Author Info

I was trained as a theoretical physicist at the University of Notre Dame and subsequently worked as a product development chemist and eventually as the Director of Research and Development of the Minwax Co.; I currently work at a U.S. government national laboratory as a Senior Technical Writer/Editor. Why someone with such a background is today writing extensively about psychology, dreaming, and sleep is a long story, the recounting of which is not pertinent to the purposes of this website.

Recently, however, a friend asked me to tell the story, anyway, so here goes. The research project was initially motivated by personal considerations. I was born roughly at the start of World War II, which means that I grew up during a period of great social change, as the United States made the transition to a super-rich industrial society. Life got better seemingly for everyone as the years went on, but not for me, and I didn’t understand why.

My problem was with the so-called American Dream. For me, it meant, acquiring a good-paying job and wife, buying a home of my own and other nice things like a big flashy car, and having a lot of kids. That was it; that was all life was about, so I was taught. My problem was that there seemed to be a lot more to life that wasn’t included in this simple vision, yet I really didn’t have a clue about what all that was.

My Poster Person for my problem was my father, who had nominally achieved a measure of the American Dream, yet was not happy with his life. He hated his job; nevertheless, his job was the only meaningful activity he had. He had no other interests. When he wasn’t working, all he could think to do was sleep, watch TV, putter around the house, or go fishing. His life alternated between working at a job he hated and charging his batteries so that he could continue going back to work.

During the ‘60s I came to realize that my personal problem was shared by many people. At that time, many people openly criticized the American Dream and the value system supporting it and experimented with alternative lifestyles. I wasn’t one of those, because it seemed to me that these people were living junky, escapist lives; I knew of no one who had actually solved the problem, which I had formulated as finding a way of holding onto the meaningfulness the American Dream offered while including all of the other things life seemed to offer.

Not knowing how to move my life forward, I stayed in school, studying physics. I did this because I was interested in physics, but also because I felt that if I could get a Ph.D. in physics, I should be able to go into any field I wanted, when I found out what it was that I wanted to do. All I knew that I was interested in was writing. I figured that a physics degree would get me a plushy job in a university where I would have plenty of free time to write on whatever subject interested me. This was soon after Russia launched the Sputnik satellite when the government was deluging science programs with money.

Having rejected the credibility of my own country’s values as a way of going forward, I recognized that the kind of answer I was seeking should not be tainted by my cultural upbringing. This led me to study history and other cultures on the side. Again my focus was on how cultures create meaning. I was struck by how malleable humans are and by how readily people buy into a culture’s simplistic, ready-made answers. I concluded that part of the reason was that cultural answers guide people toward living meaningful lives, that these answers—no matter how crudely phrased—were grounded in fundamental human needs. The other part of the answer was that people were desperate for prepackaged answers because they had no clue about how to base their lives on individualistic desires. Bored? Tough. There is more.

These conclusions were disheartening because they led to the understanding that there was nothing basically wrong with the American Dream and the value system that supports it as a general framework. The problem was that to make this approach work at a time when people have the opportunity to do much more with their lives than merely survive requires that they find some way of grounding their lives in who they fundamentally are, and then use that understanding to fill in the details of their lives. This meant that I had to find some approach to psychological understanding that would enable people (including myself) to do this.

In studying other cultures, I was struck by the fact that people’s lives are governed largely by beliefs defining concepts of reality. So I started trying to develop a psychology of everyday life based on that, and do it in a way that was free of cultural taint. It struck me that if I was right—if people process information they receive each day about themselves and life and modify their personal belief systems accordingly a day at a time—then sleep must be largely devoted to information processing, as this information processing is too important and too complicated to take place on a catch-as-catch-can basis. If I was right about the fundamental nature of beliefs, it should be possible to understand sleep as an information-processing activity. That’s how I got started studying sleep, as a test of my general psychological stance. My success motivated me to take the next step, which was to develop psychoanalytic skills. I say success because I belief the viewpoint I developed is fundamentally correct. The only thing wrong with it is that it seems to imply that individual neuron know what they are doing in working on life problems. It actually doesn’t suppose that, but the language I used creates that impression because I don’t know enough about neural function (no one else does either) to develop more accurate language.

Actually I began developing psychoanalytic skills within the context of my study of sleep. It hit me one day that if I was such an expert on sleep, I ought to know how to interpret dreams in a way based on logical consequences of the viewpoint I used to understand sleep. That led me to study Freud’s so-called Irma dream, which led me to make what I thought were rather peculiar assumptions about how people operate unconsciously. It was at this point that I came across Joe Weiss’s writings, and I was incredibly encouraged to find him advocating the same positions. He was a hotshot head of a psychoanalytic group, while I (after quitting a job as a Research Director and spending all of my savings so I could live three years without working) was a lowly cabdriver. So I didn’t contact him at that time. Having gotten to know Joe much later in life, I realize now that he would have welcomed the letter I started writing many times but never sent. It is the greatest regret in my life that I never sent that letter.

When I was at Notre Dame supposedly working on my thesis on adding spin vibrations to the Onsager solution of the Ising model of phase transitions, I actually spent my time trying to write a self-help book. But I couldn’t get far at that time because I had much to learn. The website contains what I learned between then and now.