NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE
Dec. 21, 2000
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By BONNIE ROTHMAN MORRIS
Mr. Francis, 29, is not a scientist, and has taken only a handful of classes
at a community college, but he is a self-educated computer programmer from
San Jose, Calif., who just happens to be comfortable, he says, discussing
the theories and applications of mathematical physics, vector algebra and
calculus.
Ten years ago, Mr. Francis started talking online with other people who shared
his interests. Along with lively discussions with the other science enthusiasts,
Mr. Francis often found himself debating people who espoused bizarre theories
that were more science fiction than science. The more Mr. Francis argued
with them, the more they dug in their heels.
Mr. Francis began thinking of these people as cranks, reasoning that science
is an ever-evolving process, and scientists change their views as they make
new discoveries that tear down old assumptions. On the other hand, "a crank
has already made up his mind, evidence one way or another will not make him
change it," Mr. Francis said.
In 1996, Mr. Francis created a separate file in his computer to keep track
of the cranks and their Web sites. In 1997, he spun off his quickly sprawling
file into a separate domain, and dubbed it Crank Dot Net (www.crank.net).
Today, Crank Dot Net is an index of about 1,000 of these sites. Through it,
Mr. Francis performs the role of vigilante, by ranking and categorizing Web
sites propounding pseudoscience that Mr. Francis says is misleading and simply
ridiculous. On Crank Dot Net, Mr. Francis pulls a quote from each site that
he feels best defines it, then ranks the sites as "Cranky (Downright strange),
Crankiest, (above and beyond the normal call of the crank), and Illucid,
(Something so beyond understanding that it defies classification)."
Among the sites listed by Mr. Francis are ones espousing time travel,
teleportation, alchemy, crop circles and the idea that the Earth is hollow.
There are several sites dedicated to an old favorite, cold fusion, which
created a sensation when it was announced in 1989 but now is largely dismissed
by the scientific community.
Initially, Mr. Francis said, he kept track of these kinds of sites for his
own amusement, in an effort to study their abnormal psychology. What struck
him was how television has influenced pseudo-science. "It's surprising to
me how many scientific cranks think pseudoscience and technobabble are really
how science gets done," wrote Mr. Francis in an e-mail message, blaming the
thinking on the influence of "Star Trek."
Mr. Francis said he had also come to believe that many people create their
own scientific theories because they simply don't understand the real ones.
Since math is fundamental to science and many people are math illiterate,
he said, they simply think words will do. To Mr. Francis, words are simply
not enough.
Crank Dot Net's sorting and filtering function for strange stuff on the Web
has taken on a wider import: helping site visitors see fallacy for what it
is. To that end, Mr. Francis also lists extreme religions, white supremacists
and hatemongers on the site, along with crystal healers and victims of alien
abductions.
Mr. Francis isn't the only Web vigilante out there devoted to pin-pointing
fallacy to encourage critical thinking. Phil Plaitt, the Web master of Bad
Astronomy started his site (www.badastronomy.com) devoted to exposing myths
about astronomy because he was, he says "full of righteous fury," after watching
a TV news reader on a national network morning show give a report on the
space shuttle then laugh on air that he had no idea what he was talking about.
"I have a passion for the rightness of science," said Mr. Plaitt, an astronomer
and a friend of Mr. Francis. "Science works. It's a pretty good way to describe
the universe." Mr. Plaitt suggests that sites like Bad Astronomy and Crank
Dot Net provide a "process to separate the rational from the irrational."
As the Internet expands to give every person a platform to say whatever he
wants about the way the universe works, (a good thing, in both Mr. Francis's
and Mr. Plaitt's view), it behooves people like Mr. Francis, Mr. Plaitt and
the Webmaster of similar sites, like Quintessence of the Loon
(www.ratbags.com/loon) to put them in context.
In addition to the pseudoscience sites, Crank Dot Net features an anticrank
category that lists sites "fighting crankism, debunking bad science and promoting
logic."
Crank Dot Net also flags sites that are parodies. Sometimes, Mr. Francis
admits, it is tough separating the parodies from the real thing. Sometimes,
he has ranked a site as cranky, only to be corrected by site visitors.
"It's really hard to tell the difference," Mr. Francis said. "The crankiest
people, literally, they are talking and you are giggling and what they're
saying is ridiculous, but they are serious."
Mr. Francis said he received several submissions daily suggesting sites to
mention. Many of the submissions come from cranky Webmasters. In fact, Mr.
Francis said he rarely gets complaints from the Webmasters he's clearly
criticizing on the site. "Most are quite pleased," he said. "By no means
is Crank Dot Net considered a hostile resource by people who are listed there."
Mr. Francis recently listed Greatdreams.com and rated it "crankiest." Almost
immediately, he received an e-mail message from Dee Finney, the site's Webmaster,
thanking him for the listing.
"Our main thrust is to educate people to watch their dreams," Mrs. Finney
said. `In their dreams you see the future. "We're tickled to be listed. He
has got the best links on his site to any educational subject that we actually
favor."
Related Sites
To Surf, Perchance to Dream
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?
As computers leach deeper into the subconscious, accounts of anxiety-filled
dreams about them are showing up in the public spaces of the Internet and
in off-line conversations. While "10,000 Dreams Interpreted" by Gustavus
Hindman Miller, written in 1909, featured dream objects like absinthe, reapers
and saltpeter, and current dream lexicons are filled with cars and airplanes,
it may be that before long, control panels and File Not Found messages will
be regularly showing up in the collective subconscious.
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.
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."
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.
Dream Dictionary
Tips
and Information
Mind Media Review
"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.
:)"
October 1, 1998
Can dreams tell people something about their relationship to technology?
Many people who report having such dreams say they can. Following are a
computer-related dream and several interpretations of it:
THE DREAM:
"I have experienced a high-anxiety dream in which the walls of a
room are computer screens," Tanya Tabachnikoff, director of media relations
at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vt., said in an e-mail message describing
a dream she had had about six months ago. "When I use the keyboard to try
to go to a Web site, the computer interrupts me with moving messages of new
software programs that I must download before proceeding, or else it is deluging
me with products I must purchase -- demanding my credit card number, expiration
date, etc. Even when I refuse to enter any information, it starts racking
up the bill in front of my eyes.
"I feel completely trapped by the room, completely at the mercy of these
enormous monitors surrounding me. The computer 'persona' (which is definitely
masculine) is overpowering and relentless, verging on cruel, and I am struggling
to regain control as it attempts to take control of me."
Ms. Tabachnikoff, responding to an electronic posting in search of
computer-related dreams, said her dream might be related to her pregnancy
-- a condition that she says leads to vivid dreams -- and to her college's
growing reliance on technology. She said Marlboro had embraced computers
as a tool for education, offering master's degrees in Internet Technology
Management and Teaching With the Internet, programs she has helped promote.
And she often uses e-mail to communicate with her boss and co-workers.
"I guess all the emphasis on technology has had some anxiety-provoking effect
on my unconscious," she wrote. "The dream obviously conveys a fear of computers
taking over our lives."
Circuits asked a number of dream interpreters, amateur and professional,
to analyze Ms. Tabachnikoff's dream.
THE INTERPRETATIONS:
John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University, said: "You have
the masculine, father-type image of the computer as a masculine, controlling
force. It's a turnaround because usually we think of computers as servants.
This is a source of anxiety: you're thinking you're in control, but there's
a kind of betrayal by them in that dream."
Thomas Wear, a Jungian clinical psychologist in Seattle, said: "Now the machine
has all the information, all the data, and you're just the operator, still
a tool tender. You're tending the machine and nothing more. Suddenly this
impersonal thing obviously overwhelms her and surrounds her, and she feels
attacked by its masculine energy. Computers are totally masculine in the
sense that they are totally objective."
Hillary Butler, a certified social worker with a Freudian bent at the
Postgraduate Center for Mental Health in New York, said: "Certainly there's
a fear/wish to be submissive and to be dominated. There's a sense absolutely
of being overwhelmed, being out of control, being at the mercy of another,
which again can be a fear and a wish. I think it's both. So the college,
the job, the boss are all representations of a father, and the fear and the
wish to give in to a powerful father. I don't know that this was particularly
about computers, except that that's her life, that's the language that she
would use to express her deepest desires and fears."
Dr. Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said:
"It's a classic REM-sleep dream in that it has anxiety, a fair amount of
bizarreness, incongruity and things that are probably very unlikely if not
physically impossible. What it doesn't have is scene changes or action. It
feels like a kind of relatively static preawakening experience.
"The problem with dream interpretation is it was never scientific and can
never be scientific, but that doesn't mean we won't do it. We interpret
everything. My guess is that you'd still have as many interpretations as
you have people. That's an inexact process and should be left outside the
realm of science."
The following is Richard Wilkerson's response to an e-mail from
TinaKelley@aol.com at the NYTimes. 9-22-98 - used with permission from Richard
Wilkerson. 10-01-98
Digital Dreaming: The Evolution of the Computer Symbol.
John's Gum Computer dream
John Jacobs, 26, a programmer in Miami Lakes, Florida, posted the following
dream on the newsgroup alt.dreams:
"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. As I saw things, I would relay them to my brother.
"The first thing that I saw was so totally inexplicable that I could probably
only put it in a painting. I suppose you could say I saw paisleys of white
light. But I had absolutely no idea what they meant. These paisleys of light
started out as arrows pointing the way through a large maze.
"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."
The yaramb computer dream
"I had a dream, a sick dream. I was walking along the varamb~ [cq] of a paddy
field. I was yelling ‘pazhaya computer vAngngAn ALundOOO?, pazhaya computer
vAngngAn ALundOOO?' [cq] and I had a heavy bundle of computer junks (monitors,
mother boards, floppies) on my head. I looked like the occasional aluminium
[cq] vessel-vendor on the street."
(According to the glossary attached to the page, a varamb~ is "a narrow path
made of mud, across or along a paddy field" and he was yelling "Yo! anybody
out there to buy these used computers?")
The Entry Key Dream
another: "I was working on this dream page," she wrote, "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
Finney's Ferris wheel Dream
another person: The next day, when she recorded four dreams and a vision,
Finney had the following dream: "I was on the computer, typing in url'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 Ferris-wheelian circle of
messages, where she came to understand 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.
=================================================================
Computer dreams build a symbolic bridge to the 21st Century across which
the meanings of our culture that survive the 20th Century can travel. What
I mean is that computers are a new technology born in the 20th Century and
bound to mature and be significant in the 21st. The symbolism and meaning
we attach to them and that emerges from them will be seen in our dreams.
If Swiss Depth Psychologist Carl G. Jung is correct, these symbols not only
reflect our personal and cultural attitudes about computers, but also carry
the next step in the evolution of our personality.
Stage 1. Centralized Computing.
The personal meaning of John's Gum Computer dream is something only John
may know. But by taking the dream as if it were our own, we can look at the
elements that we share culturally, and perhaps even find some personal
significance for our own lives.
Let's set aside the meaning in a dream of the computer for a moment and see
how the computer symbol works. I will pretend the dream is my own...
In "my" Gum Computer dream I go to a store, meaning I am about to buy something.
For me, this means I'm about to buy into a perspective or viewpoint, about
to invest my personality or desires in a particular new way of being. Or
I'm shopping for this new attitude. In this dream it is a main frame computer,
or the central computer that dominates the shopping place. In this dream
the computer is putting out a tape or program or vision of life that I am
barely able to see. It is new, inexplicable and I can only imagine communicating
it as a painting. I can relay the image to my brother, a significant act.
Jung often talked about how new meanings in our lives first appear on the
horizon as an image that can barely be spoken. Being one of the original
art therapists, he would often have his patients paint, draw and mold in
clay or in a sandtray the dream image. After some time and work with this
material, the meaning would emerge. But the process was like going through
a maze. First we turn one way, then another, and when all hope of getting
out seems lost, we make one more turn, and there is, the path way beyond
the labyrinth. In the Gum Computer dream, I look through the image of the
world the computer is presenting and find no way to express it and leave.
Even though the vision is gummy and I can stretch it a little this way and
that. Perhaps I am not ready for this vision, and perhaps I reject it. It
many be that my vision of the world is not spewed out by this particular
machine. I may not want a vision of the world that comes from a main frame,
but rather from a distributed processing model.
Now back to the computer symbolism.
It is interesting to note that our view of the computer itself is changing
and this too will not only be reflected in dreams but can be a way to gather
insight about ourselves. At one time a computer was seen as a central computing
device. Cartoons in the 1960's always had the main frames churning out some
funny message to men in white lab coats. Science Fiction of the same time
pitted man against some centralized computer that was about to take over
the world, or universe. These books manifested into movies & TV shows
in the 1970s and 1980s . In this sense, the computer represented to us our
fears of becoming stripped of individuality and threatened our sense of
superiority. Dreams of centralized computers may be used to gain insight
into our fears in these areas and maybe our desires as well. Sometimes we
desire our own imprisonment to avoid personal growth.
Stage 2. Interactivity
In the Return Key dream, the computer symbol is shifting from a technological
advance to a technological space, and from an authoritarian spew of directions
and answers to an interactive journey. The question of the simulation of
reality is emerging. That is, it is a dream within a dream. What is real
is not like in the centralized computer dream where reality is reeled out
by the machine, but though a relationship with the machine. I might say that
if this were my dream, I would see the computer here as a tool of communication
and meaning. It helps us interpret our dreams. If we can hit the return key
in the right place.
Stage 3. Transition
The yaramb computer dream forms a image from the cycle of apocalyptic fiction.
Here, the world has become a place were recycling and chaos exceeds production
and organization. Carl Jung often talks about the dream itself as a kind
of bricouler, a fellow who collects and sells what others have thrown away.
In our new computer world, just as soon as we buy a computer it is obsolete.
Like the yaramb dreamer, we have all become bricoulers and junk collectors,
patching together an old modem from one machine with a graphics card from
another.We try to stay ahead of the junk and make use of it, but we feel
like we are in a field of mud. Now this sets up an interesting condition
for our psyche and dreammaker. In the past, our dreams had machines that
stayed around for a while. The plow lasted for a thousand years. The steam
engine for a century. Cars for decades. As symbols of the unconscious they
formed a threatening but stable image pattern. Computers will carry with
them a sense of transience and will be useful as dream symbols for exploring
our new relationship with technology. Note: I would like to widen the notion
of technology to mean here not just machines of metal, but any extension
of function and pleasure. The jaw, for example, is technology, extended slowly
over time via evolution. To explore the most profound levels of our emotional
relationships with technology, we need to see the full extension of this
class of objects. The struggle of the individual in the postmodern world
is for some, to find uniqueness and spirit in a world that offers only basic
survival in heaps of junk. Others feel it is the notion of individuality
itself that creates the piles of junk. Between these to polar views, we move
along the yaramb.
Stage 4. Distributed Network
Finney's Ferris wheel dreams may be seen as a end stage in the current evolution
of computer symbolism. Here we have what Jung would have identified as a
Mandala, or complete geometric expression of Wholeness. 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. One may make the metaphor here to life, that problems are
solved not by running form them but by entering into them. At first, I try
addressing (typing in URLs) the problem to others, still trying to send the
problem off to someone else. But in the later dream I see that I need to
find a central pivot and can enter other wheels and networks this way. The
dream goes on to amplify this with a larger vision of the cycles of life
and death. The computer here is entering into a new kind of symbolism, a
vehicle for transportation and mediated communications with other. The Internet
addresses become paths not just to new rooms in a maze, but whole new worlds.
Dreams that entertain these notions of computers will allow the dreamer to
shift from a maze to amazing. I suspect that dream computers will represent
fear of the unknown for some, but will in general transport our fear of
technology into into the plows of a new distributed global field of dreams.
. Richard Wilkerson is a Bay Area dream educator and the editor of the Electric
Dreams e-zine. He offers classes in dream interpretation online and manages
the electronic communications program for ASD, the Association for the Study
of Dreams.
Homesite Electric Dreams Homesite
Association for the Study of Dreams
Association for the Study of Dreams
email Richard Wilkerson
email Dee Finney
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
Taking the Mask Off Pseudoscience
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Erik Max Francis started
keeping track of pseudoscience for his own amusement.
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web,
and The Times has no control over their content or availability.
• Crank Dot Net
• Bad Astronomy
• Quintessence of the Loon
• Greatdreams.com
October 1, 1998
Some people who spend their days with computers are finding
that the machines have also invaded their dreams.
By TINA KELLEY
"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.
SITE-SEEING DREAM INTERPRETATION
"10,000 Dreams Interpreted," a great old book by Gustavus Hindman Miller
listing dream symbols, can be found here in its entirety.
You can receive an e-mail tip list on dreams, including hints for clearer
dreaming.
This site describes Dream Analyzer software ($15), which will "recognize
thousands of dream symbols and reveal their real meanings."
Dream Analysis: Meaning of the Monitor
By TINA KELLEY
One dream (a computer run amok), four
interpretations.