Chapter 1: Introduction and OverviewSenoi Dream Theory is a set of claims about how people can learn to control their dreams to reduce fear and increase pleasure -- especially sexual pleasure. It was a key element in a whole new orientation toward dreams that first became popular as one small strand of the human potential movement in the 1960s. Since then this new approach has grown to the point where it is now a separate movement, called the "dreamwork movement." It has its own in-group vocabulary, bulletins, workshops, and meeting places. Books on "creative dreaming" and "dream power," often invoking the wisdom of other cultures and classical Greece, have sold in the tens of thousands. The practitioners and leaders in this movement call themselves "dream workers." They draw on several different theories and traditions, which are weaved together in different ways by different dream workers. One key source is the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), whose theory claims that dreams are a source of wisdom and personal growth. There's also the Gestalt therapist Frederick (Fritz) Perls (1893-1970), who argued that the emotional re-experiencing and dramatization of dreams by members of groups can lead to the creative integration of the personality. Then, too, the beliefs and practices of various Native American groups, as well as the general use of dreams in spiritual healing by tribal peoples all over the world, have also been incorporated into the dreamwork movement. Very crucially, but now taken for granted, the movement is based on an accidental discovery about sleep and dreams that emerged from a physiology laboratory in 1953. This research showed that sleep is very different from the passive, inactive brain state it had been thought to be by all the experts up until that time, including the expert in whose laboratory the contradictory discover was made. Instead, sleep has several periodic active phases, now known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, in which the eyes dart about underneath the eyelids and respiration rate changes, along with numerous other physiological and behavioral changes. Most of all, it was soon discovered that the most vivid dreaming occurs during this stage of sleep, which means that most people spend at least 20-25 percent of each night dreaming, far more than ever had been imagined in the past. (I say "most" people, not everyone, because evidence has emerged that adults with certain kinds of brain lesions and pre-school children do not dream.) These laboratory studies gave a material reality to what hitherto had appeared to be an ephemeral and irregular phenomenon, and thereby reinforced the inclination to believe that dreams are somehow of deep and fundamental importance.[1] Within this context, Senoi Dream Theory was the crucial final ingredient -- as shown in great detail in Chapter 3 -- in the creation of the dreamwork movement. That's because it added the idea that dreams can be shaped and controlled through positive group experiences. It isn't just that dreams contain wisdom in esoteric symbolic form, as Jung claimed, or that they can be used in an aggressive fashion in therapy groups to deal with personal problems, as Perls said. In addition, according to Senoi Dream Theory, dreams can be shared and shaped in groups in a positive and supportive fashion for the benefit of everyone, not just specific individuals with problems. As the literature of the now-defunct Jungian-Senoi Institute in Berkeley put it in the early 1980s, "Senoi dreamwork emphasizes the deliberate alteration of dream states, the resolution in dreams of problems encountered in waking consciousness, dream 'rehearsal' for activity while awake, and the application of dreams to creative individual and community projects."[2] The new theory sees dreams as an open and positive phenomenon which can be shared and shaped for maximum human development. The human potential movement has long since disappeared, but the dreamwork movement lives on. The people who were said to first practice this new way of thinking about and using dreams, the Senoi, are an aboriginal people who live in the jungle highlands of Malaysia. Numbering between 30,000 and 45,000 for the past 50 years, they live near rivers in loose-knit settlements of fifteen to 100 people. The Senoi are characterized by the dreamwork movement as an easygoing and nonviolent people. Their ideas about dreams are so appealing because they are believed to be among the healthiest and happiest people in the world. There is reportedly no mental illness or violence precisely because they have a theory of dream control and dream utilization unlike anything ever heard of in Western history. The main source on the Senoi use of dreams is the work of Kilton Stewart (1902-1965), who first learned about the Senoi during a stay in Malaya (now Malaysia) in 1934. His articles in Complex and Mental Hygiene provide the basis for the discussion of the Senoi in such widely read dream books as Ann Faraday's Dream Power (1972) and The Dream Game (1974).[3] Moreover, three different articles in Psychology Today, one in 1970, another in 1972, and a final one in 1978, discuss his work in a favorable light.[4] Then, too, his 1951 article in Complex, "Dream Theory in Malaya," later was reprinted in such once-influential collections on human possibilities as Charles Tart's Altered States of Consciousness (1969) and Theodore Roszak's Sources (1972). In addition, Stewart's writings on the Senoi are supplemented by the work of psychologist Patricia Garfield, author of the best-selling Creative Dreaming (1974), which was reprinted with a new introduction in 1995. Although her book has chapters on the dream practices of Native Americans, ancient Greeks, and Eastern mystics, it is in fact built around her chapter on how to learn and utilize what are said to be Senoi principles for controlling dreams. Garfield visited with some Senoi at the aborigine hospital in Gombak, Malaysia, in 1972. Until the early 1980s, Garfield was the only dream researcher besides Stewart claiming direct knowledge of Senoi dream practices. She was that crucial "second opinion" that helped solidify belief in the reality of Senoi Dream Theory. Moreover, she tantalized readers by reporting that her personal use of Senoi techniques led to a decline in the number of dreams in which she was a helpless victim and an increase in the number of dreams in which she had orgasms. According to Stewart: "The Senoi make their dreams the major focus of their intellectual and social interest, and have solved the problem of violent crime and destructive economic conflict, and largely eliminated insanity, neurosis, and psychogenic illness." Although highly cooperative, they are nonetheless individualistic and creative, with each person developing his or her unique personality characteristics. As Stewart puts it in a particularly well-turned phrase: "The freest type of psychic play occurs in sleep, and the social acceptance of the dream would therefore constitute the deepest possible acceptance of the individual."[5] Most of all, Senoi have near-perfect mental health. "Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the Senoi is their extraordinary psychological adjustment," says Garfield. "Neurosis and psychosis as we know them are reported to be nonexistent among the Senoi," she continues. "Western therapists find this statement hard to believe, yet it is documented by researchers who spent considerable time directly observing the Senoi. The Senoi show remarkable emotional maturity."[6] Those in the dreamwork movement who write about the Senoi accept Stewart's claim that this unusual level of health and happiness can be attributed to the way in which the Senoi use and interpret dreams. "There are no well-controlled scientific studies to prove that peacefulness, cooperativeness, and creativeness, mental health, and emotional maturity are the result of the Senoi's unique use of dream material," Garfield admits. "However, there is much to strongly suggest that, at the very least, their use of dreams is a basic element in developing these characteristics."[7] For the Senoi, life is a veritable dream clinic. The concern with dreams begins at the break of day. "The Senoi parent inquires of his child's dream at breakfast, praises the child for having the dream, and discusses the significance of it," reports Stewart. "He asks about past incidences and tells the child how to change his behavior and attitude in future dreams. He also recommends certain social activities or gestures which the dream makes necessary or advisable."[8] The dreamwork continues after breakfast at the village council. "Here the serious work of dream discussion continues," says Garfield, picking up the story. "The men, adolescent boys, and some of the women share their dreams with the larger group. They discuss the significance of each dream symbol and situation. Each council member expresses his opinion of its meanings. Those of the tribe who agree on the meaning of a dream will adopt it as a group project."[9] The frank discussion of dreams is especially important in the promotion of social harmony. Negative actions in dreams are discussed with the people who were part of these interactions in order to resolve the problems that might have caused these images. "If the dreamer injures the dream images of his fellows or refuses to cooperate with them in dreams," writes Stewart, "he should go out of his way to express friendship and cooperation on awakening, since hostile dream characters can only use the image of people for whom his good will is running low." By the same token, "if the image of a friend hurts him in a dream, the friend should be advised of the fact, so he can repair his damage or negative dream image by friendly social intercourse."[10] But the Senoi, it is claimed, not only share and interpret their dreams. Even more significantly, they shape and control them. They are able to have the kinds of dreams they want to have, free of fearful chases and frightening falls, and full of sensuality and creativity. They do so through three basic principles that are taught to children as they report their dreams around the breakfast table. These principles, which are unique in the dream literature and greatly appeal to modern readers, can be paraphrased from Stewart and Garfield as follows:
These accounts of the Senoi people and their use of dreams have an otherworldly, utopian quality about them. They seem almost too good to be true. Indeed, Stewart's 1951 article, "Dream Theory in Malaya," begins by talking about a hypothetical "flying saucer from another planet" that lands on a "lonely mountain peak" in Malaysia. After playing with the image for another sentence or two by noting that we would be curious about the people who could make such a craft, he then turns the tables by telling us that in 1934: "I was introduced to an isolated tribe of jungle folk, who employed methods of psychology and interpersonal relations so astonishing that they might have come from another planet." Stewart thus moves from "outer space" to "inner space" in such a way that the reader is prepared to be enchanted by these fascinating people:
Mention of flying saucers, other planets, and outer space gives Stewart's article a literary quality. In fact, the more one contemplates how really remarkable and atypical these people are, the more one is likely to ask: how much of this is true? Could such healthy and happy people really exist, and if they do, are their principles of dream control and their practices of dream sharing actually the basis for their wonderful culture and superb mental health? In fact, none of this is true. It is all a fairy tale. It is not a hoax, but it does show how gullible most people can be due to persuasive dream hucksters and the general American will to believe that there must be some good and pure people somewhere in the world. As I show in Chapter 2, drawing on detailed field work by anthropologists that has been totally ignored by the dreamwork movement, the Senoi do not practice Senoi Dream Theory. Senoi peoples certainly have a dream theory and a dream practice, but it is nothing like what American dreamworkers believe. If anything, it is just the opposite. Following the chapter showing the truth about the Senoi, who are in reality a subjugated aboriginal people doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances, Chapter 3 turns to Stewart's life story in an attempt to understand how he came to conclusions that are very different from those of trained anthropologists. Drawing on many different sources, but especially interviews and materials shared with me by the sibling who admired him the most, I show that the American version of Senoi Dream Theory is the product of the fertile imagination and messianic hopes of a romantic wanderer with no previous training in anthropology. He happened on the Senoi quite by accident in the 1930s, knew nothing of the language or culture, and spent at most eight weeks with them in the course of two different visits. I further show that his dissertation, completed years after his visit to the Malaysian highlands, did not make the extravagant claims made in his later papers. Why did so many people uncritically accept the claims by Stewart and Garfield — and why have they persisted in believing these claims despite all the contradictory evidence that has been available since I brought it together in a 1985 book, The Mystique of Dreams? The answer to this question is discussed in Chapter 4. It involves the hopefulness of the early 1960s, when everything was considered possible, but it also relates to the later rejection of all things American by many young and liberal Americans in the late 1960s due to the Vietnam War. Most of all, it is based on the general American attitude toward the world: the spirit of "can-do," the idea that everything can be shaped and controlled, which is then unwittingly built into Senoi Dream Theory. But whatever the theory's origins, and whatever the weaknesses of Kilton Stewart as an observer and thinker, the bigger question is whether or not his theory has any validity. That is, the theory has to be judged on the evidence for and against it, not on the basis of Stewart's romantic claims about its alleged Senoi origins. This judgment is undertaken in Chapter 5. According to several studies in the 1970s and 1980s, there may be some benefit to sharing dreams, just as there may be benefit to sharing any intimate thoughts in a supportive group. However, Stewart's ideas about dream control do not work. People aren't likely to be able to confront and conquer danger, go toward pleasure, or extract a creative gift from one or another dream character. Quite ironically though, there is new evidence since the 1990s that nightmares can be reduced by writing down a new ending to the nightmare of one's own choosing, and then imagining that new ending several times each day ("imagery rehearsal," a technique of cognitive-behavioral therapy). Even here, no credit can be given to Stewart or the dreamwork movement. The successful approach to nightmare reduction -- which can be thought of as a form of "dream control" -- was developed by a physician, Barry Krakow, who based his work on an article on imagery rehearsal that appeared in a British psychiatry journal in the 1970s. Citations to two of Krakow's research studies appear at the end of Chapter 5. When I first wrote about Senoi Dream Theory, I was very gentle, ironic, and circumspect. In effect, I said that dreams are very difficult to study and that we all make mistakes. I even noted that some of the early claims about REM sleep and dreams turned out to be slightly wrong (e.g., the eye movements do not correlate with the dreams, dreams sometimes occur in non-REM sleep towards morning, and people do not become crazy if they are deprived of REM sleep). I was generally forgiving toward Stewart as an enthusiastic, well-meaning, and creative person with liberal values. But this approach turned out to be a big mistake for two reasons, and that is why this streamlined and updated account is so direct and frank. First, I managed to annoy some of my scientific colleagues because I did not more clearly debunk Stewart and expose him as the half-baked bounder that he was. (For example, one of the greatest anthropologists of the 20th century, Sir Edmund Leach, who knew Stewart extremely well in the 1930s, wrote me that Stewart was a blowhard and storyteller who was not taken seriously by anyone who knew him.) For my research colleagues, then, I was guilty of pulling my punches. Second, my approach let the Senoi Dream Theory advocates slip off the hook far too easily. They were able to finesse and distort what I had said, and go right on making their absurd claims about Senoi Dream Theory. The most prominent example of this point is one of the most visible figures in the dreamwork movement, Jeremy Taylor, the author of several pop psychology books on dreams and a frequent leader at dream workshops. An eloquent and forceful speaker, Taylor tells people that the Senoi used to practice the theory Stewart put forth, but that they abandoned it or hid it from Western view due to being put in stockades during World War II.[13] Further, he says they retreated from frank interactions with Westerners in the face of the American anti-communist crusade after World War II. Rather than basing his conclusions on the weight of the overall evidence, Taylor says there is "justification for reasonable doubt" on the issue of whether Senoi ever practiced Senoi Dream Theory. He makes this claim based on very dubious anecdotal sources. He thereby adopts the opposite approach to a scientific one, where the important issue is the comparison of rival hypotheses for their ability to explain the most systematic and reliable evidence currently available, not whether there is some faint hope that the most unlikely hypothesis just possibly may be true. If Senoi Dream Theory is to be given the benefit of an alleged "reasonable doubt," then any unlikely hypothesis can hang on forever in the dream community, deadening the impetus to entertain new hypotheses and collect new data. The whole enterprise becomes futile, frozen in rival camps. But it is not just Taylor. He is simply the best exemplar of what must be considered a general tendency until someone within the dreamwork movement challenges the orientation that he advocates. Moreover, Taylor's extreme position has given cover for Garfield to look like a reasonable moderate who need not change her earlier views. In the new preface to the 1995 edition of her 1974 book, she notes that my book seemingly refutes everything she claims about the Senoi. But then she notes that there are those -- namely, Taylor -- who doubt this refutation. For herself, then, there is just no way to be sure who is right, so she doesn't need to rethink anything. And thus the miseducation of the next generation of dreamworkers continues. There is only one positive note in this litany of silence and denial. The aforementioned Ann Faraday, the author of popular dream books in 1972 and 1974, visited a Senoi group with her husband in 1982-1983 and stayed for nearly a year. When she realized that everything she had written on the basis of Stewart's account was wrong, she said so in no uncertain terms that are quoted toward the end of Chapter 2. Now that the claims by Stewart, Garfield, and Taylor have been spelled out, it is time to look at what anthropologists who spent large periods of time with Senoi groups actually found. Chapter 2: What Do We Know About the Senoi?The word "Senoi" means "human being" or "person" in the language of the aboriginal people who still managed to practice their traditional way of life into the 1980s in the mountainous central area of mainland Malaysia. The people called "the Senoi" by dream researchers are actually two groups, the Temiar and the Semai, who are very closely related culturally. The Temiar tended to live in the highest and most isolated regions, at the headwaters of the various rivers, whereas the Semai live a little closer to farming areas. (In 1994, a census report estimated that there were 15,000 Temiar and 26,000 Semai in the country.) There is sometimes a little mutual suspicion between Temiar and Semai villages, but there is also a considerable amount of interaction and intermarriage in some regions of the jungle.[1] Senoi groups are most readily distinguishable from two neighboring aboriginal groups by their practice of a shifting form of agriculture -- called "swidden" agriculture by anthropologists -- in which they prepare new fields every three or four years within those areas that are more or less theirs by tradition and common consent. In some parts of the jungle interiors, their settlements border on the traditional areas of a few thousand seminomadic hunters and foragers called the Semang, who may be descended from some of the first human beings to leave Africa tens of thousands of years ago. At the edges of the jungle, closer to civilization, Senoi groups mingle with aboriginal proto-Malays, who are traditional farmers.[2] These three general groupings of native peoples share many concepts and beliefs in common, including many beliefs about dreams. There also has been a great deal of intermarriage over the centuries, but their cultures are distinctive enough that the three general groupings appear to be defined at least in part by an attempt to remain different from each other and to retain a unique style of life. They are now collectively called "Orang Asli," a term in the Malay language that means "original people."[3] It seems likely that these three native cultures were pushed off their original lands as many as 4,000 years ago by people who migrated from the south of China and became what are today called Malaysians. These modern Malaysians make up almost 60% of the current population of Malaysia, with immigrant Chinese accounting for another 30%, and immigrants from Indian and Pakistan another 10%. In a country with a population of nearly 9 million in the 1980s, the aboriginal populations are truly miniscule, and they must be seen first of all as subjugated and marginalized people. Indeed, the Senoi were long called saki by the Malaysians, which means "bestial aborigine" or "slave."[4] Until the turn of the century, when the British finally put a stop to the practice, Senoi often were captured by Malaysians and sold as slaves. Moreover, many Semai and some Temiar suffered at the hands of both sides between 1948 and 1952 when the British and the majority Malay population fought a counterinsurgency war against the Malaysian Communist Party, which was based primarily in the Chinese immigrant population.[5] Since that time, the government seems to have adopted a more enlightened attitude toward the Senoi and the other indigenous groups, but their members still remain suspicious of Malay intentions and government practices. There is considerable physical isolation and cultural variation among Semai and Temiar groups. Most Senoi are unlikely to travel more than a few dozen miles from their place of birth. The fact that Semai speak forty different dialects provides one good indication of this relative isolation. Because it is so difficult to cross the rain forests and mountains, most contacts are among villages along one of the several rivers that run east and west from the highlands. There are more frequent contacts at the headwaters in the somewhat more open highlands, and these areas are seen as the purest regions of Senoi culture. Although there was some important descriptive anthropological work on the Temiar and Semai as early as the 1920s and 1930s, very little was published about Senoi culture until the 1960s. Since then several anthropologists have settled among Senoi peoples and become fluent in their difficult language, which is part of the Austro-Asiatic family that includes Cambodian and some of the languages spoken by Vietnamese hill people. Robert Dentan, as a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University, spent seven months in 1962 in a mixed settlement of Temiar and Semai. He also lived with other Semai for another seven months in 1963, and then returned for a brief stay in 1975 during a sabbatical from his professorial position at SUNY Buffalo. A British anthropologist, Geoffrey Benjamin, who trained at Cambridge University and teaches at the National University of Singapore, lived among the Temiar for eighteen months in 1964-65 and on several later occasions. Clayton Robarchek, who studied at the University of California, Riverside, and teaches at Chico State University, lived with the Semai in two different settlements for fourteen months in 1973-74 and visited them again in 1980. It is from the work of these three anthropologists that we have our primary information about Senoi culture and their dream practices when the people were still practicing their traditional ways of life. As noted briefly in Chapter 1, the Temiar and Semai live in loose-knit settlements of from fifteen to 100 people. In the most remote areas, where the dangers from wild elephants and tigers seem greatest, the settlement often consists of a single "long house," which has compartments for a dozen or more families as well as a communal area. However, in other areas there are usually two or three smaller houses, and the number varies over the space of several months as people move into the village or depart. Built on wooden poles from four to twenty feet above the ground, the houses are made out of bamboo and are covered with thatched jungle palms. Historically, the material culture of the Senoi was built around bamboo. "To describe the material culture of the Temiars," says H. D. "Pat" Noone, the first anthropologist to study the Senoi at any length in the 1930s," is to tell the uses to which bamboo may be put." Bamboo is indispensable for "houses, household utensils, vessels, tools, weapons, fences, baskets, waterpipes, rafts, musical instruments and ornaments."[6] (Noone and his work are especially important in terms of Stewart's later claims because it was Noone who took Stewart with him to visit Senoi groups in 1934 and 1938). The primary concern of the Senoi are their fields, which are "owned" by the families that clear them. It takes from two weeks to a month to clear a new field, which then will be used for two or three years in most areas before it is allowed to return to jungle. The Senoi plant a mixture of tapioca, manioc, maize, and hill rice, along with vegetables and a few fruit trees. Little time is spent in weeding the field or keeping it free of pests, almost hopeless tasks in the jungle in any case, and much of the harvest is lost to the elements and predators. Although the Senoi obviously love their fields, they also delight in the hunt. Hunting is done with poisonous darts, which are shot out of eight-foot bamboo blowpipes. Blowpipes are sources of great pride among Senoi men. They are decorated and polished with great care and affection; more time is spent in fashioning the perfect blowpipe than in building a new house. Dentan believes that blowpipes are clearly a symbol of virility for Senoi males.[7] The objects of a Senoi hunt are such relatively small animals as squirrels, monkeys, and wild pigs. Returning hunters are greeted with enthusiasm and gleeful dancing, and the meat is shared equally with everyone in the settlement. Although they subsist in good part on their crops and fruits, the Senoi say they have not really eaten unless the meal includes fish, meat, or fowl. Senoi women are largely responsible for looking after the children and taking care of household chores. They also spend time making baskets and mats, gathering fruit in the jungle, helping with the fields, and fishing with baskets. There is no rigid division of labor and no strong taboos upon women during pregnancy or menstruation, but women do most of the cooking, and men usually take the leadership roles in healing ceremonies or village councils.[8] Stewart reports that the Senoi have a peaceful way of life, and other Americans and Europeans who have spent time with them have found their culture extremely attractive. Noone married a Temiar woman; and P. D. R. Williams-Hunt, a British colonial officer who wrote a book on the aborigines of Malaysia in 1952, married a Semai woman. (A son from this marriage, who grew up in his mother's village after his father was killed in an accident, became a spokesperson for aboriginal peoples in Malaysia.) The Senoi are extremely tolerant, sexually permissive, and unaggressive. Couples move slowly and informally into permanent relationships that involve no elaborate marriage ceremonies. Children are deeply cared for, and there is no rigid system of religious beliefs and rituals. The Senoi prefer withdrawal to conflict, and they are not ashamed to admit when they are afraid. Reserved to the point of timidity with strangers, including other Senoi they do not know, they love to discuss and argue with great rhetorical flourishes in the company of friends. They are quick with puns and put-ons, and they use self-deprecation with great finesse in arguments. The Senoi have an open-minded perspective that Dentan characterizes as skeptical, eclectic, and pragmatic.[9] However, contrary to Stewart and Garfield, it is not true that they are never violent or that their physical and mental health is exceptional. In fact, interactions with the dominant culture have led the Senoi into violent activities. Some Temiar, for example, used to guide slave raiders to Semai and other Temiar settlements, knowing that the raiders would murder many of the adults.[10] During the counterinsurgency war in the highlands in the late 1940s and early 1950s, some Temiar were members of the counterinsurgency unit called Senoi Praak, or War People. Organized in good part by Richard Noone, the younger brother of Pat Noone, they played a role in the fighting, which included some killing.[11] Similarly, Dentan reports that the Semai told him of fighting in Senoi Praak:
Closer to home, the Senoi on rare occasions become violent in dealing with frustrated love or passion. Ironically, it was learned in the late fifties by Richard Noone that his brother Pat (the anthropologist who befriended Stewart, recall) probably was the victim of a violent love triangle. When Pat refused to let his Temiar wife and his young adopted Temiar "brother" sleep together, which would not be that unusual among the Senoi, the young man allegedly murdered Noone with a dart shot from a blowpipe.[13] Pat Noone himself certainly did not share Stewart's optimistic claim that the Temiar were never violent. He made the following assertion based on his several months of observations and discussion in Temiar settlements: "A husband whose wife has run away and is living permanently with another man may either revenge himself indirectly by gaining the aid of a sorcerer or directly by blowpiping or spearing the man who has supplanted him.[14] As for the Semai, Dentan also notes crimes of passion: "At least two murders have been committed between 1955 and 1977, and there is gossip about a couple of others." Nor does the relative lack of violence mean a lack of quarrels and threats. Thus, the fact that the Senoi are nonviolent does not mean they are gentle and benign. As Dentan explains:
Nor are sickness and mental illness absent from the Temiar and Semai people. The jungle is described like a Garden of Eden by both Stewart and Garfield, but it is in fact a harsh taskmaster that takes its toll on Senoi health. The climate is extremely hot and damp, malaria is rampant in most areas, and there are numerous dangerous insects, leeches, worms, large snakes, and poisonous plants. The people are extremely afraid of tigers. Until recently, most babies died in the first year, and many young children contract malaria or a serious respiratory disease. According to Noone, the Temiar do not give children a formal name until their second or third year, when they are sure the child is going to live. They say that this will make it easier for them to forget if the child dies and they will not be so sad.[16] Information such as this shows that Senoi people are very admirable, but not for the reasons claimed by Stewart and Garfield. Unlike most human populations, there were until recently more males than females in every adult age group. A physical anthropologist who studied the Senoi in the late sixties suspects that this is because so many women die in childbirth, but he cannot support this explanation with certainty because of the problems of gathering reliable data. However, the wide prevalence of hookworm infestation, which is very dangerous for pregnant women, is an indirect piece of evidence for this suspicion.[17] By this point, it probably comes as no surprise that there is also mental illness among the Senoi. Dentan reports as follows: "Robarchek and I, who collected case histories, both have the impression that in most Semai settlements there will be one to three people whom we and most of the people in the settlement think are crazy."[18] These anthropological findings are supported by the observations of a psychiatrist and a medical director in the early 1970s at the aborigine hospital in Gombak, a small town several miles from the jungle. Among twenty aboriginal psychiatric patients seen there in the course of a year, nine were Senoi, and all nine were psychotic. The patients were brought to the hospital in each case by relatives who had become concerned about their disruptive and unpredictable behavior. In keeping with the non-aggressiveness of the Senoi, the most frequent symptoms of these patients were withdrawal and running away. They were not likely to be aggressive, and only one, a manic depressive, had suicidal thoughts. Generally speaking, the schizophrenic patients were strikingly similar in their symptom patterns to those seen in Western Societies.[19] I think these findings are a damming commentary on Garfield's credibility, because she made her implausible claims about the wonderful mental health of Senoi peoples on the basis of a very brief visit to this same aboriginal hospital during the same time period covered in the 1972 paper just cited. Illness and psychiatric problems aside, it must be remembered that the Senoi way of life is not entirely carefree and of their own choosing. As people who were forced to live in the most remote jungles if they wanted any autonomy, they are in many ways subjugated, and as such they have the mixture of admiration and fear toward their more powerful neighbors that is found in many people in their situation. They adopt a cautious and passive style toward outsiders in order to make the best of a difficult situation. The Senoi are taught very early in life to fear outsiders. When strangers approach a village, parents yell "fear, fear" to their children and cover the heads of the infants they are holding. Although it was known up and down the valley that he was harmless, Dentan reports that when he approached, some mothers nonetheless did this with their infants merely as an object lesson.[20] Similarly, Robarchek notes that this practice made it very difficult for him to approach children even after he had been there for some time: "I was constantly thwarted in my attempts to establish contact with infants and small children by mothers who, even after we had lived in the village for months, would snatch them away and cry 'afraid.'"[21] Children also learn to be extremely frightened through the behavior of their parents during the violent thunderstorms that suddenly and unexpectedly occur from time to time. These storms bring with them almost continuous crashes of thunder, winds of up to forty or fifty miles an hour, and the danger of flooding even for settlements on high ground. Senoi adults become very upset during these storms, sometimes running wildly into the jungles. They scream and shout, and they yell "fear, fear" to their children. According to what Semai informants told Dentan and Robarchek, these storms are the product of "Thunder," a spiritual entity who sends storms because he is angry over some misbehavior or another by the Senoi. In order to appease him, people sometimes slash themselves with a bamboo knife or machete, collect the blood in bamboo containers filled with water, and then toss the mixture into the wind, shouting terlaid, terlaid, which means they have acted "in a way that might bring on a natural calamity."[22] In Robarchek's observation, however, the people most frequently blame the storm on the misbehavior of children. During the storm adults seek out children and ask them what wrong they have done to cause such a calamity. When the guilty child is found, a piece of his or her hair is cut off and burned as a kind of sacrifice to Thunder. "Often," reports Robarchek, "hair from all the children is burned just in case they may have unknowingly committed some 'terlaid' offense." Robarchek believes that these practices teach children to fear their emotions and seek control of them:
As children grow older, the concept of terlaid is used to restrain them in other contexts. The Senoi claim they do not instruct their children; to do so might make them sick or cause their souls to flee. Nor do they discipline children in any physical way except by carrying them back to their houses if the annoying behavior persists. However, they do yell terlaid when children become too loud or boisterous. They tell children there are various kinds of "bogeymen" who come in the night to cut off people's heads. Children also learn of ubiquitous "evil spirits" that often take the form of tigers or other dangerous creatures.[24] Perhaps it is not surprising, then, given the historical situation in which the Senoi find themselves, and the way in which children are raised, that the Senoi people are in general very restrained. After commenting on their lack of interpersonal violence or overt hostility, Robarchek notes that this is but one aspect of a general emotional reserve:
This resistance to strong emotions is also seen in the fact that the Senoi will even deny being angry. "The Semai do not say, 'Anger is bad,"' writes Dentan. "They say, 'we do not get angry,' and an obviously angry man will flatly deny his anger."[26] To say the least, then, it seems likely that Senoi psychology is far more complex and typically human than the impression conveyed by Stewart and Garfield. Moreover, Senoi share many of the characteristics developed by subjugated groups, suggesting that they are just about the opposite of the carefree and happy people portrayed by Stewart and Garfield. But is there such a thing as Senoi Dream Theory? And what do the Senoi do with their dreams? The Senoi do have a dream theory, and dreams are far more important in their culture than in any Western society. However, the Senoi theory is not psychological in the way that Stewart claimed, and it does not have the practical applications that he suggested. The account that follows is based primarily on Dentan's fieldwork in the mixed Temiar-Semai settlement in 1962 and the Semai settlement in 1963, supplemented by the writings of Robarchek and personal communications from Benjamin and Robarchek. (Specifically, I interviewed both Benjamin and Robarchek in person, and corresponded with both of them as well.) Given the variations in Senoi beliefs from river valley to river valley and the subtlety of the concepts involved, it has been far more difficult for anthropologists to understand Senoi Dream Theory than Senoi daily life. Nevertheless, some commonality has emerged in what anthropologists have learned about Senoi views on the psyche and dreams. The Semai with whom Dentan discussed the nature of the psyche seem to have five basic concepts covering the entities that make up the personality.[27] Benjamin found among the Temiar he spoke with that these may reduce to two "souls" that are linked in a complex and interactive fashion.[28] Either way, the Semai and Temiar agreed that the two most important psychic entities, one localized behind the center of the forehead, the other focused in the pupil of the eye, are able to leave the body when a person is asleep or in a trance. It is these two psychic entities that account for dreaming, as Noone first suggested. Dreams, then, are the experiences that one or the other of these "souls" has when it encounters other souls belonging to animals, trees, waterfalls, people, or supernaturals. Ruwaay, the soul at the center of the forehead, is by far the more important of the two when it comes to dreaming and is sometimes referred to as the "dream soul" by the Temiar.[29] Ruwaay appear in dreams as birds, butterflies, homunculi, or children. All ruwaay are timid, childlike, and a little irrational. The "soft" ruwaay of children are so easily frightened that the slightest thing can scare them off Sometimes wandering ruwaay are so fearful of malevolent entities that they can only be lured back by special healing ceremonies called "singing ceremonies."[30] Although this theory of dreaming may not be credible to psychologically oriented Americans, it would not seem strange to many tribal people around the world. The oldest and most widespread theory of dreaming is that it is the actual experience of the soul or self while the body is asleep.[31] Dreams can be important in many different ways in Senoi culture. They can reveal that a woman is pregnant or why a child is sick. They can tell a man whether or not his new field will be productive. Dreams are essential in contacting the supernatural world, and they play a role in healing ceremonies. It is even claimed that dreams can predict the weather. Still, most Senoi are very reluctant to make very many predictions on the basis of their dreams. They tend not to mention a predictive dream to anyone until the prediction has come true. "Thus," says Dentan, "no one ever told us about having a weather forecast dream until after the prophesied weather had occurred."[32] For all this emphasis on dreams, the Semai and Temiar with whom Dentan lived attached no importance to most dreams. Like many Western dream theorists, the ancient Greeks, and other tribal societies with a strong interest in dreams, they discriminate between "little" dreams and "big" dreams, dreams that are insignificant and dreams that are important.[33] Insignificant dreams are piypuuy. They involve no contact with friendly or evil supernatural spirits, and they are generally meaningless. Obvious wish fulfillment dreams are always piypuuy. "You dream of sleeping with a pretty girl and the next day you don't even see her," complained a Temiar dream expert in explaining this point to Dentan.[34] Typical dreams, such as falling dreams, are piypuuy. "Kids always dream about falling. They usually grow out of it," one person explained. Another person said: "It's like dreams about fighting or burning someone's house down. It never happens. Anyway, the child usually wakes up before he hits the ground."[35] When frightening sex dreams occur, one person claimed, the best thing to do is tell your spouse or lover about it so the alien dream soul will be too embarrassed to return. This places the blame for the dream on the dream soul of somebody else. Others deal with such dreams in an emotional way that might occur in any society; for example, a young woman and her new husband told Dentan the following:
As many people do the world over, the Senoi often deny that upsetting dreams reflect their own desires. The following dialogue took place in the Semai language in 1962. Merloh is a man in his forties:
But incest dreams are not automatically threatening. One Semai explained to Robarchek that the actions and experiences of the ruwaay soul do not always have to be taken seriously because it is so often childlike or irrational. Dreams are often silly or trivial precisely because the ruwaay soul is the childish and somewhat irrational part of us.[37] Nor are ordinary dreams seen as particularly positive. When Dentan asked one Semai what he dreamed about most often, he said "falling, stabbing people, swimming, fleeing, and dying." But he added that the dream about dying meant that he would live for a long time.[38] The important dreams that do occur from time to time have to be understood in the context of a fundamental dichotomy that exists for the Senoi within the realm of the nonmaterial. This is the dichotomy between "they that kill us" (called mara' by some Semai) and "those who help us" (gunik). In the words of Robarchek, mara' are "dangerous beings that may or may not have material form at any given time."[39] Included in this category are the beings that cause illness, accidents, and other misfortunes. Mara' are unpredictable and malevolent. They may attack at any time for no reason at all, although doing something wrong or offending a neighbor may increase the chances of being attacked. The only protection against a mara' is another mara' who has become friendly to a person or group. Such a mara' is called a gunik, a kind of protector or familiar, and it may be called upon in times of trouble. It is precisely at this point that dreams become significant, as Stewart recognized, but not through any conscious actions or principles of dream control. Instead, it is a matter of luck or chance that a person acquires a protector through his dreams. As Robarchek explains:
Senoi who acquire a gunik summon him to help by means of curative singing ceremonies that can last for as long as three consecutive nights. These ceremonies are necessary to summon gunik because they are shy and hard to reach. Singing, dancing, and the rhythmic striking of bamboo sticks to produce a musical accompaniment are necessary to assure the gunik that they are indeed welcome. The extremely important role of music in Senoi culture has been demonstrated in a detailed anthropological study by anthropologist Marina Roseman, published in 1991. Generally speaking, she corroborates the earlier work on Senoi culture reported so far in this chapter. She also explicitly refutes the notion that Senoi dreamers ever demand a gift in their dreams:
From an American point of view, the long and complicated singing ceremonies might seem to include a combination of religion, partying, flirting, and healing. They can be a time of great merriment even when someone is ill. Their most important element is the trance state in which the individual Semai or Temiar relates to the gunik. It is while a person is in a trance state that the gunik speaks through his human "father" and is sent into the body of the patient to search out the cause of illness. (This entry into the body of the patient is very common in aboriginal cultures around the world.) The relatively few people with gunik thus have the ability to deal with other supernatural entities. They are often called upon for help by other members of the settlement. Dentan used the word adepts to describe such people; Noone and Stewart called them medicine men or shamans. It is claimed that women can become adepts, and that they are usually better adepts than men when they do. However, female adepts are rare, supposedly because their bodies are not strong enough to withstand the rigors of trance.[42] The presence of a melody can turn a seemingly straightforward wish-fulfillment dream into an important dream. A Semai man whom Dentan knew in 1962 desired to sleep with a Temiar woman, but she spurned him. He moped around for a few days and then dreamed that her soul had given him a melody. It was not, he insisted, a wish-fulfillment dream like dreaming of a winning number in a lottery, which everyone knows merely reflects your desires. Instead, this was a gunik-type dream. "The other man has her body," he said, "but I have her dream soul."[43] Although dreams have a central role as the medium through which gunik announce themselves, no researcher has encountered the morning dream clinics described by Stewart. Since the Semai and the Temiar work at tasks they choose, they do not usually wake up at the same time. The aforementioned Williams-Hunt, who lived among the Semai and the Temiar in the 1940s, describes the morning scene:
What a wonderfully human scene this is. It is far more believable, and moving, than anything Stewart or Garfield ever wrote in their fairy tale accounts. Moreover, it is supported by another observer from that time period, John D. Leary, who was active on the British side in the counterinsurgency war. In 1995 he used government documents and interviews to write a detailed book on the role of the Orang Asli in that war. As one small part of that book, he commented on a key aspect of Stewart's claims: "On a number of occasions when I had cause to stay overnight in Senoi huts, either on ambush, for the tribal groups' protection, or just for shelter, I did not see any of the after-breakfast gathering of parents and children to discuss their previous night's dreams; most Orang Asli did not seem to have any kind of formal meal in the morning."[45] Perhaps even more important than the lack of breakfast dream discussions, Dentan found that adults deny that they ever instruct children about dreaming. According to the Senoi, asserting authority makes children sick. Even trying to persuade a child to do something it does not want to do risks scaring its ruwaay soul, perhaps killing the child in the process. If there is one thing that seems certain to Dentan, Benjamin, and Robarchek, it is that there is no deliberate attempt to teach children principles of dream control.[46]. Nor did the drama therapist and anthropologist Sue Jennings find any sign of Senoi use of dreams when she and her three young children spent four months in the highlands while doing fieldwork on healing ceremonies in the 1970s:
When Dentan explained some of the principles of Stewart's theory to a young Semai man in 1962, he had the following reaction, as recorded in Dentan's field notes. Why something like this does not sink Senoi Dream Theory all by itself is a mystery to me:
The Semai and Temiar do hold village councils from time to time in which everyone can participate regardless of age or gender. Older men tend to dominate the proceedings, however, and the discussions involve serious disputes, not dreams. The councils can go on for many hours or even several days until everyone is satisfied. Most people find them exhausting and unpleasant, not the occasions of joy and cooperation fantasized by Stewart. For this reason, only a serious threat to the whole settlement or a general quarrel can induce everyone to participate. Councils begin with a monologue by one of the village elders, who recounts the necessity of maintaining the group's unity in spite of the present disagreement. "He emphasizes how each of the villagers depends on the others; how all must help and care for one another; how, if one is without food, the others must feed him; and so on," writes Robarchek. "Numerous instances of such assistance in the past are recounted in detail."[49] After several more speeches in the same vein, one of the disputants presents his or her case to the group. There is great emphasis on the style with which the argument is presented, but little concern with whether or not one part of the argument contradicts another. Robarchek stresses that the councils do not involve a discussion or trial in our sense of the word. Instead, there is a repetition of the same stories by the disputants and their respective kinsmen until all emotion has been dissipated. The problem is not so much solved as it is talked to death:
Finally, one of the older male leaders will express the consensus that slowly and quietly has emerged among the listeners. He will lecture one or both of the principals about their guilt in the matter, and he may assess a small fine. But half of the fine, if not all of it, will be returned to the guilty party, once again revealing the overwhelming importance of group solidarity. Not all disputes are settled to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. In those cases, one of the people involved is likely to move to another settlement. The sparsely populated jungle terrain and the loose Senoi social structure make it very easy for those who have conflicts to avoid each other for years on end. Looked at from this vantage point, brief visits to Senoi settlements would no doubt give the impression of group harmony. But brief visits miss the reality that the worst conflicts -- frequently involving sexual jealousy -- are often settled because someone, or a whole family, leaves the settlement. This, too, sounds all too human, and the opposite of what Stewart and Garfield try to portray to give stature to their own beliefs about the importance of dreams. This account of Senoi dream practice does not include any of the unique elements reported either by Stewart or by Garfield. There is no serious discussion of dreams at breakfast or at village councils, no instruction in how to control dreams, and no evidence in the singing ceremonies that the Senoi believe dreams can be controlled. In fact, these people don't even have breakfast together, which is an excellent indication of how far Stewart and Garfield have strayed from Senoi reality. Although these conclusions are based on work in several different settlements, I realized when I wrote my book in 1985 that there are two objections that might be raised about them, and sure enough, they were raised by Taylor and other dreamworkers, even though such objections are anticipated and directly dealt with in the book. As shown in Taylor's published comments, he claims that I did not consider these points, but as I wrote in 1985:
But, in fact, there are no "secret" Temiar hideouts. All Temiar settlements are known because the jungles were thoroughly surveyed and mapped by the government in the 1940s and 1950s as part of its battle against the communists. Moreover, Benjamin has visited almost all of the most remote Temiar groups as part of his ongoing studies of Temiar religion, and he has found no evidence of a different use of dreams there.[52] The possibility that Senoi culture was disrupted by the "Emergency" of the fifties, as the counterinsurgency was called, has greater plausibility. At first, many of the Senoi were rounded up into a few guarded camps -- called "stockades" by Taylor, who wrongly says all this happened during World War II. This drastic action was taken in an attempt to prevent the communists from receiving any help with food or information. This was a two-year internment, which led to such a high death rate among the Senoi that they were allowed to return to the jungle, with some being recruited into counterinsurgency groups as well. This experience is bitterly remembered by many Senoi, and it is still regarded by some of them as the first step in a plan to deprive them of their land.[53] Leary's aforementioned detailed account of the Orang Asli participation in this war shows that the people were indeed mistreated, and that at least many hundreds died from various kinds of illnesses. In addition, he notes there was a large infusion of troops and military equipment. He remarks that many Orang Asli probably rode in a helicopter before they ever even saw a car or a train. However, he also concludes that their cultural was relatively untouched, which is the point that Taylor and the dreamwork movement continue to reject: "The Orang Asli were conscious of and experienced the power of modern technology while still adhering to their traditional ways."[54] The work of several anthropologists supports Leary's first-hand observations: there is no evidence that the war had any lasting effect on Senoi beliefs or culture, or that it erased all memory of the previous use of techniques of dream control. This is demonstrated, first, in the observations of Iskander Carey, the anthropologist who knew the Temiar best in the middle and late fifties. In the introduction to his 1961 book on Temiar grammar, he wrote about the minimal effects of the emergency on the Temiar way of life:
Benjamin's first paper on the Temiar, published in 1966, similarly comments on how little the outside world had impinged on the people at that time. He notes that many of them had memories of the "old days" before either World War II or the emergency and that they did not feel things had changed.[56] This continuity is also revealed in some of Benjamin's genealogical work. He notes that part of his fieldwork was done in Ressing, one of the villages reported on by Pat Noone in his only published paper in 1936. As part of his kinship work there, Benjamin succeeded in "tracing what happened to every person on Noone's genealogy, so demonstrating its continuity with my own data."[57] Such a detailed accounting thirty years later would hardly be possible if there had been serious disruptions of the traditional social structure or if the Temiar had forgotten their past. Benjamin's 1966 paper should have stopped Taylor and Garfield cold, but it didn't. Nor, contrary to Taylor, were there any government officials present to stand guard and interpret for Benjamin. Benjamin was alone, and knows the language well. The continuity between the thirties and sixties is also revealed in the fact that both Dentan and Benjamin did fieldwork in exactly the same mixed Temiar-Semai settlement where Noone and Stewart did part of their work twenty-five years earlier. Things couldn't be much more direct and continuous than that. Then, too, the man who "adopted" Dentan at his second field site in 1963 had been Noone's field assistant among the Temiar. Benjamin also talked with informants who had worked for or knew Noone in the thirties.[58] How little had changed on the cultural level between the early thirties and mid-1970s can be demonstrated very concretely by comparing Pat Noone's brief section on "The Spirit Element in Temiar Life" in his 1936 monograph with the description of Semai spirit and healing beliefs by Robarchek in his 1979 paper, "Learning to Fear," which is summarized earlier in this chapter in the discussion of Senoi beliefs about the spirit world. Noone begins: "To the Temiar the whole of nature is impregnated by spiritual forces, many of them personified in the form of evil spirits." He then describes the "medicine man" (hala) who leads the singing ceremonies as an "intermediary between man and the world of spirits." This "medicine man" is aided in his "combat" with "the evil spirits of which indignant nature is full" by being in the "possession" of his "tiger-familiar (gunik)." Noone then explains that the medicine man attains a state of "dissociation" through his dancing, in which he "forgets his own self" and "is believed to be possessed by his gunik or "familiar.'" Noone concludes: "It is this gunik which makes the hala "powerful to heal sickness."[59] Unfortunately, Noone's full account of Temiar spiritual life was never written, but the correspondence between what little he wrote about healing ceremonies and what has been reported by Robarchek (and Dentan and Benjamin) is remarkable across time and settlements. If beliefs about "spirit elements" are so continuous, how can Taylor and Garfield explain the alleged disappearance of dream groups and dream control? Why would dream-sharing groups and dream-control techniques disappear, but not the spirits so central to dreams? Nor did the long visit with the Senoi in 1982-83 by Faraday and her husband, John Wren-Lewis, lead to any evidence of cultural change or loss of older dream practices. They reported that "it would be hard to imagine a people more dedicated to preserving their traditions intact despite all the changes going on around them," and they note that "our welcome would have been short-lived had we not scrupulously observed their time-hallowed rituals and taboos." They talked to elders who recalled the thirties, including one who actually had told his dreams to Noone and to Stewart. Faraday and Wren-Lewis conclude:
Given this devastating conclusion by Faraday and Wren-Lewis, perhaps it is no surprise that Faraday and her work would disappear from the discourse of the American dreamwork movement, while Garfield would continue to be a respected source of information for many dreamworkers. For readers who base their judgment on the overall weight of the available anthropological evidence, however, there seems to be no way to avoid a rather mundane conclusion: Senoi people do not have an unusual theory or practice of dreams. What they believe and do would come as no great surprise to one of the founders of anthropology, Edward Tylor, who wrote that dreams are an important basis for a belief in a spirit world and a separable soul. Nor is Senoi Dream Theory very different from the tribal and peasant beliefs brought together by several different anthropologists. Further, it would be difficult to count the number of ethnographic field reports that have commented on the use of dreams by shamans in healing ceremonies all over the world.[61] Since, against all this systematic evidence over decades from a number of different trained observers that there is great continuity in Senoi culture and no hint of unique dream practices, Taylor relies primarily on an impassioned memoir. This memoir was published in 1972 by Richard Noone, brother of Stewart's friend Pat, in an attempt to explain his brother's death in the Malaysian highlands in the early 1940's. The alleged knowledge of one dream by a Senoi arrested during the counterinsurgency in the 1950s is said by Taylor to be "significant evidence" of communal dream sharing. But clearly, the weight of the evidence is so overwhelming against any unique Senoi Dream Theory that an anecdote like this, recalled many years after the event by a frightened man hoping to escape imprisonment, has no standing whatsoever. Taylor is in fact grasping at straws instead of adopting the scientific attitude that is necessary here. Taylor also adopts the technique of creating a straw man when he says Stewart's critics say he "faked his research," which is not true. However, as Chapter 3 shows, there is much evidence that Stewart was a romantic story teller with little knowledge of Senoi peoples. He confused his casual observations of a variety of small traditional societies with his own musings and theorizing. As the evidence in Chapter 3 also shows, Stewart was a guru type, and a blowhard, not a hoaxer. However, there's good evidence that Carlos Castañeda, mentioned by Taylor in the context of denying fakery by Stewart, did "fake" his research. He consciously perpetrated a fraud, cleverly recycling ideas and anecdotes from other people's writing on religion, spiritualism, mysticism, and anthropology. Amazingly, Taylor says he believes Castaneda for the same reason he believes Stewart, because some of Castaneda's ideas worked for Taylor. But the correctness or usefulness of the ideas is a separate topic, which is discussed based on research evidence in Chapter 5. For now, the simple point is that such evidence tells us nothing about whether the ideas were used by Senoi. Although the anthropological evidence should end the matter as far as the accuracy of Stewart's claims about Senoi dream practices, there is another way to approach the problem. Kilton Stewart life and writings can be studied to see if he is credible as a scientific observer. Chapter 3: The Life and Mind of Kilton StewartThe previous chapter was based on the similar experiences and observations recorded by several anthropologists at different field sites. Their findings are at variance with most of the claims about dreams by Kilton Stewart, and differences of time and location do not seem to resolve the discrepancies. It becomes useful, therefore, to turn to a consideration of Stewart's life and work to see if that provides any insight into the validity of his claims about Senoi Dream Theory. Stewart was born in 1902 in Provo, Utah, where his father was the city traffic engineer. The second of six children, four boys and two girls, he graduated from high school in Provo in 1920. He spent his freshman year at Brigham Young University in 1921-22, then went to the University of Utah from 1924 to 1928 to earn his bachelor's degree. Stewart returned to the University of Utah in 1930-31 for a master's degree in psychology, and he received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1948. He spent most of his time between 1920 and 1940 traveling around the world as what was then called a vagabond, or beachcomber. For most of the years between 1940 and 1965, he practiced psychotherapy in New York City, where he died of cancer at the age of sixty-two. One of the people who knew Stewart best in the 1930s was a young British woman, Claudia Parsons, who met him in Southeast Asia in 1937-38 when she was halfway through a trip around the world. Parsons kept a diary of her journey, which became the basis for a charming travelogue, Vagabondage, published in 1941. She recorded her first impressions of Stewart when she spotted him at breakfast just before an early morning bus ride in what is now Cambodia in November 1937. She compared him with someone named Christian she had met earlier in her travels:
The beachcomber hero who looked like John the Baptist was indeed striking in appearance: handsome good looks, a strong build, and powerful shoulders, the latter the products of work on his father's ranch and his love of swimming. But he was even more impressive as a conversationalist, and as he expounded "on religion, youthful repressions, personality conflicts, and finally on dreams being the expression of one's ego," Parsons learned that he considered himself a psychoanalyst. "It was early impressed on me," she continues, "that he was a follower not of Freud but of Otto Rank, having himself been psycho-analyzed by one of Rank's disciples in Paris." Parsons also heard about his interest in tribal peoples:
Following the bus ride, Parsons and Stewart spent two busy and romantic days in Bangkok, where they became lovers. Stewart also roamed the back streets looking for ivories, jade, Oriental knives, and small antiques. Then their ways parted because Stewart was going to visit Senoi territory in what was then called Malaya. He asked Parsons to join him as the secretary-typist for the expedition. When she reluctantly refused his kind offer, Stewart professed a broken heart. (However, note well, she later changed her mind about not joining the expedition, which means there is a detailed record of Stewart's main visit with the Senoi that will be presented later in this chapter.) For now, the point is that by the time Stewart professed a broken heart Parsons already had a good understanding of her new friend:
After an exchange of letters and telegrams, however, Parsons met up with Stewart and one of his friends about two months later in Singapore. It was during the stay in Singapore that Parsons made another of those discoveries about Stewart that always left her speechless:
Shortly thereafter, Stewart and Parsons decided to take an automobile trip from Calcutta to London. Over the next three months she learned that he possessed even more unusual traits than she had imagined. For example, he was generous to a fault, giving away money right and left:
More than money, Stewart wanted to give everyone a ride even though he and Parsons had only a two-seat Studebaker with a rumble seat in the back:
Parsons's warm portrait of Stewart as a zestful charmer and open-handed traveler is filled out and supported by an autobiographical account that he dictated to another one of his lovers, a young Australian named Nancy Grasby, just a year before he met Parsons. Entitled "Journey of a Psychologist," this unpublished manuscript recounts his adventures between 1932 and 1934. It begins with his musings after he was fired from his job at a Utah state school for mentally retarded children. Perhaps he lost his job because he kept alcohol in his room, he wrote, which was against the rules. Or maybe it was because he had attempted an unauthorized experiment in curing bedwetting with a mild electroshock device. Or maybe it was both. Stewart could not decide. The manuscript tells how he then hopped a freight train from Salt Lake to Sacramento and sold Fuller brushes in the wealthy sections of Oakland for a few months while he hung around Berkeley. Eventually he decided to move on to Honolulu, but he had to travel as a stowaway because the seaman's papers he had obtained on one of his earlier journeys around the world were not good enough to get him a legitimate ride across the ocean. The manuscript continues with his many adventures in Hawaii, reports on the roundabout way he finally obtained a job as a mental tester for the psychologist S. D. Porteus, and ends with a long account of the deliriums and fantasies caused by a bad case of what he calls typhus fever, contracted during his first trip into the jungles of Malaya. The self-portrait of an adventurer who lived by his wits that is provided in the early parts of this youthful memoir is not a fictional product of Stewart's fertile imagination. It is supported by the recollections of two people who knew him well. The first, Dorothy Nyswander, a retired psychology professor when I interviewed her, first met Stewart when he was an undergraduate at the University of Utah. The second, his brother, Omer, a retired anthropologist from the University of Colorado when I interviewed him, was the author of several books and dozens of articles on the Indians of Utah and the Southwest. Omer, who admired Kilton greatly as a person, recalled that his older brother first began taking unauthorized train rides as a teenager. By the time Kilton was in his late twenties, according to Omer, he had been around the world two or three times as a merchant seaman.[6] The idea that Stewart was able to stowaway on a ship to Honolulu may seem unlikely, but it is corroborated by Nyswander. In the early thirties she was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stewart stayed with her when he arrived on the West Coast. Nyswander recalls being with him on the docks of San Francisco while he walked up and down, deciding which ship would be most likely to treat him well and give him a job in the kitchen once he was discovered.[7] If any reader still doubts that Stewart was a vagabond, in spite of the independent accounts by Claudia Parsons and his brother Omer, the separate account by Nyswander should put their minds at rest. According to his own account, Stewart soon tired of his job in Honolulu. He decided he wanted to do mental testing among tribal groups in the Pacific. It was thus that he had come to visit the Ainu of Japan, the headhunters of Formosa, the Negritos of the Philippines, and several other primitive groups. The manuscript, however, is not primarily about his findings with these groups. It is also full of adventure, telling of near drownings, battles with illness, numerous love affairs with exotic women, and encounters with such interesting characters as an aging prospector in the mountains of the Philippines and an American-turned-Buddhist priest in Bangkok. The data that he collected from his mental testing were turned over to Porteus in Honolulu and were later used as part of a chapter in Porteus's Primitive Intelligence and Environment (1937).[8] Stewart dictated his 1936 manuscript because he did not like to write, and he was also an extremely poor speller. He discusses these matters with his usual flair in the autobiography:
Once in Manila, he repaired to a park early one morning to get the articles ready to show a magazine publisher there:
Actually, the articles never appeared, and that was probably the last time that Stewart laid pen to paper. Henceforth he would dictate all of his ideas to paramours who believed in him and his creative abilities, relying on them to be his editors and proofreaders. Although Stewart was a poor writer, he had unusual talents as a speaker and storyteller, as attested to by Parsons and others. He seemed to be able to convince anyone of anything. People were enthralled by the stories he could tell from his many travels even though they didn't always believe him. "Kilton was a great story-teller and I often had the impression he would not worry about the exactness of details if it might interfere with his narrative," his brother Omer wrote to me."[11] "I never knew what to believe, but he was a wonderful friend and companion," Dorothy Nyswander said to me. Then she asked, "Tell me, did he really get a Ph.D. in England?"[12] One of his friends from the fifties, John Wires, a young man at the time, asked me exactly the same question after telling me how he heard Stewart speak to a liberal group at the Community Church in New York and became interested in his theories.[13] Stewart's penchant for dramatic stories is illustrated by his account to a reporter in 1964 of how he came to be interested in dreams. Beginning with the fact that his father had been a government surveyor, Stewart said that as a boy he often went along with his father when he surveyed on Indian reservations. There he met a shaman who helped him conquer a terrifying dream:
According to Omer, who was very close to Kilton and enjoyed recounting his exploits, this account could not possibly be true. It is a complete fabrication. Their father left government surveying before Kilton was born to work for the city of Provo, and the Indians of Utah were on two reservations that were far from where the Stewart children grew up. It is Omer's strong recollection that Kilton did not spend any time with Indians until he and Omer became friends with the anthropologist Julian H. Steward at the University of Utah and helped him with his archeological work on one of the Utah reservations in the summer of 1930 or 1931. When I expressed skepticism and asked Omer how he had become interested in Indians and anthropology, he replied that it was through an introductory class in anthropology during his freshman year at the University of Utah.[15] In addition to his rhetorical talents, Stewart also was an excellent hypnotist. He had learned this skill on his own in the early thirties, and he had practiced it all over the world, even for minor sultans in Asia and in the context of tribal dances and healing ceremonies. He also used it to collect hypnotic dreams for some of his studies. One of the several people able to attest to Stewart's abilities as a hypnotist is Sir Edmund R. Leach, one of the most distinguished anthropologist in the English-speaking world in the second half of the 20th century. Leach had finished a three-year contract as a commercial assistant for a British firm when he met Stewart at a party at the British embassy in Peking in 1936. It was not too long before Stewart had convinced Leach to join him and Nancy Grasby on a short expedition to study the Yami on Botel Tobago, a small, windswept island forty miles off the coast of Formosa. It was there that Leach saw Stewart put natives into a trance as part of his dream research:
According to the 1936 autobiographical manuscript, Stewart's first visit to Senoi country was unplanned and unexpected. He had arrived in Singapore in early 1934 after completing his testing for Porteus, and he was down to his last few dollars. He was planning on a recreational week in an exciting city before catching a steamer to Hawaii:
Noone was not at home when Stewart arrived, but his Malay servant invited Stewart to come in and wait for his return. The result was an enjoyable week of hot baths and good meals before Noone finally appeared. According to Stewart, he and Noone hit it off immediately, a claim that is easily believed because other accounts report that Noone was almost as outgoing and open-handed as Stewart. As for Noone, he took one look at Stewart and named him "Torso":
According to Stewart, the expedition started with an elephant caravan and lasted about two or three months. Noone's published paper reveals a very different picture, however. He calls it one of several demographic expeditions concerned with the distribution of settlements. It had a field staff of only two men. Other men were recruited from the various settlements along the way to serve as bearers. Noone explains that he already had spent two different three-month periods learning the Temiar language and studying Temiar culture at other settlements. He describes the expedition with Stewart:
Two strong conclusions emerge from this description and other information in Noone's monograph. First, contrary to Stewart's usual exaggerations, it is not likely that they had an elephant caravan, at least beyond the first day or so. More important, it is very likely that this expedition lasted in the neighborhood of sixteen days. This number is important to keep in mind in order to see how it -- and a subsequent visit of seven weeks in 1938 -- are gradually inflated later on by Stewart and Garfield. Whatever the length of the trip, Stewart reports that he and Noone participated in several of the song ceremonies that were put on for their benefit, sometimes joining in the dancing or inducing the much-coveted trance states through hypnosis. Indeed, Stewart drew some conclusions about the nature of Temiar religion on the basis of his hypnotic work:
Actually, this hypothesis about the nature of religion was not a new one for Stewart. He put forth the same view in his master's thesis on religion, which is entitled "Fear as Prime Factor in the Origin of Religion." Working within a Pavlovian framework, Stewart argued that religion is based on a conditioned fear of the unknown and is then passed on through imitation. The argument is illustrated with material from a wide variety of anthropological studies. It was done under the direction of a behavioristic psychologist, M. C. Barlow. Most importantly for my purposes here, there is only one brief mention of dreams in Stewart's 1936 account of his first visit to Senoi country. It does not suggest any sustained focus on dreaming and dreams. It appears in the context of the general program of his investigations with Noone:
Stewart left Malaya in the spring of 1934, and he did not return for three and a half years. In between, he made two different trips to Peking, spent several weeks on the aforementioned expedition to Botel Tobago, and returned to the Philippines for the third or fourth time to collect dreams in a Negrito group. Stewart also claims to have undergone a Rankian psychoanalysis in Paris in the summer of 1935, but the particulars of his training and analysis are still lost to history despite my efforts to uncover them. Otto Rank, one of Freud's earliest and most creative followers, had broken with Freud in 1926 and set up his own school of psychoanalysis. His theory deviated widely from Freud's, putting great emphasis on the traumatic effects of the birth experience and the importance of a creative will or life spirit. He also came to believe that the lengthy treatments that had become part of psychoanalytic orthodoxy were not really necessary. His own brand of therapy became a matter of a few weeks or months, with considerable time spent in discussion of spiritual growth and little or none on childhood fears and fantasies.[22] Rank moved to Paris in 1926 to take up private practice In 1934 he and his small handful of followers founded a summer institute there called the Psychological Center. The six-week session included lectures by social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists from Paris, New York, and Philadelphia. Rank gave several of the lectures. Plans were made to hold the institute again the next summer, but they were canceled because Rank moved to New York in the fall of 1934. Rank was in Paris in the spring of 1935 for only a few weeks and then returned to New York.[23] Nonetheless, Stewart reports in a brief biographical statement written for a family history in 1944 that he was "psychoanalyzed at the Rankian Psychoanalytic [sic] Center" in Paris in 1935 and then worked at a Psychopathic Hospital in that city. What he may have done was to work with the psychologist Pearce Bailey, who had received his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in 1933 and helped Rank run the Psychological Center in 1934. Bailey stayed in Paris through 1936 before returning to the United States to earn a medical degree and become a neurologist. According to an expert on Rank and his followers that I interviewed, Bailey was the only person in Paris at the time who could have worked with Stewart.[24] But whatever Stewart's exact involvement with Rank or any of his followers, the experience clearly meant a great deal to him. Although nothing is known about the nature of Stewart's work in Paris, some things can be inferred about its length and intensity from his travel schedule and a letter to his brother. He left New York for Paris in May or June of 1935, arriving in Paris in late June or early July. In the fall he left Paris for a railroad trip to Peking via Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, arriving in Peking in December 1936 or January 1937.[25] In other words, his psychoanalytic training, if he had any whatsoever, may have been brief even by Rankian standards. He gives a glimpse of it in a letter to Omer from Peking dated January 22, 1936, with his usual emphasis on goofing off and making out :
The letter also makes clear that Stewart was highly impressed with Rank's theories and was using them in his work in Peking:
Armed with his newly acquired identity as a psychoanalyst, Stewart made his second visit to Senoi country early in 1938. This time the trip was planned in advance, and it again included Noone, but it nonetheless had some elements of Stewart's unique style. Moreover, we know a great deal about this visit thanks to the very lucky fact that Claudia Parsons agreed at the last minute to go along as his typist if Stewart would drive to London with her afterward. She begins her report by providing us with a picture of the general setting:
Even in a setting relatively close to civilization, however, Parsons anticipated a fair amount of hardship, but instead she was in for yet another surprise:
The study moved along in an uneventful fashion. Noone and Stewart would go down to the same mixed Temiar-Semai settlement later studied by Dentan and Benjamin, and then return to dictate to Parsons:
It was the information collected on this second visit to the jungle, which ended on March 24, 1938, that provided most of the systematic Senoi data that Stewart eventually used in his dissertation. But let us make no mistake. The Senoi dreams were collected by Noone, who understood the native language. Stewart only administered his various mental tests. Once in London, Stewart's thoughts turned to the possibility of earning a Ph.D. in anthropology. He had mentioned the idea in one or two letters to his family and to Omer in conversations, but this was the first time he had decided to do anything about it. Since he already had plenty of data, it was primarily a matter of organizing it into a dissertation. He initially planned to register at Cambridge University in the fall of 1938, but then decided on the London School of Economics instead.[29] Noone also was in England in late 1938 and early 1939, on a leave from his job with the Department of Aborigines in Malaya. Stewart wrote to his family in Utah that the two of them planned to write up their findings together for publication as well as work on individual dissertations. Noone had first registered as a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge in 1935. At that time he stated that his dissertation would concern "The Social Psychology of the Temiar Senoi, a jungle Tribe of Malaya." However, in 1938 he changed his topic to the more specific subject of dreams, which is further evidence that the dream data collected by him was meant for his own dissertation. He registered his new title as "Dream Experience and Spirit Guides in the Religion of the Temiar Senoi of Malaya."[30] Noone gave a talk based on his Senoi dream data to the Royal Anthropological Institute in March 1939. It was entitled "Chinchem: A Study of the Role of Dream-Experience in Culture-Contact Amongst the Temiar Senoi of Malaya." It concerned the introduction of a new ceremonial dance called "Chinchem." The dance had been obtained from a dream revelation by a leading adept or shaman. Although no copy of the talk exists, it is summarized in the Royal Anthropological Institute's journal, Man (April 1939). According to the summary, Noone argued that the new ceremonial dance arose from the difficulties this particular Temiar group was experiencing because of its contacts with Malay culture. His main claim was that the new values introduced through the dream and the dance had "mobilized the morale of this group towards more effective adjustment in the contact situation."[31] Noone also noted that there were certain similarities between Chinchem and the ghost dance revivals among Indians in the United States in the late nineteenth century, and the parallels are indeed striking. As with his 1936 paper, Noone's findings and conclusions in this talk are ones that are consistent with what other anthropologists have observed. Thirty years later, for example, Weston LaBarre called his book on the origins of religion The Ghost Dance (1970). Based on his analysis of religions around the world, including the new religions that arise in the crisis situations that primitive groups face when they confront Western colonialists, LaBarre concluded that "every religion begins in some dramatic individual revelation or dream, culturally diffused to others, and gradually edited into the necessarily vague and contradictory entity appropriate to a whole group."[32] There is therefore good reason to suspect that Noone was a solidly grounded and sensible anthropologist. Stewart also gave a lecture at the institute during his stay in London. It was entitled "A Psychological Analysis of the Negritos of Luzon, Philippine Islands." According to the four paragraph summary in Man (January 1939), it was based on work done in two periods of three months each in the summers of 1933 and 1937. Using data from various mental tests as well as free associations under hypnosis, word associations, and dreams, Stewart concluded that "a rough analysis of the test results fails to support the theory of racial differences, as there were individuals in all three groups [of Negritos] who compared favourably with the higher test scores of Europeans." Stewart put his findings into the context of his theoretical interest in Otto Rank. The summary concluded:
The talk is notable for two reasons. First, it suggests that Stewart was going to rely primarily on mental test data, not dreams, for his dissertation. Second, it is notable that Stewart did not stress differences between groups, unlike many observers in that era. In fact, Stewart was a strong egalitarian and a critic of capitalism as well. His letter to Omer from Peking in January 1936, following his trip across the Soviet Union, included the following paragraph on his impressions of that country:
In a paper he published a year later in Philippine Magazine on "The Yami of Botel Tobago," Stewart used his findings on the Yami to make a sustained critique of racism and inequality. After noting that casual observers might think these people are "stupid savages" because their level of material development is so primitive, he attacks that kind of argument on the basis of his test results:
Stewart contrasts the equality of the Yami social order with the extremes of wealth and power in modern capitalist societies:
In short, there are strong indications that the itinerate mental tester and future dream theorist also was a passionate social critic. It was an element of his character that gave an immediacy and moral force to his later writings on dreams, which are infused with calls for social betterment. Despite their respective talks to the Royal Anthropological Institute, there are no indications that anything materialized in the way of writing for either Noone or Stewart at this time. Noone returned to Malaya soon thereafter and was caught up in the war against the Japanese. It was during this period, while working in the jungles against the Japanese, that he probably was killed by his young Senoi "brother" in a love triangle. Since his brother Richard Noone was never able to find Pat's data and manuscripts after World War II, despite a sustained effort, it is likely that they all were destroyed at some point by Japanese soldiers, or by the humidity and torrential rains. It is therefore not possible that Pat Noone wrote the liner notes for a record album on Temiar music that Taylor thinks are evidence for his case of a "reasonable doubt." What else Noone had learned about the Senoi use of dreams or how he would have utilized the dreams he had collected in early 1938 may never be known with certainty. The claims about his views put forth in the book on his life by his brother Richard are romantic accounts of doubtful accuracy. They are based in good part on retrospective memory, conversations with Stewart, and Stewart's own articles. Letters that Pat Noone wrote to his parents in the early thirties demonstrate interest in the Senoi emphasis on dreams, but there is no indication in his 1936 monograph or his talk to the Royal Anthropological Institute, contrary to Taylor's attempt to yoke him with Stewart intellectually, that he shared Stewart's later claims about Senoi dream sharing and dream control.[37] Following Noone's departure for Malaysia in 1939, Stewart wanted to stay in London, but his plans were disrupted by the war in a totally unexpected way. He happened to be visiting friends in Paris in September 1939 when the war broke out. Because he was an American citizen, he was immediately shipped directly back to the United States from France. He arrived in New York with only the few belongings he had taken with him to France. Fortunately, Parsons retrieved his trunks of memorabilia and data from the apartment that one of her friends had loaned to Stewart.[38] The data included carbon copies of the dreams that Parsons had typed up for Noone back in the jungle in early 1938. There things stood as far as the dissertation and Senoi Dream Theory were concerned until after the war. Once relocated to the United States, Stewart settled in New York City in the early 1940s to practice a mixture of Rankian psychoanalysis and his own dream-based therapy. Shortly after he set up practice, he felt the need to have a record of the dreams of a wealthy and prominent patient. He advertised for a stenotypist who could take dictation on the kind of machines that are used today only in law courts. The person he hired, Clara Marcus, remained with him from that time on as an assistant, editor, and lover, and then as his wife in the last five or six years of his life. Dorothy Nyswander, Margaret Nyswander Manson, and Claudia Parsons all expressed the firm belief that Stewart's involvement with Marcus was a significant turning point in his work. As a highly organized and business-oriented person, she brought some degree of discipline to his life and handled the administrative and financial details of his group practice. In addition to taking down what was said in many of the therapy sessions, she also served as a typist and editor on the manuscripts he dictated to her. As Parsons put it in a letter to me dated July 30, 1983: "She made herself indispensable to him both as housewife and amanuensis and indeed it needed someone with her purpose and drive to tidy up his life." Several of the people I interviewed described her as an aggressive and confrontational person who frightened or annoyed many of the people who met her. As my own interview with her made clear, she had not changed very much by the early 1980s. No sooner was Stewart settled into his private practice in New York than his plans were once again changed by the war. In July 1942, at the age of forty, he was drafted into the army. He was assigned to a special intelligence unit because Omer, serving as a lieutenant in an intelligence training unit, suggested to his superiors that Stewart might make a good interrogator because of his abilities as a hypnotist. But things did not work out for Stewart as a soldier. The army had no use for his skills, and his undisciplined character led to tensions for him. He received a discharge in March 1943 and returned to private practice in New York until the war ended.[39] But the interlude in the army turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it qualified Stewart for the GI bill and thus enabled him to move back to London as a student in 1946. After retrieving his data from Parsons, he registered once again for a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. Since the London School at that time did not require any course work for the doctorate, he focused his attention on his dissertation. This lack of course work is worth underscoring because it shows that Stewart was completely self-taught to the degree that he knew anything about the anthropological literature. Stewart and Marcus spent two years in London, with Stewart dictating what Marcus told me were usually "page-long sentences," which she edited and rewrote. His thesis advisers were two prominent anthropologists of the day, Raymond Firth and S. F. Nadel. According to Marcus, these advisers made Stewart rewrite the dissertation several times, much to her great annoyance.[40] For Firth's part, he was reluctant to put anything on paper for me about his recollections of that time period. Thus, it is not known if he shared the extreme doubt about Stewart's academic abilities that were frankly expressed to me in letters in the early 1980s by Sir Edmund Leach, but which I did not mention in my book because Leach and other principals, including Clara Marcus, were still alive at the time. The final result of Stewart's stay in London was a 545-page dissertation entitled "Magico-Religious Beliefs and Practices in Primitive Society-A Sociological Interpretation of Their Therapeutic Aspects." Its primary theoretical focus is on the way in which the Senoi use of dreams and healing ceremonies is superior to the practices of Yami and Negritos, thereby allowing the Senoi a more open and creative psychological development. It also includes dozens of pages of purely descriptive material on the everyday lives of Yami and Negritos. More important for our purposes here, there are eighty-four pages of reported dreams in its appendices. There are 312 dream reports from Senoi, 192 from Negritos, and 316 from Yami. The descriptive material on the Senoi is similar to what has been reported by Pat Noone and later observers. There is also the kind of material on dream teaching and dream councils that has not been corroborated by anthropologists who learned the language and spent considerable time living among the people. Still, the dissertation usually does not make the grandiose claims that are contained in the later articles. The different parts of the psyche according to the Senoi are discussed in sober fashion, and the village councils are characterized as "interminable," just as later observers attested.[41] To the degree that there is any discussion of dream control, the emphasis is on the dreams of the shamans, not the people in general. It is only shaman dreams that are claimed to demonstrate the decline in fear and attack themes: "We have shown, however, that in the dreams of the Senoi shaman, the dream response to this category of changes [that is, fear and attack dreams] also reverses the early childhood patterns, causing the dream image of the thing which has been used, disturbed, or destroyed to appear as a spirit guide and make a creative contribution."[42] The dissertation has not been widely read. This is because his widow refused to allow it to be circulated. She asked me at the outset of our interview if I had ever seen it, and then told me that she would sue people who tried to obtain it. Having been forewarned, I told her I didn't have a copy, but I soon received a bootlegged copy from another dream researcher. Given these threats and constraints, it was not possible for most researchers to make a comparison of Stewart's dissertation and subsequent articles. Although the dissertation contains most of the basic ideas that are presented in the published articles, it is most interesting today for what it does not say and does not demonstrate. First of all, it makes no mention of the Senoi encouraging their children to have pleasurable dreams. Indeed, the only sustained discussion of pleasurable dreams is at the end of a section on the dreams of children and early adolescents. Here Stewart notes that there seems to be a decline in pleasurable dreams by early adolescence, the opposite of what he claimed later. He then speculates on the possible causes:
Also missing from the dissertation is any account of how the dreams were collected in the three societies. This is a notable omission because there is reason to believe from other evidence that they were collected and recorded in different ways in the three cultures. Among the Yami, for example, the dreams were very often -- if not always -- collected under hypnosis, with a Japanese policeman serving as the interpreter both for the induction of hypnosis by Stewart and the reporting of the dreams by the Yami subjects.[44] Among the Senoi, on the other hand, the dreams were collected directly by Noone, who spoke Temiar, and then dictated to Parsons. Moreover, the Senoi dreams were collected in different ways from different age groups. Children's dreams were collected by asking parents what their children had dreamed about, which is in fact a totally worthless method. The dreams of teenagers and young adults were collected by asking them to report recent dreams. In the case of the older men, still another procedure was used. They were asked to recall all those dreams that they believed to be significant in bringing them to the status of adept or shaman. This is an invitation to storytelling and fabrication.[45] As for the Negritos, most of the dreams were collected in English-speaking schools set up by Americans, who had, of course, taken control of the Philippines as a protectorate after the Spanish-American War. Seventy-five percent of the Negrito dreams are from adolescents and preadolescents, a far higher percentage than in the other two samples. There are references in the dream reports to horses, streets, the Catholic church, and being chased by "wild Negritos," all of which is strong evidence that these participants were highly acculturated.[46] Considering the different ways in which the dreams were collected among the different groups and within the Senoi settlement, and the wildly differing degrees to which the three groups were assimilated into Western ways, there is every reason to be cautious about any claims concerning the superiority of Senoi psychological adjustment and flexibility that are based on alleged differences in dream content. Moreover, there is only weak evidence that night dreams and hypnotic dreams can be equated. A few studies suggest that this can be the case with some participants under the right conditions, but other studies lead to the conclusion that night dreams and hypnotic dreams are different. Still other studies suggest that hypnotized people are susceptible to suggestion and often make up their reports of dreams or memories.[47] This is not a believable empirical basis for the even greater leap of comparing hypnotic dreams from one culture with night dreams from another. Nor is the retrospective recall of dreams by shamans comparable to present-day recall by ordinary adolescents and young adults, or with parents' reports of what their children supposedly say they dream about. These problems within the dissertation are serious enough to discredit any of his psychological conclusions, but the major problems with Stewart's claims about Senoi Dream Theory really began after he resumed private practice in New York and published his first article after completing the dissertation. "Dream Theory in Malaya" appeared in 1951 in Complex, a relatively new -- and short-lived -- journal founded by author-critic Paul Goodman to explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and society. Although Stewart published three articles subsequent to this one, they make no major additions to the claims about the Senoi that he made at this time. Stewart's published presentation of Senoi Dream Theory begins with a considerable inflation of his credentials. He calls himself an honorary fellow of the "Royal Anthropological Society" (sic) and a research fellow of "Peiping Union Medical College, Rockefeller Institute." In fact, the Royal Anthropological Institute elects only a handful of the most renowned anthropologists in the world as honorary fellows; Stewart was a regular fellow by reason of paying his dues.[48] Nor was Stewart a research fellow of the Rockefeller Institute. Although the exact nature of his few months of employment in Peking cannot be determined with final certainty, it seems most likely that he was paid out of the pocket of the psychiatric facility's wealthy American director.[49] The paper also greatly exaggerates the amount of time Stewart spent studying the Senoi. The two or three months that he claims in his 1936 autobiography for the first trip (probably 16 days in reality), and the seven to eight weeks that Parsons documents for the second trip, were said to be ten months in the dissertation. In the paper, the ten months become a year, and the two months in England with Noone become another year: "From a year's experience with these people working as a research psychologist, and another year with Noone in England integrating his seven years of anthropological research with my own findings, I am able to make the following formulations of the principles of Senoi psychology."[50] After setting the stage by calling Senoi an "astonishing" people who are as advanced as if they came from another planet, Stewart states his most important assertion: "The Senoi believes that any human being, with the aid of his fellows, can outface, master, and actually utilize all beings and forces in the dream universe." To demonstrate this point, he uses the example of dreams of falling. When children report a falling dream, he says, "the adult answers with enthusiasm, 'That is a wonderful dream, one of the best dreams a man can have. Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?'"[51] According to Stewart, the adult then says:
Stewart then asserts that these instructions to the child bring about changes in the dreams. His authority for this claim is that he "made a collection of the dreams of younger and older Senoi children, adolescents, and adults, and compared them with similar collections made in other societies where they had different social attitudes toward the dream and different methods of dream interpretation." In the case of falling dreams specifically, the results are termed "astonishing":
Beyond the already mentioned difficulties of comparing the three different sets of dreams, the really astonishing fact is that the Senoi dreams in the dissertation do not provide any evidence whatsoever for these large claims. They show that the article is a complete fabrication in terms of his evidentiary claims about changes in falling dreams. There are only four dreams in the 228 young-adult and adult dreams that might be interpreted as flying dreams, and they do not reveal any pleasure in flying or any ability to confront and conquer danger. Three are near-disasters. For example, one adult male had the following flying dream:
The only positive dream that mentions flying is a pre-shamanistic dream told in retrospect by an adult male. The flying occurs in passing in the context of a command from a potentially friendly spirit:
In addition, and even more damning, there are four dreams in which falling occurs, three from young adult males, one from an adult male. None of them turns into a flying dream. A person falls to the earth and dies in two of the dreams, and a dreamer's "spirit" falls into the river and drowns in a third. In the fourth dream the dreamer fell from a tree into a marsh and "awoke with a start."[56] One of the dreams with a falling death has a happy ending, however. The spirit who had ordered the dead child to climb the tree in the first place brings it back to life. The idea that pleasurable dreams should be pursued to a conclusion is introduced for the first time in this paper:
This general claim about pleasurable dreams contrasts greatly with the earlier-cited assertion in the dissertation that the number of pleasurable dreams seems to decline along about adolescence. Moreover, the discussion of sexual dreams in the dissertation makes no mention of this principle. Nor are there any sexual dreams in the collection that support the notion that the principle has any influence. The relatively few dreams that even hint at sex, a mere nine in all, are primarily what Stewart calls in the dissertation "sexual frustration dreams." Anger or fear is mentioned in five of them, and in only one is there any suggestion of pleasure. After reproducing four of the frustration dreams from younger adults in the main text, Stewart comments: "Such dreams of sexual frustration do not completely cease with adolescence, but we were told they rarely occur in the lives of the practising shaman."[58] But of course there are no data to back this up. The several differences between the dissertation and the first published paper, and the lack of dream evidence in the dissertation for some of the claims in the paper, are important clues concerning the origins of Senoi Dream Theory. They are concrete evidence that Stewart's grandiose tendencies got away from him in his later discussions of the Senoi. This leads to the conclusion that the dream theory Stewart attributed to the Senoi in his published articles was in fact an amalgamation of his own ideas with what he had learned from his studies of hypnotic dreams, trance reveries, and night dreams among Yami, Negritos, Senoi, and his patients. Put more bluntly, the articles are one big fantasy that have no basis in the data and conclusions contained in the dissertation. The dissertation is the "smoking gun" that exposes Stewart as an intellectual fraud in his published claims about the dream life of Senoi peoples. Parsons's account of Stewart, along with his 1936 autobiography and my interviews and correspondence with people who knew him well, all combine to make it clear that Stewart was not the kind of person who learned foreign languages and immersed himself in detailed studies of the cultures he visited. Instead, these sources suggest that he was a storyteller who let his imagination have free reign as he sifted through his experiences. Much of what he says in his dissertation about daily Senoi life is in agreement with what others have reported, but most of what he published is highly exaggerated and used as a starting point for what are actually his own ideas. Based on my detailed analysis of Stewart's dissertation, and the many hours I spent interviewing people and combing through archives, I believe Stewart first and foremost saw himself as a guru and healer in relating to the world. His participation in healing ceremonies and tribal dances had impressed him with the importance of magic rituals and joyful ceremonies in human life. He thought that modern life lacked social occasions of deep psychological significance. He kept repeating the fact that Westernized human beings had cut themselves off from the emotional and psychological wisdom of the nonviolent tribes he had studied, and that the result was violence and homicide, mental disorders, and war. In praising these aboriginal people for their alleged nonviolent principles, he completely misunderstood that these subjugated people had no choice but to be nonviolent or perish. He also ignored the evidence that some were personally violent in their own communities and that others fought and killed during World War II and the counterinsurgency war of the 1950s. Indeed, Stewart's primary preoccupation in every one of his published articles -- from the 1937 article on the Yami to a 1943 article, "Education and Split Personalities," to a 1962 article, "The Dream Comes of Age" -- concerned the major social problems that faced the civilized world. He criticized the lack of cooperativeness and the indifference to equality in the 1937 article, the split personalities allegedly brought about by overly rationalistic educational systems in his 1943 article, the failure of scientists to study peace when "the engines of war today are terrifying" in a 1954 article, and the need to promote mental health and world peace through dream education in his 1962 finale.[59] These are not the usual concerns of a dream researcher. In short, Stewart thought he had found the answers to modern societal problems in the ritual practices of primitive peoples. He thought the wisdom of tribal healers could be applied to today's world. Preliterate people, and especially the Senoi in his later years, had the answers to the problems of violence, insanity, and war. His desire to be a great healer and prophet led him to imbue his dream principles with the mystique of the nonviolent and easygoing Senoi. However, as the anthropological accounts in the previous chapter demonstrate, Stewart's claims about the psychology of the Senoi are complete nonsense. Recall that the people he calls relaxed and happy are wary of strangers, skeptical, and pragmatic after centuries of being enslaved and looked down up. They suffer greatly due to the physical environment they live in. Thus, it would be more honest if Senoi Dream Theory was identified correctly as Stewart's own theory about the efficacy of dream sharing and dream control. It was Stewart, not the Senoi, who first proposed that people actually might be able to share and control their dreams for their pleasure and development.. He may have come to the ideas in part from discussions with dream adepts in Senoi settlements, but the ideas were in fact his. This does not mean that Stewart consciously created a hoax. Like many gurus and con artists, he fervently believed what he said. He simply did not have the character or training to discipline his thinking. He wanted to be a well-known prophet and healer, and in a certain small sense he succeeded because of the dreamwork movement, although he never convinced more than a handful of people of anything during his lifetime. But the anthropological evidence and the testimony of everyone I talked to shows that he was not a credible observer. The comparison of what is in his dissertation with what he wrote later shows in detail how his claims grew larger and had no basis in evidence. It is now time to show in detail how Stewart's misguided claims about the Senoi became a key element in the dreamwork movement. Chapter 4: Why Did Stewart's Ideas Have Such Appeal?The Senoi do not utilize, or even know, the principles wrongly named Senoi Dream Theory. It was an American adventurer/vagabond/hypnotist/storyteller who proposed the idea that societies can benefit from sharing their dreams, and that dreams can be shaped through three simple principles of mind control. This is as clear as such matters can be, despite continuing efforts to cast doubt by implying that "just maybe" there were some Senoi somewhere who once practiced Kilton Stewart's theory. But we are left with a further puzzling question. Why did these ideas, in the guise of an ancient aboriginal practice, suddenly resonate with a new generation of psychologically minded young adults of college backgrounds a decade after Stewart first introduced them? And why do they continue to have some appeal? The larger response to Stewart's ideas, which came in the 1960s, was first of all based on the dramatic social changes that spawned the human potential movement as one of their many consequences. For a brief moment, thanks to the civil rights movement and the election of a charismatic young president who promised to get the country moving again, it seemed to be a time when all things were possible. The economy was good, colleges and universities were filling up with the energetic youth of the baby-boom generation, the Peace Corps provided an outlet for idealism, and America was going to the moon. The ideas of the humanistic psychologists began to take hold, and people were experimenting with LSD and other drugs that promised to expand the frontiers of the human mind. Senoi Dream Theory was one of the new possibilities that captured the attention of those who were seeking to expand human consciousness in the 1960s. The idea that the sharing of dreams could bring about greater social harmony and that dreams could be shaped and changed through the application of the proper principles was attractive to social scientists and psychotherapists of the new humanistic orientation. Confront and conquer danger, go toward pleasure, extract a gift from dream characters -- these ideas made sense to a generation that rejected "conservative' notions such as the unconscious for the idea of self-actualization. Senoi Dream Theory was consistent with the interest in using meditation, drugs, and other techniques to attain "altered states of consciousness." Senoi Dream Theory entered the human potential movement by way of one of its major wellsprings, Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California, 165 miles south of San Francisco. As might be expected, the Senoi idea arrived at Esalen, probably in 1965, via a copy of Stewart's 1951 paper in Complex. Most of the people I talked with who were there at the time think that the paper probably was brought to the attention of Esalen leaders by psychologist Charles Tart, who was one of the institutes supporters. Tart, now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, had a strong research interest in dreams, hypnosis, and parapsychology, and he recalls coming across Stewart's article in the early 1960s in the course of his systematic search of all the past literature relating to dreams and altered states of consciousness. His personal experiences with the possibilities of dream control made the paper of immediate interest to him, but he is not sure whether it was he or one of his friends who actually brought the article to Esalen.[1] Senoi Dream Theory was incorporated into Esalen planning for what was at first called the Experimental College and later the Residence Program. The idea was to go beyond weekend seminars and occasional visiting lecturers by developing a nine-month program that would gather together a diverse group of talented people under the tutelage of two fulltime faculty members and a series of visiting experts. The fellows would experiment with a variety of consciousness expanding techniques and then carry the best of them to colleges, professional associations, and other organizations around the country:
These elaborate and ambitious plans were presented to the heads of large foundations in New York with the hope of obtaining major funding. The secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Johnson administration was contacted. However, neither the foundations nor the Washington bigwig would go beyond expressions of interest, and the size of the program had to be scaled down considerably. There would be only one faculty leader, Virginia Satir, a well-known family therapist, and no accompanying research program. The new college of consciousness began in the fall of 1966 with seventeen resident fellows chosen from among about 200 applicants. They included an engineer; a Jesuit brother; a psychologist who had written a dissertation on meditation at the University of Michigan; and a professor of art from a community college in nearby Santa Cruz, California. As it turned out, the program did not work out very well at all. In fact, it was a disaster. Satir suddenly departed without warning or explanation after the first few weeks, and the fellows were left pretty much to their own devices. They floundered from experiment to experiment, including attempts to use Senoi principles of dream control, but none of the work was very conclusive. The program was somewhat more organized in its second year, but there was so much anxiety, conflict, and acting out within the group and among the program leaders that it was scaled down even more and then abandoned in the next few years.[3] Although the Residence Program itself was a failure, that did not deter an Esalen enthusiast from publishing an influential book that implied just the opposite. Entitled Education and Ecstasy (1968), it was written by George Leonard, a journalist and West Coast editor for Look magazine, one of the most widely read popular magazines of that era. After doing some reporting on the human potential movement, Leonard grew very interested in the Esalen experiment and joined it as a director and adviser in 1965. Defining ecstasy in terms of delight and wonderment, Leonard called for a more emotionally based approach to the education of children, and claimed that it drew some of its inspiration from the human potential movement. At the same time, his book also built on suggestions put forth by the behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, who was as interested in the control of behavior as Stewart was in the control of dreams. He had written a utopian novel, Walden Two, in 1948 to show how "operant conditioning" based on "schedules of positive reinforcement" could create a better society. Leonard's book was serialized in Look just before its publication in 1968 and sold over 250,000 copies in its first few years. Leonard says he received about 5,000 letters in response to the Look serialization and the book, which gives an idea of the impact his work had on the general public.[4] Stewart's claims about Senoi dream practices were introduced by Leonard in a futuristic chapter as one of the "Discovery Tents" at a school in the year 2001. The school was named Kennedy School, no doubt to capture the magic of the name that had rekindled hope for the young at the national level at the start of the 1960s. The section on the Senoi explained the principles in Stewart's 1951 article and suggested that in the future every American child would learn them -- along with biofeedback, body awareness, and other new psychological techniques that were just then appearing on the horizon. Two chapters later, Leonard deceptively told his readers for the first time that everything he had proposed as the fourth aspect of a new approach to education allegedly was being tried at a place called Esalen Institute. After softening up readers by noting that Esalen had been described by one of the founders of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow, as "probably the most important educational institute in the world," Leonard then explained that the institute was founded in 1961 and was named after the tribe of Indians who had lived in that area.[5] He reported that its founder, Michael Murphy, whose family owned the Esalen land, had spent nine years in "ascetic study and contemplation in the Eastern disciplines." This allegedly huge number of years, which is hard for me to believe, included eighteen months during which he supposedly meditated for six to eight hours a day in an ashram in India. Murphy then "came back to his native California convinced that the human potential, even in the realm called 'mystical,' can best be achieved on an American model, through an affirmation of the sensory universe." Murphy and Esalen were said to be at the cutting edge of the human potential movement, and the new ideas were being spread through seminars, workshops, and a graduate-level Residence Program. The Senoi methods that did not receive much use in 1966 and 1967 were said to be part of this wonderful program, which certainly sounded organized and successful even though by 1967 it was clearly a failure:
Thus, Esalen and Education and Ecstasy were the starting points in bringing Senoi Dream Theory into the mainstream of the human potential movement and to the attention of the general public. However, the avenue for bringing the ideas to a wide audience of psychologists and their students was the publication of Stewart's 1951 article in Tart's collection of readings, Altered States of Consciousness (1969), which sold over 50,000 copies in its first four years. Tart began his comments on the Senoi as follows: "You can imagine my amazement when I read that a whole tribe of primitive people, the Senoi of Malaya, had been practicing dream control techniques for centuries."[7] His amazement did not keep him from registering appropriate scholarly caution, noting that he had not been able to find corroborating accounts and that further research was needed. But his mild caution went unheeded, and he himself already was a firm believer based on his own earlier efforts at dream control. Instead, Tart's book gave further legitimacy to Stewart's claims. The psychologists who started Senoi dream groups in the late 1960s and early seventies often traced their work to a reading of Stewart's article in Tart's book.[8] Although the original interest in Senoi Dream Theory arose as part of the optimism and enthusiasm of the early 1960s, a second push came, strangely enough, from the growing frustration and anger over America's widening involvement in the war in Southeast Asia. As young people turned against the war and the society that had produced it, they found great appeal in the fact that this new way of dreaming was not American. Instead, it was the practice of an allegedly nonviolent people who lived simply in another part of Southeast Asia and who were claimed to be in many ways the opposite of Americans in their attitudes toward confrontation, aggression, and group violence. It was at this point that Stewart's own moral fervor about the social possibilities for Senoi Dream Theory resonated with the needs of his readers. As the war continued and broadened despite massive demonstrations and other forms of protest, the daily newspaper and television revelations concerning its horrors also grew apace. Soon there was a growing rejection of anything connected with what was said to be an overly urbanized, industrialized, routinized, and intellectualized Western civilization. A mystique of the simple and the primitive gradually took hold. The Senoi were one small part of this mystique that included a glorification of Native Americans and their beliefs, especially their beliefs about dreams, visions, and healing, as popularized most successfully in Carlos Casteñada's alleged (but totally fabricated) conversations with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan.[9] This rejectionist mood is best captured in Theodore Roszak's widely read and discussed book, Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), which uses Senoi Dream Theory to bolster its anti-Western critique. Roszak calls the environment of urban-industrial civilization "artificial" and "inhuman."[10] Even such sympathetic humanists as Buckminster Fuller and Jacob Bronowski come in for criticism, Fuller for being too fascinated with technological gimmicks, Bronowski for an allegedly elitist attitude toward the wisdom of tribal cultures. Scientists and Bible-quoting fundamentalists are lumped together as essentially similar because they both concentrate on an objective, factual world. No stone is left unturned in Roszak's relentless rejection of the main currents of Western civilization, including the way we sleep and awaken, and it is here that Stewart and Senoi Dream Theory make their appearance. Americans see sleep as a dead loss of time, says Roszak. They awaken too quickly and immediately turn their attention to what they have to do that day. They do not take their dreams seriously. They have a "single vision" or tunnel vision. This allegedly superficial attitude toward sleep and dreams is then contrasted with what Roszak believes to be the superior wisdom of primitive cultures, and the Senoi are one of his primary examples:
It was in this atmosphere that the two popular books mentioned in the introduction appeared in 1974. They completed the mystification of the Senoi. The first, Faraday's The Dream Game, was a "how-to-do-it" sequel to her 1972 best-seller, Dream Power. Whereas Dream Power had devoted only a few paragraphs to Stewart and his ideas, The Dream Game spent several pages on Senoi dreaming and gave every indication that the ideas worked.[12] The second, Garfield's Creative Dreaming, as noted already in Chapter 1, was even more crucial. Not only did it sell just as widely as Faraday's, but Garfield allegedly provided independent evidence from her own discussions with the Senoi that Stewart was correct about them. Moreover, Garfield reported that she had talked with people in Singapore who were experts on the Senoi. Here she is probably referring to the anthropologist mentioned in the second chapter, Geoffrey Benjamin, who probably told her just the opposite of what she wrote Whatever Garfield actually saw and heard, her work was the clincher in creating the Senoi mystique because it provided the corroboration that was needed before the skeptics could be convinced. She seemed to be that necessary second opinion. Yet Garfield's discovery of the Senoi and their dream theory was even more coincidental and happenstance than it had been for Stewart. As she tells the story in the foreword to her book, she was in Tokyo for the 1972 meeting of the International Congress of Psychology. She mentioned to Joe Kamiya, a pioneer dream researcher and the originator of biofeedback techniques, that she was going to visit Malaysia on the return trip. "If you're going to Malaysia, why not visit the Senoi?" Kamiya asked casually. "The who?" replied Garfield.[13] Kamiya then told Garfield about Stewart's ideas concerning Senoi dream practices, based on his reading of Stewart's article in Tart's book. Garfield was intrigued enough to visit the area for a day or two, but she never came close to a Senoi settlement. Instead, as noted in Chapter 2, she talked to a few Senoi who were employed at an aboriginal hospital many miles from the jungle. She then reports: "I have studied Senoi dream practices by personally interviewing some members of the tribe (in English translated to Malay to Senoi who spoke both their aboriginal language and Malay)." This is of course a disgraceful claim for such a quick visit. But she also acknowledges a debt to Stewart, whom she first read after she came home. She describes him as an "American trained in both anthropology and psychoanalysis who spent several years in Malaysia observing the Senoi use of dreams with Herbert [Pat] Noone, the British anthropologist, who gathered the basic data on these people."[14] Stewart's grand total of ten weeks maximum in the presence of Senoi was now "several years," another indication of the inaccuracy of Garfield's books. By 1974, then, the new myth was fully developed, and it was still going strong when I began my Senoi research late in 1982. Doubts were raised in 1978 when two documentary filmmakers came back from Senoi country with the news that they could find no morning dream clinics.[15] However, it was not until word of my findings and those of Dentan, Faraday, and Wren-Lewis began to get around, primarily through the Dream Network Bulletin, that the practitioners of the new dreamwork began to downplay the Senoi. Only in 1984, for example, did the Jungian-Senoi Institute change its name to the Jungian Dreamwork Institute.
To this point I have explained the appeal of Stewart's writings about the Senoi in terms of three factors: the currency and publicity given to them by the human potential movement that grew out of the optimism of the early 1960s; the legitimacy given to his ideas by dream experts; and the rejection of American society for a mystique of the primitive in the context of the antiwar movement. But this explanation is not complete. An emphasis on social change explains why people were open to new ideas in many areas of their lives, but it does not tell us why these particular ideas, and not others, were so readily accepted. Paradoxical as it may sound, I think that Senoi Dream Theory had a deep appeal for Americans at this time because it was a new application of their deepest and most ingrained beliefs about human nature, as presented in the context of an allegorical story about community and authenticity. Very simply, the "Senoi way of dreaming" actually rests on the unquestioned American belief in the possibility of shaping and controlling both the environment and human nature. For Americans, but not for most people, and certainly not for the Senoi, human nature is malleable and perfectible. Americans are what they make of themselves. They can do it if they try. Senoi Dream Theory is an extension of that basic precept to the world of dreams. The fact that it is unwittingly presented in a mystique of the primitive only makes it all the more attractive. It is independent evidence for American convictions. In short, it is a giant group self-deception, a self-serving ideology weaved together by many different hands, none of which feels any personal responsibility for the overall fable and its consequences. The social scientists like Tart claim they were just "presenting" tentative findings, and furthermore noted that "replications" were needed, but no one did the replications or read the anthropological literature. The journalists say that they were just "reporting" what the social scientists had told them. Readers who spread the ideas in conversations with their friends saw titles like "Ph.D." and respected magazine names like Look, so they trusted what they read. Eager new converts then used the magazine articles to show how legitimate the ideas were. No one bothered to be skeptical. No one bothered to check. An ideology is the product of many people involved in a network of "organized irresponsibility." Everyone contributes, no one takes responsibility. At a certain point, when many people have a strong emotional and/or occupational investment in the organizational network created around the new ideas, any doubts are immediately cast aside, and any doubters are branded as heretics. Perhaps the most famous American psychologist of the years from 1950 to 1980 was the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, whose ideas on education were incorporated into Leonard's Education and Ecstasy. Considering Skinner's general popularity and the near-fanatical loyalty of his followers, present-day readers who never heard of Skinner should not be surprised that he believed that all human behavior can be shaped and controlled through schedules of positive and negative (but preferably positive) reinforcement that are administered by agents of society. In terms of American psychology, then, Stewart is the B. F. Skinner of dreams, with his article "Dream Theory in Malaya" fulfilling the same utopian function among his followers that Walden Two did among Skinner's. It was Stewart's achievement to apply the same American beliefs that once gave Skinner's behaviorism its inherent appeal to the seemingly uncontrollable happenings called dreams. Just as Skinner believed that behavior could be controlled with tangible rewards, so Stewart believed that dreams could be controlled with the social approval of group leaders. At bottom, he was just another behaviorist, as first seen in his M.A. training in psychology in the early 1930s. However, too much credit for the application of these basic American assumptions should not be given to either of these pioneers. American beliefs about the malleability of human nature received practical implementation long before psychologists happened on the scene. As several historians, sociologists, and psychologists have shown, Americans have embraced various techniques for self-control and mind control for many centuries. These techniques have ranged from Benjamin Franklin's system of self-betterment through "moral bookkeeping" (just write down the traits you want to improve and then work on one each week, keeping track of how you are doing), to the French psychotherapist Emile Coue's repeated phrase "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better," to Norman Vincent Peale's "power of positive thinking." Americans have made best-sellers out of self-help books since very early in the nineteenth century, and they have gone through numerous spiritual movements and mind control fads at crisis points in their history that are now largely unknown to those who think that the surge of interest in such techniques and formulas in the 1960s, or 1990s, or early 21st century, is a new phenomenon. The only thing that seems to have altered is that now these ideas are often placed within a psychological and therapeutic framework rather than a religious one.[16] Viewed in this way, Senoi Dream Theory is typical American can-do. Taking hold in the 1960s, it was part of an attempt to conquer "inner space" at the very time that "outer space" was being conquered by another set of new pioneers. Indeed, the analogy between the conquest of "inner space" and "outer space" was often made in the human potential movement, just as Stewart had done in the opening paragraphs of his 1951 article. But the narratives that appeal to Americans the most usually contain more subtle messages than their most basic assumptions about human nature, and the story about the Senoi and their dream theory is probably no exception. Such narratives are also new allegorical stories that address fundamental issues about American society at specific time periods.[17] When Margaret Mead wrote years ago that young women come of age in Samoa with less tension than their American counterparts and then asks, in the final sentence of her classic book, "Will we, who have the knowledge of many ways, leave our children free to choose among them?" people sense they have read an allegorical story about the way in which a liberal and pluralistic American society might deal with the breakdown of traditional family patterns.[18] Nor does Mead try to hide this level of her presentation. "Throughout her book," writes the author I am drawing from, "Mead presents the Samoan case as a lesson in human possibility for a troubled society."[19] From this vantage point, Stewart's writings on the Senoi are an allegory about the search for community and a lost authenticity, and this also gave them a special appeal in the 1960s and later. Certainly Stewart did not hesitate to draw such lessons throughout his writings, which I have shown to abound with biting critiques of civilization and appeals for human betterment. Senoi Dream Theory was a tale that fit the times as well as a story for all seasons. As many readers may be thinking, the dreamwork movement survived the critique of Senoi Dream Theory. This indeed shows that Stewart's theory was only one part of its underpinning. As I said in Chapter 1, there was also Jung, Perls, and the newly discovered frequency of dreaming. More than that, though, there was suddenly "lucid dreaming," which came along just in time to replace Senoi Dream Theory as the next Great New Thing for the dreamwork movement. But it can't be ignored that Senoi Dream Theory played a crucial role in the period 1965 to 1978 in solidifying the dreamwork movement, and is still probably believed by many, if not most, of its members. Lucid dreaming, the quick fix for the problems created by the truth about the Senoi's dream practices, had been around for a long time, mostly in parapsychology and other fringe areas. Luckily for the dreamwork movement, it suddenly obtained the necessary solidity around the turn of the 1980s when it allegedly was demonstrated in the sleep laboratory by a lucid dream adept, Stephen LaBerge, that good lucid dreamers could signal their lucidity during REM sleep.[20] (I say "allegedly" demonstrated because, after all, 14 of the verified signalings came from LaBerge himself, and two of the other four participants did not do any successful signaling in three nights in the lab.) The hope for dream control was reborn in a new guise. But that's another failed hope that is discussed very briefly in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to say that the acceptance of an idea does not necessarily mean it has any validity. The human capacity for individual and group self-deception is endless, which is why a scientific attitude toward ideas is so important. Chapter 5: Does Senoi Dream Theory Have Any Validity?The fact that Stewart's theories of dream sharing and dream control are not practiced by the Senoi does not invalidate his ideas. Nor does his sloppy thinking and dubious credibility as an anthropologist and psychologist mean that the ideas are wrong, although his tendency to fabricate should lead people to be skeptical. The fact that his ideas were embraced uncritically by an eager new generation of ever hopeful Americans is interesting in and of itself, but that is neither here nor there as far as the validity of the ideas. It may be that sharing dreams is beneficial for individuals, groups, or societies. It may be that Stewart's principles of dream control are useful in ridding dream life of the aggression and negative feelings that predominate over friendliness and positive feelings for most dreamers, as has been found in dream reports from all over the world studied systematically using the Hall/Van de Castle coding system.[1] The ideas put forth by Stewart are worthy of investigation whatever their origins or appeal. Even those who agree with me that the anthropological, biographical, and sociological findings raise serious questions ought to concede that we owe it to these ideas to give them a fair hearing on the evidence. Thus, in this chapter I will assess the independent evidence that is available on the efficacy of sharing and shaping dreams. This evidence comes from classrooms, dream groups, and experimental studies. There is not much systematic evidence on the usefulness of dream sharing, but the little that exists is interesting. In particular, the idea that the sharing of dreams can lead to creativity and social harmony in small groups received support in a classroom exercise carried out over a period of several months in 1961 by a future grade school teacher working on her M.A. degree in psychology. Based in part on her knowledge of Stewart's work, but also drawing on her reading of experts on creativity, Elena Werlin spontaneously asked her students early in the school year if they would like to share their dreams:
Werlin then kept a classroom log over a six-month period, in which she reports on the effects of dream sharing among twenty-five first-grade children. Although there was "no wild enthusiasm" for the idea of "dream time" in the first few weeks, the children were often eager for these sessions after a few months, and many sessions seemed to result in reduced tensions in the classroom or heightened creativity for some individuals. However, it was not only dreams that were shared, but as often daydreams or made-up stories. Nor was any attempt made to interpret the dreams. In effect, she found that the surest way to discourage children from sharing their dreams is to interpret them. Children don't seem to find such a task very interesting. Instead, the dreams were seen by Werlin and the children simply as a means of communicating personal thoughts or as a basis for stories or drawings. For these purposes the children often related to the dreams they told and heard in a very constructive way. At the same time, Werlin felt that she gained an awareness of aspects of the children's personalities that she would not have been aware of if she had not instituted dream sharing:
Werlin did not do any further work with dream sharing in the classroom. She told me that larger class sizes and the pressures to meet specific reading and arithmetic requirements rendered the open-ended sessions unfeasible, especially because the children often urged that dream discussions be continued beyond their allotted time. The same factors probably explain why nobody else apparently tried the idea. There are no comparable reports on the effects of dream sharing among older students, adults, or therapeutic groups. Many such dream groups have existed, but they go unreported or are discussed in a brief fashion with a very few examples. One of the few published reports in the journal literature provides three dreams that were elaborated or completed by dream groups. This 1973 article begins with the following introductory comment:
Although those who direct dream groups of course say that dream sharing is useful, they do not show that there is anything unique about dream sharing. However, contrary to their emphasis, the general conclusion that can be drawn from a wide range of studies of personal sharing in small discussion groups is that any personal disclosure in an open and supportive atmosphere is found by some participants to be personally helpful and conducive to group cohesiveness.[5] Viewed from this perspective, dream sharing may be useful because it is one of many intimate disclosures that can have positive effects. Even here, however, there is need for caution. It may be that people feel enthusiastic about sensitivity groups, therapy groups, and dream groups even when there is no objective evidence that anybody or anything changed. As a skeptical clinical psychologist suggested on the basis of a detailed survey of the literature on psychotherapy, supplemented by his own interviews with therapists and former patients, there is a strong tendency to emphasize the positive and ignore the negative even when the group or individual therapy has not reached its stated goals. First of all, people are pleased to find they have been able to say personal or shocking things without being censured. For example, to admit to a murderous or deceitful dream action and not be scorned can lead to a sense of relief. Second, they are glad to know they are not alone in their problems, which they learn when other people say they have had somewhat similar dreams. Third, people have a strong will to believe that they must be getting something out of an experience to which they have committed time, effort, and probably money. Finally, and most subtly, therapists and group leaders have ways of suggesting that the responsibility for success or failure lies with the patient or group member, so people are reluctant to admit to negative outcomes.[6] Still, it seems that dream sharing could be a somewhat unique kind of sharing because a dream is at once so personal and yet not seen as something for which the person is responsible. In some languages people say "It dreamed to me," and English speakers in effect express the same distance when they say things like "I had this dream." A dream group leader of the 1970s expressed the point very well:
Based on the peculiar status that dreams enjoy as personal statements for which people do not feel responsible, further studies of their usefulness in groups could be conducted within the framework of the intimacy and self-disclosure literatures. These studies could directly compare dream sharing and other types of disclosures within experimental groups on the variety of dependent variables that are used in sensitivity studies, including individual ratings of others in the group and experimenter ratings of individual reactions and group interactions. Studies of this kind are not likely to determine whether or not dream sharing could lead to the larger, societywide harmony that Stewart hoped for, but they would be a starting point on the personal and social usefulness of this idea. However, in the years since I first made this point in 1985, there has been no effort on the part of anyone in the dreamwork movement to make any form of systematic study of what they do. I turn now to the small literature on shaping and controlling dreams, only part of which derives from Stewart's claims. First, there is some evidence that people can dream about a topic if they are encouraged to do so, but it should be noted at the outset that dreaming about a suggested topic is one thing and controlling dream content is another. In the first of three studies at the University of Brunswick in the 1970s, for example, sixteen students were asked by eight of their friends to dream about one of four suggested topics on specified nights. They were instructed to set their alarm clock for 6:30 A.M. and to record any dreams they remembered. The experiment lasted for three consecutive nights. Ten of the nineteen reported dreams contained suggested topics. The two pleasant topics (riding a bicycle, going fishing) were incorporated more frequently than the two unpleasant topics (a car accident, a world war erupting).[8] The second study included seventy students over five nights who were asked to dream about eating a favorite food. which led to similar positive results. In addition, it was found that those who were best able to dream about the suggested topic had a more positive attitude toward dreaming, a higher frequency of dream recall, and a greater tendency to be introspective.[9] The third study involved twenty-four students who slept two nights in a laboratory setting. Eight of the participants were asked to dream about eating a favorite food, eight were asked to dream about eating an unpleasant meal that made them sick, and eight were given no instructions. The subjects were awakened four times during the night. Seven of the eight subjects who received the positive suggestion reported themes of eating, but only three of the eight who received the negative suggestion did so. (But four of the eight people who received no suggestion dreamed about eating anyway, so the results are not conclusive by any means with such a small sample).[10] Still another study showed the incorporation of pre-sleep suggestions, but no evidence that the content could be controlled. Inspired in part by Stewart's writings, the researcher asked seventeen college participants to list personal traits they would like to change and then urged them to have positive dreams about one of these traits in the sleep laboratory. They were told to wish over and over again as they fell asleep for the change they wanted to make; for example, "I wish I were not so hostile, I wish I were not so irritable, I wish I were more poised." Fifteen of the seventeen participants reported at least one instance of apparent incorporation of the target trait when they were awakened in the laboratory. However, only two of the dreams incorporated the trait in the positive way that was wished for. Instead of having positive incorporations, more often than not the participants incorporated the negative trait and seemed "to be getting some gratification out of maintaining it."[11] In the example that is provided, a participant who wished to be less sarcastic had two different dreams in which she was very sarcastic. Another piece of seemingly positive evidence from the laboratory turned out to be inconclusive. This second study first came to public attention as one that seemed likely to lead to positive results. In "Happy Endings for Our Dreams," which appeared in Psychology Today in 1978, psychologist Rosalind D. Cartwright reported that she and her associates were attempting to alter the dream plots of sixty recently divorced women. Her comments on the ongoing study began by saying that some of the women "occasionally do succeed."[12] Beyond this preliminary report, however, no results were published. The study was discontinued at the pilot stage because it was not fund by the National Institute of Mental Health. This study ends up as another example of how popular magazine reports can create false impressions. In the 1980s, claims by enthusiasts for lucid dreaming, such as Stephen LaBerge, raised the hope that lucid dreaming can lead to dream control, as it allegedly does for LaBerge himself, who was by far the most successful subject in his various studies.[13] However, the few other systematic studies that exist do not give much support to this hope. In one such study, for example, experienced lucid dreamers were instructed to turn on a light in the dream. Only two of sixteen subjects reported that they were successful.[14] There have been few attempts since the early 1990s to demonstrate dream control during lucid dreaming, where the emphasis is now on becoming and staying lucid to enjoy what unfolds. As against these few hopeful glimmers in a few studies, there is stronger evidence that dreams cannot be controlled even to a small extent within dream groups or experimental situations using Stewart's principles. Two of the earliest leaders of Senoi dream groups, Joel Latner and Meredith Sabini, wrote as follows in an article that is very positive toward dream discussion groups as a way of heightening personal sensitivity and enhancing creativity:
Ironically, a strong piece of negative evidence comes from a 1974 study by Garfield herself. In this study a good dream recaller spent five months trying to increase the frequency with which his hands appeared in dreams. (Casteñada claimed that his mythical sorcerer, Don Juan, often focused on his hands while dreaming.) The dreamer also spent twelve months trying to increase the frequency of flying dreams. But the frequency of hand images stayed the same and the frequency of flying dreams rose only from 2 to 4 percent. Garfield attempts to rescue these findings by claiming that some of the hand dreams became more vivid and some of the flying dreams included intense sensations, but the frequencies speak for themselves against her after-the-fact interpretations.[16] Two very careful and detailed studies of dream control by psychologists David Foulkes and M. L. Griffin were also unable to report any positive results. In the first study, twenty three participants were taught the Stewart control techniques as described in Garfield's book. They were asked to dream about a randomly assigned target selected from a list of six dream suggestions. They kept daily records of the dreams they remembered over ten consecutive nights. Two independent judges attempted to match the dream reports with the target suggestions. Their matchings did not exceed what would be expected by chance.[17] The second study used twenty-nine highly motivated students who claimed some previous success in dream control or great interest in the topic. They too tried to dream about targets from a list of six dream suggestions. This time, however, the chosen targets were more carefully monitored by the experimenters "so as to be better equated for emotional tone, amount of detailed elaboration of content, and degree of specific personal relevance." This study also covered ten nights, but this time subjects were allowed to pick the nights on which they felt they were most likely to be able to control their dreams. The subjects reported an average of seven dreams. Four independent judges attempted to match these dreams to the target suggestions. Once again, the correct matches did not exceed what would be expected by chance. The authors reached the following conclusion:
A similar lack of results was reported in a laboratory study by a team of Canadian researchers, who assessed physiological reactions as well as dream content. In this study, seven females and three males aged nineteen to twenty-nine were instructed to either increase or decrease their emotional involvement in their dreams on the fourth and sixth nights of seven consecutive nights in the sleep laboratory. There was a slight increase in the variability of heart rate and respiration on experimental nights, but dream content measures did not show the anticipated changes in emotionality. The authors concluded that their instructions induced stress, but no changes in the dreams.[19] Just when it seemed that any form of dream control was near hopeless, a new researcher reported success in the 1990s in reducing nightmares with a technique very different from the one advocated by Stewart. In this approach, nightmare sufferers are asked to write out a new ending of their own choosing, and then to imagine the dream, complete with the new ending, several times each day. This "imagery rehearsal" is a technique of cognitive-behavioral therapy. As noted in the first chapter, it was developed without any influence from the advocates of Senoi Dream Theory. Studies by its originator, Barry Krakow, conducted with the help of several colleagues, suggest that it works to at least some degree for many patients.[20] This finding supports Stewart in the general sense that at least some people seem to have the capacity to "control" nightmarish dreaming if provided with the right techniques. However, the program by which nightmare frequency can be reduced does not fit with Stewart's principles of dream control. First, it is based on allowing people to create their own new endings, not on following rules about what to dream about (confronting danger, going toward pleasure, extracting creative gifts). In some cases, in fact, people pick very unlikely endings, such as being killed by their pursuer, but it works for them. Second, the technique is very individualistic, whereas Stewart claimed that control is learned through socialization within a group. Third, the technique relies on the cognitive strategy of imagery rehearsal, whereas Stewart claimed that dream control is acquired through social reinforcement by esteemed role models. As Stewart put it in his final published statement in 1962:
It is also necessary, in Stewart's view, to share and evaluate dreams in order to gain control of them:
Neither of these claims by Stewart is supported by the work using imagery rehearsal. The clock has run out on Senoi Dream Theory as a technique of dream control. Chapter 6: What Should We Make of All This, If Anything?I believe that the conclusions drawn in the previous chapters can be summarized as follows. First, the Senoi are indeed people worthy of great admiration, and they do have a detailed dream theory, but they do not practice Senoi Dream Theory as Americans know it. Second, Kilton Stewart was a charmer and storyteller who misunderstood Senoi psychology and dream practices, and incorrectly attributed his own ideas to them. Third, Senoi Dream Theory has seemed plausible to many Americans since it caught hold during the turbulent 1960s, but that is because it combined a new application of traditional American ideas about the malleability of human nature with a story about a lost authenticity. Fourth, there is some evidence that dream sharing can be useful, but that's because any kind of intimate sharing tends to be judged positively by group participants. Fifth, there is no good evidence that dream control is possible using Stewart's techniques. Sixth, there is evidence that the frequency of nightmares can be reduced, which can be construed as a form of dream control, but the techniques are very different than those proposed by Stewart. Specific issues about the Senoi, Stewart, and dream control to one side, are there any general morals that we can draw from the research about Senoi Dream Theory? Maybe. First, it is very difficult to study dreams. That's because it is not possible to make them happen (thus rendering the experimental method less useful), and they can't be seen by others or reported by dreamers while they are happening. For the most part, then, researchers have to take people's word for what they dream about, which can be an iffy proposition in many instances. If awakenings in the sleep laboratory are taken as a kind of normative baseline, then many claims about dreaming and dream control outside the laboratory seem to be a product of poetic license. Second, the human capacity for self-deception and the American need to believe in happy endings loom very large. Third, it is always necessary to be skeptical about ideas that have not been tested in systematic ways. Fourth, the unwillingness of the dreamwork movement to reject the claims by Stewart and Garfield about the Senoi suggests that the movement is not open to scientific criticisms and standards. On a more hopeful note, small advances sometimes occur in the study of dreams, often in unforeseen ways. Physiologists stumbled across REM sleep in 1953, which has led to huge further discoveries and, in the case of sleep research, helpful therapeutic interventions that have benefited millions of people. Foulkes unexpectedly found that children do not dream often or well before ages 7-8, which turns dream theorizing in a cognitive direction. Recent work in neuropsychology and neuroimaging suggests there may be a fairly specific neural network for dreaming that can be studied in a variety of ways. Nearly forty years of dream content analysis using the Hall/Van de Castle system has led to some systematic findings that are discussed on this web site, especially in articles and chapters in its dream library. The cognitive-behavioral therapy technique known as imagery rehearsal may be useful in reducing the frequency of nightmares, which would be of real benefit for a large number of people if it is perfected and becomes more generally known. But if the persistence of Senoi Dream Theory is any indication, progress in dream studies will remain slow. ReferencesChapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
 Go back to the Dream Library index.
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