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My most recent project is to investigate human consciousness during the state of sleep and dreams. The phenomenon of human consciousness in dreams is presently known in sleep research as "lucid dreaming". Popularly, it might also include the phenomenon known as "out of body experiences". However, the beauty of this subject is the possibility to conjugate the study of the brain and nervous system with the phenomena produced by the presence of consciousness in dreams and the sleep/awake onsets. To investigate this area I will be using the method of "qualitative research". This is a frequently used method in the areas of Social Sciences, Anthropology, and in Educational Psychology. It is a method appropriate to situations where it is necessary to build new theories without the use of numerical data or statistical analysis, even though they might be included in a hybrid form, as well.
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The philosopher, John Dewey, writing about art, though he believed the same about science, expressed this eloquently and with a memorable metaphor:
"The act of expression that constitutes a work of art is a construction in time, not an instantaneous emission... [This] means that the expression of the self in and through a medium, constituting the work of art, is itself a prolonged interaction of something issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in which both of them acquire a form and order they did not at first possess. Even the Almighty took seven days to create the heaven and the earth, and if the record were complete, we should also learn that it was only at the end of that period that He was aware of just what He set out to do with the raw material of chaos that confronted him".
(John Dewey, "Art as Experience", 1034, p. 65) - [Taken from A. Strauss, J. Corbin, "Basics of Qualitative Research", Sage]
Next: <The Qualitative Research Method & "Grounded Theory" Method>
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Copyright © 1996-2001 Sirley Marques-Bonham.