My Story

My mother is responsible for this web site. Let me explain that. About twenty years ago, my mother suffered a cerebral aneurysm in her left frontal lobe above and slightly behind her left eye at her hairline. The neuro-surgery was successful. After Mother was moved, while in a coma, from recovery to intensive care, my family and I walked down the hospital hall with two neurologists assigned to her case as they described what could be expected now that the surgery was successful. The neurologists explained that there would be paralysis on the right side of her body and any recovery from the paralysis would occur within the first year. There would be little or no recovery after that. Mother did recover 90% of her strength and functionality on her right side by the end of the first year. The neurologists also said that Mother's personality would be affected. They went on to say that anyone meeting Mother after her recovery from the aneurysm would notice nothing but a normal woman. However, anyone who knew her before the aneurysm would notice a difference in her personality. We were astonished. We asked, "What do you mean?" "How?" The neurologists answered only that they couldn't explain it. We would have to see for ourselves.

My knowledge of the brain consisted of high school and college biology and of psychology by Psych 101 in college. I went straight to our public library to learn what I could and to understand what the neurologists had told my family and me. I burned through the anatomy, biology and physiology of the brain, as it related to the paralysis, fairly quickly. What eluded me was the psychological explanation of the personality change predicted by the neurologists. My experience with Psych 101, and Freud especially, left me with the impression that this was voodoo science and I held it in very low regard. While I was riffling through the psychology texts, I ran across a book by Thomas Blakeslee titled The Right Brain. It described the "split brain" and claimed the right brain as the "unconscious mind." Wow! Here was the physical location of the thing that gave me so much trouble with Freud, the unconscious mind. I subsequently discovered that the unconscious mind was more complicated than the book presented it to be. But, it did propel me to dig deeper. I discovered Wilson Bryan Key and his presentation of subliminal perception. This led to the more scholarly Norman Dixon and preconscious processing. I investigated hypnosis and then dreaming.

During this personal pursuit of psychological phenomena, I decided to utilize a more formal pursuit and enrolled in psychology courses at the local university. It was while taking a course in Social Psychology and preparing a research paper that I ran across an article by Hubert J. Hermans in the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology" describing the use of of correlations between dreams and everyday issues in life. It wasn't useful in the course research paper, but I realized that this was the key to relating a person's dreams to that person's life. I eventually discontinued taking university courses in order to continue researching more personally interesting subjects.

Oh. The neurologists were right about my mother. She was perfectly normal after her recovery from the neurosugery for the aneurysm she had suffered. There were subtle differences in her personality and one major difference. Mother had been a very emotional person. She knew how she was supposed to act, but, there was no feeling beneath. She never laughed or cried again.