Category: Dream Research

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A conversation about the American Dream with Jim McDermott

Thanks again to an introduction provided by Tom Campbell, a former U.S. representative himself (and my uncle-in-law), I also interviewed Jim McDermott, a nine-term representative from the seventh congressional district of Washington.  McDermott is a leading Democrat and a professional psychotherapist, so I hoped he could provide some thoughts about the idealism of the “American Dream” from a liberal perspective.  We spoke by phone on November 5, 2007, the same day I talked with Martin Anderson.

As with Anderson, McDermott’s initial response to my questions was both surprising and intriguing.  I expected he would discuss the American Dream in terms of a liberal optimism about progress and the hope of a better society in the future.  Instead, he took a decidedly negative approach and associated it with a deceptive promise made to immigrants coming to this country—a promise more often broken than kept.  McDermott spoke of the painful struggles of his immigrant ancestors when they first came to America, people who were filled with unrealistic hopes and then exploited by powerful others.  The dream “was not always what it was cracked up to be.  Many Americans found it a false dream.”  He asked, “What about people who don’t make it?”

McDermott’s compassion for those who have been left behind clearly underlies his political ideals, especially the cause of expanding health care to include all Americans, and it defines his opposition to Republican policies that neglect the human wreckage caused by the selfish “dreaming” of the economically powerful.

McDermott was understandably reluctant to discuss his personal dreams, or anyone else’s actual dreams.  He recalled losing the 1980 governor’s race due in part to getting “clobbered as a liberal Seattle psychologist,” and ever since he’s been reluctant to offer easy ammunition for his political opponents.

I was sorry to hear that.

Even though I agree almost entirely with McDermott’s political priorities, I felt something was fundamentally missing from his perspective—something that, ironically, I found in abundance in Martin Anderson’s portrait of Ronald Reagan.  It’s a sense of connection with the creative power of dreaming, which I believe is the psychological truth at the core of the national ideal of the American Dream.  McDermott’s skepticism about that dream reflects the liberal virtues of rational clarity and empathy for the suffering of others, but it seems to depreciate the equally liberal virtue of courage to imagine and envision new possibilities and new hopes for the future.

Jim McDermott is the Democratic Representative from Washington

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A Conversation with Martin Anderson, biographer of Ronald Reagan

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A conversation about the American Dream with Martin Anderson, biographer of Ronald Reagan

Thanks to the kind intercession of Tom Campbell, then Dean of the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, I had the opportunity to interview Martin Anderson by telephone on November 5, 2007.  Anderson was an administration official during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and has written and edited several books about Reagan, including Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (2001).  Reagan’s presidency is often associated with a particularly sunny, Westernized vision of the American Dream, and I hoped Anderson could provide a well-informed description of his politically conservative ideals.

Our conversation got off to a difficult start.  I must not have been very clear in my initial description of what I wanted to discuss (it’s a hard project to describe in a few words), and Anderson reacted as if I were taking a critical approach to Reagan’s reputation as a napper.  It’s true, I was curious about that and planned to ask about it eventually, but Anderson immediately declared that Reagan “never napped,” and he dismissed any suggestion that Reagan was ever less than fully fit and alert both mentally and physically while President.  Anderson said he challenged anyone to find a photograph that showed Reagan napping (I made a quick check of Google images and found nothing).  I expressed surprise at this, since the legend that Reagan enjoyed a daily siesta is widespread and even a point of pride among conservatives, who regard his regular afternoon naps as endearing expressions of equanimity and good sense.  The most Anderson would allow is that there may have been “brief closings of his eyes” during meetings, but nothing that would count as a full nap.

Of much greater interest to Anderson, and to me as well, was the nature of Reagan’s political idealism.  According to Anderson, Reagan’s boldest political initiatives were inspired by “dreams” and “visions” that gave him a profound sense of meaning, purpose, and direction throughout his political career.  It’s not clear to what extent these inspirations were related to actual dreams during sleep, but in Anderson’s view they reflected an admirable openness to sudden intuitions and calls to action.  The greatest of these dreams was that of a nuclear-free world.  Reagan was a pacifist in his 20’s, and Anderson said he never lost his idealistic vision of a world beyond the horrors of war.  At the 1976 Republican National Convention, where he narrowly lost the nomination to Gerald Ford, Reagan gave a final speech in which he surprised everyone by calling for an elimination of nuclear weapons, a very un-Republican proposal. “It was always Ronnie’s dream that the world would be free of nuclear weapons.”  Anderson also pointed to the “Star Wars” anti-missile defense system as an instance where Reagan made a sudden decision, unanticipated by even his closest aides, to pursue a highly idealistic effort to end the threat of nuclear war.

As someone who cast his first two presidential votes against Reagan, I found it hard to reconcile Anderson’s glowing portrait with the Reagan I perceived from 1980 to 1988.  At the time, his visionary idealism made less of an impression on me than his administration’s unwillingness to deal with growing problems with the environment, civil rights, poverty, etc.  Yet Anderson persuaded me to recognize in Reagan an authentic visionary quality, a reliance on deep personal intuitions of purpose and truth.  I may disagree fundamentally with the purposes to which Reagan directed his intuitions, but I can still respect him as a dreamer whose political success derived in large part from his ability to communicate his dreams to others.  His mojo just didn’t work on me.

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Rich Men Dream More About Sex than the Rest of Us

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And they may be better lucid dreamers to.  This and other tidbits were made plain in my research for the book American Dreamers.  What follows is some of the data that compares sleep, income, and dream content for individuals who mke less than $30/year to those who make more than $100k/year.

Sleep, dreams, and economic status

Income x Sleep

Less than $30k More than $100k
Sleep Less than 6 hours a night 24 6
6-8.9 hours a night 70 91
More than 9 hours a night 5 3
Insomnia Never 50 63
1-2 nights a week 20 21
3 or more nights a week 29 14

Income x Dream Prototypes

Less than $30k More than $100k
A person who’s now dead appearing alive 39 40
Magically flying in the air 21 26
Being chased or attacked 40 49
Falling 47 52
Sexual experiences 40 50
Being in a situation exactly like your regular waking life 53 59
Being aware you’re dreaming and able to control the dream 36 51

I talk about work and economic factors in chapter 5.

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The Wondering Brain: Thinking About Religion With and Beyond Cognitive Neuroscience

wonderingbrain_largeThe Wondering Brain: Thinking About Religion With and Beyond Cognitive Neuroscience

By Kelly Bulkeley

Routledge, 2004

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Purchase this Book – Paperback

This book offers a new integration of religious thought and cognitive neuroscience. By focusing on experiences of wonder—startling encounters with the true, real, and/or beautiful—the author shows that human religiosity (and indeed all creative experience) depends on unexpected moments of radical decentering in which ordinary brain-mind systems are profoundly transformed, generating what science calls new consciousness and what religions call divine revelation.

The Wondering Brain explores four different spheres of wonder: dreams, sexual desire, art, and contemplative practice. Each chapter begins with a narrative of an individual life in which one of these spheres of wonder appears in especially vibrant form. The details of that narrative are then discussed in relation to the revolutionary findings of cognitive neuroscience (CN), which shed new light on the physiological roots of wonder in the human brain. CN can only take us so far, however, and this is where the resources of religious studies (RS) are brought into play, to provide historical and cultural context, to question the metaphysical assumptions of CN, and to clarify the inspiring, life-changing impact of experiences of wonder. Each chapter ends by returning to the original narrative with a richer appreciation for the dynamic interplay of brain-mind functioning and the religious imagination. Guided by the pioneering 20th century investigations of Freud, Jung, and James but pushing far beyond them, The Wondering Brain provides a new foundation for the study of religion and psychology in the 21st century. The book also issues a provocative challenge to scholars and general readers alike to think more deeply about the most dangerous of all spheres of wonder—the violent wonder of war.

Blurbs and Reviews

“A genuinely revelatory read in both the religious and intellectual senses of that term. The reductionist can only come away with a deeper appreciation for the innate or “hard-wired” religiosity of the human brain, and the religionist can only stand in awe before how much we really do know about the brain and its predictable workings. The wisest read, though, is perhaps the one that insists on balancing both of these polarized perspectives within a deep and playful sense of human wonder. Personally speaking, I have not stopped thinking and talking about this text since I set it down, and that was five months ago.”

— Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Rice University

“Kelly Bulkeley’s latest book, “The Wondering Brain” empowers both the scientific and the religious points of view. In his warm and humorous style the reader is informed of recent developments in brain science and religious thinking. I highly recommend this unique book to anyone interested in opening him or herself up to the wonders of the brain.”

— David Kahn, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Dreams and Visions

2. Sexual Desire

3. Creative Madness

4. Contemplative Practice

Conclusion: The Evolution of Wonder

 

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Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-Mind Science

soulpsychebrainSoul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-Mind Science
by Kelly Bulkeley (editor)
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
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Soul, Psyche, Brain is a collection of essays that address the relationships between neuroscience, religion and human nature. The book highlights some startling new developments in neuroscience that have many people rethinking spirituality, the mind-body connection, and cognition in general. Soul, Psyche, Brain explores questions like: What are the neurological effects of meditation and prayer? How does the mind develop psychological and spiritual self-awareness? And what are the practical implications of brain-mind science for religious faith and moral reasoning?

Blurbs and Reviews

“Bulkeley provides a unique and valuable resource reporting from the cutting edges of the encounter between neuroscience and religion. Fields as diverse as emotion and dream studies, complexity theory, spiritual development, Christian and non-Christian theology—and more—contribute to the ferment. Those working in any or all of these areas will find here resources to stretch their mind.”
Carol Rausch Albright, co-author of The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet

“Soul, Psyche, Brain has successfully re-set the starting point for any serious interdisciplinary conversation on the topic of religion. By doing so, this book at once updates all parties, levels the intellectual playing field, and lays open new possibilities for collaborative research—both reflective and empirical—on the topic of religion across a broad range of disciplines.”
Nina P. Azari, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Hilo


Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Genes, Brains, Minds: The Human Complex
Holmes Rolston III

2. Brain, Mind, and Spirit—A Clinician’s Perspective, or, Why I Am Not Afraid of Dualism
James W. Jones

3. Psychoneurological Dimensions of Anomalous Experience in Relation to Religious Belief and Spiritual Practice
Stanley Krippner

4. Sacred Emotions
Robert Emmons

5. Where Neurocognition Meets the Master: Attention and Metacognition in Zazen
Tracey Kahan and Patti Simone

6. From Chaos to Self-Organization: The Brain, Dreaming, and Religious Experience
David Kahn

7. Converting: Toward a Cognitive Theory of Religious Change
Patricia Davis and Lewis Rambo

8. Cognitive Science and Christian Theology
Charlene Burns

9. Overcoming an Impoverished Ontology: Candrakirti on Buddhism and the Mind-Brain Problem
Richard K. Payne

10.Religion and Brain-Mind Science: Dreaming the Future
Kelly Bulkeley

11.Religion out of Mind: The Ideology of Cognitive Science and Religion
Jeremy Carrette

12.Brain Science on Ethics: The Neurobiology of Making Choices
Walter J. Freeman


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Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey.

spiritualdreamingcrossSpiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey.
By Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.
Paulist Press 1995
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Read Chapter 2: Snakes

Blurbs and Reviews

“Kelly Bulkeley’s book is a valuable addition to the growing shelf of dream writings. Using dream reports from traditions as diverse as the religions of Asia, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and many native traditions, Bulkeley presents dreams whose common theme is the experience of the sacred… This is a scholarly but very readable book, including exhaustive notes and a complete transcultural and transtemporal bibliography of dreams.”
—Betsy Caprio, Praying


Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Dead
2. Snakes
3. Gods
4. Nightmares
5. Sexuality
6. Flying
7. Lucidity
8. Creativity
9. Healing
10.Prophecy
11.Rituals
12.Initiation
13.Conversion
Conclusion
Appendix 1. Hermeneutics: The Interpretation of
Spiritual Dreams
Appendix 2. Dreams and Conceptions of the Soul,
Reality, and Reason
Appendix 3. Methodological Issues