If only he’d written it all down: “One night at their campfire, accompanied by whisky ablutions,” Miguel A., a native Zuni finally told the anthropologist everything:

all his remaining secrets, those “deeply held private beliefs” he held and the truth of his experience as a Zuni, an event that filled the anthropologist-friend with elation, he recalled decades later. Drunk as he was, he made a mental note to write everything down, but he failed to. “That night, as I crawled into my sleeping bag, I had an exhilarating sense of having gained a profound new insight into the mind and heart of [Miguel] and through him into the quality of life in the pueblo.

You can guess what happens the morning after: “All had vanished,” the anthropologist recalled, “except the memory of the intense excitement I had experienced. Even this was a hollow thing.”

In Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity, Rebecca Lemov, a professor of the History of Science at Harvard, recollects with flair, affection and dazzling detail, a post World War II project to do away with mornings after like this one: those episodes of mourning that follow some lost telling of some last secret of some human heart. You were so sure that what you heard last night and the way you heard it illuminated everything that mattered—like all the best campfire stories, filled with omens from places within and beyond, darker than any night: like those nocturnal admissions and communions that start-off near a campfire, nearly as hot as the fire itself, and that everyone “forgets” the next day. Such forgetful mornings after seem as unavoidable as the dying of a flame.



The “database of dreams” was, Lemov writes, “one of the most promising and yet strangely forgotten undertakings in American social science—a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture people’s dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank.” The mastermind of the database was Bert Kaplan, a brilliant and enterprising student of the great cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, and according to Lemov’s riveting history, one of the great early visionaries of data storage. Kaplan and his team, the Committee on Primary Records in Culture and Personality of the National Research Council, sought to transcribe and store people’s accounts of what they dreamed about in this “experimental data bank” as well as a range of subjective testimony delivered by various tests and tellings. Among the methods for surveying subjectivity, the fabled Rorschach inkblot test. Lemov conveys the charged atmosphere that animated their research: “It was vital for future endeavor to plumb the depths of the human psyche to know exactly what a certain inkblot or picture held for a certain person (a bear? a clown? an eviscerated body on a dissection table?)”

Rorschach test cards were in wide circulation among social scientists after the World War II. “Oh those crazy cards again,” Hermann Goring exclaimed when the test was given to him for a second time while he awaited trial at Nuremburg. As the Nazis’ encounter with “those crazy cards” suggest, the test were granted great authority by the end of World War II, “especially within American juridical, clinical, and “pure research” circles.” As the inkblots gained prominence and prestige during the post-war period, the protocols for administering the test became more elaborate. As Lemov remarks, there was a lot more to the tests than “inkblots or drawings on cards or some ideas about scoring. They involved procedural rituals, standardized steps, and elaborate instructions about everything from how far away the subject must be from the image (arm’s length) to how not to lead or coerce the subject.” All of this was to “work like an impersonal but very accurate machine for extracting samples of the “self.”