Content Analyses Across Time:
What seems to be occurring from his diary is an emergence of feelings associated with his childhood trauma and with this emergence a decrease in one of his coping mechanisms, OBE's and lucid dreams. Half the groups looked at various dream element progressions across the ten years of the diary. Possible early versus late diary differences were analyzed for all information. The first four years represented the early diary years and 1989 and 1990 the last diary years. Because the last two years only had partial years of diary entries their numbers were converted to twelve month entries in order to equalize them with the early 12 month diary entries. Ten of the 27 tests showed a significant or near significant difference from early to late in the diary. Father X was more happy and more angry including nonholiday aggression and holiday thanatos images late in the diary than early in the diary. Additionally there were more doors and fewer masks late in the diary.
The presence of masks in the diary was mentioned by many of the student groups. One of the general qualitative groups focused exclusively on the role of faces/masks in the diary. They defined these as any physical entity that obscures the dream ego's vision, including glass-like and metal masks as well as veils, curtains, and nets.
Faces and masks are devices used to conceal or alter one's identity. We all use masks and different faces to deceive and hide from others our true self. Masks have long been associated with hiding the true nature of a person. Evidence dates the use of masks to the Paleolithic cave paintings some 30,000 years ago. With the diverse history masks have held for many societies, there are only a few interpretations that most ascribe to masks. Throughout the diary there is a myriad of references to masks but the incidence declines in the latter years of the diary. Father X may have resolved some of his inner conflicts associated with these dreams or perhaps no longer needed to or could "mask" his personal angst.
Here is a 1983 illustration from the diary:
I find myself outside in the bright sunshine. My vision is not too good, and when I put my hand to my face I can feel another of those hard, metal masks, but his one has a piece of cellophane over it which I easily pull away; then I pull the first metal mask off and look at it; it has a brown color to it with openings for the eyes, nose and mouth, and a bright coloring around all the openings; then I pull the second mask off and it seems to be like the first except that it is a lot more fragile as there doesn't seem to be much body to it, like a bunch of straps sewed together; when I start to pull the third one off the experience ends.
The increase in happiness and anger late in the diary along with the decrease in masks and increase in doors implies an opening up of the emotions which had haunted him for years which peals away the layers of masks with more doors as entries to new areas of self.
The type of sleep experiences did not differ as a function of time in dairy in this analysis except nonlucid dreams which were significantly more mentioned by Father X late in the diary. This is of interest as Father X made a point of not mentioning them for so many years even though he had them. He felt the value of the diary was in the lucid dreams and OBE's and not in the nonlucid experiences. Yet he began to see value in the nonlucid dreams towards the end of his diary years. Also the increase in elaboration of experiences, as implied by number of lines per experience, late in the diary implies that perhaps more meaning was emerging.
Experiences after Mass went up while those after the Office of Vigils went down. Early in the diary he virtually never mentioned mass which came increased in incidence as precipitating his experiences later in the diary. Early morning Mass relative to Lauds, which showed no difference, is a more elaborate celebration of the divine at the start of the new day. Vigils being an all night process results in sleep loss and thus that alone could account for Mass-Lauds and Vigils differences. More can be seen in the next set of analyses.
Given Father X's focus on lucid dreams and OBE's as his very reason for sending the diary to scientists it is incumbent on us to specifically examine the role lucidity/OBE's played relative to the other variables. This correlation matrix between the various sleep experiences and elements analyzed by the groups gives some insight into the relationship between elements and sleep experience form. Those correlation coefficients which were .5 or greater are bold faced in the table. The most obvious trend in this table is that there are only three correlation's above .50 with OBE's frequency while there are 14 to 15 for the other three type of sleep experiences. Not only were fewer things related to OBE's, the direction of the relationship is often the opposite as the other sleep experiences and of quite a bit less magnitude. This pattern is less clear for nonlucid dreams than for the two lucid type experiences. So for instance, happiness, sadness and anger were positively and strongly associated with lucid/OBE's and lucid and nonlucid dreams and negatively and weakly associated with OBE's. One could argue that lucidity for Father X was associated with a wide range of emotions and dream experiences while OBE's were less uniformly characterized. Perhaps lucidity can be seen as being in some sense without a mask. However, several of the groups of students also pointed out that Father X used lucidity to gain control over unpleasant dream situations and was most often used to escape.
Go to: Blank/Pure Consciousness Experiences