However, on a number of occasions in the eighties, when I was dreaming hard and fast and remembering huge amounts of material, I had dreams which took frightening turns. Flew, gliding over countryside like that around my current home. In subsequent dreams when I found myself high off the ground and afraid of falling, I was sometimes able to remember that I could fly in my dreams, and to use the occasion to jump off and do so, experimenting with diff- erent postures and mental commands and states to try to get control of the flying experience so that I could fly faster, higher, and for longer periods of time. Any theoretical framework which closes doors just where experience seems to be opening them is in danger of becoming just another extension of the great, ugly prison of dogma, rather than a neighborhood in the city of science. But then, I have always preferred questions to answers, which may be why I'm a writer, not a therapist of any stripe.
Questions make much better stories . . .
Here, for what they're worth, are some rudimentary thoughts on the effects of reading thread. Psychoanalysis does study the effect of literary texts on people. I know of at least two articles, and I think there are many more. But, as far as I can see, it uses no special theoretical framework for this. Though there have certainly been attempts at a psychoanalytic theory of art, in practice psychoanalysis treats reading a book as it treats any other experience.