Stanley Krippner, PhD
2006 IASD Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

Personal Profile

Stanley Krippner took an interest in dreams at an early age, and still has a collection of dream reports from his high school days.

While a student at the University of Wisconsin, he recalls one comment about dreams from his introductory psychology class. The instructor stated, “Dreaming in color is a symptom of schizophrenia.” Stan and his friends were alarmed because they all recalled dreaming in color! The year was 1953, a few years after the University of Chicago research on REMs and dream reports had been published, so there was no excuse for such an ill-informed statement.

Stan received his PhD from Northwestern University where he was exposed to Freudian and Jungian concepts of dreams and dreaming (but in the School of Education, not in the Department of Psychology). He taught at Kent State University for three years and then received an invitation from Montague Ullman to direct the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in .

Stan jumped at the opportunity, even after knowing that a dozen more highly qualified psychologists had turned down the offer because it lacked job security. Indeed, the grant Ullman had received to study anomalous dreams was only for three years. Ullman, Stan, and their colleagues were able to stretch out the funding for a decade, publishing over 100 articles based on their research as well as a monograph (Dream Studies and Telepathy) and a book (Dream Telepathy).

In addition, Stan has edited Dreamtime and Dreamwork, has co-edited Dreamscaping, and has co-authored Dreamworking and Extraordinary Dreams. While at Maimonides, Stan directed some of the first research studies on dreams reported during pregnancy and dream reports of male-to-female transsexuals. When the funds finally ran out, Stan moved to California where he became Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. He supervised several dissertations on the topic of dreams and designed a course, “The Psychoneurology of Dreams and Dreaming,” as well as helping to create a certificate program on dream studies. Over the years, Stan has given dream workshops in a dozen countries; his collection of dream reports from some of these workshops have allowed him to study gender differences in dreams, specifically in Argentina, Brazil, and England, as well as the United States. With Allan Combs, Stan has published several articles on chaos theory and self-organization in dreaming, and has written several articles for IASD’s Journal Dreaming, one of them on Native American models of dreaming. He has served as President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and in 2006 received that organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Stanley Krippner was a professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco.