Kilton Stewart and The Marvelous Senoi Dream Controversy.

A summary by Richard Wilkerson

The Senoi represent a whole development of dreamwork and dream anthropology that really forms its own world off the left of mainstream dream anthropology. I'm re-presenting a summary from my online History of Dream Sharing class as the controversy will someday soon move onto the Net. The work has had a great influence on American dreamwork culture since the 1960's.

The Senoi are (were) a Malaysian hunting and gathering tribe brought to the attention of the West by Kilton Stewart. His descriptions of this happy tribe, free of disease and mental illness due to their morning dream sharing and techniques of dream control, were first described in the early 1950's though the research itself took place before the Second World War.

But (outside of the dream content psychologist Calvin Hall), the information was relatively unknown. Then Charles Tart (or a friend of his - Charles can't remember) rediscovered Kilton's writings and made them available at Esalen, the experimental retreat center in Big Sur, California. The ideas became part of a larger program to find the best in self development and consciousness raising techniques and distribute them into the mainstream education system. The program floundered, but Tart and George Leonard, a journalist/educational theorist, both wrote popular books that included information on the Senoi.

(According to G. W. Domhoff) With the growing frustration with urbanization, technology and Western values arising out of the Vietnam War conflict, the appeal of more earthy, simpler paths arose and with it the valorization of native and primitive cultural patterns and living styles. In the early 70's both Ann Faraday and Patricia Garfield use the Senoi as models in their popular books and Garfield even had a chance to talk with some Senoi that were working in a hospital she visited in the area. The dreamwork principles are summarized by Domhoff: (via Stewart and Garfield) (1985, pg 9):

1. Always confront and conquer danger in dreams. If an animal looms out of the jungle, go toward it. If someone attacks you, fight back.

2. Always move toward pleasurable experiences in dreams, If you are attracted to someone in a dream, feel free to turn the attraction into a full sexual experience, If you are enjoying the pleasurable sensations of flying or swing, relax and experience them fully.

3. Always make your dreams have a positive outcome and extract a creative product form them. Best of all in this regard, try to obtain a gift from the dream images, such as a poem, a song, a dance, a design, or a painting.

As  mentioned, if one can't handle the beasties alone, you can call on others to help and this is very effective too.

But other researchers could not find any evidence of that the tribe practiced this morning ritual and by the early 1980's other critics left the reality of the Senoi in question. The most critical of these researchers was G. William Domhoff, and in his 1985 _The Mystique of Dreams_ he attempts to "debunk" the whole affair and argues not only that the Senoi people show no signs of having practiced these techniques and that the whole program as adopted by Westerners only promotes the very control and manipulation of the environment it ardently is meant to offer an alternative for in the first place.

But the critiques have not caused much despair among dreamworkers. Most have felt that the Senoi are an important inner metaphor of our desires and valid as such. For an example of this creativity, see Strephon Kaplan Williams' Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual, the culmination of a myriad of wonderful approaches to the dream inspired by Jung , the Senoi and his work in areas of healing and wholeness.

Recently some, like Jeremy Taylor, feel the criticisms of the Senoi to be exaggerated and feel that the evidence against them came from the tribe after it had been destroyed by contact with the modern world. That is, the later research by Faraday was done with a group who may have identified themselves as Senoi, but in fact had experienced a break in the culture they had descended from, and no longer carried on or knew their own traditions.

The controversy continues, as is evidenced by the very heated discussions found in  issues of the ASD  newsletters ( Now IASD, the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Dream Time Magazine) between Taylor and Domhoff.  The discussion continued in a 1996 panel discussion at the ASD international convention in Berkeley which included Allen Flagg. Flagg, who married Stewart's wife after his death, claims to have enough materials from Kilton Stewart to prove their existence as a dream sharing tribe.  Flagg has plans to bring the work more into the public domain, following the lead of Kilton and Clara Stewart who also taught classes on the Senoi dream control techniques and talked about plans of creating an institute. I noticed a piece by Flagg in the  Summer 97 Dream Network Journal.

I'm sure we will see and hear more about the Senoi, and can watch for their appearance on the Net.