Dreams Reflect Our Waking World

(Santa Clara Magazine, Spring 2003, 8-11)

Are dreams meaningful revelations of truth, or just deceptive gibberish? That is a question humans have been debating for thousands of years. Some of the earliest written documents from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India are texts on dream interpretation that provide instructions on how to separate the sense from the nonsense in dreaming. Most cultures through history have agreed that at least some dreams are genuinely meaningful and relevant to people’s lives.

Over the past century, Western psychologists have used new methods to study this age-old question, and their research has confirmed the basic meaningfulness of dreaming. Clinical psychotherapists from Sigmund Freud on have found that dreams bear strong relevance to people’s emotional concerns and personal conflicts. For example, psychotherapists have repeatedly found that if a client is going through a divorce, or suffering an illness, or experiencing a crisis situation at work, the client’s dreams are likely to provide informative, insightful reflections of his or her emotional situation in waking life.

In addition to the abundant clinical evidence from psychotherapists, the meaningfulness of dreams has also established by cognitive psychologists who have studied long-term dream journals—personal diaries in which people have recorded their dreams over a period of years or even decades. Content analysis of these journals has revealed a remarkable continuity between people’s dreams and their waking lives. The characters, settings, and modes of social interaction in the dreams have clearly identifiable connections with journal keepers’ everyday waking experiences. Thus students frequently dream about school, parents about their children, athletes about their sports, artists about their creations, etc. The upshot of this research is, whatever it is you do in waking life, you probably dream about it, too.

Taking the last 100 years of psychological research as a whole, the evidence is quite strong that dreaming is not deceptive gibberish (at least not entirely), and it does have genuinely meaningful relevance to people’s lives.

Now that we have a well-grounded answer to that initial question, a new question can be addressed: What kinds of meaning does dreaming convey? Most researchers have focused on the personal dimensions of dream meaning—how dreams relate to the private life concerns of the individual dreamer (health, sex, family relationships, etc.). While I value and appreciate the work of these researchers, my own studies have followed a different path. I have become increasingly interested in the communal dimensions of dream meaning. My research over the past several years has been building a case for the idea that dreams offer meaningful reflections of the broader cultural, political, and economic environment in which people live.

As you might expect, this idea has struck many people (including a number of my fellow researchers) as highly implausible. How can dreams, the bizarrely idiosyncratic products of an individual’s sleeping mind, have any significance for the waking world of public life?

One way I have tried to answer that question is by studying people’s dreams during times of unusually intense political activity—namely, Presidential elections. I have done research during the past three election cycles (1992, 1996, 2000), and each time I have found numerous instances of dreams with explicit themes and images from the waking world political scene. By 1996 I had gathered a sufficiently large number of politically-related dreams from people all over the country to begin sorting them by theme and content into three broad groups:

Political cartoons of the mind: Dreams expressing in succinct and sometimes very humorous ways the dreamer’s waking life political perspective. Here’s an example from a 36-year old man from Florida: “I’m playing golf with Bill Clinton. I’ve heard people say he cheats, and I understand what they mean, because he frequently improves the lie of his ball. But he encourages the people he’s playing with to do the same. He says, ‘It’s just a game, and just for fun!’” This dreamer voted enthusiastically for Clinton in 1992, but in 1996, when he had this dream, he wasn’t sure if he would vote for Clinton in the upcoming election. The dreamer saw the golf imagery of his dream as an expression of his concern that President Clinton is a “cheater” who frequently “improves his lies” and then tries to smooth-talk other people into letting him get away with it.

Personal symbols: Dreams using the figures of politicians as “personal symbols” to express strong emotions that the dreamer is feeling toward some matter in his or her waking life. Here’s an example from a 55-year old woman from New Mexico: “I’m back in college, in one of the classrooms, and Bill Clinton is one of the students. Then he’s the teacher, and he asks me how alcohol manufacturers get us to drink so much. I say I haven’t given the question much thought.” This dreamer had long struggled with alcoholism, and in her dream she sees the President as voice of “executive authority” within her, a voice that is prompting her to think more carefully about why she drinks.

New political perspectives: Dreams directly calling into question the dreamer’s waking life political attitudes, leading the dreamer to think anew about his or her accustomed beliefs about a politician or a political issue. This example comes from a 44-year old man from New York: “I’m on a camping trip with the President and his party in a heavily wooded area. Suddenly, Clinton darts up a hill into the woods. He sees a bear approaching the camping area. None of us moves, as the President confronts the bear; Clinton is very expert and competent as he does this, not wild or frightened. He manages to drive the huge bear, the size of a Grizzly, into a snare set for him. The FBI in the entourage are angry at the close call, but the President seems unperturbed.” This dreamer said that from the start he had been skeptical of Bill Clinton’s leadership qualities, but he awoke from this dream surprised by Clinton’s swift, assertive, and fearless response to the threat of the huge bear. As a result of his dream, this man reconsidered his generally dim view of Clinton’s executive abilities, wondering if he had been overlooking the President’s skills as a fighter.

My next research project tried to build on those earlier findings by taking a different approach to the general question of dreaming and politics. Beginning in the Fall of 1996 I began gathering most recent dream reports from college undergraduates of varying political persuasions. In addition to writing down their most recent dreams, I asked the students a series of questions about their political beliefs and activities: were they registered to vote? If so, in which party? Did they vote in the election? If so, for whom? How would they describe their political views, as conservative, liberal, moderate, other? I then compared the dreams of 28 highly conservative people and 28 highly liberal people (half men, half women in both groups) and found the following:

People on the right had more nightmares and dreams in which they lacked power. They had a greater frequency of lifelike dreams. Female rights were especially anxious about family relationships, and male rights had dreams almost devoid of girlfriends.

People on the left had fewer nightmares and more dreams in which they had power. They had a greater frequency of good fortunes and bizarre elements in their dreams. Female lefts had an especially high frequency of good fortunes, and male lefts had an unusually high percentage of female characters.

What do these findings mean? When I presented this research finding at an academic conference in the summer of 2001, I said my pilot study was far too small to support any certain conclusions. However, to my surprise and amusement, this little research factoid—“Republicans have more nightmares than Democrats”—was quickly seized by the national news media and bandied about by pundits of all persuasion (Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Schneider, Bob Edwards, Peter Jennings, etc.). Despite my cautions, political partisans on both sides did not hesitate to assert their interpretation of my findings. As reported by UPI correspondent Mike Martin, Terry McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee chairman, declared “If George W. Bush were the leader of my party, I’d have trouble sleeping at night, too.” Not to be outdone in the game of “dream spinning,” Kevin Sheridan of the Republican National Committee quickly replied, “What do you expect after eight years of William Jefferson Clinton?”

As you can imagine, this episode taught me a humbling lesson about the manipulation of academic research by the mass media. But beyond that, it encouraged me to expand on this small but promising project and continue exploring dreams as a means of gaining new insight into the unconscious roots of people’s waking life political beliefs.

On a more sober note, I have over the past year been gathering dream reports related to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As you can imagine, many of these reports have been nightmares—frighteningly vivid dreams of planes being hijacked, terrorists with bombs, tall buildings exploding, all the horrifying imagery of that unforgettable day. In a forthcoming book (Dreams of Healing: Transforming Nightmares Into Visions of Hope, Paulist Press) I discuss these dreams both in terms of their relevance to the dreamer’s personal life and to the profoundly changed communal world in which we all now find ourselves. I have found that many of the post-September 11 dreams not only express the dreamer’s private emotions but also envision creative new possibilities for meaning and order in the life of the community.

This capacity of dreams to convey meanings of both personal and collective significance is beautifully illustrated in the experience of Mandy (not her real name), a twenty-nine year old artist from California. A couple of days before September 11 Mandy had flown to New York to visit a friend who happened to work in one of the World Trade Center towers. On the morning of the 11th her friend had gone to work as usual, leaving Mandy asleep in her apartment (right across the river from the towers), with plans to meet at the WTC for lunch. When the attack occurred, Mandy rode her bike to a spot where she witnessed the towers collapsing. It was several hours before she learned her friend had survived. That night, Mandy had this dream:

“I’m walking through a forest that has been chopped down. It is a sea of stumps. Every single tree has been cut. I stand in the middle, sobbing. Who could do this? I walk up to one of the stumps and see the huge beautiful spiral inside. I get lost in its magnificence. These trees are so old. I can see all of history in these trees, and I’m struck with the beauty and power of seeing this part of the tree. It’s a part that I don’t get to see. This spiral is taking me so deeply down into myself, to a place so powerful that it overwhelms me.”

Mandy knew right away that her dream was directly related to her harrowing personal experiences the previous day. She felt “so much calmer and clear-headed” when she woke up, and she said the beautiful image of the spiral helped her get through the agonies of the next day. She also recognized that her dream had a broader, almost allegorical dimension of meaning: Amid a scene of apparently total devastation and ruin, a previously hidden source of power, beauty, and strength is discovered. Mandy understood that this message was relevant not only to her but to everyone who was consumed by fear, confusion, and despair in the immediate aftermath of September 11. When she returned home she made a painting of her dream, and since then she has shown it in public exhibitions as a way of sharing its inspirational meaning with others.

My current research project on the social dimensions of dreaming is a collaborative effort with Prof. Tracey Kahan of the Psychology Department of Santa Clara University. Prof. Kahan has taught a class on Sleep and Dreams for several years, and one requirement of her course is to keep a sleep and dreams journal. At the end of Fall Quarter of 2001 Prof. Kahan and I gathered the journals of 22 students who volunteered to participate as anonymous subjects in our study. We are currently in the process of analyzing the journals for evidence of explicit incorporations of September 11-related imagery (e.g., hijacked airplanes, terrorists, Osama Bin Laden, etc.), and we will present our findings at the 2003 conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams, to be held in Berkeley from June 27 to July 1. In previous studies Prof. Kahan has examined the various types of thinking, awareness, and self-reflection that occur in dreaming, and one question we will be examining is whether dreams with clear incorporations of September 11 themes have distinct qualities of awareness as compared to dreams without such content. Do dreams with explicit images of terrorism have less self-reflection (because of overwhelming fear) or more self-reflection (because of heightened vigilance)? The results of our study should cast new light on this and other questions relating to the profound psychological impact of September 11.

My interest in how dream content relates to major events in public life is not intended to disparage the value of dream interpretation for personal insight. Particularly in the practical contexts of psychotherapy, counseling, and spiritual direction, dreams are a wonderful resource for individual growth and self-knowledge. My concern is to rather to complement the personal meanings with communal meanings by heightening people’s awareness of their deep and often unconscious relations to broader forces in their communities and in the world. Like many social commentators, I lament the tendency in American society to segregate private and public spheres of existence, and my research is providing evidence that even in the seemingly isolated realm of dreaming we are still dynamically involved with the political, economic, and cultural forces shaping our lives. My guiding belief is that the more aware we become of those forces, the better able we will be to guide them in creative and fruitful directions.

Dream Content and Political Ideology

LIST OF THE DREAMS

Appendix 1

FL 1 COOK KILLS HER MOTHER

I was at my house with my mom, my younger sister, and my younger brother and his friends. My brother and his friends were watching a sports game on TV. Out of nowhere the cook at my parents’ restaurant came to my house and murdered my mom in my bathroom. My dad came home a little while later, went into my sister’s room and killed himself. When I found him there, I went to call 911 and our phone wouldn’t work. I finally got through on a cell phone, and suddenly my dad was alive again. My sister then took his hand and led him into my bathroom. She said, “Look, there’s mom,” and pointed to her dead body. We went back out to the living room and my dad said, “Let’s get out of here.” Just as I said, “We can’t, Tom (the cook/murderer) took mom’s car,” Tom pulled up in the driveway. I was terrified as he walked up our walkway and into our house again, but my dad wasn’t. Tom then proceeded to explain the procedures and the logic behind killing my mom, as I stuffed my face with a huge bowl of raviolis.

FL 2 BOYFRIEND’S HAPPY PARTY

I dreamt that I was at a party that my boyfriend was hosting at his house. I cannot remember the specific details of how/why I was at this party, but I do remember that it was at his house. I can remember it was very warm in the house, and all the lights were on. Everyone was very happy and seemed to be enjoying everyone’s company. What made this dream memorable was that my high school friends were there, who I haven’t seen in two years. I remember their faces being extremely colorful (red lips, pink cheeks), and just full of life. Both my friends and I were extremely excited to see each other.

FL 3 HUGGING HER CONFUSED AUNT

I am in my house I lived in when I was younger. My aunt and little cousin Marcus came to visit me. I was back home from going to school in Hawaii. When I saw my aunt I gave her a hug but she was hesitant at hugging me back. She looked extremely confused. Marcus was playing with my mom, he was restless and he wanted to leave. I was just standing there. I was confused myself. I wasn’t sure what was going on.

FL 4 EX-LOVER’S MASSAGE

I was dreaming about a past relationship. I ran into my ex-lover at the mall. We went back to his house and I began speaking with his mother. He and I went upstairs and he began to massage my body. When his hands touched the small of my back, I quickly woke up and called my boyfriend to tell him how much I love him.

FL 5 MOTHER CUTS HER HAIR CRAZILY

I had a dream that my mom cut my hair all crazy, giving me bangs and cutting it uneven on the sides. We were on a vacation and the house in which we were staying was located right on the beach. My parents were there and I believe my brother was there as well. I remember looking out the glass doors and seeing the ocean directly outside. The waves kept getting closer and closer and taller and taller. Then I realized that there was an emergency warning being sounded out, but no one was taking it seriously and I had to try and get everyone out of the house.

FL 6 A WATCH IN THE WATER

I dreamt that I was in the ocean near the shore, with people. As I was floating I noticed a male watch and swam down to reach it. The watch kept slipping out of my hand and then I noticed the clasp was floating away. I managed to catch the watch but not the clasp. Then when I looked at my hand with the watch in it, it was a female watch that I had grabbed. I went back and took the male watch as well but both were damaged when I brought them back to shore. On the shore there is a little girl with a nose piercing that is almost grotesque. It is revealed that her mother made her wear it because it is trendy. Then her father notices that the piercing is infected and removes it.

FL 7 BOYFRIEND’S MOM YELLS AT HER

My boyfriend and I were watching tv in his living room and he went outside to smoke. So, I was just sitting by myself watching TV. Then his mom comes home and starts yelling at us and yelling at me because she didn’t know that he smokes. I was really scared and sad because I didn’t want his mom yelling at me. I wanted her to like me.

FL 8 TAKING CARE OF HER YOUNG NIECE

My family had a reunion get together at a hotel and I was in charge of taking care of my young niece. We were outside and walking on this pathway that was very slippery and we kept falling. My niece would cry every time we would fall and I would try to distract her. Suddenly I realized I didn’t have her milk bottle, so I asked my dad to watch her while I went inside the hotel to get it. I managed to get up the slippery pathway again and go inside the hotel, but suddenly it turned into a mall and I could not find my family anywhere. Although I had never seen the mall before, I somehow knew my way around. The rest of the dream I spent looking for my family (very vague at this point).

FL 9 TEMPTED TO LEAVE HER BOYFRIEND

I dreamed I was lying on my stomach and a friend of mine who I might have crush on came next to me. We were in a corner of a room. He kissed me on the ear. The next thing in the dream was us sitting on a sofa in the living room (mine??) talking, and I’d assume stuff happened in between that I did not actually dream. He was offering to give me a lot of things, I don’t know what exactly for, something like, leave my boyfriend and run away with him. He offered things like spending his savings on me, and when I didn’t give an answer, neither yes nor no, he offered more. I didn’t speak, just cried. I knew what was the right thing to do, but I didn’t want to commit myself. Out of the parlor? Came the chair of my department and I thought, oh great, now I’m in trouble. (the chair knows of my boyfriend, and he’s met him. But instead, he talked to my friend as if they knew each other and asked, “were you the one that did this (made her cry)?” When he nodded, the chair said, then it’s your responsibility to make it better.

FL 10 CRUEL SOCCER GAME FLYING

I was walking in a park-like area toward some sort of museum, there was a lot of statuary (Greek?) leading up to the museum and I remember thinking how far (unusually far) the walk to the door was. I was with a friend, Pat, I have had since second grade. I noticed a soccer match going on to our left and it consisted of many adult men but there was a line of children (6-7 years old) who had their shirts pulled over their heads, and their parents were lining them up. I remember thinking how odd and cruel that was to send the children into a violent game with older men. At this point I became lucid and remembered that I could fly in my dreams if I wanted to. I began to fly and I thought to myself, “If only I could remember how to do this while I am awake, it is so easy.” Pat was up ahead and as I flew towards him I awoke.

FL 11 BLISSFUL PREGNANCY

I am not sure of where I am exactly; however, that does not really concern me. It is not dark yet not overly bright. I do realize I am indoors because though there is not a mirror visible to me I know I am looking at myself and through my eyes. It is pleasantly warm and quiet; I can feel this in my arms, back, face…through my whole body. I may be reclined in a bed or a very soft and big easy chair. I am very comfortable and peaceful. I feel my abdomen, large and warm, and I know life is within me. This is a recurring dream in which I have the baby in my arms and I am nursing the baby. It is so real that the baby’s smell and gurgling, suckling, etc. I feel physically. I have to emphasize the calm and contentment, the overwhelming love I have for this child welling up within me.

FL 12 SEEING THE GIRL SHE LOVES

In the dream there was me, the girl I’m in love with, and her boyfriend, who is a friend of mine also. We were in this really large bathroom like thing and she wanted he and I to escort her to the bathroom. The weird thing about the bathroom was that some stalls had doors and others had shower curtains. Like the almost clear kind but you can’t really see through it. She wanted to go to one that had the shower curtain, but was afraid to because she thought we would look at her.

FL 13 HAUNTED APARTMENT

I was moving into a new apartment, from the 3rd floor to the 3rd floor-across a grassy area, there were other people helping me with boxes, when I got in to the new apartment I loved it, I remember climbing up the stairs, I looked around and liked it, but I knew it was haunted, I can’t remember what happened so that I would know, but I knew and I didn’t mind.

FL 14 GEORGE W. BUSH STEALS HER CHIPS

I was in my room watching the news on the election and eating chips and G.W. Bush came into my room and stole my chips. I was surprised and caught off guard. I looked up at the TV and Gore won because they miscalculated the votes.

Comments on DreamingNow, 2005

The Dreams We Dream For Each Other

In a lecture Jorge Luis Borges once gave on the subject of dreams and nightmares, he said “dreams are an aesthetic work, perhaps the earliest aesthetic expression” of our species.[1] Borges’ insight has been abundantly supported by recent studies in history, archeology, and anthropology, all pointing to the universality of dreaming as a primal source of human cultural creativity.[2] Some of the earliest written texts in China, Egypt, and India are catalogs of dream symbols. Myths originating in ancient oral traditions tell of dreams that helped to create the world (e.g., the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime). Shrines and temples around the world are devoted to deities who visit their worshippers in dreams to provide healing, guidance, and inspiration. At least some of the cave paintings of Paleolithic Europe, long celebrated as revolutionary expressions of unprecedented symbolic creativity, are believed to be portrayals of dreams experienced by early homo sapiens engaging in the ancient practice of dream incubation, or seeking a dream.

Dreaming may inspire creative activity, but a dream is not the same as a work of art. The moment we wake up, we leave the pluralistic world of the oneiric imagination behind us, and our minds are quickly restructured and reoriented by the sensory demands of the consensual social world. Given the radical nature of this existential transition (which, significantly, is genetically hardwired into the basic neural functioning of the human brain), any effort to remember and/or communicate our dream experiences is inevitably colored by our waking life interests, desires, fears, and conflicts, not to mention the vastly complex web of cultural traditions shaping our apprehension of the world. Just as we must reject the scientist who claims to capture “pure” specimens of dreaming in the sleep laboratory, so we must reject the artist whose work purports to be a direct transmission of dream experience. In both cases what is forgotten is the inescapable partiality of our waking encounters with dreaming. Again, Borges: “The study of dreams is particularly difficult, for we cannot examine dreams directly, we can only speak of the memory of dreams….If we think of the dream as a work of fiction—and I think it is—it may be that we continue to spin tales when we wake and later when we recount them.”[3]

My impression is that most artists do not believe their works are direct replications of dream experience, but rather are carefully crafted transformations of images, moods, and themes from the world of dreaming. To be a dreamer is not necessarily to be an artist; experiencing dreams and knowing how to express them as art are two different things.

Still, the connection between dreaming and aesthetic creativity is not spurious. The powerful inspiration provided by dreaming derives, in my view, from a fundamental impulse in dreams toward communal expression. Dreaming provokes greater consciousness—in both the personal and collective spheres. This wonder-working power is most evident in the vivid memorability of certain dreams that burn themselves into people’s minds and absolutely demand to be acknowledged and expressed in the waking world. Jung used the term “big dreams” to describe such experiences, which he called “the richest jewels in the treasure-house of psychic experience.”[4] Whether by virtue of their hyper-realistic imagery, strong physiological carry-over effects, or revelatory existential insights, certain dreams literally cannot be forgotten; they force their way into waking awareness, prompting an urgent need to share the experience with others—“Listen, I had a dream….”[5]

In many cultures around the world this impulse toward communal expression is celebrated as a valuable resource by which dreaming contributes to collective well-being. Dream-sharing among family members is the norm, and collective decision-making (e.g., about hunting, war, legal disputes) includes dreams as useful sources of information and guidance. Anthropological literature is filled with examples of communities, both historical and contemporary, in which dream-sharing is an integral part of broader social, political, and religious processes. One of my favorite examples comes from the Iroquois people of Northeast America. For hundreds of years they have performed “the Dream-Guessing Rite,” a three-day ceremony held in midwinter, when the nights are long and the opportunities for dreaming abundant. It begins with the members of one moiety house walking over to the cabins of the opposite moiety and asking to have their dreams guessed and fulfilled—with the dreams being proposed to the assembled group in the form of riddles. According to anthropologist Harold Blau, “these riddles are stylized and are clues to the assembly as to the subject of the dream. Clues may be understood more readily if one is familiar with legendary accounts of various societies and spirit forces. Single sentence riddles are proposed: ‘It whistled in the wind’ may refer to a corn husk spirit. Likewise, ‘It has holes, yet it catches’ may refer to a lacrosse stick net.”[6] The groups Blau observed took great pleasure in the guessing process, and once the dream is revealed, the person who made the correct guess promises to present the dreamer with whatever appeared in his or her dream. Then the roles are reversed, until everyone has had the opportunity both to guess someone else’s dreams and share a dream of one’s own. It can easily be imagined, I think, that a community that provides such a stimulating public space for dream expression would benefit from a vastly deeper sense of mutual understanding, respect, and cooperative spirit. Perhaps we should not be surprised to learn that the earliest Christian missionaries to visit North America were horrified by the Iroquois’ idolatrous reverence for dreaming, and one young Jesuit wrote a letter to his superiors back in Europe to say he was worried one of the natives might dream about murdering him and might then try acting out the dream in waking life.[7] (Of his own dreams, the young missionary said nothing.)

We are living in something of a golden age in the historical and cross-cultural study of dreams, with several excellent books and articles appearing in the past few years.[8] For our purposes, the key point in these works is the widespread belief that dreaming is not simply a private affair with exclusively personal relevance, but rather an experience rooted in collective realities and potentially relevant to the broader concerns of the community. Contrary to modernist prejudices, humans have long recognized the psychophysiological dimension of dream meaning and the relationship between dream content and the individual’s personal life context. Artemidorus, for example, the 2nd century C.E. Roman dream interpreter, argued that the meanings of dreams can vary depending on the dreamer’s gender, age, health, marital status, social position, etc, while Hindu medical texts analyzed dreams for diagnostic indicators of the individual’s physical health. What current historical and anthropological studies have shown is that many cultures have also recognized collective dimensions of dreaming as well, dimensions by which the dreamer is connected to his or her family, to other people, to the land, to the planet, and to various trans-human powers and realities.

To speak of such collective dimensions of dreaming may sound scandalous to those of us influenced by Western psychological thinking. Freud, as ever the ideological pioneer, claimed that all dreams, no matter how politically relevant they appear on the surface, are in fact nothing more than disguised fulfillments of repressed childhood wishes. In The Interpretation of Dreams he describes one of his own dreams in which he encounters a notoriously reactionary Austrian politician, Count Thun, whom Freud had actually seen that day at the train station. Freud confesses that in waking life he felt “insolent and revolutionary ideas”[9] after seeing Count Thun. But his interpretation of his dream ignores all that and reduces the possible meanings to just one, a symbolic reference to infantile megalomania. Freud dismisses any thought of connecting the political imagery of his dreams to the actual political situation of his community: “This revolutionary fantasy, which was derived from ideas aroused in me by seeing Count Thun, was like the façade of an Italian church in having no organic relation with the structure lying behind it.”[10]

American dream psychologist Calvin Hall endorsed Freud’s individualist/anti-political bias in his influential 1966 work The Meaning of Dreams, rejecting any legitimate interest in the communal dimensions of dreaming and insisting that the only genuine dimension of meaning involved the dreamer’s personal life: “Dreams contain few ideas of a political or economic nature. They have little or nothing to say about current events in the world of affairs.”[11] Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse in recent years. Nowadays prominent neuroscientists debate whether dreams have any meaning at all, individual or collective.[12] Everything that happens in dreams can be explained (so the argument goes) in terms of automatic changes in the chemical and electrical activities of the brain as it passes through the various stages of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. According to Owen Flanagan, a leading voice in the reincarnated form of sociobiology known as evolutionary psychology, dreams are “spandrels of sleep,” mere epiphenomena that have no meaning, function, or value whatsoever.[13]

This, then, is the current condition of the field of dream studies: At the same time as historians and anthropologists are discovering an incredibly rich variety of dream beliefs and practices from around the world and throughout history, leading Western scientists are denying any functional value for dreaming whatsoever.

This is also the context, or at least one of the contexts, in which the DreamingNow show is appearing. Explicitly dedicated to exploring the social and political potential of dreaming, the show is a direct repudiation of the mainstream Western psychological belief that dreams are either purely personal self-reflections or sheer neural nonsense. I don’t know if the DreamingNow curator Raphaela Platow intended to make a major theoretical statement to the dream research community, and I’m sure the artists’ works have many aesthetic virtues that escape my untrained eye. But to me what’s most interesting about the contributions to DreamingNow is the way the works evoke a vivid awareness of exactly that which is missing in the Western psychological approach—a deeper appreciation for dreaming as a source of collective meaning-making. With that in mind, let me offer some brief reflections on a few particular pieces in the exhibit.

Antonio and Isabel Aquilizan’s Dream Blanket draws the observer into an enclosed but comforting and ultimately transformative space of multiple colors, sounds, and feelings. Their collection of blankets from various cultures around the world reminds us that dreaming occurs in sleep, and sleep is both a culturally-constructed experience (each blanket has a distinctive pattern of color and texture) and a natural bodily process we share with all mammals. The fact that we humans prefer while sleeping to have a blanket to keep us warm is itself a sign of how vulnerable we become for eight or so hours every night. We lie motionless for hours on end, oblivious to the external environment, defenseless and vulnerable, incapable even of preserving our own bodily warmth. Pace Flanagan, something very valuable must happen during sleep for evolution to have preserved such a helpless condition as part of our necessary psychological functioning. The other feature I appreciate in the Aquilizans’ Dream Blanket is their inclusion of so many different dream voices, from people we too rarely have the opportunity to hear. One of the dirty little secrets of dream research is that the majority of empirical studies use mostly white, mostly middle- and upper-class college students as their subjects, with their dreams then presented as the “norms” by which all human dreaming is measured. Needless to say, this leads to a rather narrow view of the subject, with virtually no attention to the dream lives of the people from different economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. Nietzsche once said, “among all these dreamers, I, too, who ‘know,’ am dancing my dance”—that’s the expansive, liberating feeling I get from Dream Blankets.

A very different set of associations come to mind in connection with Chiharu Shiota’s installation, with its numerous single beds literally tied to each other by an intricate, seemingly random web of black thread. The web is a metaphor frequently employed by cognitive scientists to account for the fundamentally social nature of the evolved human mind (i.e., neural networks as vast interweavings of synaptic activity, in constant interaction with the neural networks of other people’s minds), and it is also used by anthropologists in the Geertzian tradition to describe the elaborate symbol systems pervading human cultural experience. Following those ideas, the web can be understood as an expression of ontological relatedness and community, both in waking and dreaming experience. However, the austere, black-and-white composition of Shiota’s installation also calls forth darker feelings, of the dreaming individual as spider’s prey, trapped in a colorless void, a prisoner of sleep, incapable of movement or escape. Shiota’s performance in one of the beds during the exhibit’s opening will undoubtedly add further dimensions of meaning to this powerfully ambivalent dream image/image of dreaming.

David Solow’s work centers on one of the most bizarre features of dreaming—its infinite potential for metamorphosis, the capacity of dreaming to mix and merge people, places, objects, times, and ideas. Morpheus, son of the Roman god of sleep, was well known for his ability to assume the shape of any person, making him ideally suited to bear divine messages in dreams. I take Solow’s work as a revelation of a different kind of divine truth, the truth that in dreaming the ordinary boundaries of selfhood dissolve, opening us to other dimensions of being and other ways of knowing the world. The naked bodies of the dreamers are illuminated in a pool of water (the classic Jungian symbol of the unconscious), and again we are reminded of the brute physicality of sleep. The naked bodies merge in and out of one another, but not sexually—indeed, the effect of the nudity in this work is decidedly unarousing. Perhaps we’ve heard enough already about sex and dreaming from Freud, the Surrealists, and David Lynch, and Solow is now pushing us to consider embodied dimensions of dreaming beyond the biological process of reproduction, beyond the binary opposition of inseminating male and ovulating female, to a place where we recognize the astonishing, glorious mutability of the human body. There is a little Morpheus in all of us, and through Morpheus there is something of you in me, and me in you.

A hint of sexuality can be inferred in Cai Guo Quiang’s work Dream, for the bed used in his installation is a double, rather than the single person-sized beds in the other pieces. Quiang’s bed is bathed in red, which might in other circumstances highlight the erotic passions kindled by two people sleeping together, but which in this case is more ominously a reference to the official color of the Chinese communist government (whose “one-child” policy leads the state to reach into people’s beds and control their procreative activities). The red lanterns suspended above the bed take the shape of weapons, cars, computers, and the omnipresent Chinese star, all forming a web-like snare that constrains the dreaming imagination and seeks to replace free-form creativity with the dominant ideology of the state. In this regard, Quiang’s work echoes the remarkable book of Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, in which she recounts several hundred dreams gathered from people living in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939.[14] Beradt’s courageous study illustrates the power of a totalitarian political regime to invade and virtually destroy the individual’s capacity to imagine, create, and envision new possibilities. In a similar way, Quiang is calling our attention to the fragility of dreaming, its vulnerability to social manipulation and political aggression. To dream well, we must be safe and free. Quiang, like Beradt, is trying to make us wake up to the oppressive social conditions that constrain our oneiric potentials.

A different kind of external influence is at work in Marina Abramovic’s Dream Bed. Her creation of a carefully structured and unabashedly visible space for sleeping and dreaming is reminiscent of the sleep laboratory, that modern Asklepion where complex technological devices are used to monitor the subjects’ sleep and “catch” their dreams for scientific analysis. Abramovic does not use EEG scalp attachments or rectal thermometers like in the sleep lab, nor does she provide freely roaming snakes on the floor as in the temples of Asklepius. Nevertheless, Dream Bed places the individual in a highly unusual sleeping environment. The rectangular box in which the participants lie is like a coffin without a lid, which perhaps makes sense given the long historical connection between sleeping, dreaming, and death. The puffy body suits (with magnets embedded in the fabric), glowing blue or red lights, obsidian crystal pillow, and exposure to the eyes of curious observers all makes it likely that whatever dreams the participants experience, they will be dramatically different from those they experience at home. From my perspective as a researcher, I’ll be very interested to see what gets recorded in the Dream Book Abramovic is providing for her participants. We already know that the artificial, intrusive, and resolutely unaesthetic conditions of the sleep lab have a homogenizing effect on dreaming, with fewer nightmares, sexual dreams, and bizarre/transcendent dreams in the lab than in a home setting. Will the same be true of the Dream Bed? Or will its explicitly artistic context, combined with the subtle influences of the crystals and magnets, stimulate a greater degree of aesthetic creativity and imaginal freedom in the people’s dreams?

Expanding on that same question, and bringing this essay to a close, I wonder how DreamingNow as a whole will affect the dream lives of the people who observe and participate in the installations. The exhibit itself is a grand incubation experiment—it creates an astonishing, reality-bending liminal space, sanctioned by a reputable cultural institution, in which people may freely explore the farthest reaches of the dreaming imagination. What new dreams will the exhibit inspire? What novel Borgesian ficciones will be woven? What fresh ideas and surprising insights will come to people as they share in the dreams of others, trying like the Iroquois to guess at subtle meanings that stir their deepest desires and speak eloquently to the broader concerns of their community? In a society that has become more sleep-deprived than perhaps any in human history, at a time when the market is booming for pills that suppress the need for sleep, DreamingNow is a necessary affirmation of the transformative power of dreaming. I suspect many of the exhibit’s observers will be pleasurably startled by the exhibit’s multi-dimensional impact on their own dream creations.

Beradt, Charlotte. 1966. The Third Reich of Dreams. Translated by A. Gottwald. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

Blau, Harold. 1963. Dream-Guessing: A Comparative Analysis. Ethnohistory 10 (3):233-249.

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1984. Seven Nights. Translated by E. Weinberger. New York: New Directions.

Bulkeley, Kelly. 1995. Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey. Mahwah: Paulist Press.

———. 1996b. Political Dreaming: Dreams of the 1992 Presidential Election. In Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society, edited by K. Bulkeley. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. 1999. Dreaming in a Totalitarian Society: A Winnicottian Reading of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams. In Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion, and Psychology, edited by K. Bulkeley. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. 1999a. Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion, and Psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. 2002. Dream Content and Political Ideology. Dreaming 12 (2):61-78.

———. 2003. Dreaming and the Cinema of David Lynch. Dreaming 13 (1):49-60.

———. 2003. Dreams of Healing: Transforming Nightmares into Visions of Hope. Mahwah: Paulist Press.

———, ed. 1996a. Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society. Edited by R. V. d. Castle, SUNY Series in Dream Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———, ed. 2001. Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming. New York: Palgrave.

Crick, Francis, and Graeme Mitchison. 1983. The Function of Dream Sleep. Nature 304:111-114.

Descola, Phillipe. 1993. The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle. New York: The New Press.

Ewing, Katherine. 1989. The Dream of Spiritual Initiation and the Organization of Self Representations among Pakistani Sufis. American Ethnologist 16:56-74.

Flanagan, Owen. 2000. Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1965. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: Avon Books.

Gregor, Thomas. 1981. “Far, Far Away My Shadow Wandered….”: The Dream Symbolism and Dream Theories of the Mehinaku Indians of Brazil. American Ethnologist 8 (4):709-729.

Hall, Calvin. 1966. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill.

Harris, Monford. 1994. Studies in Jewish Dream Interpretation. Northvale: Jason Aronson.

Hobson, J. Allan. 1999. Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hobson, J. Allan, Ed Pace-Schott, and Robert Stickgold. 2000. Dreaming and the Brain: Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Conscious States. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (6):793-842.

Irwin, Lee. 1994. The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Jung, C.G. 1974. On the Nature of Dreams. In Dreams. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Original edition, 1948.

Kelsey, Morton. 1991. God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing.

Lama, The Dalai. 1997. Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Lamoreaux, John C. 2002. The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Lohmann, Roger. 2001. The Role of Dreams in Religious Enculturation among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea. In Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming, edited by K. Bulkeley. New York: Palgrave.

Mageo, Jeannette Marie, ed. 2003. Dreaming and the Self: New Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Miller, Patricia Cox. 1994. Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. 1984. Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pace-Schott, Ed, Mark Solms, Mark Blagrove, and Stevan Harnad, eds. 2003. Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsiderations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stephen, Michelle. 1995. A’Aisa’s Gifts: A Study of Magic and the Self. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tedlock, Barbara. 2001. The New Anthropology of Dreaming. In Dreams: A Reader in the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming, edited by K. Bulkeley. New York: Palgrave.

———, ed. 1987. Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Trompf, G.W. 1990. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Von Grunebaum, G.E., and Roger Callois, eds. 1966. The Dream and Human Societies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1958. Dreams and Wishes of the Soul: A Type of Psychoanalytic Theory among the Seventeenth Century Iroquois. American Anthropologist 60:234-248.

Young, Serinity. 1999. Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and Practice. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

1.(Borges 1984).
2. (Borges 1984; Young 1999; Von Grunebaum and Callois 1966; Trompf 1990; Tedlock 1987, 2001; Stephen 1995; O’Flaherty 1984; Miller 1994; Mageo 2003; Lohmann 2001; Lamoreaux 2002; Lama 1997; Kelsey 1991; Irwin 1994; Harris 1994; Gregor 1981; Ewing 1989; Descola 1993; Bulkeley 2001, 1999a, 1995, 1996a)
3. (Borges 1984) Let me take this opportunity to mention a few contemporary artists I know who draw inspiration and guidance from dreaming: poets Betsy Davids, Richard Russo, and Tom Traub; photographer Shelley Lawrence; painters/graphic artists Fariba Bogzaran, Jennie Braman, Emily Anderson, and Tristy Taylor; musician Nancy Grace. For a discussion of the role of dreaming in the filmmaking of David Lynch, see (Bulkeley 2003).
4. (Jung 1974)
5.The likelihood of communicating a powerful dream depends in large part on cultural context. In a Native American community, for example, a big dream would be celebrated as a revelation of the dreamer’s special connection to the spirit world. In the contemporary US, where a significant percentage of people believe dreams are random nonsense, fewer people pay attention to their dreams no matter how powerful the dreams may be.
6. (Blau 1963).
7. (Wallace 1958)
See note 2.
8. (Freud 1965)
9. (Freud 1965)
10. (Hall 1966) This was the comment that spurred my interest in the relationship between dream content and politics 10. 11. (Bulkeley 2002, 2003, 1996b).
12. (Hall 1966; Hobson 1999; Hobson, Pace-Schott, and Stickgold 2000; Flanagan 2000; Pace-Schott et al. 2003; Crick and Mitchison 1983)
13. (Flanagan 2000)
14. (Beradt 1966). For a discussion of Beradt’s work, see (Bulkeley 1999).

Dreams Shed Light on Obama’s Values

San Francisco Chronicle Insight Article
Originally Published August 17, 2008

“I am something of a dreamer” – so confesses Barack Obama in the closing pages of “Dreams from My Father,” the title of which signaled his strong interest in dreaming, both metaphorical and literal. In the book, he shared two of his own dreams, each testifying to his long struggle with the morally and spiritually ambiguous legacy of his father.

Surprisingly, neither Obama’s critics nor his supporters seem to recognize the significance of what those two dreams reveal about his core values.

As he prepares to deliver his address at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 28, the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Obama’s personal dreams provide a deeper psychological context for this key campaign moment.

The first dream occurred when he was a senior at Columbia University, a year after receiving the news of his father’s death. It started with him on a bus trip with an unknown group of people. An old white man sitting nearby informed him that “our treatment of the old test(s) our souls.” The bus stopped at a grand hotel, and the old man somehow changed into a small black girl who began playing the piano.

The trip continued. Obama dozed, then awakened (still in the dream), alone. He got off the bus and stood in front of a rough stone building. Inside, a lawyer and judge discussed the fate of Obama’s father, a captive in jail. The judge was willing to release him, but the lawyer argued against it because of “the need to maintain order.”

Then Obama stood before the door to his father’s cell. He unlocked it and confronted the man, with “only a cloth wrapped around his waist.” His father smiled and said, ” ‘Barack, I always wanted to tell you how much I love you.’ ” They embraced, but suddenly his father shrank in size, and a deep sadness overcame him. Obama tried to lead his father out of the cell, but he declined and told his son he should go.

The dream ended there, and Obama said, “I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him – and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son.”

We would need Obama’s personal associations to make sense of all the dream’s details. But no special psychoanalytic training is required to identify his feelings of hostility toward his father, intermixed with love and sadness.

Obama narrated this dream in the closing pages of the memoir’s first part, titled “Origins.” The dream marked the end of his beginning, the initiation of his journey back to his ancestral roots, back to his father’s grave in Africa.

The second dream came during that journey, when Obama and his half-sister were traveling by train to his family’s village in Kenya. She told him a disturbing story about their grandfather and his cruelly self-righteous behavior toward others. That night, Obama dreamed he was walking through a Kenyan village filled with playful children and pleasant old men. Suddenly everyone panicked at the sight of something behind Obama; they ran for safety as he heard the growl of a leopard. He fled in a mad dash, finally collapsing in exhaustion: “Panting for breath, I turned around to see the day turned night, and a giant figure looming as tall as the trees, wearing only a loincloth and a ghostly mask.”

The detail of the loincloth appears in this dream as in the first, suggesting the giant figure’s tremendous size reflects a doubling of generational influence, the combined impact of his father’s and grandfather’s high moral demands.

If, as many dream researchers believe, one of the functions of nightmares involves the expression of unconscious conflicts between different parts of the psyche, then Obama’s nightmare can be seen as a call to greater awareness of shadow elements from his past – personal qualities he deplores in his paternal ancestors yet fears may dwell within him, too.

Again, we can’t know the full meaning of any dream without additional input from the dreamer. But Obama has told us enough in his memoir to draw at least one fairly straightforward conclusion: His dreams reveal him to be acutely conscious of the ever-present power of family tradition in his life. He may feel deeply ambivalent toward his ancestors, but he has discovered he must find a way to accept their continuing influence over him.

This suggests that Obama is perhaps more temperamentally conservative and respectful of paternal authority than most Americans assume.

Critics who portray him as an anarchist fail to appreciate this quality of his character. So, apparently, do those liberals who have been alarmed at the seeming “rightward shift” in his recent policy statements. His dreams suggest this is not just short-term electoral maneuvering but rather a reflection of a conviction that he must show respect for traditional wisdom, even as he tries to adapt that wisdom to changing circumstances of the present.

This article appeared on page G – 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Link to Article Online:
“Dreams Shed Light on Obama’s Values,”
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A Talk with Kelly Bulkeley: The Boston Globe, Nov. 2, 2008

Boston Globe Article

November 2, 2008

KELLY BULKELEY FIRST became interested in dreams as a teenager, after being haunted by a recurring nightmare of being chased by Darth Vader. He’d wake up in a cold sweat, terrified of that glossy black mask. While the typical adolescent would probably choose to avoid “Star Wars” paraphernalia, Bulkeley ended up pursuing the deeper meaning of the dreams: Why were these imagined experiences so vivid and powerful? Where did they come from? What was their significance?

Bulkeley discovered that the content of dreams – the particular stories we tell ourselves when asleep – had been disregarded as a scientific subject. “Studying dreams still seemed like a very Freudian activity,” he says, “and nobody wanted to do anything that Freud might have done.”

This led Bulkeley to divinity school. For most of recorded history, he explains, dreaming has been intertwined with the divine. A vivid nightmare was a prophecy, a coded message from the gods. What Bulkeley wanted to do was use this rich religious tradition to better understand the process of dreaming. “You see the same type of dream occur over and over again, in all these different religious texts,” he says. “I think this universality can teach us something interesting about how the brain works.”

A visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., Bulkeley recently published “Dreaming in the World’s Religions,” a vast survey of religious dreams and religious attitudes toward dreaming. He analyzes the sexually tempting nightmares of St. Augustine and the mourning dreams of “The Illiad,” the conception dream of Buddha’s mother and the “vision quests” of the Ojibwa people. But Bulkeley isn’t interested in these dreams because of what they teach us about the divine. “I’m not a particularly religious person,” he says. Rather, he hopes that these old narratives will inspire new research. A dream might not be real, but it can still illuminate the reality of the human mind.

IDEAS: Do you think dreaming played a crucial role in the development of religion?

BULKELEY: I think it’s clear that having certain kinds of dreams can’t help but provoke religious or spiritual thoughts. It’s just inevitable. In that sense, spirituality is a natural outgrowth of the way the dreaming brain seems to work. I’ve tried to be very agnostic in this book, but I can also see why theologically minded people find dreams to be such a source of inspiration.

IDEAS: There’s a long tradition of people trying to understand the mind of God by studying their own dreams. But dreams are also inherently ambiguous and open to interpretation. How do religions deal with that issue?

BULKELEY: The problem of how you interpret dreams without being deceived is a real source of tension for a lot of religions. You might think you’ve cracked the code [of the dream] but you haven’t. Or maybe the demon is trying to trick you with dreams.

There’s this assumption, I think, that looking at dreams goes along with a naive state of mind, that you’ve got to suspend reason and critical thinking when thinking about dream content. But, in fact, virtually every culture has struggled with that very question, the question of decoding, how to find the deeper messages and not be misled.

IDEAS: You argue that modern science can learn about dreaming from religion. Do you have a favorite example that you use when talking to scientists?

BULKELEY: Well, consider this particular kind of nightmare dream that recurs again and again in religious texts. In the Christian tradition they talk about the incubus, or the demons of the night. In Newfoundland, it’s the old hag and so on. But what all these various religions agree on is that there’s a type of nightmare that’s very intense and involves the constriction of breathing or paralysis. Now we know, thanks to modern science, that this is a real class of dream called night terrors and they’re very different from ordinary nightmares. So all these texts that talk about night terrors, they’re actually describing a real element of human experience.

IDEAS: Then is it fair to say that these religious prophets or religious texts were there first? That they described a psychological phenomenon that science would only later describe?

BULKELEY: If you bracket out the claims about how the world was created or what God is like, and you just look at the kind of experiences that are described in all these religious texts, and then compare these descriptions to what we know today from science, I think you can see that there are some real correlations. I’m talking about dreams that appear across cultures – they’re universal themes – and that suggests to me that these dreams are rooted in a fundamental feature of human nature.

IDEAS: Was there a particular moment when dreams stopped being seen as largely religious phenomena?

BULKELEY: As far back as Aristotle, people are thinking that dreams are at least in part produced by the physical workings of our bodies and not just messages from above. I think that sort of skepticism has been part of a more widespread tradition that you can see in just about every culture, which is the acknowledgment that even these dreams which seem to have a spiritual dimension can still be false or misleading.

In more modern times, it’s easy to pin the blame on [Rene] Descartes, who largely dismissed dreams as irrelevant. . . .The irony is that we now know from scholarship that Descartes had some powerful dreams himself which inspired him to leave his family business and become a philosopher.

IDEAS: You argue in your book that modern science, like Descartes, has largely discounted dream content as inherently meaningless. Is this a mistake?

BULKELEY: My partisan view is that science should certainly learn to appreciate dream content. I think too often there’s this belief among scientists that dreams are just random utterances of the brain stem and that we shouldn’t waste time trying to figure out what they mean.

In part, I think this is a justifiable reaction to the tendency of Freud and Jung to impose categories onto dreams, and so then you end up finding what you expect to find. It’s absolutely fair to question those loose interpretative systems.

But I also think it’s possible to analyze dream content in a more systematic way, so that you can really pull out these patterns that are universal. And I think you can find some of these universals by looking at various religions.

IDEAS: Do you still dream about Darth Vader?

BULKELEY: No, I haven’t been visited by Darth in a while, which is quite nice.

Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large at Seed magazine and the author of “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.” His next book, “How We Decide,” will be published in February. He is a regular contributor to Ideas.

Boston.com: A Talk with Kelly Bulkeley

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Bin Laden’s Dreams, and Ours

The recently released videotape of Osama bin Laden openly discussing the September 11 terrorist attacks does more than offer compelling evidence of his role in organizing the attacks. The video also provides the best insight yet into the religious and psychological world of bin Laden and his followers. A major portion of the video involves bin Laden, an unnamed sheik, and several other men discussing prophetic dreams and visions relating to the September 11 attacks. Many American commentators have expressed amazement at bin Laden’s interest in such tribal superstitions. But in fact this seemingly nonsensical conversation is quite revealing of the deepest motivations guiding the behavior of bin Laden and his followers.

Dreams and visions have played an enormously important role in Islam from its very beginning. The Prophet Muhammed is said to have received the first revelation of the Qur’an in a dream visitation from the angel Gabriel. Throughout his life Muhammed experienced dreams he believed were communications from Allah, and he encouraged his followers to tell him their dreams so he could interpret them. Many of these dreams included images of violence and warfare, and in each case the dream was interpreted as a sign of God’s support and guidance in the battle against the unbelievers.

Viewed in this light, the video portrays a ritual reenactment of the dream interpretation practices of the Prophet Muhammed. Bin Laden, playing the role of the religious/military/political leader, is taking time out from the war against the infidels to speak with his followers about dreams, visions, and other reassuring signs that God is on their side and will guide them to ultimate victory. This is identical with what Muhammed practiced with his followers on a regular basis almost 1400 years earlier.

The video is perhaps the clearest evidence yet found that bin Laden is patterning his life after the Prophet Muhammed, and feels himself blessed with the same degree of divine approval for his violent struggle with the enemies of God. His perverse success in persuading thousands of young Muslim men to fight and die for him is very likely due to their perception of him as a Muhammed figure—an inspiring warrior-prophet who embodies the wrathful power of Allah.

Can anything be learned from the particular dreams discussed in the video? Bin Laden and his followers mention a total of seven dreams and dream-like experiences. The first involves a strange soccer game between American pilots and Muslim pilots, which the Muslim team wins. Three other dreams portray airplanes crashing into tall buildings. A man is reported to have had a vision of carrying a huge plane on his back to the desert, while another man envisioned a group Muslim faithful leaving for jihad in New York and Washington. Bin Laden says a soldier told him he’d dreamed of a tall building in America, and then of learning from a spiritual teacher how to “play karate.”

What’s most striking about these dreams is how similar they are to the dreams reported by Americans about the terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan. Since September 11 I have gathered several hundred dream reports, most of them highly disturbing nightmares, from people all across the U.S. The predominant themes in these fear-ridden dreams are airplane crashes, military conflict, building explosions, terrorist attacks, and threats to children and family members. Many of the American dream images are almost identical to the bin Laden dreams, but the emotions they evoke are radically different: the American dreams are suffused with fear, confusion, and a horrible sense of vulnerability, while the bin Laden dreams are welcomed as good omens. What terrifies the Americans brings joy to the Muslims. Nothing could make clearer the distressingly huge psychological gap separating the two warring sides.

Many of the dreams people have reported to me came before September 11 and appear, like the bin Laden dreams, to have “prophetically” foreseen the attack. There is of course great scientific controversy about whether dreams can actually anticipate future events. But for people who feel they’ve had such dreams, the experience often bring a terrible sense of guilt—“Did I really see this coming? Could I have done anything to stop it?” For those people, the most chilling part of the bin Laden videotape surely comes right after he tells about the young man who dreamed of a tall building in America: “At that point,” bin Laden tells his followers, “I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dreams. So I closed the subject.”

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., teaches religion and psychology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He is editor of Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming (Palgrave, 2001)