OQ15: A life of dreams with Dr Dave, Part One

Episode descrip­tion:

Do you ever get a feel­ing that your dreams are try­ing to tell you some­thing impor­tant? Do you want to estab­lish com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the uncon­scious? In the next few episodes I talk dreams with “Dr Dave”,  also known as David van Nuys, Ph.D. Dr Dave is the host of the pop­u­lar Shrink Rap Radio Psy­chol­ogy Pod­cast, taught the course Myth, dream and sym­bol at Sonoma State Uni­ver­sity for a num­ber of years, has been a mem­ber of a dream group for over three decades and has inter­viewed many spe­cial­ists on the fas­ci­nat­ing sub­ject of dreams on Shrink Rap Radio.

In Part One of the con­ver­sa­tion Dr Dave sets up the foun­da­tion for talk­ing about dreams pro­vid­ing the back­ground on Freud’s and Jung’s con­tri­bu­tion to the field and describ­ing briefly how the two big minds explained the dreams’ lan­guage of visual metaphors and sym­bols that is some­times hard to under­stand and take seri­ously. Dr Dave also reflects on where dreams come from and what lies at the roots of our thoughts.

After the con­ver­sa­tion, I give a brief sum­mary of how Freud and Jung saw the func­tion of dream­ing and take a few min­utes to intro­duce other the­o­ries that try to give us some clues as to why we dream.

More info about the guest:

David van Nuys, Ph.D, is Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­ogy at Sonoma State Uni­ver­sity and served as that department’s Chair for seven years. He has also taught psy­chol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Mon­tana, the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, and the Uni­ver­sity of New Hamp­shire. He runs a mar­ket research con­sult­ing busi­ness, hosts  Shrink Rap Radio Psy­chol­ogy Pod­cast and Wise Coun­cil Pod­cast  and in 2001 co-authored the book, This is the Zodiac Speak­ing: Into the mind of a ser­ial killer, in which he pro­files the mur­derer in this famous, unsolved case. HBO picked up an option on the book with the idea of pos­si­bly using it as the basis for a mini-series. Over the years David, who is also a father of three, has been involved in ham radio, sport judo, freight train hop­ping, folk gui­tar, piano, did­jeridu, sky div­ing, fly­ing sailplanes, wind­surf­ing, moun­tain bik­ing, road cycling, motor­cy­cles, cross-country ski­ing, down­hill ski­ing, and Tai Chi.

Fea­tured music track:

Although tech­ni­cally Baaszt­ian is not a “musi­cian from Swe­den”,  I think he is more than qual­i­fied to be part of the show: I met him in Upp­sala through the depart­ment of psy­chol­ogy (coin­ci­dence?), he hap­pens to have a Master’s degree in cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy (the plot thick­ens!) and is now doing his Ph.D. in psy­cholin­guis­tics, the study of the psy­cho­log­i­cal and neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal fac­tors that enable humans to acquire, use, com­pre­hend and pro­duce lan­guage (just cool!).

I close the episode by killing lew wal­lace – the track from Baasztian’s lat­est album diag­no­sis: chron­i­cally ironic. Of course, I inquired what Baaszt­ian him­self thought about the some­what vio­lent lyrics and to what degree they they might have to do with his repressed desire for vio­lence but for­tu­nately this seems to be the case when lew wal­lace is sim­ply lew wallace.

We will hear more from Baasztian’s album as I con­tinue my con­ver­sa­tion with Dr Dave in the fol­low­ing episodes. I feel that just like our dreams, Baasztian’s lat­est album can be explored from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. For one thing, it offers a vari­ety of cross-cultural and musi­cal ref­er­ences and reflects his humor.

Episode related resources:

Shrink Rap Radio Psy­chol­ogy Pod­cast with Dr Dave

Inner work: Using Dreams and Active Imag­i­na­tion For Per­sonal Growth  by  Robert A. Johnson

Revon­suo, A. (2000) The Rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams. An evo­lu­tion­ary Hypoth­e­sis of the func­tion of dream­ing. Behav­ioral and Brain Sci­ences, 23(6), (877–901)