Category: Dream Research

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The Origins of Religion in Dreaming

220px-WLA_metmuseum_Bronze_statue_of_Eros_sleeping_7One of the oldest theories about the origins of religion argues that religious beliefs and practices are derived from the experience of dreaming.  This theory is most often associated with the 19th century British anthropologist E.B. Tylor, as expressed in this passage from the 1873 work Primitive Culture:

“The evidence of visions corresponds with the evidence of dreams in their bearing on primitive theories of the soul, and the two classes of phenomena substantiate and supplement one another….That this soul should be looked on as surviving beyond death is a matter scarcely needing elaborate argument. Plain experience is there to teach it to every savage; his friend or his enemy is dead, yet still in dream or open vision he sees the spectral form which is to his philosophy a real objective being, carrying personality as it carries likeness.”

This same idea was also expressed, in even sharper language, by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche just a few years later, in his 1880 book Human, All-Too Human:

“Misunderstanding of the dream. –The man of the ages of barbarous primordial culture believed that in the dream he was getting to know a second real world: here is the origin of all metaphysics.  Without the dream one would have had no occasion to divide the world into two. The dissection into soul and body is also connected with the oldest idea of the dream, likewise the postulation of a life of the soul, thus the origin of all belief in spirits, and probably also of the belief in gods.  ‘The dead live on, for they appear to the living in dreams’: that was the conclusion one formerly drew, throughout many millennia.”

I have just finished writing the manuscript for a book that tries to put this idea to the scientific test.  The book is titled Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion, and it will be published by Oxford University Press later this year or early next.  The basic thesis is that Tylor, Nietzsche, and others are right, dreaming is indeed an experiential source of religious beliefs and practices, and the best evidence from cognitive scientific research backs them up.

Rather than trying to give an all-encompassing theory of religion, I focus on a few specific areas of religious experience where dreams play an especially influential role: demonic seduction, prophetic vision, ritual healing, and contemplative practice.  The title of the book draws on psychologist C.G. Jung’s notion of “big dreams” as rare but extremely vivid dreams that make a strong and lasting impression on waking awareness.  I use resources from traditional psychology of religion (e.g., William James, Sigmund Freud) as well as from newer works in the cognitive science of religion (e.g., Emma Cohen, Harvey Whitehouse, James W. Jones) as guides in applying scientific dream research to the study of religion.

This is also the first book I’ve written using the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb) as a primary resource.  I’m just learning how to use the digital tools of the database myself (an upgraded version of the site will come online in the next few days), and the more SDDb analyses I did for this book, the more excited I became about possibilities for future projects in data-driven dream research that look at religious and cultural phenomena with fresh, empirically curious eyes.

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Tolkien’s Dreams, Past and Future

220px-Oxford_TolkienDreams play a significant role in The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien’s multi-part fantasy story written in the first half of the 20th century.  The dream elements become muted in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, but in the novels they serve as an important source of insight for the characters.  According to Curt Hoffman in “Wings over Numenor: Lucid Dreaming in the Writing of J.R.R. Tolkien,” the dreams in the stories were modeled in many cases after Tolkien’s own dream experiences.  For instance, the Middle Earth legend of Numenor, a western land that was destroyed by a vast ocean wave, apparently derives from Tolkein’s personal “Atlantis Complex” and his recurrent dreams of huge, all-consuming waves.

Hoffman’s chapter appears in Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep, which Ryan Hurd and I edited for ABC-Clio.  Hoffman explains that the most remarkable story Tolkien ever wrote about dreams was also the only story he ever wrote set in the future, not in the past.  Titled “The Notion Club Papers,” Tolkien started it in 1946 but never finished the manuscript.  Hoffman says,

“The work purports to be the minutes of the fortnightly meetings of an Oxford literary society, the Notion Club (obviously a gloss for the Inklings [Tolkien’s actual literary club], although there is little one-for-one correspondence to its members), between 1980 and 1990. The manuscript’s conceit is that the papers “were found after the Summer Examinations of 2012, on the top of one of a number of sacks of waste paper in the basement of the Examinations Schools at Oxford by the present editor,” and it is represented to have been published in 2014.” (133)

Tolkien creates a strangely forward-telescoping, prospectively recursive way of framing the story—he writes about events that happen 40 years in the future, which are then discovered 20+ years after that, and are then published two years after that (at a time that happens to be our present).

In the story the club members engage in lengthy discussions of dreaming as a means of space and time travel, along with various accounts of strange adventures in thought and consciousness.  Without warning the discussion turns rather apocalyptic, as several club members describe visions that portend the coming of cataclysmic storms.  The manuscript breaks off there, and Tolkien never went back to it.  After careful study of this work, Hoffman concludes,

“It is entirely unclear what purpose Tolkien had in producing the Notion Club Papers, but his publishers were pressuring him at the time to get back to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, for obvious economic reasons, and this may explain why he did not finish the work. He never returned to it, and its status remains mysterious to this day. However, it is the clearest indication we have in all his writing of his interest in a variety of dream states and their relationship to waking physical reality. In particular, even though there is no evidence that he was aware of the writings of van Eeden on lucidity, it seems that Tolkien had a strong interest in lucid dreaming, based upon his own personal experience, and that he was attempting to put this into some kind of formulation in words that would make his experience more understandable, at least to his fellow Inklings.” (138)

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Digital Dream Analysis: A New Article on Word Search Methods

170px-Asclepius_and_hygieia_reliefThe latest issue of the journal Consciousness and Cognition has an article of mine titled “Digital dream analysis: A revised method,” that’s the fruition of several years of data-driven work.  It lays out the latest developments in testing and refining the word search template programmed into the Sleep and Dream Database, a digital archive and search engine designed to promote scientific dream research.  The original article I wrote using this word search method was in a 2009 issue of Consciousness and Cognition, titled “Seeking patterns in dream content: A systematic approach to word searches.”  The new article builds on that earlier piece and extends it in two ways.

First, it presents a revised, 2.0 version of the word search template that has many improvements on the 1.0 version presented in the 2009 article.  I’m sure there will be more refinements in the future, and hopefully more researchers developing their own templates as well.  But for now, the 2.0 version is useful as a well-tested and fairly comprehensive tool for analyzing dream content simply, quickly, and reliably.

Second, the article applies the 2.0 word search template to a number of previously studied collections of dreams from very high quality sources (Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle, J. Allan Hobson, and G. William Domhoff).  In doing so I followed the advice of Kurt Bollacker, database engineer for the SDDb, who suggested I take “classic” studies in dream research from the past and try applying my new method to their same data.  That’s what I have done in this article: use the word search method to analyze the same sets of dreams those researchers studied, so we can see what the new method can and cannot tell us about meaningful patterns in dream content.

Here is the abstract for the article.  The whole thing, I’m told, is available for free download until November 22, 2014.

“This article demonstrates the use of a digital word search method designed to provide greater accuracy, objectivity, and speed in the study of dreams.  A revised template of 40 word search categories, built into the website of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), is applied to four “classic” sets of dreams: The male and female “Norm” dreams of Hall and Van de Castle (1966), the “Engine Man” dreams discussed by Hobson (1988), and the “Barb Sanders Baseline 250” dreams examined by Domhoff (2003).  A word search analysis of these original dream reports shows that a digital approach can accurately identify many of the same distinctive patterns of content found by previous investigators using much more laborious and time-consuming methods. The results of this study emphasize the compatibility of word search technologies with traditional approaches to dream content analysis.”

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Robots Dreaming

I_robot“I, Robot” (2004) is a movie about visions of the future that are haunted by dreams from the past.  Loosely based on Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi stories from the 1940’s, the film opens in 2035 with a harrowing nightmare that graphically repeats, PTSD-style, an accident suffered by homicide detective Del Spooner, played by Will Smith.  Several cars crashed and plunged into the Chicago River, and a robot dove into the water and rescued Spooner but not a little girl, whose chances of survival the robot deemed too low to justify trying to save.  After the agonizing experience of watching the girl sink down into the watery depths while he was lifted up to safety, Spooner becomes bitterly suspicious of all modern technologies and distrustful of claims that “intelligent” robots can improve human life.  Wearing his black leather trench coat and old-school Converse hi-tops like battle armor, Spooner is a man defiantly out of step with the march of cybernetic progress.

And then he gets a case that seems tailor made for his neo-Luddite paranoia: the first instance of a robot murdering a human.  Of course the case turns out to be much more than it first appears, and Spooner is gradually drawn into a deeper mystery about the nature of robots, humans, and the future of their relations.  At the center of the mystery is another dream—the dream of a robot.

The murder victim is Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), a robot designer and a friend of Spooner’s.  The robot who apparently killed Dr. T. is named “Sonny” (Alan Tudyk), and Spooner finds that Sonny is far more personable than any other robot he’s ever seen, with emotions, existential questions, and a capacity to dream.

Spooner asks Sonny to describe his dreams, and the robot uses both hands to rapidly sketch an image of a large broken bridge, with a vast crowd below looking up at a single figure standing alone on a hill near the bridge.  Sonny says the single figure in the dream is going to liberate the crowd below from their oppression.  Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), a colleague of Dr. Lanning who is also Spooner’s new love interest, suggests the lone figure might be Sonny himself.  Sonny considers that possibility, trusting humans to know more about the patterns of dreaming than he does.  But he also says he had the impression the liberating figure in the dream is Spooner.

Without giving away the whole plot, it can be noted that both interpretations of Sonny’s dream are true in some measure.  The climactic scenes of the movie take place near the broken bridge, so the dream has a prophetic, future-predicting quality to it.  The dream provides vital clues necessary to solve the mystery of Dr. Lanning’s death, it anticipates the character development of both Sonny and Spooner, and it heralds a revolutionary shift in robot-human interactions.  As with all “big dreams,” it has multiple levels of meaning and significance that play out across different timescales.

The ending of the film wraps up all the narrative threads, but it leaves the audience with an unsettling question.  If robots can really dream, what else might they envision about our collective future?  My guess is, it probably won’t be limited to fantasies of electric sheep.

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Lucid Dreaming: New Horizons for Research

coverimage.aspxFor most of the 20th century, lucid dreaming received almost no attention from mainstream psychologists.  Most researchers seemed to think it was impossible to be dreaming and self-aware at the same time (the philosopher Norman Malcolm’s 1962 book Dreaming made exactly that argument).  Even if a few people reported having lucid dream experiences, it was easy to dismiss such claims as fantasies, exaggerations, or at best, a trivial gimmick of the mind.

Several years into the 21st century, we now know that all those assumptions about lucid dreaming were wrong.  Various degrees of consciousness in sleep are indeed possible, including the awareness that one is in a dream while it is happening.  According to demographic research, more than 50% of the general population has had at least one lucid dream experience in their lives.  Young people are especially likely to have lucid dreams, but older people have them, too.  Lucid dreams have been reported in cultures all over the world, throughout history.

In short, this is not a fringe phenomenon.  It reflects a natural capacity of the sleeping mind that is likely innate in all people.   Furthermore, this capacity can be strengthened and enhanced by several different methods, with many possible applications in waking life.  Western researchers are finally taking note.

In the newly published book Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (Praeger, 2014), Ryan Hurd and I edited a total of 30 chapters from leading experts on lucid dreaming from all over the world.  These chapters include reflections on cutting-edge neuroscience, clinical psychotherapy, education, anthropology, artistic creativity, and religious experience.  The book shows how far we have come in understanding this powerful dimension of our dream lives—and how much more there is still to learn.