Dream Education by Dr. Robert Van de Castle - Introduction:


Hi, I'm Dr. Bob Van de Castle and I'm going to be working with you for maybe another couple dozen of get-together sessions here, trying to help you learn more about dreams. Dreams have been a lifelong passion for me. I've been involved with them in a variety of different ways. One of my roles at one time was at the University of Virginia Medical School where I was the Director of the Sleep and Dream Laboratory and was monitoring here [holding up picture] for REM periods for subjects in the sleeping room, but I'm also interested in dreams in more naturalistic settings. Here is one [holding up a picture] when I was down in the Amazon trying to find out more about their beliefs there ... and we'll talk about all these different topics and to much more a degree, as we move along in our other sessions.

One of the things I'd like to mention now is that there is a mention here on our site that you can get a possible copy of my book, Our Dreaming Mind, if you'll be regularly contributing to our site and reporting your dreams there. Then there will be a random drawing each month, and the one whose the winner will get a copy of Our Dreaming Mind. It's well over 500 pages in length and well over 500 pages of material covering every kind of broad area of dreams, and there's about 550 references in there. So make sure that you submit those dreams and you may be the one that will be receiving one. My role with dreamscloud is as an advisor.

This is one of the awards that I received from the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and I'm hoping you'll become more familiar with their activities ... it's a great organization devoted exclusively to dreams ... been in existence now for 28 years. I received this award, and you won't be able to read it on the camera, but it says, “Lifetime Achievement in Dreamwork, and Lifetime Contribution to ASD”, at that time it was the Association for the Study of Dreams. We later broadened it to make it the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

We'll be talking about a lot of different topics here regarding dreams. I've already submitted nine blogs on the site. So if you go here [pointing] there's a heading over here called “Blogs”. If you go there and look for Bob's blogs you’ll see a series of nine blogs there that cover information about: How long do we dream? How frequently do we dream? How are dreams related to other kinds of mental activity during the night? We talk about puns in dreams. We talk about metaphors. We talk about dreams in ancient times going back to Aristotle and Plato. We talk about dreams of more contemporary times in terms of up to the present and in terms of possible ethnic dreams talking about Barack Obama and his book on my father's dreams. So there's a large amount of information that you can obtain by going through those nine existing blogs on there and then as we get together here, with these sessions, that may be another couple dozen different sessions that will be meeting together, and I’ll be telling you more about the reason why I have some of these objects gathered around and behind me ... I’ll to try to encourage you to try and get in touch with your dreams ... to think about dreams ... that dreams are important.

This little thing here I have says ... “believe in the magic of your dreams.” So I’m going to try and get you to recognize you do have this magical gift. We are all magicians in a sense when it comes to dreams because we all have the ability to make, not exactly rabbits appear out of a hat, but to make some sort of wonderful insights and awareness by paying attention to our dreams and so we’re going to have a lot of suggestions as to how to work with those dreams. I keep a dream journal and what, when you get that dream journal completed, you will be looking for.

So it is an exciting time. I'm really happy to be an advisor for dreamscloud. They’re currently, as we indicate now at the time of this video, available in nine languages. We’re hoping to move to a large number of other languages and have all the material revealed in a language that would be familiar to you as to how to go through our site and see the information we have there. We hope all of you will start joining in with other fellow dreamers around the world, so we can have some meaningful sharing.

We’ll talk about different events coming up. One of them coming up would be the International Association for the Study of Dreams conference meeting in Berkeley this summer, and that we’re going to have a poster session and will tell you a lot more about dreamscloud and our ambitions and goals for it. If you want to find out more about the International Association for the Study of Dreams, I suggest going to their website which is .. asdreams.org, that is, asdreams.org. There you find a lot of information about dreams. Dreamscloud is an affiliate of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and we are looking for a way that we can combine their long-standing interest and their large number of expert people on the member list and trying to combine that with what we would have to offer in the way of our contacts. As we see here on the site we already have applications for using the iPhone and it's going to be for other phones coming up as well.

So some exciting times ahead and I’m looking forward to our sharing some really exciting times together. I'm really turned on by dreams, and I hope that if we keep meeting like this, you will also get turned on by dreams. So, til we have our next session, make sure tonight you have an empowering dream.