The Dream Catchers

At least since the Sumerians began chiseling records on tablets in cuneiform, humans have been, to varying extents, entries in databases. Since long before then, we have sought ways to hold onto our most ephemeral personal data–our dreams–and to try to learn their secrets.

Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity by Rebecca Lemov

In her new book, Database of Dreams, Rebecca Lemov, an associate professor of the history of science at Harvard, looks back to the 1950s, to an unprecedented effort to collect and store “human documents,” the vision of a young psychology researcher named Bert Kaplan and his colleagues on the Committee on Primary Records in Culture and Personality of the National Research Council.

Their goal: To preserve multicultural dreams and life histories via cutting-edge technology that would hold the data forever. The fact that the medium they chose would remain viable for barely a decade, Lemov argues, makes their efforts no less noteworthy.

As a postwar Harvard doctoral student, Kaplan traveled to New Mexico, administering Rorschach tests to, and collecting other psychological data from, members of several Native American nations. But he became concerned about the preservation of his materials and those of other researchers in the region, some of whom had been gathering dream reports for years. He aspired to combine the trendiest data-gathering techniques with the best available data-storage mechanism—the Microcard. In keeping with the fever for information miniaturization at that time, this system reduced standard pages of text to images one-twenty-fourth their size and reproduced them on cards that could be viewed via a desktop “Readex” machine or a portable $25 reader, with the negatives safely stored by the Microcard Corporation.

The project was psychologically as well as technologically forward looking. Dreams had long been harvested and recorded by Jesuits, Jungians, and others, but, Lemov points out, it was almost always “with an eye to supporting a particular theory or cosmology.” Kaplan and his colleagues treated dream reports, whether from the healthy or the ill, whether about demons or grocery lists, as pure data, collecting “the worldly and the otherworldly where they met,” as Lemov puts it. The repository would be available to any researcher at any time. “The mission was based not so much on the question of whether these amassed results were definitive proof of one theory or another,” Lemov notes, “as whether there might not be more questions to ask of the data in the future.”

Although more than half of the database’s records were drawn from Native American populations, primarily in the Southwest, it also curated files, including dream reports, from locales as wide-ranging as Alaska, Brazil, Micronesia, and the Philippines. And it absorbed such diverse collections as the minute-by-minute observations of people confined in sensory-deprivation chambers in attempts to enter into altered states. For sets of data so widely disseminated, Lemov writes, the information was “unprecedentedly intimate.” As the project slowly gained attention, its first set of cards (only four were ever published) sold for $35.

The Microcard collections are still held in some research centers, including the Library of Congress, and, Lemov asserts, they make for fascinating reading.

In the dream collections of anthropologist Dorothy Eggan, who worked primarily in the Hopi nation and made decades of records available to the database, one can track the creeping influence of the larger culture on the reservation. Eggan identified many residents who outwardly held fast to their traditional culture. But their dreams told a different story: Increasingly interspersed with dreams about deities like Spider Woman and Masau’u were those about driving school buses, buying new beds, and encounters with evil spirits that shared both Christian and native elements. At the end of the day, they dreamed of the world they lived in (and often about their dream collectors as well).

The database “rendered the inaccessible accessible,” preserving not just “records of deep loss and profound change, both personal and cultural,” but also insights into “the mystery of change and persistence itself.” No one had ever made such material so widely accessible—certainly not without adding their own layers of interpretation.

Kaplan’s vision, Lemov argues, was a half-century ahead of the technology that has today produced a near universally accessible collection of records. The very idea that this should be a goal, she argues, was a decade ahead of even his most avant-garde contemporaries, some of whom questioned why anyone would go to the trouble and suggested that only researchers with an “anal tendency” would have any interest in such curation. (Today, then, we are all anal.) But Kaplan was insistent that there was treasure in what others saw as trash, that it in fact held “the whole body of empirical observations upon which psychology is based.”

The project’s ethical dilemmas were also ahead of their time. Intimate records such as dream narratives and life stories, traditionally collected for the use of a single research team, were now to be made available in their entirety to anyone with a Microcard reader, raising troubling privacy issues, especially in a time before modern release forms (and with many subjects drawn from preliterate communities). The relative ease with which someone from participants’ hometowns could identify them through their stories was clear. But Kaplan’s panel largely sidestepped what Lemov calls this “unbridgeable gap between privacy and exigency that would become ever more acute.”

Lemov is a historian of science with a passion for the tools of the field. She reminds us that while the evolution of technology is often seen as a grand march from one visionary entrepreneur to the next, that’s not the reality. “Data journeys” rarely run smoothly, and some essential pioneers, like Kaplan, may not even recognize what they contributed. A poor marketer, his sales were limited and his chosen technology, while the best available at the onset of the project, quickly fell into obsolescence. Within a decade the group’s funding had run out, and by 1964 the enterprise had fizzled. He never pursued a similar mission.

And yet, as he predicted, many major psychological and public-health insights today are made precisely by asking new questions of old, and accessible, data sets. Conclusions about obesity and social influence, for example, have been drawn from the longitudinal Framingham Heart study. The Library of Congress has purchased the entire Twitter archive, accumulating at a pace of 20 million-plus messages a day and ripe for study of societal moods and linguistic mores. The accumulating records of Netflix users provide similarly rich data about our culture, just awaiting the queries of social scientists.

Lemov’s contribution informs our understanding not only of how psychological research is managed but also of our own daily contributions, voluntary and otherwise, to a “forever” database already being probed in increasingly intimate fashion. As she writes, it’s “an unfolding world-scale experiment in ever more personal data collection,” one “in which we are all living and all de facto participating.”

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