Author: Kelly Bulkeley

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The Scribes of Sleep – A New Book about the History of Dream Journals

My latest book, The Scribes of Sleep, has just been published by Oxford University Press. It’s a work dedicated to people who keep dream journals, as a new resource for learning more about the fascinating and largely unknown history of dream journal practices. The book is also intended as an argument in favor of dream journals as a valuable source of empirical data for scientific research into the nature and functions of dreaming.

If you are passionate about your dreams and tracking them over time, The Scribes of Sleep is written specifically for you.

Seven remarkable historical dreamers are the core of the book:

  1. Aelius Aristides (117-181), a Roman speaker and writer whose health crisis in his 20’s brought him to seek help at the temples of the healing god Asclepius. Aristides began recording his dreams in response to a direct command from the god.
  2. Myoe Shonin (1173-1232), an ascetic Japanese monk who advocated for reforms in the Kegon school of Buddhism. He kept a journal of his dreams, visions, and meditation experiences for forty years.
  3. Lucrecia de Leon (1568-?), an illiterate young woman who grew up in Madrid, Spain during the imperial reign of Philip II. Catholic priests recorded a series of her dreams over a period of three years, dreams that accurately foresaw the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
  4. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish scientist and philosopher who recorded his dreams over several years, leading to a spiritual awakening and the founding of a new church of mystical Christianity.
  5. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), a free African-American scientist, inventor, surveyor, and author of impressively accurate almanacs. One of the most brilliant minds of his time, Banneker kept a regular dream journal through his adult life, only fragments of which still exist.
  6. Anna Kingsford (1846-1888), a crusading English doctor, anti-vivisectionist, theosophist, and women’s rights advocate. She wrote a journal of her dreams from her early 20’s to her death at 41.
  7. Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), a Swiss theoretical physicist whose original work on quantum theory won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945. He was a therapy client of C.G. Jung’s, and for many years he kept a dream journal and shared its contents with Jung for analysis and interpretation.

To help in exploring the dream journals of these seven amazing figures, I bring them into dialogue with three broad methods of dream study: digital data science, depth psychology, and religious studies. Drawing together the findings from all these methods, I advocate for the importance of keeping a dream journal as both a unique practice of spiritual self-discovery and a vital source of scientific evidence.

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Dream Journaling as a Contemplative Practice

Most people who keep a dream journal are initially motivated by simple curiosity and the hope they will gain insights into their waking lives. But as they continue with the journaling and track the emerging patterns of their dreams over time, they often find the process becomes something more than that, something that develops a life of its own and opens into a new relationship with the unconscious realms of their minds.

Recently I was talking with Ryan Hurd, who manages the site dreamstudies.org, about the experience of keeping a dream journal, and he mentioned the idea that dream journaling can be thought of as a kind of contemplative practice, similar in many ways to meditation and prayer. This idea immediately resonated with my own feelings about the impact of dream journaling, and as we talked further it seemed worthwhile to share this line of thinking with others who might find it helpful.

At first sight, of course, this might seem like an implausible comparison. Dream journaling is not addressed to a deity like prayer, nor does it involve emptying the mind of all contents like some forms of meditation. There are no formal traditions or established schools of dream journaling, comparable to the ancient teachings about prayer in Christianity or meditation in Buddhism.

All of this is true, and yet the similarities remain striking. Consider the following features that characterize the long-term practice of dream journaling:

  • It cultivates a capacity for sustained, focused self-reflection.
  • It cultivates an ability to suspend your ego and listen to your inner voice of intuition, your true self.
  • It brings forth a more honest awareness of your greatest challenges, conflicts, and vulnerabilities.
  • It increases your sensitivity to the symbolic potentials of waking experience.
  • It will surprise you with sudden discoveries and realizations.
  • It is enjoyable and mentally transformative no matter what actual insights may come.

These core features of the practice of dream-journaling also characterize many forms of meditation and prayer. This was pragmatic gist of my conversation with Ryan. In our lives, at least, keeping a dream journal plays a role very similar to the one that meditation and prayer seems to play in other people’s lives. As much as we value the insights we learn from particular dreams, we are most drawn to dream journaling as a practice, as an ongoing dialogue with the transcendent powers of the psyche.

Setting aside time each day to record your dreams, reflect on their images and feelings, sort and categorize their contents, analyze them for their broad patterns and odd singularities—these activities generate a contemplative flow in themselves, a flow that when experienced on a regular basis becomes a powerful resource for creativity in all aspects of life. Although much less studied than meditation and prayer, keeping a dream journal is a kindred practice of deep, long-term psychological and spiritual growth.

 

(This post was first published on the website of Psychology Today, March 2, 2023.)

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Shakespeare’s Enduring Impact on Psychology

The 23rd of April is the traditional day for celebrating English playwright William Shakespeare’s birth in 1564. April 23 also happens to be the date on which he died in 1616, at the age of 52. A special reason to reflect on his legacy this year is the 400th anniversary of the publication in 1623 of the “First Folio,” the original collection of his works.

One way to appreciate the psychological value of Shakespeare’s plays is to look at his characters as case studies of mental and emotional typology. In this view, the character of King Lear gives us a vivid and psychologically accurate portrayal of an aging man struggling with mortality and loss of power. Many other examples like this emerge in the plays. Othello can be seen as embodying the violent irrationality of jealousy. Lady Macbeth shows the deranging effects of intense guilt. Falstaff exemplifies a life driven by animal appetites. Ophelia illustrates the suicidal despair of a dissolving self. When Freud first introduced his idea of the Oedipal complex and the dynamics of desire in parent-child relations in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he immediately connected it to the Bard: “Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex.

As useful as these analyses may be as a form of psychological shorthand, we need to be careful not to let such a reductive approach diminish either the characters or the plays, which are always larger than just one perspective can encompass. Trying to think in broader terms about Shakespeare’s works as a whole and their ongoing relevance to psychology, the following three general themes seem to me the clearest and most significant.

Respect for psychological diversity: Over the course of 38 plays, Shakespeare created hundreds of characters with an astonishing variety of personalities, thoughts, feelings, motivations, and behaviors. Even more impressively, he gave each of them a distinctive voice and fully-realized presence within the world of their play, enabling them to articulate their individual human experiences (most explicitly in their soliloquy speeches, alone on stage with the audience). In a striking expression of this humanistic, diversity-embracing spirit, Shakespeare never demonizes his villains, nor does he deify his heroes. The bad characters (Iago, Caliban, Richard III) are definitely bad, but they are also portrayed with genuinely sympathetic qualities. The good characters (Henry V, Prospero, Rosalind) are truly good, but we see their flaws and vulnerabilities, too.

The power of the imagination: Many of Shakespeare’s plays build up dense networks of metaphorical interaction between sleep, dreaming, illusion, madness, children’s play, love, revelation, and the practice of theater itself. Some of the most psychologically acute speeches in the plays revolve around this theme of the mind’s image-generating power in its many manifestations. Although wild and dangerous, Shakespeare portrays the human imagination as a creative source of new critical awareness of ourselves, society, and the world around us. In this way, his plays provide a kind of psychological map of the symbolic resonances between different realms of imaginal experience.

Transformative effects of art: Shakespeare not only created plays with a wide range of characters, he also created plays for a wide range of audiences. His stories addressed everyone in his society, from the elite royals to the lowly groundlings and everyone in between. The plays were meant to be entertaining, of course, but it seems that Shakespeare wanted to have a deeper impact on his audience by stimulating, within the imaginal space of live theater, a flow of provocative insights about individual and collective life. These dramatically-generated insights can have transformative effects because they unsettle our assumptions and open our minds to surprise, wonder, and growth. Even for the audiences of Shakespeare’s time, his plays were hard to understand. He twisted traditional tales, subverted conventional genres, used an endless stream of bizarre words, mixed ethereal poetry with bawdy puns, and devised elaborately convoluted plots. He intentionally kept his audiences off-balance and uncertain, not to confuse them but to open their eyes to fresh possibilities of human experience, to new dimensions of perception, feeling, and empathic connection. At the risk of anachronism, I’d say we should appreciate mind-expanding complexity as a feature of Shakespeare’s art, not a bug.

Happy birthday, Will!

 

(This post was first published on the website of Psychology Today, April 18, 2023.)

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Recurring Dreams

Many dreams contain recurrent elements that have appeared in previous dreams. These elements include characters you have encountered before, in settings where you have been before, doing things you have done before. The long-term consistency of your dreaming offers a unique window into the nature of your personality and the foundational realities of your waking life.

When specifically asked to describe a recurrent dream, people will usually share a common dream scenario with intense emotionality and/or counter-factual weirdness. For example:

“I’m speeding downhill in a car with no brakes…”

“I discover surprising new rooms in a familiar house…”

“I’m back in school taking a test on a subject I don’t know…”

These dreams can be extremely vivid and memorable just by themselves. As a repeating series, they become even more attention-grabbing.

To interpret recurrent dreams like these, it helps to look at them as metaphors, as attempts to understand something we do not know in terms of something we do know. With the no-brakes scenario, we might ask the dreamer, is there anything in waking life that feels like you’re speeding dangerously out of control? With new-rooms dreams, where in your waking life do you feel moments of wonder and growth, or unexpected insights? With the school-testing dreams, is something happening in waking life that makes you feel unprepared, or out of your depths, or judged by others?

In describing a recurrent dream, people will often say the same single dream has happened many times, but after further discussion it usually emerges that the recurrent scenario almost never appears exactly the same way in each dream. In most cases there are shifts, differences, and changes to the basic scenario, some small, some big, all of which can be considered as meaningful variations on the theme. For instance, the no-brakes dreams might shift over time in what kind of car is being driven, where is it going, and what happens at the end. The new-rooms dreams might vary in what kinds of architectural spaces are discovered and what the dreamer discovers inside. The school-testing dreams could differ in the school and class settings, the subjects being studied, and the results of the test.

These variations on the recurrent theme can be very helpful in understanding why the dreams come when they do. If the basic scenario of a recurrent dream has metaphorical meaning, how do the changed details in a particular dream connect the metaphor to something happening in the waking world right now? A key question with recurrent dreams is why they appear when they do. What is it in current life that has triggered another instance of this theme? Recurrent dreams are rarely about trivial matters. Something important is at stake, something so important that repeated efforts at sparking conscious attention are required. Perhaps the dream is a warning: watch out, you’ve been in this situation before! Perhaps the dream is highlighting an opportunity: hey, do you see that? Do you recognize its value?

By looking closely at the metaphorical dimensions of your recurrent dreams, at both their basic themes and their many variations, you can gain more insight into the ongoing psychological relevance of these lifelong companions of your sleeping mind.

Note: if you have distressing recurrent nightmares about a single repetitive theme with no variations, you might consider consulting with a mental health professional.

(This post was originally published on the website of Psychology Today, January 23, 2023.)

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Escape from Mercury: A New Science Fiction Novel

Escape from Mercury is a science-fiction novel about a secretive NASA mission to the planet Mercury, what the astronauts find at its shadowy north pole, and what they must do to reach Earth again. The book portrays an alternate history of America from the 1960’s to the 1980’s in which NASA’s Apollo program does not end shortly after the Lunar landings but continues and expands with new missions to other planets in the Solar system. It’s a surreal space Western that combines period-specific Apollo program technologies with dark theology, musical metaphysics, and the psychology of dreaming.

Escape from Mercury is only available in a limited paperback edition. No authorized electronic version of the text exists. The shape, size, and cover design reflect the aesthetics of pulp sci-fi novels of the 60’s and 70’s. Alas, the price of EfM, $9.99, is an order of magnitude more expensive than those books. However, T.A. and I take comfort in the fact that our publisher paused the production process at one point to ask if we really and truly wanted to set the price the book at such a low, barely profitable figure.

My previously published writings have been non-fiction works of dream research. To write about dreams, however, is always to write about the stories of people’s lives. My non-fiction has always included many narrative elements as a result, even when I’m trying to make technical academic points. Escape from Mercury is the Yin to the Yang of those writings. Here, the foreground changes places with the background: the narrative story-telling takes the lead, with the scholarly theorizing in a supporting role. And yet, the non-fictional elements in EfM are essential to the alternate-reality plot. For example, we present (thanks largely to T.A.’s expertise) an historically accurate portrait of how the 70’s era Apollo Applications Program would have continued to develop its plans for interplanetary missions following the original Lunar landings. EfM also includes numerous references to the origins, functions, and interpretation of dreams, all of which is grounded in actual research and historical fact. If you have enjoyed any of my other books, I think you’ll like EfM.

A big difference between Escape from Mercury and my other writings is that I don’t really want to say anything about it. With non-fiction books, it’s much easier to summarize the basic ideas and discuss them in general terms, which helps in giving potentially interested readers an idea of what the text is about. With EfM, even what I have written here feels like too much, like I’m giving things away we would prefer the readers to discover on their own. We’re not trying to be cryptic, or at least not too cryptic. We just want to give you a chance to enjoy the story without any spoilers getting in the way.

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Generating Dream Images Using AI

The practice of dream interpretation may be on the brink of a revolution, thanks to the emergence of powerful online tools for generating original images from text. However, an informal experiment with three long-term dreamers indicates there is much work still to be done to realize this potential.

The goal here is not to review a specific tool or approach. Rather, I want to highlight the key issues that any image-generator must address if it is to be successfully deployed with dreams. After considering several online resources, I selected one with the advantages of being fast and free, with several image styles available. I asked three dream-journaling friends if they would be willing to share a descriptive phrase of a vivid image from one of their dreams and let me try it with the image-generator. I framed it as a novel kind of dream-sharing process, in the spirit of Jeremy Taylor and Montague Ullman, with each of the different images representing an “if it were my dream…” projection, but in this case from an AI system rather than a group of people.

Let me begin with the most negative response, since I found it so surprising and thought-provoking. This comes from “Sarah,” a woman in her 30’s whose dream image was “I’m holding a baby, it’s not mine.” I used the online tool to create eight different images of this dream and then shared them with Sarah. Here is what she told me in reply:

“Oh my gosh, every single one of those images is absolutely horrifying with the exception of the last one!  They feel very distorted and have bad trip vibes. Viscerally, I can feel my throat close like I’m about to vomit. I do not like them at all and the word coming to mind is abomination…”

Sarah went on to say she didn’t even like the last image very much, it just wasn’t as terrible as the others.

Sarah’s response makes it clear that in some instances, the AI-generated images can prompt a strongly negative response from the dreamer. Alas, there is no technological solution to this problem: the same image might be neutral to me, appealing to you, and yet an abomination to someone else. But the potentially negative impact can be minimized. In dream-sharing groups we use the “if it were my dream…” preface for precisely this reason, to elicit another person’s perspective on the dream while also protecting the dreamer from intrusive, unwanted projections. A practical suggestion for future versions of these systems is to include in a “dream mode” a cautionary note about the potentially startling and unsettling effect of the image-generator when used with dream material, plus a brief statement about the value of considering multiple perspectives on the dream, even perspectives that initially seem strange or off-putting, and a reminder that ultimately only the dreamer can know what their dream truly means.

The second dreamer’s response was more positive, highlighting the potential benefits of this technology if it can be properly calibrated to work with dreams. This comes from “Rose,” a woman in her 30’s, whose dream image was “A forearm with a tattoo of a unicorn.” I entered this phrase into the system and created images using the same eight visual styles. Here is Rose’s response:

“This memory was a relatively ‘small’ moment in a dream and yet these images spark my curiosity and add to the dream. I’m drawn into all of them and I feel that they expand my understanding of the dream. I’m reminded of how much I enjoy looking at tattoos. They tell a story on the skin and yet even people who have the most prominently displayed tattoos rarely tell the deeper story/meaning of their art to the many people who see them.”

Here, the AI-generated images provided the dreamer with new ways of thinking about her dream and stimulated further reflection on how the dream relates to her cultural experiences in the waking world. This is exactly what a conventional dream-sharing group seeks to elicit with the process of everyone offering different projections onto the single dream—the varying perspectives enhance and enrich the dreamer’s sense of meaning, relevance, and possibility.

Significantly, none of the images provided an exact match to Rose’s dream. In the context of dream-sharing, the goal is to provide an interesting and hopefully stimulating angle on the dream, not to replicate it with photographic accuracy. The latter might be impressive, but it would offer little or no insight to the dreamer.

The third dreamer, “Stanley,” a man in his 70’s, found the images neither horrifying nor particularly insightful, though he did enjoy the weird artistry of several of them. His dream phrase, “Giant birds take me home from an island in the sky,” gave the system an extra challenge, with several of the images failing to yield a coherent visual representation. Stanley’s overall response is worth pondering:

“I suspect that the AI program interprets “dream” to mean impressionistic, gauzy, dreamlike, as the conventional thought of it goes. Or did you include the word dream in your input to the AI? [I did not.] Perhaps it just inferred it from the impossibility of the situation. At any rate, many of my dreams are very concrete and clear, with no fuzzy bits. I see every brick in a building, every leaf on the trees, every line on a person’s face.”

Here is another essential point: not all dreams are like a Salvador Dali painting, or any other work of surrealist art. Some dreams, like Stanley’s, have strong elements of naturalism and perceptual clarity.

Looking ahead, the best way to realize the transformational power of this technology as a tool for dream interpretation will be to collaborate closely with experienced dreamers, ideally those who are also experienced artists, in the basic training of the algorithms. If actual dreams and dreamers are included in the learning input of these systems, their output will be much more useful for the interpretive process.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on July 12, 2022.