Common ideas about dreams are woven together from what we know about the average experience of sleep. They don't stretch wide enough to outfit the extraordinary. However, certain intrepid laboratory and field researchers have been stitching together what's unknown or ignored by the mainstream. Their investigations have uncovered bits and pieces of the grander puzzle of dreams. These researchers are beginning to assemble a new picture of the nightly theater of the mind. Completing the tapestry will change how we view, explain and interpret all our dreams.

What's new is the discovery of a body of fact about how dreams construct and present visual material. On that foundation a modern understanding of dreams can be built. Researchers can fashion the rough outlines of this new perspective. But it takes you, the dreamer, to fill in the blanks.

Dream Detection is the personal investigation and application of clues discovered in perceptive dreams during laboratory and field research. It uses this formula to establish a factual foundation for dreams.

Your waking life + Your dreaming life

Illuminated by

Lab + field perceptual research

Perceptive dreams are those that reflect and respond to the influence of waking life. Through stimulus-response experimentation, researchers have uncovered consistent patterns in perceptive dreams. The patterns occur no matter what sort of sleeping experience is being studied. They have been found in nightmares and regular, lucid, flying, prodromic, mutual and psychic dreams. They occur in sensory, subliminal and extrasensory perception. First, you look for perceptual clues in your everyday dreams, because they are easiest to spot. Because each dreamer favors different pattern displays, the preliminary detective work will reveal the quirks and preferences of your unique dreaming mind. This new self-knowledge can then be applied to extraordinary dreams.

Extraordinary dream ­ A dream with unique or remarkable content, often remembered longer than the average dream. The most profound and intense can exert a very real impact on public and private life.

Why Dream Detection? By and large, dream understanding hasn't relied on reality checks. Instead of keeping pace with current standards of investigation, dreams have been subject to centuries of ungrounded opinion, unfounded faith, untested theory and urban legends. The only way out of the confusion is to begin with a core of verifiable information as the secure anchor or ground control for further exploration into the far reaches of dreamspace. Research into extraordinary dreams is often ignored by mainstream science, yet it conforms to scientific standards of investigation. The essential patterns for detective work didn't become apparent until extraordinary dreams were included in the analysis.

The Practical Applications of Dream Detection * Diagnosing and preventing nightmares * Tracking the links between lucid and out-of-body dreams * Relaying health warnings in prodromic dreams * Discovering disguised psychic phenomena * Identifying dream characters * Finding the trigger for a favorite dream * Establishing ethics of mutual dreaming * Laying the groundwork for reliable dream interpretation

The Three Types of Dream Content

A dream is an experience of sleep. Although many other incidents have been called "dream," only sleeping events truly qualify. Sleep gives the content of the dream characteristics unlike any waking state of consciousness.

Dream content is the performance that plays in the movie theater of your sleeping mind. It's what you recognize, recall and tag with words after you wake up. Traditional interpretation and analysis apply to dream content that's obvious, in your face, on the surface of the screen. But extraordinary dreams depend on what's ignored, dismissed or hidden behind the scenes.

There are 3 main kinds of dream content.

Self-Involvement	Special Effects	Perception
It all circles around you	It's about the nature of the dream world	It's about seeing through your self-absorption and behind the special effects

Self-involvement occurs when you sleep oblivious to the outside world. The movies in your mind are mental reveries and emotional reactions that arise out of your private thoughts and feelings. The dream is your own reality blanket and you are totally wrapped up in yourself. This psychoanalytic perspective is currently the most popular view of dreams.

Reverie: wandering mind, talking to yourself, mental rehearsal, conjecture, storytelling Reaction: fear, desire, anxiety, emotional concerns, bias, projection.

Self-involvement relies on the notion that a dream is all in your head. The content comes from either mix-and-match memories of the past or on-the-spot weirdness produced by sleep. The idea of sleeping like a hermit in a cave supports these common assumptions.

Dreams are internal * Dreams are private * Dreams are immaterial Dreams are delusional * Dreams are uncontrollable * Dreams are unreal

At best, these presumptions are only true for self-involved dreams. They ignore inherent dream nature and the fact that dreams can respond to what's beyond ourselves.