Update: I delivered some of the descriptive statistics from the survey to Seeker last week. They were quite interesting and also not so surprising. The survey went well, over 70 responses. I used only those I recieved within the first four days after the announcement. I hope the information is useful to others studying archetypes.

I would encourage the use of surveys for data gathering as they allow you to define the response somewhat and you get a more representative demographic. The result was that tornadoes are not a general archetype, only 46% of DVers surveyed ever dreamed of tornadoes despite the fact that through media , family and education all were familiar with them. The incidence of tornado dreams was higher among those who lived where tornadoes actually occur, hinting strongly at the link between our real world and the symbols we find in our dreams. Of course there were some unique cases among the data but the overall results were basically clear.

As for me, I have completed one round of research into the paranormal and need to move off into other areas that are more pressing for now. I may return to this study in the future. I have found interesting people and wish both my friends and my enemies the best. I have not in this round of research been able to find evidence of supernatural, other worldly or non-material influences in the lives of human beings. That being said, neither have I been able to completely eliminate the possibility.

Cheers!

Elijah Jones

Take care where you put that penny, copper is poisonous to some!

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I would like to start an experiment that looks into dream archetypes. A dream archetype is a universal symbol in dreams. Many dream books and Jungian psychologists believe that the symbols in our dreams are often universal symbols. To understand the dreams one need only look in a book.

My hypothesis is that dream symbolism is mostly personal but that there are some archetypes that may be cultural on at least a few levels. Firstly there can be large scale cultural archetypes (e.g. media archetypes) and there can also be peer and kinship cultural archetypes. There may also be universal archetypes related to primal urges like fear of the dark, these may lie underneath other symbol paradigms.

What I would like to do is post a symbol for discussion about its meaning until noone new seems to be posting to it anymore. I can then examine the replies for proximity using some statistical techniques. From this we can tell how highly correlated the definitions are and possibly make a scientific assertion that an archetype exists.