Lucid Dreaming

About the Book

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness.  At such times, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers..."

       Charles Dickens

Lucid Dreaming is an intellectual adventure story most readers will enjoy but be warned that it is the dreams and ideas presented that will invade and change the reader’s dreams.  Lucid dream narrations, fiction, lectures, conversations, scientific observations, evidence, and speculations are woven to produce a tapestry that illuminates and support the author’s revolutionary theory of the coevolution of dreaming, language and consciousness.  

All those who read it enjoyed it enough to ask for personal copies.  And all of them seemed to feel a need to quarrel with the characters regarding minor points of opinion.  They seem unable to remember that Lucid Dreaming is fiction.  One of my friends said it reminded him of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is high praise indeed.

A Novel Preface

My explanation of dreaming is so obvious and clear to me that I feel like a sighted man in the country of the blind watching the wise but sightless examine a pink elephant. Freud, of course, has hold of its private parts.  Other oneiric researchers have staked claims on other parts.  Some cling to the elephant's tusks, some to its brain, some to its writhing trunk.  Still others cluster about its nether region to scientifically examine its dung.  Unable to contain my zeal, I began, in 1990, submitting my essay, A Heuristic Theory of Dreaming, to various publications.  Ernest Hartman, editor of Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams was one whose response was encouraging.

Having failed to interest other oneiric researchers in my common sense theory of dreaming I decided to present my ideas in a novel.  I added rich dream narratives and turned the essay into a novel. The requirements of the novel form better suit the topic than does the essay in form any case because mine is a theory of why we dream not how we dream, and is therefore a subjective creative endeavor rather than a scientific one. More importantly, less stringent limitations on length make it feasible to include descriptions of dreams that illustrate features of my theory.  Continuing to read the literature of dreaming while I worked on my novel required constant but minor revision  but nothing I read made me doubt the validity of my insights.

I resigned my self to the fact that a novel illustrating on a theory of dreaming based on a combination of insights and scientific developments can never be finished but in early 2000 I read The Paradox of Sleep, recently published by Michel Jouvet.  I was sure that I was going to like The Paradox of Sleep when I read, “… can we conceive of genetic programs being periodically reinforced in order to maintain the functional synaptic circuits responsible for psychological heredity?  …  My hypothesis is that this genetic reprogramming occurs during paradoxical sleep, that is, during dreaming.”  The “reprogramming” cannot be genetic of course; I’m sure he meant to imply the reprogramming of genetic predispositions; but I liked it, nevertheless.  He treats the idea offered by F. Crick and G. Mitchison, that we dream so that we can forget, as independent and incompatible with his hypothesis.  Had he rephrased their idea thus, “we may forget because we have dreamed,” he might have seen that they are facets of the same idea.  If we de-emphasize use of the adjective “genetic” the resultant combination is closer to my

About the Author

Over forty years ago George Parrish was awarded an Honorable Mention in an Atlantic Monthly creative writing contest and never recovered. He spent twenty-five years as a writer miscast as an entrepreneur. Until 1990 most of his writing time was consumed by FORTRAN programming, reports, and proposals related to CPU, Inc., the computer sales and data processing business he started in 1968 and sold 25 year later to turn to reading and creative writing full time. George Parrish was born in Muskegon, Michigan, where he still lives. He is an honor graduate of the University of Michigan with degrees in electrical engineering and engineering mathematics. He held positions as technician, research engineer, college instructor, and business executive. He and his wife of 40 plus years have three children and seven grandchildren. Rite of Passage was first novel. He has also completed other novels, collections of poems, essays, and short stories.