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In June 2001, fort da spoke with Dr. Ogden about some of the ideas in his latest book, Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming (published by Jason Aronson Inc., October 2001). What follows is a transcript of that interview.
fort da: What do you have in mind by the enigmatic title of your new book, Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming?
Ogden: What I'm referring to is the ongoing conversation with ourselves that is, to my mind, among a handful of qualities that define the experience of being human. Dreaming is one form of that conversation. Dreaming is quite a remarkable thing. It involves a back-and-forth communication, a conversation, if you will, between two aspects of oneself. One of these aspects of self deals only in images and feelings and a form of logic that is timeless and cares nothing about cause and effect and has no use for words except to throw them around as things. The other aspect of oneself engaged in this communicative process is a form of self that not only thinks in words, it feels in terms of verbal understandings as well. It is deeply rooted in linear cause-and-effect logic and gets completely confused if deprived of access to chronological sequences. Dreaming as a vital and vitalizing conversation between these aspects of self (laboriously named the unconscious and the preconscious mind) is an astounding thing. Who in the history of mankind could have had an imagination of such magnitude as to be able to invent the experience of dreaming as a form in which we can talk to ourselves in such a way that conscious experience is continually being fuelled by the heat of the unconscious while the unconscious is continually being versed in lived experience in the world?
fort da: I notice you used the term versed in responding to my question about the conversations you speak about. Was that an intentional pun?
Ogden: Yes and no. I didn't plan it ahead of time, but it was there waiting for me at the frontier of dreaming. It is a pun that Frost used in