Dreaming In Cyberspace

• Editor's Notes
• Guest Editor'sNotes

Possible additional groups might include Lucidity, Dreams and Trauma, Dreams and Spirituality, or others.

The immediate purposes of the Dream List e-mail groups are:

1. To promote community and active communication among ASD members with common interests;
2. To share, discuss, and explore current research, writings, art, or unique projects across the spectra of dreaming and dream studies;
3. To work together on mutual projects such as research and/or preparing seminars or presentations for ASD conferences and regional meeting or in your own locations and communities.
4. To provide guidance and mentorship to members who want to develop their interests in a particular field;
5. To ultimately attract new members who will want to join in these active dream studies' "incubators" of ideas and synergy.
If you are interested in participating, please contact one of the coordinators listed above or log on to the ASD bulletin board and express your interests and comments about this project.

Use The D2D or Dreamer-to-Dreamer Part of Our Bulletin Board.

You may have heard of B2B or B2C Internet companies. ASD is starting a "D2D" match-up of member skills with the needs of ASD and its members. For those who have expertise, energy or curiosity about working with ASD, please log on to the ASD bulletin board and describe your interests and skills and we will try to match you with projects and committees. This is a good way not only to help ASD but also to work with a committee or team and get to know others with similar interests. Current pressing needs are help assisting with recruitment of new members, conference planning, work on ASD publications, responding to queries about dreaming, getting articles from ASD publications online, working with committees to set up regional ASD meetings, helping with PR and much, much more. Log on to our bulletin board and tell us your interests and expertise (asdreams.org/subidxdiscussionsbboard. htm).

Dream Time Notes and Deadlines
We are developing more outstanding special issues for the years 2000 and 2001. Deadlines and guest editors for upcoming theme issues are as follows:
Conference 2000 Special Issue: July 15, 2000
Dreams and Psychotherapy: Alan Siegel: November 1, 2000: dreamsdr@aol.com
Psi Dreaming: Precognition, Telepathy and Beyond: Rita Dwyer: February 1, 2001: DreamRita@aol.com (Seeking visual art, poetry and other creative expressions of this theme)
Dreams, Healing and the Body: Wendy Pannier: April 1, 2001

I hope you will join us in celebrating and dreaming in the new Millennium in Washington DC from July 4-8 at our annual international conference.

Alan Siegel, Ph.D.
Summer Solstice, 2000

From the Guest Editor 
 Richard Catlett Wilkerson

"Hominization is virtualization"
Pierre Lévy

Inhabiting the virtual world of the Twenty-First Century may seem quite strange to some, but will be very familiar to dream explorers. Rooms and scenery will easily shift and change, our senses will travel to remote places, our identities and bodies will marvelously mingle and mutate, and everywhere there will be desire and wishes, desire and wishes.

The cyberspatial shift allows all areas of dream studies an opportunity to pull up their roots and begin migrating towards a truly cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary flow of wisdom. If we apply to Cyberspace what we have learned in dreamwork (such as how relationships are key to being centered in one's cosmos) then this informational terraforming of earth will result in a meaningful and balanced cyberecology rather than an electro-automated nightmare.

Included in this special issue of Dream Time is a display of cyberdream trends which not only honor the older traditions of science, psychology, spirituality and dreamwork, but also redirect the flow of these practices across the global electric dream stream currently fashioned as the Internet. But we must not forget the medium is also the message. Dreamers & dream researchers know the dream is itself a rupture, creating a novel world between waking and sleeping that modifies both. The Internet is a rupture as well, and dream studies and dreamwork online go further than just recapitulating old paradigms in a new environment. The virtualization of dreaming follows the virtualization of culture. This virtual shift might be characterized in the same way that archetypal psychologists have characterized the shift in the axis of the dream. When we wake up we say we had a dream, but when we are dreaming, the dream has us. While inner values remain important in the externalized electrosphere, they needn't be literalized. The inner-ness of the dream is as located in culture as it is in our heads. Currently we talk about the Internet as if it were in something between us, in a computer. Soon we will see that we are in the Net, and our dreams are in the Net and the interfaces for our sharing will be nothing short of amazing.

Part of the amazing interface is our feelings. While remote dream sharing may seem cold and distance to some, Robert Bosnak has developed ways for us to experience the emotions of one other across any distance. Robert was hesitant about online dreamwork since so much of his work is visceral and carried by the human voice. But things have changed. His cyberdreamwork extends Jung's complex studies with GSR meters into the latest skin interface designs that connect the participants in a dream group environment online where they can "see" as well as hear each other's reactions. Jill Fischer joins Robert in and exploration of the Cyberdreamwork Movement.

Harry Bosma, a long time dreamworker, suffers from Myalgic Encephalopathy (CFS). Like many isolated people, Harry finds that the Internet offers him an opportunity to actualize his potentials despite his challenges. He has explored ways that dreams help him and other CFS sufferers find meaning in the illness. Harry explores this and other relevant topics on creating online networks in The Healing Dreams Website.

Linda Lane Magallón is an Internet pioneer in dream exploration and she has been organizing and participating online dream related projects since the mid-1990's. If you are planning dream research online and would like to find the venues for this as well as consider the ethical considerations that are unique to the Internet, I would highly suggest reading her article Dream Research and Experimentation Online.

Linda has also contributed to pioneering online dream education. More than just getting information out online, this includes seeing the Net as a unique medium and using the many different forums for different purposes. If you would like to learn more, please read Dream Communication, Education and Commercial Products.

Two old problems in doing systematic studies of dream content include collecting an adequate sample and developing methods for analyzing the reports. G. William Domhoff and Adam Schneider have been addressing these issues with the use of the Net. Dreambank.net allows researchers from around the world to sort and search through a large data bank of dreams. Dreamresearch.net provides aids and online training for using the Hall/Van de Castle scoring system. Bill Domhoff explains the site and explores how these sites might be used in tandem in DREAMBANK.NET and DREAMRESEARCH.NET: Two New Resources for Studying Dream Content.

It was my great luck in 1994 to find John Herbert on AOL SeniorNet. My Electric Dreams community was looking for new ways to share dreams on the Internet and the process that John had worked out fitted our online listserv groups like a glove. John has since gone on to develop and work in a wide variety of online dreamwork venues. He shares a summary of these in Reflections on Online Dream Groups.

How deep can relationships get in an online dream group? Walter Logeman, in DreamEvents in Psyberspace gives sample from a "game" that is played by adults online and creates for several weeks a closed and confidential setting. The game is based on Herman Hesse's The Bead Game and allows players to make relational moves on a virtual board, connecting dreams, thoughts and feelings in a soulful way.

One of the more popular of online venues are called chat rooms. When un-moderated, these dens of anarchy are inhabitable only by those young enough to be able to hold six simultaneous conversations. Yet handled right the can also provide an anonymous sharing chamber that can be quite emotional. Fred Olsen has been exploring dreamwork based on questions and re-entering the dream imagery in these chat venues and shares with us his first encounter in Dream Reentry and On-line Chat: An Experience of Synchronicity and Resolving Loss in a Chat Room Setting.

If you are familiar with online chat rooms, you may also have experienced a conference room. In a conference or chat auditorium only a few people are allowed on the middle stage, but there may be thousands of people in the "auditorium." Jeremy Taylor became very familiar with this venue in his early morning tour of duty with "The Dream Show" on America Online. In Praise of Electronic Intimacy explores the factors that make an online group chat significant, the problems and the future of dreamwork online.

Why are video game players more likely to be lucid dreamers? Jayne Gackenbach's research into this area suggests that our telepresence, in games, virtual reality or dreaming are an active, constructive process and may be the first indications of our developing a higher state of consciousness via the Internet. By studying the access to these immersive realities we begin to bridge the gap between levels of consciousness and their actualization.

If you are curious about what dreaming will be like in the future, you will appreciate the Lars Spivock's  An Email from the Future. From the phobia of the transpersonal to the photonic of the transhuman, Lars explores dream gadgets, nanotechnology and just how we will interface with new technologies in dreamspace. 

Once a year, the Electric Dreams community makes a special request of the members of the DreamWheels and eDreams dream groups. We ask each of the member's permission to publish a full transcript. These peeks into intimate dream sharing allow the general public a inside view as well as providing a model for other groups. Be sure to read  "Mel", A full transcript of an Electric Dreams dream sharing group.

 If you are looking for what resources the Internet has to offer in the field of dreams, you will appreciate my Guide to Everything About Dreams Online. This index is a virtual Dream-O-Rama of links, lists, articles, groups and other events in online dreaming.

Many thanks to Alan Siegel for his idea to have a special Cyberspace issue and to the many contributors that have provide what I feel to be one of the best resources for dreams and dreaming in Cyberspace, as well as a visionary guide to the future of dreaming.
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Virtually your, 

Richard C. Wilkerson