John Wren-Lewis
Artie Shaw
Dreamed c. 1971/8/17 by John Wren-Lewis as told by his wife Ann Faraday
Introduction: ESP as Radar
...the observation that telepathy seems like prying or spying is interesting, for it makes the "receiver" of the information the active agent reading the other person's mind, in contrast to the model of "mental radio" on which most telepathy experiments are based. The mental radio model implies someone actively trying to send out messages to a relatively passive recipient, whereas... radar scan[s] the environment for something either threatening or desired. This is congruous with the mind's "normal" ability to pick up subtle impressions and vibes without our being aware of them until they turn up in dreams. The radar model also puts telepathy in the same category as clairvoyance and precognition, which do not involve a sender.
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John Wren-Lewis |
The radar model does not, of course, explain how ESP is able to work in defiance of the present laws of physics, but it may direct our thinking and research into new areas--and Einstein himself once said that in physics the proper formulation of a problem is often more important than its solution.
When I came to apply the psychic radar model to the dream diaries available to me, a pattern began to emerge which enabled me to formulate a hypothesis about the psychodynamics of ESP in dreams, and I can best introduce it by describing one of John's most spectacular displays of apparent ESP dreaming.
The Dream
When I was enjoying the first success of Dream Power in the United States, John dreamed of writing a novel in which he himself was the hero and the villain was the head of a secret British government research station who intended to seize power for himself with the aid of a newly developed spy plane.We had little time to work on the dream, for I was currently appearing on several TV and radio shows every day, but John felt its essential meaning lay in the spy plane. He confessed to feeling jealous of my success and resonated to the notion that one part of himself would like to have a magic spy plane that would enable him to keep an eye on me. Lord Snow was someone who had helped him in his career in England, but he had practically no associations to Artie Shaw, whom he had never met and remembered only as a bandleader of the 1930s and 1940s.In the dream John modeled one character of his story, a member of the government to whom he turned for help, on a real-life member of the British House of Lords, Lord Snow, but realizing he would have to give him a fictitious name, decided to call him Artie Shaw. The novel ended with John denouncing the villain and being covered with glory.
Mike Douglas, talkshow host |
We then forgot about the dream until two weeks later when I found myself at the studios of the Mike Douglas show in Philadelphia, being introduced to Artie Shaw, who was to be the principal guest that day. This came as a complete surprise, since I had been told that the main guest was to be Peter Ustinov. Apparently he had cancelled at the last minute, and Artie Shaw had agreed to take his place. Naturally we told Artie that John had been dreaming about him, and when he expressed interest, we took the dream out of the folder we carried around with us and showed it to him.
Artie Shaw, bandleader--and writer |
As he read the dream his face paled, and when he had finished he asked John to swear that he knew nothing about his private life. John replied that as a Britisher, he had not even kept up with his public life and had to confess that Artie Shaw was just a name to him. Artie then told us that he had once written a novel under the pseudonym of Adam Snow, but very few people knew of this.
Within minutes the story of John's amazing precognition went around the studio, and when Mike Douglas interviewed me on the show itself his first question was, "I hear your husband has been dreaming about Artie. Tell us about it." I did, and it stole the show. The rest of the guests, including Artie, joined in the discussion--and John was the hero of the hour.
There is a clear parallel here with the cases of ESP in the consulting room, for John's heart had a need which his head forbade him to gratify directly. Any attempt to upstage me deliberately would have made me angry and spoiled his own self-image as the good, sensible, unselfish husband--just as Freud's Mr. Foresight could not demand more attention outright without losing his self-image as the "good boy" patient and being told by Freud that he was showing infantile dependency needs... the psychoanalytic patients seemed to restrict themselves to spying on their analysts to impress them and capture their attention, [but] John's psychic radar (or spy plane) swept out into the future to find a situation where he could upstage me on a major national TV show without taking any responsibility for doing so, and in a way that neither I nor anyone else could possibly grudge him.
There was probably no other way in which John's underdog could have got what he was after so effectively, for Artie turned out to be interested in dreams, ESP, group therapy, and related subjects, and had a radio show of his own in New York on which he interviewed people working in different branches of the human potential movement. Having impressed Artie with his powers of precognition, there was every likelihood of John's being invited on his show.
EDITOR'S NOTE
I posted this dream to show Faraday's model of ESP--and because it's funny. With fifty years of hindsight, I admire how she ignores the fraternity of skeptics (and it is a fraternity: strongly skewing male) who still try to confine the ESP debate to its conflict with whatever physics is saying this week; instead she turns feminist eyes on ordinary people's experience and use of apparent ESP. Not proof, but life.
Her sonar model has the virtue of explaining why ESP is so spotty--we can't get echoes of things we don't scan for! What we get reflects what we worry about.
Mind you, I don't believe all ESP experiences are generated by strong underdoggy feelings, any more than I find Jungian, Gestalt or any other dream-theories applicable to every dream. Dream researchers from Alfred Maury in 1850 (Guillotine), through JW Dunne in 1900 (Factory Fire), and even me in 1983 (Fanfare Foreseen) and 1996 (The Rhamphorhynchus Question) record paranormal experiences driven by pure research-curiosity, not by strong (underdoggy) feelings. And shamans (and occasionally therapists) routinely report paranormal experiences meant to help clients, not driven by their own needs at all, as with Jung c.1925 (Scarab).
But universal or not, Artie Shaw is a wittily told example of a type to watch for--like Freudian slips, Jungian shadows, and Gestalt topdogs. Such sonar dreams are doubly useful. They bare more than others' secrets; they bare what you care about.
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: The Dream Game, Ann Faraday, Harper & Row, 1976 ed.; pp 318-321. Passage untitled; 'Artie Shaw' added to aid searches. Dream Power published 1972; IMDB lists Shaw's last appearance on Mike Douglas as 1971/9/1, hence tentative date for dream. Wikipedia has Artie Shaw's alter ego as Albie Snow, not Adam Snow.
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