The
dream doctor Charles McPhee ’85 interprets nighttime visions
Charles
McPhee ’85 has amassed the world’s largest database
of dreams, some 500,000. (courtesy Charles McPhee ’85)
A woman from Minneapolis called The Dream Doctor Show,
a nationally syndicated radio program hosted by Charles McPhee ’85,
to ask about a recurring dream. A baby and the flesh-eating Hannibal
Lecter, who had been frozen and thawed, are chasing her and trying
to eat her. McPhee, aka the Dream Doctor, quickly found out that
the woman, 34 and single, desperately wanted to meet a partner and
have a child. Recounting the phone call during an interview, McPhee
said he told her that her dream symbolized concerns about becoming
a mother. And those concerns, he said, “were consuming her.”
McPhee has made a career of helping people make sense of their
nighttime visions. Through his Web site (www.dreamdoctor.com) and
The Dream Doctor Show, which airs weeknights across the United States,
McPhee interprets people’s dreams and offers advice about
how to deal with the real-life issues they reflect. His advice to
the woman from Minneapolis: Acknowledge your fears of being childless,
talk openly about your feelings with friends, socialize ... and
hunt that man down — her future husband, not Hannibal Lecter.
McPhee’s Web site includes information about different kinds
of dreams, sleep disorders, tips on improving sleep, and a dream
symbols dictionary. Crashing planes and oversleeping for an exam,
for example, have to do with career concerns; kittens are related
to fertility; and fire is a common metaphor for a crisis that needs
attention, he says.
Dreamology — at least the way he practices it— is
no crackpot science, says McPhee. He has studied sleep disorders
and dreams for some 20 years. McPhee, a nephew of writer and professor
John McPhee ’53, first got interested in dreams as a freshman
at Princeton when he started having lucid dreams, in which the dreamer
is aware that he is dreaming and can even act in the dream. McPhee
headed to Firestone and read everything he could on the subject
— which didn’t take very long, he says. There’s
no academic field of dreamology. He wrote his senior thesis in the
sociology department on lucid dreaming and later expanded his thesis
into his first book, Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams (1995).
After college he coordinated the sleep research laboratory at
the National Institute of Mental Health; later he was certified
by the Board of Registered Polysomnographic Technologists to perform
sleep-disorder testing, earned a master’s in communication
management from the University of Southern California, and directed
the sleep apnea patient-treatment program at the Sleep Disorders
Center of Santa Barbara. Since 1998, he has focused on dream interpretation
and has amassed the world’s largest database of dreams —
some 500,000, mostly through his Web site.
A common misconception about dreams, he says, is that “they
are about far-out things or mystical.” But common dreams that
we all have, he says, are always about practical, down-to-earth
concerns, such as careers, frustration with reaching our goals,
romantic relationships, and children.
To help remember your dreams, he says, you can tell yourself before
you go to sleep to remember them and then try to recall them as
soon as you wake up. McPhee keeps a dream diary. Every morning he
and his wife talk about their dreams. About their meaning, he says,
“we’re rarely stumped.”
