Category: Dream Research

New York University Press
July 2008

From Biblical stories of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams in Egypt to prayers against bad dreams in the Hindu Rg Veda, cultures all over the world have seen their dreams first and foremost as religiously meaningful experiences. Dreaming in the World’s Religions provides an authoritative and engaging one-volume resource for the study of dreaming and religion. It tells the story of how dreaming has shaped the religious history of humankind, from the conception dream of Buddha’s mother to the sexually tempting nightmares of St. Augustine, and from the Ojibwa vision quest to Australian Aboriginal journeys in the Dreamtime. Dreaming in the World’s Religions offers a carefully researched, accessibly written portrait of dreaming as a powerful, unpredictable, often iconoclastic force in human religious life.

“A pleasure to read, well written and full of fascinating examples. It combines a sensitive and sympathetic understanding of the religious meanings of dreams with a state-of-the-art treatment of the insights that cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology bring to our understanding of them.” –Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago, and author of Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities

“Offers a sophisticated, yet easily accessible and engaging discussion of how and in what way dreams and a broad range of the world’s religions have enjoyed mutual influence throughout history. . . . This book is unique in that is provides a valuable resource for the serious scholar of religion, yet has equal potential for non-specialists interested in exploring how their own dreams may find relevance for their own lives, religious or otherwise.” –Nina P. Azari, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopaedia of Sciences and Religions

Main findings:

1. Dreams have strongly influenced the beliefs and practices of religious traditions all over the world, throughout history.

Each of the ten chapters of the book is devoted to a different religious tradition (or family of traditions) and its historical teachings about dreams, including Hinduism, Chinese religions, Buddhism, religions of the Fertile Crescent, Greek and Roman religions, Christianity, Islam, and the indigenous cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.  In every case, dreams appear as a powerful medium of transpersonal guidance offering the opportunity to communicate with divine beings, gain wisdom and power, heal suffering, and explore new realms of existence.

2. Dreams and reason are not mutually antagonistic.

Voices of critical questioning and naturalistic analysis have risen up wherever and whenever humans have explored their dreams.  It might be a surprise to those who assume that modern scientists were the first to explain dreaming as the mental by-products of sleep, but many ancient traditions recognized exactly the same psychophysiological dynamics at work in people’s dreams.  The skeptical perspective did not come after religious perspective, nor even before it.  Historically speaking, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive.  They have coexisted from the start.  The prototypical experiences of dreaming have provoked not only religious and spiritual experience but also a deeply human capacity for rational thought and critical reflection.  Dreams have stimulated the power of reason to become increasingly aware of deceptive appearances, hidden connections, subtle perceptions, and cognitively impactful emotions.

3. Dreaming is a primal wellspring of religious experience.

This means that dreams, by virtue of their natural emergence out of the immensely complex, internally-generated activities of the mammalian brain during sleep, offer all human beings a potential source of visionary insight, creative inspiration, and expanded self-awareness.  The abundant evidence of cross-cultural history proves that we are indeed a dreaming species.  Through dreams humans have discovered the deepest realms of their psyches and grown in awareness of the powerful relational bonds that connect them to their families, communities, natural environments, religious traditions, and ultimately the cosmos itself.  Whether dreaming came before religion or religion came before dreaming is an impossible question to answer. But we now have evidence strongly suggesting that the natural rootedness of dreaming in the human brain-mind system makes it a universally available source of experiential awareness of precisely those powers that people have historically associated with religion.  To accept that evidence does not mean abandoning science or pledging faith to some religious creed or dogma.  Rather, it means acknowledging the reality of an autonomous visionary capacity within the human brain-mind system, a capacity driven by an unconscious intelligence deeply rooted in our biological nature yet continuously striving for transcendent understanding and insight.

4. The pan-human prototypes of dreaming are rooted in the brain, the body, and the evolutionary history of our species.

In almost every known cultural tradition, people have described certain types of intensified, highly memorable dreams (e.g., flying, falling, being chased or attacked, meeting a dead relative, having sex), and I refer to them collectively as prototypical dreams  Prototypical dreams are not universal in the sense that every single person experiences all of them.  Rather, they are latent forms of dreaming potential. They reflect innate predispositions to dream in certain ways that, when actualized, make unusually strong impressions on waking awareness.  In contrast to the vast majority of sleep experiences that fade into oblivion, prototypical dreams are actually quite easy to remember.  Some of them are literally impossible to forget, remaining a vivid presence in people’s memories for the rest of their lives.

My basic argument in the book is that highly memorable prototypical dreams have played a powerfully creative role in virtually all the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. The consciousness-provoking impact of dreaming has not been sufficiently recognized by scientists or religious studies scholars, and my hope is to present a compelling case for taking dream experiences more fully into account in the comparative study of religion.

Each of the four prototypes I discuss is clearly associated with a distinct kind of carry-over effect of dreaming experience into the waking state.  With sexual dreams the carry-over is a physical orgasm, of both the male and female varieties.  With aggressive dreams it’s the hyper-activation of the fight/flight response—extreme fear, racing heart, rapid breathing, and full-body sweat.  With gravitational dreams it’s the horribly realistic sensation of falling and waking up with a sudden gasping start.  With mystical dreams it’s the blissful, ultra-realistic sensation of flying or the profound joy of being reunited with a deceased loved one. These kinds of direct emotional and bodily continuations of the dreaming experience into the person’s waking life are perhaps the strongest and most easily observed instances of the deeply rooted interplay of dreaming and waking consciousness.  The palpable carry-over effects associated with prototypical dreams are clues to the specific processes by which dreaming contributes to healthy brain-mind functioning.  Aggressive dreams reflect an adaptive concern with identifying and responding to threats in the waking world.  Although emotionally disturbing, such nightmares have the beneficial effect (in survival terms) of stimulating greater waking-world vigilance toward similar threats.  The evolutionary logic is simple: the more often and more intensely you dream of various kinds of threatening situations, the better prepared you’ll be to react effectively to those situations if and when they occur in waking life.  Likewise with gravitational dreams, which accurately reflect and simulate the existential dangers of entropic destruction.  The intense fear and horror generated by these dreams activates the fundamental instincts of self-preservation that must always be ready to respond immediately should a comparable danger arise in the waking world, whether it be falling off something high, getting in a car crash, or losing physical mobility.  Sexual dreams prompt the reproductive system and envision a variety of possible ways of satisfying its desires.  Their stimulating and taboo-defying effect on the erotic imagination is, I suspect, self-evident to most readers.  The impact of mystical dreams is less directly tied to evolutionary biology, and more to the emerging spirit of human creativity.  Dreams of the mystical prototype have the effect of enlarging people’s sense of life’s possibilities, expanding their awareness from a narrow fixation on what is to a broader consideration of what might be.  Such dreams stretch the mind by pushing it to become more conscious of its own powers and the realities that extend beyond what is immediately present in normal perceptions of the waking world.

When politicians and pundits refer to the American Dream, they are evoking images of national unity, identity, and a better future. But in what ways does this metaphor manifest in the literal dreams of sleeping Americans? In American Dreamers, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley takes the ideology of the American Dream one step further—into the study of actual dreams—to explore how the nocturnal side of human existence offers a key to the psychological origins of people’s waking beliefs and political passions.

Building on sixteen years of scientific research involving thousands of dream reports, Bulkeley shows how the playful fancies of people’s dreaming imaginations can be interpreted as insightful expressions of their hopes and fears about issues as varied as the environment, religion, family values, and the Iraq war. Examining in particular detail the dreaming tendencies of conservatives and liberals, the book centers on ten people of different political perspectives—a dreamers’ focus group—who kept yearlong sleep and dream journals. The dreaming and waking stories of these “ordinary” Americans (among them a cancer survivor, a lesbian horse rancher, a former Catholic priest, a young waitress engaged to be married, and a soldier preparing for his third tour to Iraq) provide raw psychological material and a window into their deepest beliefs, darkest fears, and most inspiring ideals.

Hyper-ventilating political pundits have described in lurid detail what conservatives and liberals disagree about but rarely do they try to explain why they disagree—and that’s the real question. At a time of bitter partisan conflict and governmental paralysis, American Dreamers calls the country back to its visionary origins, arguing that dreams can serve as a royal road to the creation of new political solutions that integrate the best of conservative and liberal ideals. If we truly want to learn something new about the American Dream in people’s lives today, Bulkeley proposes we take a good, close look at how well American people are sleeping and dreaming at night.

Main findings:

1. Conservatives are more likely to sleep well and report fewer dreams, and liberals are more likely to sleep worse and report more dreams.

This is the overall conclusion of the sleep and dreams poll (sleep and dream poll results: political ideology), and it’s consistent with the same finding in my earlier studies (KB articles 2002 and 2006). It must be said, however, that some conservatives report many dreams, and some liberals report none; the distinctions are not absolute. In fact, the book’s analysis of more than 1500 dreams recorded in home journals by a group people with mixed political views (The 10 members of the “dreamers focus group”) reveals a much more complex psychological process at work, with conservative and liberal tendencies interacting in each person’s dreams in unexpected ways. Still, taking all the evidence as a whole, it seems fair to propose the working hypothesis that conservatives tend to be good sleepers and minimal dreamers, while liberals tend to be troubled sleepers and expansive dreamers.

2. The most religiously observant Americans (attend a worship service more than once a week) report better sleep and fewer dreams than the least religious Americans (never attend a worship service).

This was a surprising finding (sleep and dream poll results: religion), insofar as other research has indicated a close relationship between dreaming and religion (Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History). These results may be due to a) the connection between religion and conservative politics in America, and/or b) the connection between American liberalism and a “spiritual but not religious” perspective. Chapter 3 looks at the religious and spiritual beliefs of the ten journal-keepers, who range across the spectrum from conservative Christian to liberal atheist.

3. A surprisingly frequent type of dream among both conservatives and liberals is a nightmare about work.

This is the most unexpected finding, because it reveals the impact of economic pressures on sleeping and dreaming in ways that no previous research has shown (sleep and dream poll results: economic status). Chapter 5 of the book discusses the economic circumstances of the focus group members, most of whom struggled financially during the journal-keeping year. Their job-related dreams reveal a profound populist frustration with the economic status quo.

4. The continuity of waking and dreaming extends to political ideals, beliefs, and attitudes.

Analysis of the dreams of the ten journal-keepers adds further evidence to the continuity hypothesis (www.dreamresearch.net), which says that dream content accurately reflects the most important concerns of the individual’s waking life. The findings in this book show that basic, easily identified patterns in dream content are continuous with a person’s most meaningful and emotionally intense relationships, activities, and beliefs. Those beliefs include a person’s attitudes toward politics. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to predict people’s political views with no information other than the patterns of their dreams.

Blurbs

“A beautifully written reminder of the depth of differences, and a dream of how difference might be understood. Bulkeley understands something profound about us; we would benefit enormously if we could even just glimpse that understanding.”—Lawrence Lessig, author of The Future of Ideas and Free Culture and Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

 

“No book about dreams could be more timely or more important than Kelly Bulkeley’s American Dreamers. Whatever is important in people’s waking lives is reflected in their dreams–politics included. American conservatives report different dreams than American liberals. American Democrats report different dreams than American Republicans. Dr. Bulkeley paints his portraits of American dreamers with a palette that reflects his scholarship in both religious studies and dream science; the results are filled with insights that will delight, amuse, and infuriate his readers. American Dreamers provides its readers with insight into the country’s future, insight that is available from no other (or better) source.”—Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., Co-author, Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans

“This story we tell ourselves in our dreams passes the impurities of our waking life through an ethical filter and exposes truths we have not yet acknowledged. American Dreamers is a comprehensive and very readable account of our unconscious adaptation of what is still a hazardous and imperfect waking domain. Bulkeley’s professional life has revolved around dreams and what we can learn from them. This book is true to its title. He has opened the door to the sociology of dreams.”—Montague Ullman, M.D., author of Appreciating Dreams: A Group Approach and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, Yeshiva University

“In this ground-breaking and timely work, Kelly Bulkeley uses the psychological analysis of dreams to plumb the depths of political, religious, and cultural realities. With an exemplary grasp of dream science built upon thousands of dream accounts, Bulkeley presents a multifaceted and nuanced portrait of the ways our deeply seated ideas, values, virtues, and fears become apparent within our dreams. American Dreamers challenges us to develop a greater understanding of and respect for all people across the political spectrum.”—Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, author of In the Midst of Chaos and Let the Children Come

“Any political pundit who wants to speak with intelligence and genuine insight about the psychological motivations of American voters across the political spectrum would be well advised to read Kelly Bulkeley’s American Dreamers. Kelly Bulkeley is arguably the most rigorously empirical and psychologically subtle contemporary interpreter of the phenomenon of human dreaming. Over twenty-five years of writing and research is deployed in this urgently relevant, non-partisan, and broadly sympathetic analysis of the underlying psychological and spiritual concerns that unconsciously organize the political views of ordinary Americans today.”—John McDargh, author of Psychoanalytic Object Relations Theory and the Study of Religion and Associate Professor of the Psychology of Religion, Boston College