September 9: Ullman’s Dream Laboratory

Psychoanalyst and parapsychologist Montague Ullman, who founded the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and devoted himself to the study of dreams -- and mental telepathy -- was born on this date in 1916. Ullman was a psychiatrist trained at the New York University School of Medicine and the New York Medical College, where he was on the faculty for twelve years; he was also a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and president of the American Society for Psychical Research. In 1967, he became director of Maimonides’ department of psychiatry and developed one of America’s first community mental health centers. In 1974, he discovered the work of physicist and quantum metaphysician David Bohm, and committed himself to the investigation of dreaming as a form of intraspecies collective consciousness. Ullman, writes Dr. Sandy Sela-Smith, “believed that there is a species consciousness that is calling for our personal and collective survival and drawing us toward our ongoing evolution to oneness. Each of us, according to Ullman’s philosophy, contains billions of single-celled organisms that have, over time, evolved into collectives that eventually specialized into organs, systems, and functions of a single body, and that these collectives have learned to live as one. He speculated that as a species, we are replicating the learning process that transformed billions of cells into one person, which will lead to transforming several billions of people into a consciousness of one.” “Dreams offer us a spontaneously generated visual drama, depicting where we are subjectively at the moment. They help us understand the connection of the present to the past as we move into the future.” In addition, “Our dreams resort to a variety of techniques to call attention to aspects of ourselves we are simply not attending to or not attending to enough, or not attending to clearly. They frighten, shame, ridicule, exaggerate, and at times expose wondrous feelings that we never knew we had, all of which offer us the opportunity to get to know ourselves better.” --Montague Ullman