What is it with some linguists and claiming a mysterious relationship between English and Hebrew? First there's Isaac Mozeson, the literature professor (I hesitate to use the term "linguist") who maintains that all English words can be traced to Hebrew. Then there's Ernest Klein, a rabbi/linguist who saw Semitic origins where other scholars didn't. I never expected John McWhorter of all people to enter the fray. But he does, in a recent book that features an eccentric theory about early Semitic influence on the language that would become English.
Superficial relationships
Even in my early childhood, I noticed resemblances between certain Hebrew words and their English counterparts: camel is gamal, wine is yayin, and earth is eretz. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Animal names often come from languages spoken in the region where the animal is found. Hence, moose comes from a Native American tongue, and camel comes from a Middle Eastern Semitic tongue that may or may not have been Hebrew, but was certainly related. Similarly, the ancients would have referred to wine using the term from the culture that first disseminated the drink, just as we today adopted the Japanese word sushi instead of inventing our own term using pure-English roots (e.g. "seafood roll"). As for eretz and "earth," that's probably just a coincidence.
That last statement, in my experience, often provokes the response, "I don't believe in coincidence." But it has nothing to do with coincidence in a cosmic sense. The Hawaiian word kahuna meaning "priest" sounds remarkably similar to the Hebrew word for priest, but unless you can devise a story about an ancient encounter between Semitic tribes and Polynesians, it is likely that the two languages just happened to hit upon the same combination of sound and meaning in this one instant. These things happen from time to time.
Isaac Mozeson
In his 1988 book The Word, Mozeson maintains not only that the English language (as well as all other languages) comes directly from Hebrew, "the language of Eden," but that this fact can be discerned by examining the roots of English words. According to Mozeson, "Hebrew vocabulary has as much affinity with English as it has with Arabic. More English words can be clearly linked to Biblical Hebrew than to Latin, Greek, or French."
As for the Indo-European theory of modern linguistics, Mozeson argues that it is nothing more than a racist plot by white Gentiles to segregate their languages from other cultures and undermine the eternal truth of the Torah. As Mozeson puts it, "The third son of Noah, Ham, is behind the generic term for African languages, and white gentiles in the linguistic community have no trouble with the evidence of a related Hamito-Semitic language family. Let the Blacks and Jews share the ghetto, whisper the professors, as long as Indo-European remains lily white." It never seems to occur to him what the "Indo" part of the theory signifies.
The book is filled with his unorthodox etymologies. "Sparrow," he claims, comes from the Hebrew tzipor ("bird"). The English word "lad" derives from the Hebrew yeled ("boy"). "Direction" comes from derekh ("path, way"). He even traces "samurai" to the Hebrew shomer ("guardian")--via Japanese, of course.
This is all quite clever. But I can't help thinking of the father in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding who insists that if you give him any English word, he can explain how it is derived from Greek. He shows how it's done with some easy examples, like arachnophobia. Then one of the kids says "kimono!" The father is stopped short for a moment, then he explains that it comes from the Greek word for winter, himona, and in winter you stay warm by wearing a robe--kimono!
If Mozeson considered other theories, he'd find his own wanting. For example, mainstream linguists trace the word direction to the Latin directus, which is the past participle of the verb dirigere, "to set straight." That word comes from a combination of dis- ("apart") and regere ("to guide"). Not exactly a plausible candidate for connecting with the Hebrew derekh. But Mozeson disregards the mass of historical and literary evidence, as well as the theories of systematic sound change between languages, used by mainstream linguists to establish cognates. Ironically, Mozeson's picture of language evolution makes the process seem far more random and haphazard than in mainstream linguistics.
Of course, his method could be used to "prove" that any language came from any other language. John McWhorter demonstrated this in his 2003 book Power of Babel. Not specifically in reference to Mozeson or any other crank linguist, McWhorter "proves" that Japanese comes from English, based on the following words:
sagaru: hang down (i.e. "sag")
namae: name
mono: thing, single entity
nai: not
mo: more
miru: see (hence, "mirror")
taberu: eat (hence, "table," where one eats)
atsui (ott-SOO-ee): hot
hito: man (i.e. "he")
yo: emphatic particle (i.e. "Yo!")
kuu: feed your face (i.e. "chew")
inki: dark-spirited or glum (hence, "inky")
I actually think Japanese shows a close relationship to Hebrew. In Hebrew, karati means "I read." And what people are more in need of learning self-defense than the guys with their noses in books?
Ernest Klein
Klein was a linguist and Orthodox rabbi best known for two works: an etymological dictionary of English, and one of Hebrew. He had a tendency to suggest Semitic origins for English words more often than other scholars did. Unlike Mozeson, however, he worked entirely within the framework of mainstream linguistics, and in fact his dictionaries are widely respected works of scholarship. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which has had considerable influence across the Internet, relies a great deal on Klein's research. One time I was reading a word-origin blog that traced the word traffic to the Arabic tafriq meaning "distribution." I immediately suspected--and quickly confirmed--that the blogger had gotten his information from the Online Etymology Dictionary and ultimately from Klein.
John McWhorter
In his earlier books on linguistics, McWhorter mainly attempted to explain the views of professional linguists before the general public. He does some of that in his latest book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, talking about the flaws in conventional conceptions of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as well as debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that a language's grammatical properties affect its speakers' thought processes). But he also proposes some theories he admits few linguists accept.
For the purposes of this blog entry, I will mention just one of the theories: He thinks that the Phoenicians, who spoke a language very similar to Hebrew, made their way to the area that is now Germany and Denmark and had such a profound effect on the languages spoken there that the entire Germanic subfamily (which includes modern German, Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages) was the result of Semitic-speaking adults struggling to learn an Indo-European tongue.
Linguists have long believed that Proto-Germanic underwent strong non-IE influence. For one thing, one-third of Proto-Germanic vocabulary cannot be traced to IE roots. McWhorter discusses several lines of evidence, including Proto-Germanic's substitution of fricatives for stop consonants (compare English's father with Latin's pater), its tendency to put verbs into the past tense by simply changing the vowel (e.g. drink/drank), and its extreme simplification of the IE case system.
McWhorter speculates on a possible connection between certain Germanic and Semitic roots, such as the English word fright compared with the Semitic root p-r-kh meaning "to fear." Particularly interesting is his attempt to connect the names of two Germanic deities, Phol and Balder, with the Phoenician god Baal. Also, an archeologist allegedly found the remains of a Phoenician cooking pot in the shallows of the North Sea.
McWhorter is quick to admit that none of this comes close to proving his case; he simply argues that his hypothesis is an intriguing possibility worthy of further investigation.
Final thought: the line between cranks and scholars
Etymology is far from an exact science. Look in any dictionary, and you will find scores of words with unknown origins. In those situations, even the professionals end up resorting to guesswork, some of it as crude and far-fetched as anything Isaac Mozeson could have dreamed up. The difference, I suppose, is that legitimate researchers try to gather up as many facts as they can, and acknowledge when the limits have been reached. Usually.
Showing posts with label pseudoscience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pseudoscience. Show all posts
Monday, April 06, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Crazy professors
Just about everyone who has been through college has stories about crazy professors. I'll tell you a couple of mine.My first encounter with one came in my second year of community college, in a required course focusing on several thinkers who shaped the modern world including Darwin, Marx, Toynbee, and Einstein. The teacher was an African Sorbonne graduate who wore his watch on the pulse side of his wrist. I had an inkling of his ideological leanings when he criticized our assigned textbook as "too Eurocentric."
There are times when even I question Eurocentrism in traditional histories. As I suspected, however, this professor was merely replacing one "centrism" with another. I could feel his frustration as he looked for openings in the assigned material to tell us about his beliefs, which included the idea that much of Ancient Greek civilization was "stolen" from black Egyptians. It wasn't easy for him, since he was assigned to be teaching us about DWEMs (Dead White European Males). I was immune to his digressions because on the first day, I had gone to the library and borrowed a copy of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa, which debunks Afrocentrist claims about history. I learned more from that book than I did from the entire course.
He was only a moderate Afrocentrist. At the extremes is Professor Leonard Jeffries of City College in New York, who holds that mankind is divided into "ice people," comprising those of European descent, and "sun people," comprising everyone else. Ice people are violent, materialistic exploiters, while sun people are kind, compassionate peacemakers. Dr. Jeffries also maintains that Jews financed the slave trade and continue to use Hollywood to promote black subservience. It's like he took the Nazis' master-race theory and flipped it around. Around the Jews, that is.
Later on, I got an American history professor who was almost as weird as the Afrocentrist guy, though in a different way. He looked like a character out of Roald Dahl: slight build, pointy nose, pencil-thin mustache. The oddest thing about his appearance was his hair. "Never trust a professor with strange hair" should be my motto. He looked like he would have been an ordinary bald man except that he had a big clump of hair resting on top, almost like a cockatoo. Bad use of monoxodil, I thought.
On the first day, he mentioned that previous students had complained he hadn't made his teaching relevant to the current times. He promised not to make that mistake with us. He kept his promise. For one thing, he had a relentless obsession with Bill Clinton, whom he considered the most corrupt president since Nixon. (This was a while before the Lewinsky scandal.) Throughout his lectures, he kept throwing in comments about how "Slick Willy" and his wife were letting the country go to waste.
He didn't seem to recognize any boundary between fact and opinion. FDR, he taught us, was a great president, though not because of his liberalism. Truman was overrated, Eisenhower was underrated, and Vietnam was unwinnable. The prof's most fervent belief was that there was a conspiracy behind JFK's assassination. He wasn't sure of the nature of the conspiracy, he just knew beyond any doubt that there was one. And he let us argue our favored conspiracy theory on the final exam for extra credit. Accepting the findings of the Warren Commission wasn't an option.
For several years afterward, I went mad trying to read up as much as I could on the stuff we had covered, which I felt had been tainted by the guy's political and ideological proclivities. I eventually concluded that apart from his hangups about Clinton and JFK, he was reasonably fair and accurate most of the time.
I'm not implying these two professors were in any way representative of my overall college experience. After I transferred to U. of Maryland, I no longer met any ideological fruitcakes. A few of my professors there articulated liberal political views in front of the whole class, a practice I considered unprofessional (at least in non-political courses). But there was relatively little weirdness and flakiness. Yet the fact I encountered this sort of thing at all is significant. These are the kinds of experiences you hear and read about, and can't believe when they're actually happening to you.
P.S. For those who may not be aware, the picture at the start of this post is of the late comedian Sam Kinison playing a crazy professor in this scene from the 1986 movie Back to School.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
More bigotry chopping
[If you visited this blog Monday morning, you may have seen a post appear and disappear. What happened was that I decided to use the post as the basis for a letter to the Washington Post. I immediately received an automated email from the paper telling me several guidelines, among them that they would not publish my letter if I had posted anything similar to a website. I quickly deleted the blog post, though the paper's staff subsequently told me I could reinstate it as soon as the letter was published, and today it was. Here is the original post.]
At a 2000 conference, James Watson asserted that dark-skinned people have stronger sex drives than light-skinned people. "That's why you have Latin lovers," he said. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient." When I first read about this incident, I was sure he was jerking people's chains. Only gradually did I learn that he has a long history of defending theories linking race with behavior and intelligence. But in a recent column, Henry Louis Gates argues that Watson is not a racist but a "racialist."
I'm familiar with the term "racialist." White supremacists use it all the time to describe their own beliefs. But I've never before heard anyone in the mainstream suggest it is distinct from racism. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was coined in the early twentieth century to describe British and South African discriminatory policies. The word racism emerged later, in reference to doctrines of the Third Reich. There was no essential difference between the two words (and according to many dictionaries, there still isn't). Racism simply became the more popular of the two.
But the meaning of racism has changed with the social climate. Few people today openly espouse racist beliefs. Instead, the perception is that racial prejudice lurks inside many people without their necessarily being consciously aware of it.
According to some observers, virtually everyone is a little racist. Blogger Julian Sanchez recently elaborated on this point: "It's the subliminal reaction of the manager looking for a new cashier who, for some reason he can't articulate, just doesn't think the minority candidate seems quite trustworthy enough." Megan McArdle considers this argument overkill: "With civil rights, we were asking people to slay dragons. Now we're asking them to spend the rest of their lives exterminating mosquitos." And it puts those accused of racism in a Catch-22 where denying the charges is practically tantamount to admitting to them. As Geoffrey Nunberg remarked, the statement "I'm not a racist" has come to sound like "I don't have any homosexual anxiety."
Not everyone takes such an extreme perspective, but most people these days do think of racism as more of a mindset than an ideology. The latter is reserved for the older term racialism. But you'd think it would still be considered at least a form of racism.
Gates, incredibly, doesn't think so. He admits that he doesn't agree with Watson: "Watson's error is that he is too eager to map individual genetic differences (which do exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and highly malleable), and to provide a genetic explanation for ethnic differences." But despite some skepticism about Watson's motives, Gates refuses to call him a "garden-variety racist."
Gates avoids the question of why Watson would be tempted by racialist theories in the first place. One of Watson's comments in particular suggests that his beliefs do not stem from science: "people who have to deal with black employees find that [the belief that everyone is equal] is not true." That's nothing more than good old-fashioned bigotry, and it refutes the idea that Watson is an openminded truth-seeker interested only in the data.
Gates writes that his conversation with Watson has reluctantly convinced him that "the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table." But why reach that conclusion simply because a great scientist does? Has Gates examined other views? Scientists are human like the rest of us, and, in principle, just as capable of believing erroneous things as anyone else.
When I read articles like this, I begin to wonder if we've all lost sight of what racism means. When we talk about it as a defect in thought or behavior, we forget that the intellectual justification for such attitudes was once widely accepted in society. That changed for intellectual as well as moral reasons, and we ought to remember what those are.
(Note: The title of this post is taken from an earlier post of mine, which happens to converge in theme.)
At a 2000 conference, James Watson asserted that dark-skinned people have stronger sex drives than light-skinned people. "That's why you have Latin lovers," he said. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient." When I first read about this incident, I was sure he was jerking people's chains. Only gradually did I learn that he has a long history of defending theories linking race with behavior and intelligence. But in a recent column, Henry Louis Gates argues that Watson is not a racist but a "racialist."
I'm familiar with the term "racialist." White supremacists use it all the time to describe their own beliefs. But I've never before heard anyone in the mainstream suggest it is distinct from racism. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was coined in the early twentieth century to describe British and South African discriminatory policies. The word racism emerged later, in reference to doctrines of the Third Reich. There was no essential difference between the two words (and according to many dictionaries, there still isn't). Racism simply became the more popular of the two.
But the meaning of racism has changed with the social climate. Few people today openly espouse racist beliefs. Instead, the perception is that racial prejudice lurks inside many people without their necessarily being consciously aware of it.
According to some observers, virtually everyone is a little racist. Blogger Julian Sanchez recently elaborated on this point: "It's the subliminal reaction of the manager looking for a new cashier who, for some reason he can't articulate, just doesn't think the minority candidate seems quite trustworthy enough." Megan McArdle considers this argument overkill: "With civil rights, we were asking people to slay dragons. Now we're asking them to spend the rest of their lives exterminating mosquitos." And it puts those accused of racism in a Catch-22 where denying the charges is practically tantamount to admitting to them. As Geoffrey Nunberg remarked, the statement "I'm not a racist" has come to sound like "I don't have any homosexual anxiety."
Not everyone takes such an extreme perspective, but most people these days do think of racism as more of a mindset than an ideology. The latter is reserved for the older term racialism. But you'd think it would still be considered at least a form of racism.
Gates, incredibly, doesn't think so. He admits that he doesn't agree with Watson: "Watson's error is that he is too eager to map individual genetic differences (which do exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and highly malleable), and to provide a genetic explanation for ethnic differences." But despite some skepticism about Watson's motives, Gates refuses to call him a "garden-variety racist."
Gates avoids the question of why Watson would be tempted by racialist theories in the first place. One of Watson's comments in particular suggests that his beliefs do not stem from science: "people who have to deal with black employees find that [the belief that everyone is equal] is not true." That's nothing more than good old-fashioned bigotry, and it refutes the idea that Watson is an openminded truth-seeker interested only in the data.
Gates writes that his conversation with Watson has reluctantly convinced him that "the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table." But why reach that conclusion simply because a great scientist does? Has Gates examined other views? Scientists are human like the rest of us, and, in principle, just as capable of believing erroneous things as anyone else.
When I read articles like this, I begin to wonder if we've all lost sight of what racism means. When we talk about it as a defect in thought or behavior, we forget that the intellectual justification for such attitudes was once widely accepted in society. That changed for intellectual as well as moral reasons, and we ought to remember what those are.
(Note: The title of this post is taken from an earlier post of mine, which happens to converge in theme.)
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Interpreting dreams
According to popular dream interpretation manuals, if you dream about a cat, that means you are thinking about female sexuality. Parrots in dreams, on the other hand, symbolize gossip, or that "a message is being conveyed to you," or that "someone is being repetitive or even mocking you." I mention all this because I had lots of cat dreams as a child, and plenty of parrot dreams as a teenager. Of course, the fact that I've been around cats since I was four, and acquired a cockatiel when I was older, has nothing to do with it.
Never do these manuals stop to consider that dreams might be based on memories of daytime experiences. They always start from the assumption that all concrete objects are metaphors for suppressed emotions and anxieties, often of a sexual nature. Where they get these explanations I have no idea. It all sounds to me like a rather clichéd attempt to apply literary analysis (with Freudian overtones) to dream narratives.
Still, it's curious that some dreams seem so widespread. For example, lots of people report dreaming about accidentally going outside without clothing. Other common dreams include flying, or falling, or having one's teeth fall out, or facing an exam after having forgotten to come to class the entire semester. If dreams are particular to individuals, why are some of the most absurd ones nearly universal?
My personal theory is that dreams depict events that we expect might happen based on our life experiences. Many dreams consist of little more than distorted memories mixed together. Whenever I dream about an experience I've never had, I get the sense that my dreaming mind believes it could happen. There are things I desire which I never dream about, because I don't expect them to happen. Thus, I'm inclined to reject Freud's theory of dreams as wish fulfillment, even though I know he would argue that my subconscious mind suppresses my true desires.
An important mechanism in dreams is exaggeration. I once dreamt I was visiting a friend who in real life has one cat, but in the dream had five. I've also had dreams in which my own pets spoke English--not just my parrot, but my cats as well. I believe this reflects the way I anthropomorphize animals, thinking of them in such human terms that I practically expect them to talk. Only common sense (which I lack during sleep) makes me know better.
What about nightmares? How do they fit my theory? The answer is that when we're anxious about something, some part of us expects it to happen. That explains the feeling of inevitability in nightmares, nicely captured in The Wizard of Oz when the lion appears as soon as Dorothy begins worrying about "lions and tigers and bears." Those dreams in which we triumph over scary things, as Dorothy ultimately does, reflect our confidence.
As for the dreams where we walk outside without clothes, I suspect that they stem from our anxiety over relying on habit to get through daily routines. Most of the time when we dress ourselves, we aren't thinking about the activity at all. Just as we're occasionally forgetful with other habitual activities, it is semi-plausible (and I believe it has happened) that someone might forget to put on a vital piece of clothing. In the embellished world of a dream, that fear translates into reality.
As it stands, scientists now believe that REM sleep (the period in which most of our dreams occur) serves a memory-related function. It almost appears as if we're not meant to remember any of our dreams. We experience a kind of amnesia upon awakening, in which we quickly forget what we were dreaming about, unless we make a special effort to remember.
There are people who claim never to dream, but scientists assert that everybody dreams. Some people just don't remember. How do scientists know? In the sleep experiments of the 1950s which revolutionized the field, all the subjects, even those who initially denied ever dreaming, ended up reporting dreams at the moment the researchers awoke them from REM sleep.
The study of dreams presents many scientific difficulties. If a person says, "I dreamt I was a dog last night," we have to take his word for it. It's like basing our testimony on an amnesia patient who was the only witness to an event. We know that dreams don't occur in physical reality, but how can we verify that they occur at all? How do we know, as scientists currently believe, that they are hallucinatory experiences that occur in real time during REM sleep?
The 1950s researchers would awake sleepers who had just gone through a REM cycle (detected with an electroencephalogram) and ask them to approximate how long their dream had lasted. The scientists found a positive correlation between the length of the dream reported and the length of the REM cycle observed. They also studied the effects of external stimuli on dreams. In one case, a scientist dripped water down a subject's back thirty seconds before waking him. The subject reported having dreamt about singing at an opera, when molten wax suddenly began dripping from the ceiling.
The best book on dreaming I've read is J. Allan Hobson's 1988 The Dreaming Brain, which includes a remarkable amount of scientific information (much of which went over my head) as well as a theory that ties these observations together with stunning simplicity. The book is one of a kind: most books on dreaming focus either on the subjective aspects (and usually wind up sounding hokey and unscientific) or purely on the scientific observations (which are too limited to tell us much about the subjective state of dreaming). Hobson finds a middle ground where he is able to quantify the characteristics of dreaming and correlate them with the findings of neurobiology and sleep research.
I learned from this book that the portions of our brain governing movement and sight are activated during REM sleep. Hobson proposes that the ultimate source of dream sensation--which seems to be predominantly visual and motor--is physical rather than psychological. It is no wonder that dream sensations feel largely involuntary. As Hobson puts it, "we seldom have the experience of willing the movements that occur in dreams, but instead experience a sense of compelled or involuntary motor activity over which we have little or sometimes no control. This contrast is particularly and strikingly sharp in those dreams in which motor activity becomes a central part of the plot: for example, when one attempts to escape from a pursuer" (p. 171). This also helps explain the sensation of rapid movement we frequently experience during dreams. If we're anxious, we perceive that we're falling; otherwise, we may perceive that we're flying.
Since the sensations are physiological in origin, Freud was wrong: dreams are not messages from our subconscious (or from anywhere else, for that matter). But here's the catch: our thought reflections, which help organize the sensations into a narrative, infuse the dream with meaning. This meaning, according to Hobson, is usually transparent rather than oblique:
Symbolic dreams of this kind are probably a function of the individual dreamer, rather than an expression of universal mythic archetypes. People who have symbolic dreams are probably symbolic thinkers; concrete individuals will tend to dream in concrete terms. Still, human dreams might have a lot to do with why we exhibit more creativity than other species. The biochemist Otto Loewi claimed that the experiment which led him to the postulations of chemical neutrotransmission--and earned him a Nobel Prize--occurred to him in a dream, and Robert Louis Stevenson based his story "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" on a dream.
The important point is that our reactions to dream sensations prove just as important as the sensations themselves in establishing the dream "plot." This is not to suggest that dreams have no meaning. They certainly do, but according to Hobson, the meaning is usually more transparent than both Freudians and mystics would believe. Don't waste your money on a pseudoscientific dream manual; most likely, you are your own best dream manual.
Never do these manuals stop to consider that dreams might be based on memories of daytime experiences. They always start from the assumption that all concrete objects are metaphors for suppressed emotions and anxieties, often of a sexual nature. Where they get these explanations I have no idea. It all sounds to me like a rather clichéd attempt to apply literary analysis (with Freudian overtones) to dream narratives.
Still, it's curious that some dreams seem so widespread. For example, lots of people report dreaming about accidentally going outside without clothing. Other common dreams include flying, or falling, or having one's teeth fall out, or facing an exam after having forgotten to come to class the entire semester. If dreams are particular to individuals, why are some of the most absurd ones nearly universal?
My personal theory is that dreams depict events that we expect might happen based on our life experiences. Many dreams consist of little more than distorted memories mixed together. Whenever I dream about an experience I've never had, I get the sense that my dreaming mind believes it could happen. There are things I desire which I never dream about, because I don't expect them to happen. Thus, I'm inclined to reject Freud's theory of dreams as wish fulfillment, even though I know he would argue that my subconscious mind suppresses my true desires.
An important mechanism in dreams is exaggeration. I once dreamt I was visiting a friend who in real life has one cat, but in the dream had five. I've also had dreams in which my own pets spoke English--not just my parrot, but my cats as well. I believe this reflects the way I anthropomorphize animals, thinking of them in such human terms that I practically expect them to talk. Only common sense (which I lack during sleep) makes me know better.
What about nightmares? How do they fit my theory? The answer is that when we're anxious about something, some part of us expects it to happen. That explains the feeling of inevitability in nightmares, nicely captured in The Wizard of Oz when the lion appears as soon as Dorothy begins worrying about "lions and tigers and bears." Those dreams in which we triumph over scary things, as Dorothy ultimately does, reflect our confidence.
As for the dreams where we walk outside without clothes, I suspect that they stem from our anxiety over relying on habit to get through daily routines. Most of the time when we dress ourselves, we aren't thinking about the activity at all. Just as we're occasionally forgetful with other habitual activities, it is semi-plausible (and I believe it has happened) that someone might forget to put on a vital piece of clothing. In the embellished world of a dream, that fear translates into reality.
As it stands, scientists now believe that REM sleep (the period in which most of our dreams occur) serves a memory-related function. It almost appears as if we're not meant to remember any of our dreams. We experience a kind of amnesia upon awakening, in which we quickly forget what we were dreaming about, unless we make a special effort to remember.
There are people who claim never to dream, but scientists assert that everybody dreams. Some people just don't remember. How do scientists know? In the sleep experiments of the 1950s which revolutionized the field, all the subjects, even those who initially denied ever dreaming, ended up reporting dreams at the moment the researchers awoke them from REM sleep.
The study of dreams presents many scientific difficulties. If a person says, "I dreamt I was a dog last night," we have to take his word for it. It's like basing our testimony on an amnesia patient who was the only witness to an event. We know that dreams don't occur in physical reality, but how can we verify that they occur at all? How do we know, as scientists currently believe, that they are hallucinatory experiences that occur in real time during REM sleep?
The 1950s researchers would awake sleepers who had just gone through a REM cycle (detected with an electroencephalogram) and ask them to approximate how long their dream had lasted. The scientists found a positive correlation between the length of the dream reported and the length of the REM cycle observed. They also studied the effects of external stimuli on dreams. In one case, a scientist dripped water down a subject's back thirty seconds before waking him. The subject reported having dreamt about singing at an opera, when molten wax suddenly began dripping from the ceiling.
The best book on dreaming I've read is J. Allan Hobson's 1988 The Dreaming Brain, which includes a remarkable amount of scientific information (much of which went over my head) as well as a theory that ties these observations together with stunning simplicity. The book is one of a kind: most books on dreaming focus either on the subjective aspects (and usually wind up sounding hokey and unscientific) or purely on the scientific observations (which are too limited to tell us much about the subjective state of dreaming). Hobson finds a middle ground where he is able to quantify the characteristics of dreaming and correlate them with the findings of neurobiology and sleep research.
I learned from this book that the portions of our brain governing movement and sight are activated during REM sleep. Hobson proposes that the ultimate source of dream sensation--which seems to be predominantly visual and motor--is physical rather than psychological. It is no wonder that dream sensations feel largely involuntary. As Hobson puts it, "we seldom have the experience of willing the movements that occur in dreams, but instead experience a sense of compelled or involuntary motor activity over which we have little or sometimes no control. This contrast is particularly and strikingly sharp in those dreams in which motor activity becomes a central part of the plot: for example, when one attempts to escape from a pursuer" (p. 171). This also helps explain the sensation of rapid movement we frequently experience during dreams. If we're anxious, we perceive that we're falling; otherwise, we may perceive that we're flying.
Since the sensations are physiological in origin, Freud was wrong: dreams are not messages from our subconscious (or from anywhere else, for that matter). But here's the catch: our thought reflections, which help organize the sensations into a narrative, infuse the dream with meaning. This meaning, according to Hobson, is usually transparent rather than oblique:
The activated brain-mind does its best to attribute meaning to the internally generated signals. It is this synthetic effort that gives our dreams their impressive thematic coherence: dream plots remain remarkably intact despite their orientational disorganization. And it may be that their symbolic, prophetic character arises from the integrative strain of this synthetic effort. The brain-mind may need to call upon its deepest myths to find a narrative frame that can contain the data. Hence, one can continue to interpret dreams metaphorically, and even in terms of the dynamically repressed unconscious, if one so chooses. But such a practice is no longer either necessary or sufficient as an explanation of either the origin or the nature of dreaming. (p. 214)A recent dream of mine exemplifies this discrepancy. I dreamt that people's faces kept turning into non-digital clocks. Interpreting this dream reveals the different possible ways of answering the question "Why did I have this dream?" It could have been that I had been walking around in the early morning and glanced at a non-digital clock on the wall; the image stayed in my mind so that when I conjured up images of people's faces, my memory of the clock came back to me. Dreams are good at finding analogies. But the dream may also have reflected my feelings over my grandfather's recent death, an event that has made me think lately about how life is finite. In the dream, I expressed this feeling by seeing people as ticking clocks.
Symbolic dreams of this kind are probably a function of the individual dreamer, rather than an expression of universal mythic archetypes. People who have symbolic dreams are probably symbolic thinkers; concrete individuals will tend to dream in concrete terms. Still, human dreams might have a lot to do with why we exhibit more creativity than other species. The biochemist Otto Loewi claimed that the experiment which led him to the postulations of chemical neutrotransmission--and earned him a Nobel Prize--occurred to him in a dream, and Robert Louis Stevenson based his story "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" on a dream.
The important point is that our reactions to dream sensations prove just as important as the sensations themselves in establishing the dream "plot." This is not to suggest that dreams have no meaning. They certainly do, but according to Hobson, the meaning is usually more transparent than both Freudians and mystics would believe. Don't waste your money on a pseudoscientific dream manual; most likely, you are your own best dream manual.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Critics of homeschooling need to do their homework
Polls suggest that a slim majority of Americans oppose homeschooling, the method of choice for approximately two percent of the population. Ever since I took this educational route in high school, I have been stunned by the negative reactions it provokes. Though the opposition has declined significantly in the last decade, millions of Americans continue to find fault with this unusual mode of education, eager to offer their opinion on a subject they know nothing about.
It's no wonder that the arguments against homeschooling frequently contradict one another. Some critics allege that parents lack the qualifications to teach their children properly; others suggest that homeschooled children will be so hopelessly ahead they will be unable to relate to other kids their age. Some people imagine the prototypical homeschooled kid as shy and withdrawn; others imagine such a kid as loud and obnoxious. Whatever the argument, the critics base their views on very little if any personal knowledge of homeschooling. They haven't got a clue what homeschoolers actually do during the day, yet they seem to have endless confidence in their ability to guess.
One recent example of this attitude is a piece by blogger Russell Shaw for The Huffington Post. Shaw concedes that "home schooling works in some cases" (a mountain of research would suggest that this is an understatement), but he nonetheless thinks it should be restricted to those with an education degree, teaching children who are unable to attend school for physical reasons such as paralysis. Shaw, who assumes that homeschoolers learn through "rote recitation," worries that too many of the parents "want to keep their students at home in the service of simplicity and protectiveness," a situation that will make them ill-prepared for living in the real world.
Shaw's essay is very typical of anti-homeschooling pieces, not only lacking the slightest factual support for his positions but making provably false assertions of his own, such as the claim that homeschoolers consist primarily of fundamentalist Christians who reject evolution. (See here for the actual demographics.) Had Shaw bothered to look into the history of the movement he opposes, he would have learned that its godfather was a rather secular fellow named John Holt, who advocated homeschooling as an alternative to the "rote recitation" and lack of real-world preparation he observed as an instructor in traditional schools.
It's true that some homeschooling parents, like some private schools, teach creationism. Without explaining what he thinks should happen to private schools, Shaw denounces the situation: "as to the home schooler subjected to beliefs that run counter to scientific inquiry...I say send them to school and let the parents devote some of their off-hours to teaching what they feel their kids should know." Shaw implies here that it is the task of schools to expose kids to what is true, against those parents who will teach them what is false. But who decides what is true and what is false? The government? Shaw's point may resonate with those who envision homeschooling parents as extremists, but his larger implication is, frankly, scary.
If Shaw truly values scientific inquiry, then he should base his conclusions on facts, not hunches. Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness to describe conservatives who rely on gut feelings as a substitute for evidence. If there is any issue on which some liberals exhibit this quality in abundance, it is this one.
It's no wonder that the arguments against homeschooling frequently contradict one another. Some critics allege that parents lack the qualifications to teach their children properly; others suggest that homeschooled children will be so hopelessly ahead they will be unable to relate to other kids their age. Some people imagine the prototypical homeschooled kid as shy and withdrawn; others imagine such a kid as loud and obnoxious. Whatever the argument, the critics base their views on very little if any personal knowledge of homeschooling. They haven't got a clue what homeschoolers actually do during the day, yet they seem to have endless confidence in their ability to guess.
One recent example of this attitude is a piece by blogger Russell Shaw for The Huffington Post. Shaw concedes that "home schooling works in some cases" (a mountain of research would suggest that this is an understatement), but he nonetheless thinks it should be restricted to those with an education degree, teaching children who are unable to attend school for physical reasons such as paralysis. Shaw, who assumes that homeschoolers learn through "rote recitation," worries that too many of the parents "want to keep their students at home in the service of simplicity and protectiveness," a situation that will make them ill-prepared for living in the real world.
Shaw's essay is very typical of anti-homeschooling pieces, not only lacking the slightest factual support for his positions but making provably false assertions of his own, such as the claim that homeschoolers consist primarily of fundamentalist Christians who reject evolution. (See here for the actual demographics.) Had Shaw bothered to look into the history of the movement he opposes, he would have learned that its godfather was a rather secular fellow named John Holt, who advocated homeschooling as an alternative to the "rote recitation" and lack of real-world preparation he observed as an instructor in traditional schools.
It's true that some homeschooling parents, like some private schools, teach creationism. Without explaining what he thinks should happen to private schools, Shaw denounces the situation: "as to the home schooler subjected to beliefs that run counter to scientific inquiry...I say send them to school and let the parents devote some of their off-hours to teaching what they feel their kids should know." Shaw implies here that it is the task of schools to expose kids to what is true, against those parents who will teach them what is false. But who decides what is true and what is false? The government? Shaw's point may resonate with those who envision homeschooling parents as extremists, but his larger implication is, frankly, scary.
If Shaw truly values scientific inquiry, then he should base his conclusions on facts, not hunches. Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness to describe conservatives who rely on gut feelings as a substitute for evidence. If there is any issue on which some liberals exhibit this quality in abundance, it is this one.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
A paranormal romance
I recently discussed my love of the Richard Matheson novel What Dreams May Come. Now I'm going to talk about another Matheson novel, Somewhere in Time (originally titled Bid Time Return but later changed to fit the movie). I cannot exactly recommend this novel. In fact, I thought the 1980 film version improved on it considerably. Matheson, however, considers this book and What Dreams May Come to be his two greatest novels. He may even have conceived them as one book. The similarities between the two are striking. The protagonists in both books are blond 6'2" screenwriters who live in Hidden Hills, California and love classical music. They each have a brother named Robert who acquires the protagonist's memoirs but cannot bring himself to accept the otherworldly events described in them. Both books are paranormal love stories, but they emphasize different phenomena.
In Somewhere in Time, a 30-something man named Richard Collier has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and has decided, upon a coin flip, to spend his last days hanging around the Hotel del Coronado, a famous California hotel. There he grows obsessed with the photograph of a nineteenth-century stage actress, Elise McKenna, who once performed there. Through research, he learns that she never married, that she had an overprotective manager, and that she may have had a brief affair with a mysterious man while staying at the hotel. The more Richard learns, the more convinced he becomes that it is his destiny to travel back in time and become that mysterious man.
This is an interesting setup. But the execution is shaky. I barely could get through the first fifty pages, which consist of Richard's rambling journal entries as nothing happens. I realize that Matheson was attempting realism, but I don't consider that a good excuse. A novel must involve the reader or it isn't worth our time. The book's deepest flaw, however, is the love story itself. I simply did not like the character of Elise. The development of her relationship with Richard feels artificial and forced. It's definitely a case of the journey being more interesting than the destination.
The novel's most striking feature is its depiction of time travel. It's probably the only novel I've ever encountered that proposes a step-by-step method that does not require any futuristic accessories or special abilities. The method is presented in such detail that it almost tempts readers to try it themselves. I bet that some have, though I have my doubts that any have succeeded.
Richard bases his method on the theories of a real book, J.B. Priestley's Man and Time. The basic idea is that he uses self-hypnosis to convince his mind that he's in the past. He listens over and over to a tape recording of his own voice declaring that the year is 1896 and listing many details of how his surroundings would look in that year. After discovering that his voice is distracting him, he writes the hypnotic suggestions out on paper, over and over and over. The historical roots of the hotel help reinforce his purpose, as does an 1890s suit he buys for himself.
Of course, skeptical readers may suspect that the time-traveling experience occurs only in Richard's mind. Matheson leaves open that possibility. So if you think the love story is unconvincing and seems more like a lonely man's pathetic fantasy, that may be just what Matheson intended.
The movie does a better job of handling these themes. The plot is clearer and more focused. There's no mention of Richard having a brain tumor, and there seems to be external evidence that his journey really took place, such as in an early scene where an old woman goes up to him in a crowd and hands him a pocket watch and says, "Come back to me." He later takes the watch with him into the past, where he gives it to the woman when she's young. This generates one of the most famous time-travel paradoxes in the movies, the watch that seems to have no point of origin, just eternally existing in an endless loop. The book contains other paradoxes of this kind, but more subtly.
While the movie did poorly in theaters and receieved mostly negative reviews, it went on to become a cult classic, with an actual fan club. Being less than enamored by the love story, I was only able to admire the film's craft. It felt to me like an episode of The Twilight Zone, a show to which Matheson contributed heavily. But neither the book nor the film enthralled me the way the novel What Dreams May Come did, perhaps because this time I wasn't truly permitted entry into a new world.
In Somewhere in Time, a 30-something man named Richard Collier has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and has decided, upon a coin flip, to spend his last days hanging around the Hotel del Coronado, a famous California hotel. There he grows obsessed with the photograph of a nineteenth-century stage actress, Elise McKenna, who once performed there. Through research, he learns that she never married, that she had an overprotective manager, and that she may have had a brief affair with a mysterious man while staying at the hotel. The more Richard learns, the more convinced he becomes that it is his destiny to travel back in time and become that mysterious man.
This is an interesting setup. But the execution is shaky. I barely could get through the first fifty pages, which consist of Richard's rambling journal entries as nothing happens. I realize that Matheson was attempting realism, but I don't consider that a good excuse. A novel must involve the reader or it isn't worth our time. The book's deepest flaw, however, is the love story itself. I simply did not like the character of Elise. The development of her relationship with Richard feels artificial and forced. It's definitely a case of the journey being more interesting than the destination.
The novel's most striking feature is its depiction of time travel. It's probably the only novel I've ever encountered that proposes a step-by-step method that does not require any futuristic accessories or special abilities. The method is presented in such detail that it almost tempts readers to try it themselves. I bet that some have, though I have my doubts that any have succeeded.
Richard bases his method on the theories of a real book, J.B. Priestley's Man and Time. The basic idea is that he uses self-hypnosis to convince his mind that he's in the past. He listens over and over to a tape recording of his own voice declaring that the year is 1896 and listing many details of how his surroundings would look in that year. After discovering that his voice is distracting him, he writes the hypnotic suggestions out on paper, over and over and over. The historical roots of the hotel help reinforce his purpose, as does an 1890s suit he buys for himself.
Of course, skeptical readers may suspect that the time-traveling experience occurs only in Richard's mind. Matheson leaves open that possibility. So if you think the love story is unconvincing and seems more like a lonely man's pathetic fantasy, that may be just what Matheson intended.
The movie does a better job of handling these themes. The plot is clearer and more focused. There's no mention of Richard having a brain tumor, and there seems to be external evidence that his journey really took place, such as in an early scene where an old woman goes up to him in a crowd and hands him a pocket watch and says, "Come back to me." He later takes the watch with him into the past, where he gives it to the woman when she's young. This generates one of the most famous time-travel paradoxes in the movies, the watch that seems to have no point of origin, just eternally existing in an endless loop. The book contains other paradoxes of this kind, but more subtly.
While the movie did poorly in theaters and receieved mostly negative reviews, it went on to become a cult classic, with an actual fan club. Being less than enamored by the love story, I was only able to admire the film's craft. It felt to me like an episode of The Twilight Zone, a show to which Matheson contributed heavily. But neither the book nor the film enthralled me the way the novel What Dreams May Come did, perhaps because this time I wasn't truly permitted entry into a new world.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The science of fruits, nuts, and flakes
Some years ago, not long after reading parts of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, a book about the remarkable persistence of superstitions among educated people, I discovered that a highly intelligent woman I know, who has a science degree and has always seemed rationalist in her outlook, believes in astrology. She described the traits of my sign, Aquarius, and they did seem to fit me fairly well. I don't remember her description now, so instead I'll post what Wikipedia says about the sign:
But there lies the problem. One of the most obvious features of pseudoscience is allowing subjectivity to influence the testing of predictions. Having people examine their own personalities is notoriously unreliable, since people tend not to have accurate perceptions of themselves. What exactly would constitute a "bad" astrological reading? If you didn't feel the description sounded like you? If your friends didn't think so? And how close does the description have to match your personality in order to prove that its alleged accuracy isn't merely coincidental? (For example, I suspect that there are many creative and independent types not born under Aquarius.) Astrologers never set up any quantifiable boundaries by which their "predictions" can succeed or fail. It's all left up to the whim of the person reading the horoscope.
Still, I can imagine ways in which the claims of astrologers might be tested. Gather a group of people together, and give only some of them their true astrological readings. Give the others a deliberately false reading. For example, the Gemini gets the Scorpio's reading. None of the people know whether they are receiving a correct reading or not. Perhaps none of them know there even are any incorrect readings. Even the person doing the testing doesn't know which ones are correct and which ones aren't. The subjects are then asked to rate their readings, on a scale of one to ten, by how closely they feel it describes them.
Now comes the fun part: compare the reactions of the people who got false readings and the people who got true readings. If the claims of astrology are valid, then the people who got true readings should be substantially more likely to think the readings accurately describe them. If, on the other hand, there isn't much difference between the reactions of the two groups, then the claims of astrology would seem to be bogus.
Has anyone ever tried such an experiment? Do believers in astrology even care? Hey, I know that even this test probably wouldn't pass muster with the scientific community. It still has the problem that people are examining their own personalities, rather than being objectively evaluated by a disinterested outsider.
Of course, many scientists will dismiss astrology out of hand simply because of its premise that celestial bodies many light years away can have a perceptible effect on human behavior. But I'm willing to entertain this premise for the sake of argument, because astrology in principle does make real predictions about observable facts. If those predictions were scientifically confirmed, we'd have to concede that there's something to the system, no matter how absurd its philosophical underpinnings may sound. Skeptics can take comfort from the fact that we're a long way from ever having to confront that possibility.
Individuals born under this sign are thought to have a modest, creative, challenging, inquisitive, entertaining, progressive, stimulating, nocturnal, and independent character, but one which is also prone to rebelliousness, coldness, erraticism, indecisiveness, and impracticality.I have to admit that that does kind of sound like me. I like to think of myself as creative, challenging, and independent. I know I am impractical and indecisive, and unquestionably I am nocturnal. On the other hand, the article also claims that male Aquarians "are often said to tend to be effeminate in appearance." Hey, I may not be the most macho of sorts, but I sure as hell ain't effeminate looking.
But there lies the problem. One of the most obvious features of pseudoscience is allowing subjectivity to influence the testing of predictions. Having people examine their own personalities is notoriously unreliable, since people tend not to have accurate perceptions of themselves. What exactly would constitute a "bad" astrological reading? If you didn't feel the description sounded like you? If your friends didn't think so? And how close does the description have to match your personality in order to prove that its alleged accuracy isn't merely coincidental? (For example, I suspect that there are many creative and independent types not born under Aquarius.) Astrologers never set up any quantifiable boundaries by which their "predictions" can succeed or fail. It's all left up to the whim of the person reading the horoscope.
Still, I can imagine ways in which the claims of astrologers might be tested. Gather a group of people together, and give only some of them their true astrological readings. Give the others a deliberately false reading. For example, the Gemini gets the Scorpio's reading. None of the people know whether they are receiving a correct reading or not. Perhaps none of them know there even are any incorrect readings. Even the person doing the testing doesn't know which ones are correct and which ones aren't. The subjects are then asked to rate their readings, on a scale of one to ten, by how closely they feel it describes them.
Now comes the fun part: compare the reactions of the people who got false readings and the people who got true readings. If the claims of astrology are valid, then the people who got true readings should be substantially more likely to think the readings accurately describe them. If, on the other hand, there isn't much difference between the reactions of the two groups, then the claims of astrology would seem to be bogus.
Has anyone ever tried such an experiment? Do believers in astrology even care? Hey, I know that even this test probably wouldn't pass muster with the scientific community. It still has the problem that people are examining their own personalities, rather than being objectively evaluated by a disinterested outsider.
Of course, many scientists will dismiss astrology out of hand simply because of its premise that celestial bodies many light years away can have a perceptible effect on human behavior. But I'm willing to entertain this premise for the sake of argument, because astrology in principle does make real predictions about observable facts. If those predictions were scientifically confirmed, we'd have to concede that there's something to the system, no matter how absurd its philosophical underpinnings may sound. Skeptics can take comfort from the fact that we're a long way from ever having to confront that possibility.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
The most overlooked novel
We generally expect books to be better than their film adaptations. The most extreme example from my experience may be What Dreams May Come. I strongly disliked the 1998 film, and I probably would have quickly forgotten about it, except that I noticed it was based on a 1978 novel by Richard Matheson, whose fiction I had enjoyed previously. So I picked up a copy from the library. It has since become one of my favorite books.
I am not alone in this reaction, but I am in a minority. Most people haven't read the book, and most people won't even try. There are just too many preconceptions standing in their way. And, unfortunately, the movie has helped further those preconceptions. People assume it isn't the type of book they'd like to read. They think it is too "New Agey" for their tastes, or too sentimental. On the first point, they are probably correct; on the second, they couldn't be more wrong.
Why do I like the book so much? Put simply, it is the most vivid, complex, and surprisingly convincing depiction of afterlife I have ever encountered in a work of fiction. Nothing else I have seen on the subject, in literature or in film, comes close--certainly not the movie version of the book. Before I read the novel, I had no idea that a story about Heaven and Hell could have such a profound effect on me. I have always believed in afterlife as a matter of faith, but I would never before have thought it could be convincingly described in human terms.
The story involves a middle-aged man named Chris who dies and goes to Heaven, and who ultimately descends into Hell to rescue his wife. It's basically a modern-day variation on The Divine Comedy, as a man gets a tour of the afterlife. In the metaphysics of the film and the book, dying involves shedding your physical body and entering a mental environment shaped by thoughts. Your fate in such an environment is largely self-imposed. If you're a decent, pleasant person, your afterlife experience will be pleasant; if you're someone with moral problems, you'll naturally have a more difficult experience. As the novel puts it, "People are not punished for their deeds but by them" (p. 265).
That much of the movie intrigued me, the first time I saw it. The problem was the schmaltz. I mean real schmaltz, piled on in large mounds, in place of strong narrative. The beginning gives us scene after scene of two lovers (Robin Williams and Anabella Sciorra) doing little more than stare at each other and giggle, with solemn music in the background. The film is so inept at fleshing out their lives that it shows their wedding, the tragic death of their children, and fifteen years passing before it reveals out of the blue that Chris is a doctor! The performances by Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are surprisingly atrocious, maybe because they could scarcely believe their own lines.
For those who have only seen the movie, it's hard for me to convey just how very different the novel is. Of course there are major differences in the plot. One such difference is the ending. (Even Roger Ebert, who heaped high praise on the film, was disappointed by the ending.) Another is the beginning, where the film has Chris's children also die and go to Heaven. In doing this, the movie (1) makes the early scenes so depressing they become surreal (2) needlessly clutters the story with extra characters (3) introduces a silly and confusing subplot about Chris's attempts to find his children, who are in disguise.
In the book, Chris's children are adults, not youngsters, and they're minor characters. The details of Chris's life on Earth differ so greatly between the book and the film that it's like reading about a completely different person. Even though I saw the movie first, the image of Robin Williams completely vanished from my mind as I read, because he was so unlike the character described in the book.
The entire feel of the book is different, telling a touching love story that uses real characterization, not cheap manipulation, to move the audience. And Matheson's vision of the afterlife truly comes alive on the page. The Hell scenes are actually terrifying, reminding us, as the movie does not, why Matheson is primarily famous as a horror writer.
I won't overlook the movie's gorgeous visual effects, which earned the film a well-deserved Academy Award. They just aren't put to good purpose. The movie's vision of the afterlife as like being inside giant paintings fails to evoke a sense of reality. The book, in contrast, bases its afterlife imagery (vividly brought to life by Matheson's skillful prose) much more on Earth-like scenery. This approach ironically leads to far more exotic ideas, such as architects who build things using their minds, and a library containing history books more objective than those on Earth. Matheson puts the reader right inside this setting, as the following passage illustrates:
Matheson, as I mentioned, is a famous horror writer. One of his unique qualities is his almost scientific approach to the supernatural. As Roger Ebert explains in his review of the Matheson-penned Legend of Hell House:
Some people may wonder, at this point, about Matheson's religious background. He was raised a Christian Scientist, but gradually developed what he calls his own religion, taking elements from many sources. One of the book's main influences, I believe, is eighteenth-century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.
The book avoids seeming "religious" in any way other than its setting. There are no deities, no mention of Christ or anything specific to the theology of a particular religion. The characters occasionally talk about God, but it is left up to the reader to decide whether the Creator in charge of this system is at all like the Judeo-Christian God or like something more pantheistic. The book even implies that no single religion has the whole truth:
These reactions are puzzling, if you stop to think about it. Books about elves, fairies, dragons, and wizards remain popular even though nobody believes in any of those things. Why should people be bothered by a fiction book portraying a Heaven and Hell that conflicts with what they believe? The book is perfectly enjoyable whether or not you accept Matheson's metaphysics.
Of course, I personally do think Matheson provides insight into the subject--though I admit I'm a little wary of his acceptance of paranormal phenomena. But it amazes me how so many people refuse to even touch the book, thinking that any story with such a plot must automatically be hokey. In most cases, they'd be right. What Dreams May Come is a big exception. It suggests the endless possibilities in a subject that normally is dead weight for fiction. And it really makes you think.
I am not alone in this reaction, but I am in a minority. Most people haven't read the book, and most people won't even try. There are just too many preconceptions standing in their way. And, unfortunately, the movie has helped further those preconceptions. People assume it isn't the type of book they'd like to read. They think it is too "New Agey" for their tastes, or too sentimental. On the first point, they are probably correct; on the second, they couldn't be more wrong.
Why do I like the book so much? Put simply, it is the most vivid, complex, and surprisingly convincing depiction of afterlife I have ever encountered in a work of fiction. Nothing else I have seen on the subject, in literature or in film, comes close--certainly not the movie version of the book. Before I read the novel, I had no idea that a story about Heaven and Hell could have such a profound effect on me. I have always believed in afterlife as a matter of faith, but I would never before have thought it could be convincingly described in human terms.
The story involves a middle-aged man named Chris who dies and goes to Heaven, and who ultimately descends into Hell to rescue his wife. It's basically a modern-day variation on The Divine Comedy, as a man gets a tour of the afterlife. In the metaphysics of the film and the book, dying involves shedding your physical body and entering a mental environment shaped by thoughts. Your fate in such an environment is largely self-imposed. If you're a decent, pleasant person, your afterlife experience will be pleasant; if you're someone with moral problems, you'll naturally have a more difficult experience. As the novel puts it, "People are not punished for their deeds but by them" (p. 265).
That much of the movie intrigued me, the first time I saw it. The problem was the schmaltz. I mean real schmaltz, piled on in large mounds, in place of strong narrative. The beginning gives us scene after scene of two lovers (Robin Williams and Anabella Sciorra) doing little more than stare at each other and giggle, with solemn music in the background. The film is so inept at fleshing out their lives that it shows their wedding, the tragic death of their children, and fifteen years passing before it reveals out of the blue that Chris is a doctor! The performances by Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are surprisingly atrocious, maybe because they could scarcely believe their own lines.
For those who have only seen the movie, it's hard for me to convey just how very different the novel is. Of course there are major differences in the plot. One such difference is the ending. (Even Roger Ebert, who heaped high praise on the film, was disappointed by the ending.) Another is the beginning, where the film has Chris's children also die and go to Heaven. In doing this, the movie (1) makes the early scenes so depressing they become surreal (2) needlessly clutters the story with extra characters (3) introduces a silly and confusing subplot about Chris's attempts to find his children, who are in disguise.
In the book, Chris's children are adults, not youngsters, and they're minor characters. The details of Chris's life on Earth differ so greatly between the book and the film that it's like reading about a completely different person. Even though I saw the movie first, the image of Robin Williams completely vanished from my mind as I read, because he was so unlike the character described in the book.
The entire feel of the book is different, telling a touching love story that uses real characterization, not cheap manipulation, to move the audience. And Matheson's vision of the afterlife truly comes alive on the page. The Hell scenes are actually terrifying, reminding us, as the movie does not, why Matheson is primarily famous as a horror writer.
I won't overlook the movie's gorgeous visual effects, which earned the film a well-deserved Academy Award. They just aren't put to good purpose. The movie's vision of the afterlife as like being inside giant paintings fails to evoke a sense of reality. The book, in contrast, bases its afterlife imagery (vividly brought to life by Matheson's skillful prose) much more on Earth-like scenery. This approach ironically leads to far more exotic ideas, such as architects who build things using their minds, and a library containing history books more objective than those on Earth. Matheson puts the reader right inside this setting, as the following passage illustrates:
I noticed, then, there were no shadows on the ground. I sat beneath a tree yet not in shade. I didn't understand that, and looked for the sun.And here is a passage from one of the book's Hell scenes: "Now I saw that, interspersed throughout the area we crossed, were pools of dark and filthy-looking liquid; I hesitate to call it water. A loathsome stench beyond that which I had ever been exposed to rose from these pools. And I was horrified to see movement in them as though unfortunates had slipped beneath the surface and were unable to rise" (p. 183).
There wasn't any.... There was light without a sun. I looked around in confusion. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the light, I saw further into the countryside. I had never seen such scenery: a stunning vista of green-clad meadows, flowers, and trees. Ann would love this, I thought.
I remembered then. Ann was still alive. And I? I stood and pressed both palms against the solid tree trunk. Stamped on solid ground with my shoe. I was dead; there could be no question about it any longer. Yet here I was, possessed of a body that felt the same and looked the same, was even dressed the same. Standing on this very real ground in this most tangible of landscapes....
I turned my hands over and noticed that their skin and nails were pink. There was blood inside me. I had to shake myself to make certain I wasn't dreaming. I held my right hand over my nose and mouth and felt breath pulsing warmly from my lungs.... (p. 55-6)
Matheson, as I mentioned, is a famous horror writer. One of his unique qualities is his almost scientific approach to the supernatural. As Roger Ebert explains in his review of the Matheson-penned Legend of Hell House:
Matheson labored for years in the elusive territory between straight science fiction and the supernatural horror genre, developing a kind of novel in which vampires, ghouls, and the occult are treated as if they came under ordinary scientific classifications.In What Dreams May Come, Matheson makes Heaven and Hell seem like a scientific, natural process, and one of the joys of the book is discerning all the intricate "rules" of how everything works. (That's another area where the movie falls short.) What needs to be kept in mind, however, is that Matheson doesn't do this just for entertainment purposes. In the novel's introduction, he tells his readers that the characters are the only fictional component of the novel, and that almost everything else is based on research. The book even includes a lengthy bibliography. Thus, the afterlife that Matheson describes isn't some fantasy world he concocted from his own head, but something he believes to be an accurate description of reality.
There was, for example, the Matheson classic I Am Legend.... In that one, a single normal man held hundreds of vampires...at bay by figuring out the scientific reasons for old medieval antivampire measures like mirrors, crucifixes, and garlic. The Matheson novels of the 1950s and early 1960s anticipated pseudorealistic fantasy novels like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist.
Some people may wonder, at this point, about Matheson's religious background. He was raised a Christian Scientist, but gradually developed what he calls his own religion, taking elements from many sources. One of the book's main influences, I believe, is eighteenth-century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.
The book avoids seeming "religious" in any way other than its setting. There are no deities, no mention of Christ or anything specific to the theology of a particular religion. The characters occasionally talk about God, but it is left up to the reader to decide whether the Creator in charge of this system is at all like the Judeo-Christian God or like something more pantheistic. The book even implies that no single religion has the whole truth:
"For instance, you'll find, in the hereafter, the particular heaven of each theology."From what I've seen, people react negatively to this book based on how far it departs from their personal beliefs. Christians complain about the absence of Jesus, while those who don't believe in any afterlife consider the story too nonsensical to accept. Most readers, it seems, are put off by the New Age terminology and concepts scattered throughout the book.
"Which is right then?" I asked, completely baffled now.
"All of them," he said, "and none. Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Jew--each has an after-life experience which reflects his own beliefs. The Viking had his Valhalla, the American Indian his Happy Hunting Ground, the zealot his City of Gold. All are real. Each is a portion of the overall reality.
"You'll even find, here, those who claim that survival is nonsense," he said. "They bang their nonmaterial tables with their nonmaterial fists and sneer at any suggestion of a life beyond matter. It's the ultimate irony of delusion." (pp. 90-1)
These reactions are puzzling, if you stop to think about it. Books about elves, fairies, dragons, and wizards remain popular even though nobody believes in any of those things. Why should people be bothered by a fiction book portraying a Heaven and Hell that conflicts with what they believe? The book is perfectly enjoyable whether or not you accept Matheson's metaphysics.
Of course, I personally do think Matheson provides insight into the subject--though I admit I'm a little wary of his acceptance of paranormal phenomena. But it amazes me how so many people refuse to even touch the book, thinking that any story with such a plot must automatically be hokey. In most cases, they'd be right. What Dreams May Come is a big exception. It suggests the endless possibilities in a subject that normally is dead weight for fiction. And it really makes you think.
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