Johanna Blakley

The Hollywood "dream factories" have always utilized themes from dreams and nightmares, and there's no doubt in my mind that this compelling stream of screen imagery insinuates itself into our own personal dreams and nightmares. So I was riveted by a recent New Yorker piece that provided an overview of the state of nightmare research.

Apparently, certain themes tend to dominate certain historical periods. German dream researcher Michael Schredl found that "bogeyman" dreams were popular in the 1920s; the 1950s and 60s were dominated by ghosts, devils and witches; and in the 1990s, movie villains became central elements of nightmares. Currently, the chief baddies are Voldemort and Freddy Krueger, who, in the classic movie franchise Nightmare on Elm Street, actually wrecks his knife-fingered havoc inside people's dreams. Wasn't it inevitable that he would slice his way into our dreams as well?

Current research does not clearly indicate that watching more TV or playing more computer games contributes to having more bad dreams, but children's nightmares often reflect the imagery they soak up while glued to the tube. British psychoanalyst Susan Budd actually argues that pop culture has not only affected the content of our dreams, but it has also affected their length: dreams tend to be shorter and more fragmented now than they were at the turn of the century. And it is very creepy to hear that there is a strong correlation between whether people report having black and white or color dreams, and their access to black and white or color TV and movies. It's no wonder that people get so riled up about television and film and its impact on society. Screen images literally worm their way inside our heads and help shape the stories our brains tell ourselves.

Marty Kaplan

It's just about perfect that the week that LA Gang Tours launches is also the tenth anniversary of the start of the Norman Lear Center.

At $65 a head, lunch included, the LA Gang Tours bus trip through South Central is cheaper than Disneyland, and the prospect of seeing real Crips and Bloods out the window is surely less lame than dodging Terminator blanks on the Universal Studios tour.

Ghettotainment, as this kind of dark tourism has been called, was made in heaven for the Lear Center, which tracks how entertainment has been steadily conquering news, politics, policy, commerce, justice, religion and pretty much the rest of reality.

But the point isn't to lament that we're amusing ourselves to death (though there's enough trivialization, vulgarization, sensationalism, celebrity worship and ADD-inducing distractions around to make you fear for the future of civilization). It's also that the power to grab and hold attention - the Lear Center's big-tent definition of entertainment - can be harnessed to do good.

Consider Alfred Lomas, the guy behind LA Gang Tours. He isn't Arthur Frommer's evil twin; he's an ex-member of the Florencia13 gang who'll be putting ticket revenues into "saving lives, creating jobs, rebuilding communities" in some of the worst parts of the city. His bus, he says, has been given safe passage through a gunfire-free safety zone that he negotiated among three gangs, and he intends to build on that ceasefire. He is leveraging our voyeurism and our appetite for thrill rides in order to rescue some broken souls.

Entertainment matters. When Edith Bunker, on Norman Lear's All in the Family, was nearly raped, and when Bea Arthur's character, on Norman's show Maude, had an abortion, Americans across the country felt enabled by fictional characters to grapple with taboo topics, in their own ways, at their own kitchen tables. In the weeks after cool bad boy Fonzie, on Garry Marshall's series Happy Days, got a library card, the number of Americans getting library cards increased by 500 percent.