Author: Kelly Bulkeley

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Dream Education = Religious Studies Education

This is an excerpt from a panel on dream education at the recent conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.  My co-panelists were Phil King and Bernard Welt, with whom I wrote Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education.

 

Any class on dreams that occurs within a school context must, at a minimum, provide educational benefits consistent with the school’s mission.  These benefits usually include critical thinking, literacy skills, knowledge acquisition, global citizenship, etc.  All of us on the panel agree that classes on dreams can do a wonderful job of providing these educational benefits and contributing to the general goals of almost any kind of school.

 

But dream classes can do more than that.  Indeed, dream classes are always doing more than that, whether or not the teacher and students are explicitly aware of it.   Something happens when dreams enter the classroom, something very different from other topics of study.  Each of us on the panel has different ways of talking about that educational surplus.  For me, what’s interesting is how every class on dreams becomes at some level a class on religious studies.  By that I mean a class that studies human expressions of ultimacy via symbols, metaphors, and myths.  The historical aspect of this may be most obvious.  Prior to the rise of psychology as a Western academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, the primary arena in which people shared, discussed, and explored their dreams was religion–in Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the spiritual traditions of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.  Any class that’s trying to provide a solid base of knowledge about dreams can’t ignore the history of religions.  This is true whether you are teaching in psychology, literature, biology, or any other discipline—as soon as you start telling your students about dreams, you’ll need to talk about religious history, too.

 

I understand this might seem daunting to educators without any training or background in comparative religious studies.  I’m not saying you have to include large amounts of this material in your curriculum.  But I am saying you should think carefully about how you’re going to present the topics of your class within this bigger historical framework.  You should let your students know there IS a bigger historical framework, even if that’s not the specific focus of your class.

 

There’s another way that dream classes become religious studies classes, even more important than the historical aspect.  Whenever dreams become a topic of classroom discussion, the students are inevitably prompted to reflect on their private dream experiences.  The class may not explicitly involve personal dream sharing, or keeping a journal, or anything directly about the students’ own dreams—but I guarantee you, the students are thinking about their dreams in relation to what’s coming up in the class.  Especially if the teacher is a good one and gets the students excited about the topic, they’re going to be curious to explore their own dreams.  And once they do that, they’re very likely to come across themes, questions, and experiences that go to the heart of many of the world’s religions—for example, the prospect of death and an afterlife, the struggle of good and evil, the illusory nature of reality, prophetic anticipations of the future, nightmarish suffering and existential dread, haunting encounters with supernatural beings, and so forth.

 

Teachers can ignore all this if they wish, but I think it’s better if they at least recognize that their students are wondering about these kinds of issues in their dreams and thinking about how the class is, or is not, helping them make better sense of their experiences.  Again, this doesn’t mean you have to devote extensive class time to the religious implications of dreams in people’s lives.  You could devote some time to this topic, of course, and I think you’d be surprised at what your students would say if given the chance!  But it’s enough if you simply let the students know that, just as people in the past drew religious inspiration and philosophical insight from dreams, so do many people today.  It’s not a matter of ancient superstition carrying over into the modern world, but rather a recognition that humans in all times and places, up to and including us today, are dreamers, and our dreams bring us into contact with ideas, feelings, and energies that most cultures through history have regarded as religiously meaningful.  Whether or not we use religious language, the personal impact of certain dreams can be intensely meaningful and even transformative.  As dream educators, we have to give our students some degree of informed awareness of those spiritual dimensions of dreaming potential.

 

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What I Learned at the 2012 IASD Conference

Here are excerpts from notes I took during the recent conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, held in Berkeley, California, June 22-26.  In parentheses I’ve put the names of the people who were presenting or commenting at the time.

 

Jung’s focus on the number 4 is “dangerous” and promises a “seductive wholeness.”  (John Beebe)

 

In electrophysiological terms, as measured by the EEG, lucid dreaming can be described as meditation in sleep. (Jim Pagel)

 

A challenge for lucid dreamers: How to distinguish a failed lucidity technique from a sage warning from the unconscious. (Jeremy Taylor)

 

The pioneering French filmmaker George Meliere drew upon the fantastically creative, compelling illusions of dream experience to create a tradition of visionary cinema that we see today in “The Matrix” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” (Bernard Welt)

 

In a sample of 170 German school children, those who talk with their parents, siblings, and friends about dreams tend to have higher dream recall, suggesting a positive relationship between dream socialization and recall. (Michael Schredl)

 

People who are high dream recallers seem to have more activity in the brain’s tempero-parietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex, in both waking and sleep conditions.  These brain areas have been associated in waking with mental imagery and mind attributions (theory of mind), respectively. (Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub, et al.)

 

Sleep laboratory researchers are perfecting a method of awakening a person several times during the night at precise moments in the sleep cycle in order to induce an experience of sleep paralysis. (Elizaveta Solomonova)

 

Neuroscientists are experimenting with the use of transcranial direct current stimulation to directly affect the brain activity underlying dream experiences.  (Katja Valli)

 

Reflective awareness in dreaming can give humans an adaptive edge because in dreams we have the ability to anticipate, explore, and practice possible selves and possible worlds.  This ability can be cultivated through disciplined intentional mental practice.  We can change our brain anatomy simply by using our imaginations.  (Tracey Kahan, quoting Norman Doidge in the last sentence)

 

The “Inception” app is “worth a free download.” (David Kahn)

 

The mantra of the quantified self: If you track it, it improves. (Ryan Hurd)

 

In dream education with adolescents and young adults, the most relevant aspect of dreaming to their waking lives may be relational skills and emotional intelligence, helping them better navigate the complex currents of friendship, romance, and family life. (Phil King and Bernard Welt)

 

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Word Searching as a Tool in the Study of Dreams, or, Dream Research in the Era of Big Data

I’m giving a presentation with that title on Saturday, June 23, at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, held in Berkeley, California.  The presentation is part of a panel session, “What’s New in the Scientific Study of Dreams.”  I’m giving an overview of the word searching method I’ve been developing over the past several years, with a special focus on four “blind analysis” studies I’ve performed with the help of Bill Domhoff.  A youtube video preview of the presentation can be found here.

Here’s how I define blind analysis in the paper:

A blind analysis involves an exclusive focus on word usage frequencies, bracketing out the narrative reports and personal details of the dreamer’s life and making inferences based solely on statistical patterns in word usage—not reading the dreams at all, and basing one’s analysis strictly on numerical data.  The aim is to assess the patterns of dream content with the fewest possible preconceptions, as objectively as possible, before reading through the narratives and learning about the individual’s waking activities and concerns.

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The Tactful Dream Interpreter

“Once a Caliph saw his teeth falling out in a dream. He called a dream interpreter and asked him about the meaning of his dream. The interpreter replied: ‘The entire family of my master will perish.’ The Caliph became upset, and called for another interpreter and told him the dream. The second dream interpreter replied: ‘The dream of my master, the prince of believers, is true, for he shall live the longest amongst his relatives.’ Immediately the Caliph embraced the man and rewarded him for his skill and tactfulness.” (quoted in Amira Mittermaier, “Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination,” p. 63)

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More Black & White vs. Color in Dreams

Mary Walsh, a psychotherapist and grad student at the GTU, offered an intriguing idea about color variations in dreams: “I wonder if the change in our waking experience of color impacts our dream experience. Photopic vision functions only in good illumination which we have more of for longer periods of time nowadays. Scotopic, or night vision, I think, provides the ability to distinguish between black and white. Could the fact that we see more color for more hours each day and use our photopic vision more cause us to dream in color more often? Maybe dreams have changed.”

I think Mary’s right that more attention to the neurophysiology of vision and the cultural/technological changes of modernity will be helpful in making better sense of this question.

Also, Bob Van de Castle reminded me that his 1994 book Our Dreaming Mind has a good discussion of color dreams (pp. 253-256 and 298).  After reviewing several experimental studies, Van de Castle concludes that “color appears in dreams with much greater frequency than is generally acknowledged.  The saturation or intensity of color in dreams seems to vary along a continuum.” (p. 255)

Bob Hoss is another IASD member who has done especially detailed investigations of color in dreams.

I’ve just read Eric Schwitzgebel’s longer paper, “Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?” in 2002, and I’m grateful for his extensive research on this topic.  He admits that he has larger philosophical fish to fry–he says “I write in service of the broader thesis that people generally have only poor knowledge of their own conscious lives, contrary to what many philosophers have supposed.” (p. 649), an argument he elaborates in his recent book Perplexities of Consciousness (2011).  I don’t think I’d want to argue with him about that general idea.  And I agree that “our knowledge of the phenomenology of dreaming is much shakier than we ordinarily take it to be” (p. 649).

But I suspect Schwitzgebel views this as an insoluble problem because of the fundamental limits of introspection and conscious self-knowledge.  I see it as a problem that can be solved by better empirical research that builds our knowledge of dream phenomenology on  firmer foundations.

Looking at some of the initial data I’ve drawn from the SDDb, it seems clear that most people dream fairly often, but by no means always, of colors and black and white.

Here’s a link to an SDDb search for reports of 25+ words with references to achromatic colors.  472 reports show up, out of 5193 reports of that length.  White appears most often, black next, gray third.

And here’s a link to an SDDb search for reports of 25+ words with references to chromatic colors.  476 reports show up, out of 5193 reports of that length.  Red appears most often, followed by blue, green, yellow, orange, and purple.

In studies of people who have kept long-term dream journals, I’ve found lots of variation in this area.  Some people have more chromatic color references in their dreams, and other people have more achromatic references.  Some people have very high overall frequencies (e.g., Merri, whose dream series of 315 dreams is available on the Dreambank, has by my count 44.4% of her dreams with at least one chromatic reference and 40% with at least one achromatic reference) and others quite low (Paul, whose series of 136 dreams is available on the SDDb, has 0% chromatic and 1.47% achromatic references).

I don’t know of any theoretical perspective that can encompass all this data.  Isn’t it paradoxical to think about the colors we see when we’re asleep and our eyes are closed?  Perhaps we need a new paradigm entirely to make adequate sense of the visual qualities of dreaming experience.

But I still hold to my “Dorothy Hypothesis”: This whole question in mid-20th century psychology of whether we dream in color or black & white was generated by the 1939 release of The Wizard of Oz, with its dramatic contrast between the drab black & white (sepia, really) of Kansas and the gaudy, transcendent technicolor of Oz.

 

Note: Schwitzgebel’s article appeared in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002), 649-660.

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Dreaming in Black and White

The Wizard of Oz was originally released in 1939, viewed by millions of Americans who delighted in its novel cinematic analogy that waking is to dreaming as black & white film is to color film.  I’ve always assumed the question “Do we dream in color or black & white?” originated with the huge cultural impact of The Wizard of Oz.  I’ve study many dream traditions around the world, and while some typical dream phenomena are cross-cultural (e.g., flying, snakes, teeth falling out), the color vs. black & white question does not seem to be one of them.  Perhaps such a question can only arise in a culture in which people are viewing both color and black & white photos, films, and television shows.

Recently I found an article I wish I had known earlier, by Eric Schwitzgebel: “Do People Still Report Dreaming in Black and White? An Attempt to Replicate a Questionnaire from 1942.”  Schwitzgebel says, “In the 1940’s and 1950’s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were primarily a black & white phenomenon…However, by the 1960’s, most researchers reported a high incidence of color in dreams” (p. 25).  To investigate this strange psycho-cultural shift, Schwitzgebel replicated a 1942 study by W. C. Middleton in which college students were asked about their dream recall and colors in their dreams.  His results from a 2001 sample of students found a big difference: “The undergraduates in the present study reported much more colored dreaming than Middleton’s undergraduates in 1942.” (p. 28)

The exact question was, “Do you see colors in your dreams?”  “Very frequently” was the answer of 3.3% of the 1942 students (N=277) and 26.6% of the 2001 students (N=124); “Frequently,” 7.0% vs. 25.8%; “Occasionally,” 19.0% vs. 22.6%; “Rarely,” 30.8% vs. 13.3%; and “Never,” 39.9% vs. 4.4%.

Schwitzgebel ends his paper by saying, “If it is plausible to suppose that dreams themselves have not changed from black and white to color in this interval, we may conclude that one or another (or both) groups of respondents were profoundly mistaken about a basic feature of their dream experiences” (p. 29).

This seems too harsh to me.  As I mentioned at the outset, this color vs. black & white question is not a natural one.  The participants in Middleton’s 1942 study would have been high school students when The Wizard of Oz came out three years earlier.  I wonder if they interpreted the survey question as meaning, do you ever dream like Dorothy did in the movie, in fantastically vibrant technicolor?  In the cultural shadows of World War II and the Great Depression, it may not be surprising that most of the students answered “no.”

Another finding in Schwitzgebel’s study, which he doesn’t discuss, is that dream recall in general seems to have risen.  The participants in both studies were asked “How frequently do you dream?”  “Very frequently” was the answer of 13.4% of the 1942 students and 27.4% of the 2001 students; “Frequently,” 24.9% vs. 33.9%; “Occasionally,” 41.5% vs. 25.0%; “Rarely,” 30.8% vs. 13.3%; “Never,” 0.3% vs. 0.4%.  Based on these findings, it seems that not just color in dreams but dream awareness overall is greater now than in 1942.

However, Schwitzgebel’s study was performed in 2001, with students who passed their formative years in a decade of relative peace and prosperity.  Would we find the same results today if we replicated the questionnaire a third time, with students in 2012 who grew up in the cultural shadows of the War on Terror and the Great Recession?

 

Note: Schwitzgebel’s article appeared in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2003, vol. 96, pp. 25-29.