Dreams

The following chapters in The Passing of Merlin Zauber contain actual dreams from a dream diary that I maintained for about forty years:

   "Moving Beyond"  (Chapter 1)

   "Dream Interlude" (Chapter 5)

   "Final Synthesis"  (Chapter 14)

Dreams have played an important part in my life, both personally and professionally. Anyone who doubts this should visit the website that I started in 2002 but is still under construction at www.dreamtowrite.com. I created this website as a virtual textbook to showcase a revolutionary approach that I had developed to teach college students to write. Students who took the classroom version of this course in the 1960s and 1970s used to refer to this as a "dream course in composition." I taught the students basic concepts of dream psychology so that they could analyze the relationships in dreams. They kept a personal dream diary and used their own or anthologized dreams as subjects for their compositions. In this way they learn how critical writing differs from creative writing and how to compose sophisticated exposition and analysis.

In connection with this approach, I wrote a textbook, The Rhetoric of Inner Space, which I used experimentally at Georgia Tech from 1975 through 1978. Teaching online classes for the University of Phoenix caused me to put this project aside temporarily. However, the website contains enough content in the form of student writing about dreams to make it worth visiting. Using the contents panel, you can read the following types of student writing:

   Dream Descriptions

   Dream Stories

   Dream Essays

   Student Critiques of Dream Course

The almost 200 examples of student writing anthologized here are predominantly from students at Georgia Tech, but also include writing from students at the University of Florida and Florida Southern College.

I originated this "Dream Course in Writing" at Florida Southern College in 1968 and the University of Florida in 1973 and used it for three years at Georgia Tech. In its prototype form, the text for The Rhetoric of Inner Space was eventually over 400 pages and was printed in the 1970s at a cost of only five dollars per student. I used it experimentally in selected composition classes at Georgia Tech from 1975 through 1978.

After I left Georgia Tech at the end of 1978 to become a full-time industrial technical communicator, The Rhetoric of Inner Space, both the text and the associated method for teaching composition, became dormant.

However, as I get older I am finally attending to personal projects that I consider important. In addition to teaching online college classes, and working on yet another novel, I hope to complete construction of the www.dreamtowrite.com website as soon as possible.