To Surf, Perchance to Dream

Some people who spend their days with computers are finding that the machines have also invaded their dreams.

By TINA KELLEY

If you dream that your hard drive is crashing, do you wake up just before the Fatal System Error message appears? What would be the meaning of a dream about a cursor that was frozen, not flashing, on a blank screen? And in scrutinizing nightmares about computers, are there times when a hard drive is really just a hard drive?

The posting, reading and analysis of dreams is already something of an international spectator sport. People post their dreams in dozens of online dream journals, Web rings and newsgroups, and computers play starring roles in some of these pre-breakfast reveries. Recent sleep studies indicate that dreaming is more likely to be a tool for the brain to process information than to be a source of meaning and guidance, with symbols to be interpreted and heeded. But dreams and their import remain a topic of water-cooler and chat-room conversation.

Few therapists have noticed computers turning up in their patients' accounts of dreams, but some of them say computers have not been in common use long enough to become part of dreamers' repertory.

One therapist who has noticed a difference is Barbara J. Lee, a clinical social worker in South Pasadena, Calif., who says that about 5 percent of her clients have reported computer-related dreams. A Jungian, she says the computer is becoming its own archetype, a symbol of how modern life has accelerated.

"American society wants faster food and shortcuts, and a computer can embody that," Ms. Lee said. "Sometimes we lose our own identity. It's really about the individual's sense of not being in control."

Dreams about computers are quite easy to find through the Web. John Jacobs, 26, a programmer in Miami Lakes, Fla., posted the following dream on the alt.dreams newsgroup: "I was in some kind of store. There was a large mainframe computer on my left. The computer would churn out a tape of something like bubble gum. My brother was also there. After receiving the bubble gum tape, I would look intently at it until I saw something, whatever vision had been designed in the tape by the computer."

An online query about Internet dreams drew this e-mail response from Kathleen Barco, director of media relations at Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, Calif. She described her dream this way: "I sent my e-mail messages to print and there were so many the printer just kept chugging them out and buried me in paper. Then I woke up!"

But mainstream psychologists and sleep researchers have not reported any great flood of computer dreams even where you might expect them. Robert A. Hicks, a professor of psychology specializing in dreams at San Jose State University, said: "It is a little surprising to us that we've never run across that here in the Silicon Valley. We do see a lot of stress-related dreams here. It's a stressful place."

Psychologists, psychiatrists and other scientists have long debated whether dreams reflect subconscious forces within dreamers or simply show what bothers people in their daily lives. The latter point of view is in favor now, Dr. Hicks said.

"Almost all of us have dreams directly related to things we're involved with, so it's not surprising that people who post dreams on the Internet are posting dreams about computers," he said.

Dr. Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said most dreams involved emotions and physical motion but not sedentary activities. "Certain activities, like computing, that you think would be in there a lot aren't," he said. "Reading, writing, sitting at one's desk, the kinds of things we do all day, almost never get in there."

The idea " that dreams are mainly an effort to disguise unconscious conflict is outmoded," Dr. Hobson said. But many other psychologists and psychiatrists -- as well as Web site operators with scant or no professional training -- still find meaning in dreams. For them, what is the meaning behind the monitor?

Take Jacobs's dream about the computer and the tape, which he continued to describe this way: "The computer gave me another piece of gum tape. I put it up to my eyes and I saw the earth. I didn't have any idea what to make of any of it, so I left."

Rosalind Cartwright, director of the Sleep Disorder Service at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, suggested that Jacobs might be finding new technology to be a bit beyond him.

"He can't understand it," she said. "He can't make sense out of it, and it's pointing at all different directions at once. He wishes life was simple again and would just give him bubble gum as a direct reward." So far, she said, she has not run across any computer-related dreams in her studies.

In some computer nightmares, a manufactured brain overpowers a human brain. An entry on the Dream Page, a Web site where people post their dreams, said: "The room was dark and I heard an evil sound come from the floor. I could not scream or call for my roommates, the next thing I know my computer is biting me. I woke up and finished my English paper, well to this day the computer and I have not spoken."

Thomas Wear, a Jungian clinical psychologist in Seattle, said he viewed computers, with their objectivity, as male. "There's nothing warm about the machine itself, nothing nurturing or inviting, that I would suggest goes along with femininity in the Jungian sense," he said. "The machine itself is cold. All you can do is touch it with your fingertips. It sort of demands that you jump to its tune."

Related Article
Dream Analysis: Meaning of the Monitor

Dr. Wear said people who don't write code and create software might feel that they have made a stressful move from being tool users to being tool tenders. The computer seems to become the master.

One place to go for a layman's interpretation of technology-related dreams is Myths Dreams Symbols, run by Jerry Gifford, 48, a fence contractor in Nashville. "The mind is the greatest computer," said Gifford, who started working with dreams six years ago. Gifford said he based his interpretations on the teachings of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the mythologist Joseph Campbell.

One prolific dreamer, Dee Finney of Waterford, Calif., who chronicles her "Crystal Visions and Dreams" on Dee's Dreams and Visions , posted four dreams and a vision on Dec. 17, 1997, including this frustrating one:

"I was on the computer, typing in U.R.L.'s, trying to make a pattern so that if you clicked on one, it would take you full circle through the sites back to the beginning from whatever point you started in a Ferris-wheel-type pattern. I was not able to solve the puzzle."

Three days later, she had another dream about a circle of messages.

She realized that from the center of the circle, she could reach any point on it or zoom to another wheel. "It had to do with birth and death of one species of birds and the cycles of life and the tree or vines it lived in," she wrote.

Richard Wilkerson, a self-described dream educator in the San Francisco Bay area and editor of Electric Dreams, a Web zine, took a stab at analyzing Ms. Finney's circle-related dreams via e-mail.

SITE-SEEING DREAM INTERPRETATION

Dream Dictionary
"10,000 Dreams Interpreted," a great old book by Gustavus Hindman Miller listing dream symbols, can be found here in its entirety.

Tips and Information
You can receive an e-mail tip list on dreams, including hints for clearer dreaming.

Mind Media Review
This site describes Dream Analyzer software ($15), which will "recognize thousands of dream symbols and reveal their real meanings."

"Here we have what Jung would have identified as a Mandala, or complete geometric expression of Wholeness," he wrote. "If this were my dream, I would say that I have finally realized one of the greater truths about Mazes and Labyrinths, that I solve them not by escaping, but by going directly to the center."

John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., said the dreaming mind had much in common with the Web-surfing mind. In his Web textbook, The Psychology of Cyberspace, Dr. Suler said: "Under the right conditions, cyberspace becomes a dream world, not unlike the world which emerges when we sink into sleep.

The user can transcend the laws of space and physics. One simply has to click on a button to be transported from one location to another. There is no swinging of feet or turning of wheels to confirm that one has moved."

Willa G. Cline, a Web designer in Kansas City, Mo., may have had the ultimate computer dream, of a computer that would analyze her dreams. She published the following in her online dream journal.

"I was working on this dream page, and when I hit the return key on the keyboard, I was taken to another page and I couldn't figure out how I got there. I went back and tried to recreate what I had done, and it happened again. I eventually figured out that when I was looking at one of my dreams, if I hit 'return' the computer automatically interpreted my dream for me. If I put the cursor on a specific word or phrase and hit 'return,' I received an interpretation of just that portion of the dream. I thought this was pretty clever and made a mental note to come back and try it again when I had more time."

When asked about anxious computer-related dreams, she said she didn't believe that this one qualified because she viewed it as positive.

"I can't remember ever having an anxiety dream about computers, actually," she said in an e-mail message. "I *love* computers. They don't make me anxious. :)"

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October 1, 1998

To Surf, Perchance to Dream

By TINA KELLEY