in terms of ambassadorships, and in terms of leaders of countries and so forth, so we’re now in a position, and I’d like to be able to see with different cultures, how empowered are women in various cultures? If we look at a Muslim culture, a Jewish culture, and so forth, are those women, in there, predominantly yielding and having all of their activities determined by other males, or do we now find that women are getting to be more frequent, and that’s just beginning to scratch the surface, Kentyn, there’s so many things we could do if we had that pool of dreams available.

Host: Well I see, online, I see at least thousands, if not tens of thousands of people participations, and so perhaps part of this vision of yours and the DreamsCloud group is beginning to come true. Obviously as you talk there is a hundred other topics I would like to cover, can we carry this topic forward in our next interview? I appreciate your time and I so much enjoy your knowledge of the field and I look forward to our next discussion.