Welcome to the dream, the medium where we deal with the concerns and conflicts of our everyday lives. This web site is designed to advance studies of the dream, helping people realize healthier, happier lives, to restore the dream.

Dreams, yours and mine, are the mental forums where we, as individuals, deal with the concerns and conflicts of everyday life. Often these concerns arise as a result of living in groups, or societies. In his capacity as a psychology counselor, Mark Hagen saw common symbols and patterns emerge in the many dreams reported by his patients. He came to understand that dreams could be analyzed to reveal collective as well as individual issues, that there is a sociology of everyday dreaming. And so he founded the International Institute for Dream Research (IIDR).

The IIDR provides interpretations and compares the dreams of individuals to collective dreams expressed in the daily news and popular culture.

Popular communications form communal dreamscapes, where collective ideals are given vision and voice. It also follows that, when the techniques and devices of such collective daydreams are identified, they will be used to return information back to dreamers, modified to influence individuals attitudes and effect behaviour. 

These ideas enter individuals' dreams, creating acceptance or conflicts that are in return then reflected back out on the communal dreamscape. The cycles of dreaming and storytelling have intensified with technological advances, to the point that it has become possible, within the space of a single day, to witness several cycles of stimulus and response between individual and collective ideals that follow widely and intensely attended events. Speculation about possible causes of the massacre in Littleton, Colorado, 911 or the Tzunami in Asia had gone out in the media and initiated individual responses even as the event unfolded.

Just as individual dreams can be analyzed as a coping mechanism, public storytelling, the music, art and literature that form popular culture, can be viewed on the basis of how well it represents the dramatic tension between individual ideals and collective realities. 

The IIDR is intended to inform individuals of current events, research findings and trends and thereby provide access to the communication flow of the communal unconscious.
