Robert Van de Castle, PhD, Professor Emeritus,
University of Virginia Health Sciences Center, is former
president of the Association for the Study of Dreams and
the Parapsychological Association. He is author of Our
Dreaming Mind (1994) and may be contacted at
riv@virginia.edu.
I first met Montague Ullman in Miami when he
sought to recruit me for a position at Maimonides
Hospital to establish a Sleep and Dream Laboratory to
study telepathic dreams. At the time I was working with
Calvin Hall at the Institute of Dream Research. For
several hours each day sitting under a palm tree, Calvin
and I were busy scoring up dreams and working on our
book The Content Analysis of Dreams. Though I
found Monte to be a quite charming, kind, warm person
with a wonderful smile and sense of humor, that idyllic
setting overruled any considerations about moving to
Brooklyn. His subsequent hire of Dr. Stanley Krippner
turned out to be the perfect choice to meet the needs
for that challenging Maimonides project.
Eventually, Calvin and I investigated whether telepathic
material could be incorporated into dream content and
got very encouraging results. Monte invited me to see
whether I would be able to demonstrate similarly
successful results at Maimonides partly because of my
excellent memory for the details of dreams and
capabilities as a telepathic receiver. I eventually
participated as a subject on eight experimental nights
during a forty-four week period. On each morning that I
had served as a subject, I would spend an hour or two
with Monte while we explored at great length my feelings
about the person several hundred yards away in a locked
room who had served as the “sender,” what was going on
in my life at the time, what associations I had to the
target picture and so forth. Monte was the “sender” on
one of these experimental nights. It was an interesting
process to weave back and forth all the associations to
the material that emerged that night. The publication of
Monte and Stan’s classic book Dream Telepathy
eventuated from nearly a decade of their systematic
research on this topic.
It was a pleasure to be
in the audience when Monte received his award for
Lifetime Achievement in Dreamwork from the International
Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) at their
annual meeting in 2006. No one was a more deserving
recipient than Monte. His theoretical proposals
involving the vigilance hypothesis, the role of
inter-species connectedness, and his recent forays into
finding links between the mysterious realms of the
paranormal and David Bohm’s theories on quantum physics
have always been beautifully articulated, well reasoned,
and extremely compelling.
During our recent 2008
IASD conference in Montreal, Dr. Milton Kramer
emphasized in his invited address how groundbreaking
Monte’s humanitarian role had been in establishing the
first mental-health clinic in New York City and how he
had always been a strong advocate for the under-served
and under privileged.
Monte was an incredibly
humble man who would easily become embarrassed if anyone
attempted to congratulate him for being the outstanding
human being and friend that he was to so many of us, or
if we tried to point out how extraordinarily significant
his theoretical contributions had been in shaping our
views about the purpose and functions of dreaming. Monte
also completely revolutionized the way that dreams were
dealt with in professional settings. His compassionate
and supportive way of working with dream groups and
spelling out the techniques that eventually became
incorporated into his compassionate “if it were my
dream” technique have been enthusiastically spread
around the globe.
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