• dreamworking. The authors of the book start from the assumption that in any dreams are involved physiological, psychological and cultural factors; and they are eager to point the main scholars who embraced one of these three factors. However, as it will become clear along the book, both of them would emphasis only the psychological factors involved in dreaming: seemingly these psychological factors have roots in the worldviews of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung. This mention is important for at the foundation of the book there are three hypothesis: 1) the dream are similar with creative and problem solving phenomena, being processes that evolve along 4 stages (Gardner Murphy); 2) there is a continuity between dream time-style and walking time-style (Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler – the difference between those two being that the first emphasis the latent levels of dreams, while the second the manifest levels of them); and, finally, 3) one dream time-style contradict one walking time-style (Carl Gustav Jung). At a first look, the book is easy to read and it makes sense, even if the hypothesis 2 is incompatible with the hypothesis 3; and even if the hypothesis 1 is from a different worldview than the hypotheses 2 and 3. In this framework, the two authors – Stanley Krippner and Joseph Dillard – are arranging an army of practical concepts, the most important being the “dreamworking”. There are many traditions that are working with dreams, one of the most ancients utilizing “meditation”, “prayer” or “yoga”. More recently Freud used “free association” and “dream interpretation”; for his part, Adler used “dream analysis” and Jung envisioned “active imagination” and “amplification”. Krippner & Dillard are delimitating themselves from those traditions considering that the dreamworking could be understood by “immersion”, “consolidation”, “illumination” and “verification”. As I said, beside dreamworking there are many other practical concepts like, for instance: the “intuition” (Ch. 5), the “metaphor”, the “archetype” (Ch. 7), the “incubation”, the “lucidity” (Ch. 11) and many more as: the “Janusian thinking” (Ch. 4), the “convergent/ divergent thinking” (Ch. 6) and so on and on. Instead of conclusion, I think it’s worth remembering that any critique of this framework could start with some questions: “What is a human being?” and “Does the human being have any similarities/ differences with the robots and computers?”

The map 1:

The map 2:

Resources:

• Stanley Krippner & Joseph Dillard (1988): “Dreamworking. How to use your dreams for creative problem-solving”, Bearly Limited
• Keith Sawyer (2012): “Explaining creativity. The science of human innovation”, Oxford University Press