Pictures on My Pillow

Pictures On My Pillow: An Oceanographer's Exploration of the Symbols of Self-Transcendence is the entertaining, lucid and thought-provoking autobiography of Dr. Patrick B. Crean, a Canadian ocean scientist and accomplished amateur philosopher/theologian.

Written frankly and with great period detail, Crean's accounts are buoyed by an inimitable wit and a poignant recounting of his childhood, between the great wars, in rural England. The family home was a cottage on the expansive grounds of Alexander Pope's famous villa and grotto, in Patrick's day a convent school on the banks of the River Thames. Thus were his protective friends and life-long supporters fondly remembered as the 'kitchen sisters'.

The formative years of this bright lad would include an innocent recognition of the influence of dream imagery, hence the book's title, as well as being steeped in the benign qualities of faith lived with sincere practicality and authenticity. The latter in direct opposition to what he later experienced as the surd of religious, personal, professional politics - intransigent authoritarianism.

In 1944 he was accepted into a marine engineering apprenticeship in an Admiralty shipyard and in 1946 attended University College Dublin. These years would culminate in grand adventure involving three expeditions to the Antarctic whaling grounds with United Whalers' Anglo-Norwegian fleet as a chemist and a summer season at a South African shore station. Crean's professional life in the fields of chemical engineering and physical oceanography would continue with his immigration to Canada in 1953.

In 1958 Crean met the Canadian Catholic theologian/philosopher Bernard Lonergan whose vision of the universe would encourage him to develop a foundation from which his own eventual feedback model and worldview would emerge. Thus Pictures On My Pillow provides a practical application of the feedback model that Crean presents in Science, Self-knowledge and Spirituality: A Feedback Model of Bernard Lonergan's Philosophy of Human Consciousness (ISBN 978-1-897435-60-1).

"This autobiography is of a piece with Crean's other work, on Science, Self-knowledge, and Spirituality. It is a travel tale for our times, when our search needs be, not for global regions undiscovered, but for our glad hearts within." - Philip McShane, D.Phil. (Oxford), Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Mount St. Vincent University, Halifax