Dream expert in a nightmare battle

By Wesley Morgan
Princetonian Contributor

Charles McPhee '85's life, at least until last June, could have been described as a dream come true.

McPhee — who knew as a freshman that he wanted to write his senior thesis on dreams — managed to parlay that early interest into a career, spending the past 20 years treating sleep disorders and revealing the method behind the seeming madness of dreams.

Drawing on an online database of a half-million dreams, he is one of the field's most respected and innovative figures.

Last spring, though, McPhee experienced what can best be described as a nightmare: he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — better known as Lou Gehrig's disease — an almost invariably fatal neurological condition for which there is no cure.

"I feel locked out, in a way. I haven't grown tired of the story yet," he said.

McPhee, 44, is best known as the host of the nationally syndicated radio program "The Dream Doctor Show," where he answers the public's questions about the meanings of their dreams. For weeks before the diagnosis, listeners noticed a difference in his voice.

"You can hear it whenever I talk," said McPhee, whose slow and careful speech makes him sound older than he actually is. "It's more difficult, and I was noticing slurring."

Eventually, those afflicted with ALS lose their capacity to speak and move entirely. It was not until August that McPhee decided to explain his condition to listeners.
The main reason for the delay was McPhee's hope that he could continue the show with voice-replication technology.

"It was just more of an effort to speak clearly for a while," he said. With therapy reducing some of his symptoms, McPhee thought that he might be able to continue his radio show for a while longer. The technologies that he used to replicate his voice, though, did not end up providing a solution, requiring too much time and money. "It just wasn't realistic in the end," he said.

Instead, McPhee has chosen to focus his energy on his treatment, his family and his writing. The nephew of writer and Princeton professor John McPhee '53, Charles is married and has a 17-year-old daughter.

"The Dream Doctor Show" has been running old shows and will have its last broadcast this Saturday. He is not giving up his work, however. With his mind as sharp as ever and his dexterity as yet unaffected, McPhee is drawing on his vast stores of data and his own experiences to continue writing about dreams. If his treatment continues at its current pace, he said, "I've got plans for four more books."

A dream realized

From the beginning, McPhee has been much more than a radio personality. "To interpret dreams," he said, "it's very helpful to know the physiology of sleep and sleep disorders. Without that background, you wouldn't be able to tell, say, the difference between recurring nightmares that should be treated psychologically and night terrors, which are actually a parasomnia and have a fairly simple solution: keeping a light on at night."

Several times a month, callers on the show describe dreams where something is stuck in their throat. From years of treating these exact dreams at the Sleep Disorders Center of Santa Barbara, McPhee knows that this is a symptom of sleep apnea, not a simple nightmare.

Generally, though, dreams, not sleep disorders, are what McPhee deals with on his show and website. "The Web is an amazing tool not just for seeking but gathering information," he said. When he first requested that his readers submit interesting dreams, in the Internet's infancy, he received 700 dreams immediately, and more recently has been interpreting upward of 6,000 listeners' and readers' dreams per year.

Before starting his radio show, McPhee studied dreams not only in Santa Barbara but also at the National Institute of Mental Health. It all began at Princeton, though.

"It's not an easy subject to study at a place like Princeton — you might get an hour or two about dreams in a psych lab, but that's it — so I knew freshman year that to really get into it, I'd have to do independent work," he explained.

By majoring in sociology, McPhee hoped he would have a better chance of doing innovative research on the subject. Even there, though, it wasn't easy. His thesis adviser, Marvin Bressler, steered him away from studying dreams directly to fit the thesis better into the field of sociology. Instead, he studied ways of teaching general audiences about dreams. "It's ironic," McPhee noted, "because that's exactly what I've done and loved doing: teaching people about dreams using mass media."

"There's a lot of bad information about dreams out there," McPhee conceded, admitting that "most of the dream info you find on the Internet is bad."

His key message is that "dreams don't come from Mars or Pluto. Every one of them means something. There's post-traumatic dreams, like what rape victims may have, or soldiers back from Iraq or 9/11 survivors."

The dreams that fascinate McPhee most are the ones he wrote his thesis about, lucid dreams, in which the sleeper knows he is dreaming and can affect the outcome of the dream, sometimes providing greater insight. "What I would love to know is what percentage of Princeton students have lucid dreams," he said. "It's about 50 percent in the general population, but I bet it's more like 75 or 80 percent there. Intelligence has a big effect on your awareness of your dreams."

The other main category is worry-related dreams, which McPhee said are hints about what people need to address in their waking lives. "Princeton students have all kinds of worry-related dreams," he said. "You might have dreams where you're chased or trapped, and those can be clues that you're dealing with an unhealthy romantic relationship. And parents have endless accident dreams, but those don't mean their toddler is going to have an accident; it just has to do with fear of what's out of your control."

So how have the Dream Doctor's own dreams changed since his diagnosis? "I've had a lot of practice studying and being aware of my dreams, so I'm able to have a pretty good impact on them," he said. "I haven't had any nightmare dreams. They've remained very positive, just as I have. I've had a lot of dreams about building bridges, bridges under construction, which are typically symbols of transition." Even now, as he prepares to leave his radio show, McPhee continues to study the subject that fascinated him at Princeton: he is collecting his recent dreams for a book about his diagnosis, his dreams and the effects of major illness on the subconscious.

"I set out to learn the language of dreams, and I've really done it," McPhee said.

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