Kelly Bulkeley

January 25, 2012

Zeo Sleep Data and the Ur-Patterns of Dream Content

So far I’ve done word search analyses on 20 series of dreams from individuals and 9 sets of dreams from large groups of people, a total of more than 18,000 dream reports. It’s too early to say anything definite about the patterns that have emerged from this data. More reports need to be gathered from a wider variety of people, and more improvements need to be made in the SDDb word search template.

Still, a few basic patterns have appeared in nearly all the collections I’ve studied. I’m calling them ur-patterns because they seem to represent deep structural elements of dream content (ur- as in “original” or “primal”). That’s my general hypothesis, anyway, and each new set of dreams is another chance to test and refine it.

Here are the ur-patterns I’ve identified so far:

Of the five senses, sight words are used most often, smell and taste the least.
Of the five major emotions (fear, anger, sadness, confusion, happiness), fear words are used most often.
Of all the categories of cognitive activity, speech words are used most often.
Of the four natural elements, water words are used most often.
Falling words are used more often than flying words.
There are more references to family characters than animal characters, and more to animals than to fantastic beings.
There are more references to friendliness than physical aggression.

Looking at the KB DJ 2009-2010 series with Zeo sleep data (available at google docs), a scan for these patterns finds good but not perfect evidence for each one.

Vision-related words are used more frequently across all the Zeo measurements, with smell and taste words almost entirely absent. Fear words are used more frequently than other emotion words. Speech words are the most used among the cognition categories, and water is the highest among the natural elements, though earth is a consistently high second. The usage of falling words is always higher than, or equal to, flying words.

The family > animals pattern > fantastic beings was not as clear-cut. Fantastic beings always had the lowest word usage, but animals were not always lower than family. When the names of the dreamer’s immediate family were added to the search for characters, the total frequency of family-related words rose higher than the usage of animal words in 15 of the 17 subgroups.

The friendliness > physical aggression pattern was not perfectly evident either. In part this is due to a “false positive” problem in the SDDb template. The word search category for physical aggression includes the word “bit,” which the dreamer used in almost 10% of all the reports as a term meaning “small amount,” not a physical bite. I’ll provide revised numbers once I’ve fixed this. For now, looking at how often the word “bit” is used in each Zeo subgroup, it appears the physical aggression frequencies will drop below the friendliness frequencies in most, but not all, subgroups.

In sum, the ur-patterns appear across virtually all the subgroups of Zeo sleep measurement. No matter what aspect of sleep was measured, the dream reports used the same basic frequencies of words in several major categories. High or low proportions of sleep did not correlate with any major change of dream content, at least at this level of analysis.

In future posts I’ll look at the few variations from these patterns (high physical aggression, animal, flying, and earth references) in relation to the dreamer’s waking life concerns, taking the possibility of metaphorical meaning into account.

I will also look at each of the five types of Zeo data and see if I can identify any particular variations that rise to the level of statistically significant correlation. If any such correlations emerge, they may guide us toward specific areas where a measurable aspect of sleep does interact with basic patterns of dream content.

January 12, 2012

Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination

I’ve just read an excellent new book, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination, by Amira Mittermaier (University of California Press, 2011). The following two paragraphs are from a review that will appear in the next issue of the IASD magazine Dream Time.

Important new books on dreams and Islam have been coming out faster than this reviewer can keep up with them. In the last issue of Dream Time I wrote about Iain Edgar’s The Dream in Islam: From Qur’anic Tradition to Jihadist Inspiration. In this issue I review Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination by Amira Mittermaier, an Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto. Mittermaier’s work won the American Academy of Religion’s 2011 book award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Analytic-Descriptive Category. Based on her dissertation fieldwork, the book explores the lively yet hotly contested terrain of dreaming in contemporary Egypt. Whereas Edgar’s work takes a broad historical view of dreaming in Islam and then focuses on a particular type of dream experience (jihadist inspiration dreams), Mittermaier’s approach is to delve deeply into the ethnographic details of particular people’s lives in Egyptian culture and then open the discussion to broader issues and debates in Islamic teachings about dreams, revelation, and the imagination.

Mittermaier brings a unique personal background to her research topic. She was raised in Bavaria by a German father who was a neurologist and by an Egyptian mother who was a Jungian psychotherapist. Her upbringing gave her a deep familiarity with the ideas of Freud and Jung—and a conviction that the individual-centered theories of psychoanalysis were missing something important about the transpersonal dimensions of dreaming: “Intrigued by this apparent tension between Elsewhere-oriented and psychoanalytic dream models, I wanted to explore what it means for dreamers in the world today to be extended outward as opposed to inward.” (14)

I’ll post the rest of the review once the Dream Time issue appears, some time in the next few weeks.

January 5, 2012

Comparing Dream Content and Zeo Sleep Data

An advanced feature of the Sleep and Dream Database is the ability to analyze dream content using sleep stage measurements from the Zeo Sleep Manager as search constraints. So far, the SDDb has only one series with both dream reports and Zeo sleep data from the same nights (KB DJ 2009-2010). In coming months I will be pursuing new studies with other participants using a combination of dream journaling and the Zeo device. (If you’re interested in contributing to this research, please let me know!)

Using the word search template of the SDDb, I analyzed 135 dream reports with Zeo data in terms of total REM sleep, total light sleep, total deep sleep, total time awake during the night, and total ZQ (an aggregate number measuring overall sleep quality). For each of these five Zeo variables I divided the 135 reports into three or four subgroups of roughly equal number and average word length, then searched each subgroup to determine its frequency of using the seven word classes and forty word categories available in the SDDb.

At this very early stage of working with dream and Zeo data, my goal is to learn enough to be able to ask more refined questions in future research. The small size of these subgroups (28 the smallest, 52 the largest) means that the statistics are not definitive and surely include a fair amount of noise. The variation in average word length of the reports in each subset (105.53 the shortest, 142.49 the longest) is another reason to view these results cautiously. Some of the reports provide only a brief mention of sexual activity, omitting additional details for privacy reasons. The KB DJ 2009-2010 series has 182 total dreams, but 47 of the reports do not have corresponding Zeo data.

If patterns in the sleep data do correlate with patterns in dream content, I suspect the effects are likely to appear at the extremes, at the high and low ends of each measurement scale. Unusual frequencies may be nothing more than random noise, but they may also be genuine signals of interaction between sleep physiology and dream content. I’m hoping to identify where these signals might be appearing in data.

The spreadsheet with all the results can be found on Google docs.

Over the next few weeks I’ll post some comments about these data and what I think they mean. For anyone who repeats the SDDb word searches I did on the KB DJ 2009-2010 series and finds an error in my spreadsheet, I’ll send you a free book!

November 22, 2011February 25, 2024

Religion and Critical Psychology: Comments on Jeremy Carrette’s Latest Book

This is a response I wrote to Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy (Routledge, 2007) by Jeremy Carrette, a Professor of Religious Studies at University of Kent, England. We just held a session on Jeremy’s book at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco, with additional responses from Ann Taves and Bonnie Miller-McLemore.

I have followed Jeremy Carrette’s writings for many years, and I regard him as the preeminent critical thinker in the psychology of religion. His professional mission is to question “how ideas are strategically excluded, privileged, and ordered within the scientific or humanities enterprise.” (viii) His notion of “disciplinary amnesia” highlights the tendency of scholars to ignore or mischaracterize earlier generations of research in order to legitimize their own efforts to answer the same questions. It’s really a more refined way of saying we continually reinvent the wheel (or, in a different register, that we’re trapped in an oedipal rivalry with our intellectual parents). Our lack of historical self-awareness prevents real progress from being made and casts unnecessary confusion over the whole enterprise of the psychology of religion.

The turn to economics in Jeremy’s new book opens up an important and long overdue realm of inquiry for researchers in the psychology of religion. He defines the “knowledge economy” as “the situation where knowledge (not information) becomes an economic good and where technology reframes how knowledge is both transmitted and used within the socio-economic order.” (x) Jeremy makes detailed and compelling analyses of several familiar figures (Maslow, Reich, Fromm) and argues that they suffer from “critical myopia” (13); they have failed to recognize the problematic interactions of their theories with the ethical and political order of the knowledge economy. What counts as “psychology” and what counts as “religion” in their theories is conditioned by, and unwittingly contributes to, the unjust economic regime of late capitalism. A key point is that “we under-theorize at the point that our values become evident” (93); that is, whenever we assert that a claim is basic, objective, universal, and non-theoretical, that’s exactly when our ethical values and our political will-to-power are making their totalizing move.

As always, Jeremy makes creative and highly effective use of William James. I appreciate the reminder, even if it comes from the other side of the Atlantic, that James’ ideas remain acutely relevant for present-day discussions in the psychology of religion.

This book is very dense and the tone is relentlessly judgmental. I don’t think those are problems per se, but they may limit the reach of Jeremy’s arguments. There is a lot of superego in this book; it speaks in the voice of an academic conscience, exposing errors and deceptions, scolding those who fail to uphold higher ideals of scholarship. It’s a heavy book, and I think it would benefit from a complementary spirit of levity, wit, and playfulness. It needs less Senex, and more Trickster. Foucault and Nietzsche, two of Jeremy’s intellectual heroes, were wonderful tricksters, and I miss that energy in this book.

For me the most anticipated chapter was the last one, on the cognitive science of religion, where I’ve been trying to make arguments informed by Jeremy’s work for some time. I felt a slight disappointment that he chose to focus on the writings of Harvey Whitehouse. Whitehouse is an influential and well-regarded figure, but in my own rogue’s gallery of wayward scholars in the cognitive science of religion I can think of more egregiously problematic people than him. Yet by the end of the chapter I appreciated Jeremy’s choice because he shows how the rhetoric of cognitive science has infiltrated Whitehouse’s work over the course of his writings, pushing out more nuanced arguments and inclining him, in some ways against his will, toward more simplistic positions. This rings true to me from the couple of times I’ve met and talked with Whitehouse. He seems ambivalent about his own model, belatedly recognizing how easy it is to over-concretize his concepts. I think Jeremy is exactly right when he says, “Cognitive concepts have a currency because they are the dominant ideological language of the market and they therefore flow through the social apparatus more easily.” (201) The concepts of cognitive science appeal to us because they fit so easily with our economic system and its treatment of humans as computational machines seeking to optimize our consumption behavior. Most of Whitehouse’s critics have said he applies cognitive science research inadequately, but Jeremy asks why did Whitehouse adopt this language in the first place? What does it get him? What are the economic, social, and political benefits he gains from using this language? These are the questions I’ve learned to ask myself, and maybe all of us should ask: What attracts us about cognitive science? Where do its concepts come into play in our work? What are we asking those concepts to do?

I also agree with a point that Jeremy makes only briefly, but to me has tremendous potential: “The cognitive science of religion requires more dynamic modeling of the mind to appreciate its own political involvement.” (167) I would add that a more dynamic modeling of the mind will lead to a better understanding of the mind itself and the actual evidence coming from contemporary cognitive science, evidence that does not support the simplistic claims about religion often made under this banner.

This leads to my biggest question for Jeremy is this: Can one be a critic and a scientist at the same time?

I don’t see him reference anyone who is both, i.e., a scholar who successfully combines the philosophical sophistication of a critic with the generative empiricism of a scientist. I’m not sure if Jeremy thinks a) the two are mutually exclusive, or b) they can potentially co-exist but no one has actually managed to hold them together.

I admit to an autobiographical interest in this question. In graduate school I was trained as a critic, and I developed good skills at analyzing the psychological and political assumptions underlying theories in my specific field, the study of dreams. But I soon reached a point where I had to ask: Now what? Do I sit back and wait for more theories to appear so I can critically scrutinize them (and invariably find them pitifully inadequate)? Or do I roll up my sleeves and do some empirical research of my own, using the critical awareness I’ve learned from Jeremy to design projects and generate new data that will compel my scientific colleagues to change their theories, not because Jeremy and Foucault say they should but because there’s new evidence they have to take into account?

Let me emphasize this point by closing on a note of mythological whimsy. Jeremy’s book makes me think of the Trojan War. The Greeks are the forces of critique, and the Trojans are the scientists holding the truth captive within their mighty walls. The conflict between the two armies seems like it will go on forever. In this AAR version of Homer’s epic I cast Jeremy in the role of Achilles, the indomitable Greek warrior who can defeat any Trojan in single combat. But no matter how many Trojans he slays and drags around the battlefield, he cannot by force of arms alone breach the city walls. For that, I believe he needs the trickster spirit of Odysseus to create something the Trojans value, something that appeals to them and persuades them to unlock their gates. Once you’re inside the gates, then you can come out and do your transformative critique, your conceptually disruptive mischief, your dynamic consciousness-raising, your humanistic liberation of the truth. A Trojan Horse strategy has the potential to overcome the sterile clash of arms and lead to a more fruitful interaction between scientific psychology and the study of religion.

Kelly Bulkeley

The Graduate Theological Union

November 20, 2011

Note: Jeremy wrote a great chapter on cognitive neuroscience in a book I edited a few years ago, Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-Mind Science (Palgrave, 2005)

September 16, 2011

Dream Interpretation in Christianity: A Brief History

Dreams and dream interpretation play a variety of roles in the Bible. They reveal God’s presence and plan for the future (e.g., Jacob’s dream at Bethel, Gen 28:10-22), warn of impending dangers (e.g., Pharaoh’s nightmares in Gen 41), guide and reassure the faithful (e.g., Paul’s visions of the night in Acts 16:9 and 18:9), and bestow blessings (e.g., Joseph’s dream of the angel in Matt 1:20). In some passages dreaming is presented as a form of divine inspiration, for example Joel 2:28: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

However, some Biblical texts question the meaningfulness of dreams and the veracity of those that seem to reveal messages from God. In Zech10:2 it says, “the dreamers tell false dreams, and give empty consolation,” while Jer 29:8 warns, “do not listen to the dreams which they dream.” The skeptical attitude expressed in these passages does not contradict the more favorable treatment of dreams found in the other texts, but rather provides a balancing perspective that heightens awareness of the challenges of discerning God’s truth.

The imperative question then becomes, how does one distinguish a true from a false dream? If God does indeed speak in dreams, then a faithful person should be attentive to that possibility in his or her own dreaming experience. But if dreams can also be false or misleading, what guidance does a person have in distinguishing the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff?

The Bible itself suggests at least three possible answers. 1) Direct messages. Sometimes a dream’s meaning is so clear and distinct that no interpretation is necessary, as in Joseph’s dream of the angel in Matthew 1 and Paul’s night visions, both of which involve direct, unambiguous auditory communications. 2) Metaphorical analysis. In some cases a method of metaphoric/symbolic translation is required to understand a dream’s meaning and import, most famously with Joseph and his interpretation of Pharaoh’s two disturbing dreams of self-devouring cows and ears of grain. Joseph emphasizes the significance of the two dreams together: “the doubling of Pharaoh’s dreams means that the thing is fixed by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass” (Gen 41:32). Unfortunately the text does not say how exactly Joseph knew, for example, that the number of cows and ears of grain would equal the number of years of coming plenty and famine. 3) Faith and mystical intuition. Both Joseph and Daniel say that their ability to interpret dreams ultimately rests on their faith in God’s guidance. This faith enables Joseph to accurately identify the symbolic meaning of Pharaoh’s nightmares, succeeding where all the royal diviners and wise men had failed. Daniel’s faith-fueled interpretive ability is so great that he can tell Nebuchadnezzar what his dream means without even hearing the dream in the first place (Dan 2).

All Biblical references to dreams and dream interpretation are intertwined in complex ways with other cultural traditions and dream teachings, making it difficult to speak of a uniquely Christian method of interpreting dreams. It is better instead to consider some of the ways Christians have practiced, or argued against, the interpretation of dreams.

Several early Christian theologians (e.g., Tertullian, Origen, Synesius) spoke highly of dreams as an authentic source of divine inspiration. These church fathers saw dreams, properly interpreted, as a powerful means of strengthening people’s faith and converting new people to the Christian community. Augustine, following his own conversion and vow of chastity, treated dreams skeptically as a source of sexual temptation, but he acknowledged that his deeply faithful mother Monica had an innate ability to distinguish personal dreams from truly divine dreams. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, evaluates divination by dreams in terms of its theological legitimacy and concludes that it may, in the right circumstances, be practiced by good Christians: “There is no unlawful divination in making use of dreams for the foreknowledge of the future, so long as those dreams are due to divine revelation, or to some natural cause inward or outward, and so far as the efficacy of that cause extends.” A strong statement against dreams comes from Protestant reformer Martin Luther, in his commentary on the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 40: “I care nothing about visions and dreams. Although they seem to have a meaning, yet I despise them and am content with the sure meaning and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture.” Luther does not deny that some dreams may have divine messages, but he insists that any dream must be tested for its fidelity to scripture. This reduces dream interpretation to a process of confirming what is already known in scripture, effectively rendering dreams spiritually superfluous.

Since the Enlightenment, dream interpretation has generally been relegated to the realm of superstition and fortune-telling (or used by inquisitors to ferret out heretics). Modern Christian theologians have for the most part conceded to the rationalist viewpoint and ignored dreams as a topic of serious, sustained reflection. In the twentieth century the twin forces of Freudian psychoanalysis and sleep laboratory research, though disagreeing on many points, combined to dismiss religious ideas about dreams in favor of reductive psychological explanations. Present-day Christians are thus left with an ambiguous heritage. A phenomenon with an honored place in scripture and early history has fallen into disrepute, despite the experiential fact that people today continue to have dreams with religious significance and spiritually meaningful content.

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References:

Bulkeley, K., K. Adams, and P.M. Davis, eds. 2009. Dreaming in Christianity and Islam: Culture, Conflict, and Creativity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Covitz, Joel. 1990. Visions of the Night: A Study of Jewish Dream Interpretation. Boston: Shambhala.

Freud, S. 1965. The interpretation of dreams. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: Avon Books.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1992. The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Harris, M. 1994. Studies in Jewish dream interpretation. Northvale: Jason Aronson.

Kagan, Richard L. 1990. Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kelsey, M. 1991. God, dreams, and revelation: A Christian interpretation of dreams. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing.

Miller, P.C. 1994. Dreams in late antiquity: Studies in the imagination of a culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Osborne, Roger. 2001. The Dreamer of the Calle de San Salvador. London: Pimlico.

Strickling, B.L. 2007. Dreaming about the divine. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Stroumsa, D. 1999. Dreams and visions in early Christian discourse. In Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, edited by D. Shulman and D. Stroumsa. New York: Oxford University Press.

August 9, 2011

The Art and Science of Dreaming

Why do we have dreams? Where do they come from? What, if anything, do they mean? These mysterious questions have puzzled humankind since the earliest days of history. The best answers, I suggest, come from integrating the insights of art and science. Dreaming is rooted in the physical workings of our brains, and it expresses our highest spiritual yearnings and deepest psychological concerns. In dreams the mind, body, and soul come together in a creative ferment, giving us new perspectives on the emotional realities of our lives.

Looking first at art, people throughout the ages have regarded dreams as a source of creative inspiration. A number of famous works of Western art and literature were directly influenced by their creator’s dreams.

Among writers, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dreamed up several key scenes in her novel Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson had a dream about a divided soul at war with itself that gave him the core plot idea for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Surrealist painters like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte drew upon their dreams for bizarre, symbol-laden images of melting clocks and floating bowler hats. In more recent years, a number of prominent movie directors have experienced dreams that influenced their films, including David Lynch in Blue Velvet, Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now, and Akira Kurusawa in Dreams. Contemporary musicians have also described their dreams as creative inspirations. Paul McCartney had a dream that gave him the tune for “Yesterday,” and Sting’s song “The Lazarus Heart” came from a personal nightmare.

If we consider religion as another realm where humans express their deepest creativity, then we can see even more evidence of the inspiring power of dreaming. In the Hebrew Bible, visionary dreams come to Abraham and Jacob, while Joseph saved his people by his ability to interpret dreams. In the New Testament, prophetic dreams of guidance help Jesus’ parents before their child’s birth and Paul during his missionary travels. The Muslim Prophet Muhammad told of his dreams in the Qur’an, and each morning he asked his followers what they had dreamed, so they could better discern God’s will. Hindu and Buddhist mystics consider all of life to be a dream, a great illusion shaped by our desires. Many indigenous cultures around the world have myths (e.g., the Australian Aborigine’s “Dreamtime”) and rituals (e.g., the Native American vision quest) to help their members learn more about the creative potentials of their own dreaming.

Do the insights of artists and mystics stand up to the findings of modern science? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Based on the latest evidence from research in cognitive psychology, it appears that dreaming is a natural and normal aspect of healthy brain/mind functioning. Not all dreams are heaven-sent revelations or artistic breakthroughs, but in general dreaming is an accurate and meaningful expression of our fears, concerns, conflicts, and desires in waking life.

Since the 1950’s scientists have known about the different stages of sleep, and it appears that dreams occur most often during the stage of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. During REM sleep our brains are very active, but in a different configuration than in waking. In REM the brain centers for instinctual emotions and visual imagination are highly activated, while the parts of the brain responsible for focused rational attention are less active. This evidence fits the general qualities of many dreams—less rational, more emotional and visual—and it supports the idea that our capacity for dreaming is hard-wired into the human brain.

However, it is important to recognize that dreams occur in stages of sleep other than REM. REM sleep may be the most common trigger for dreaming, but research has shown that dreams can occur throughout the sleep cycle. This means that we still do not have a complete picture of the dreaming brain. We cannot “reduce” dreams to REM sleep.

Most people remember one or two dreams a week, but that can vary depending on many factors. Some people remember at least one dream almost every night, while others say they have never recalled a dream in their whole life. Researchers have found that small efforts to pay more attention to dreams can lead to big increases in dream recall. It’s like the movie “Field of Dreams”: If you build it, they will come—if you open your waking mind to the possibility that your dreams have something meaningful to say, you’re likely to start remembering more dreams.

When people ask me how to interpret their dreams, I start by emphasizing that only the dreamer can know for sure what his or her dreams really mean. “Experts” like me can offer ideas and possibilities based on our research, but ultimately you are the final authority on your own dreams.

Sometimes dreams speak in direct and literal terms. For example, you may be scared of flying, and thus you might have a nightmare of crashing in an airplane. But sometimes dreams speak indirectly, in a language of metaphor and symbol. Your nightmare of a crashing airplane may symbolically reflect your waking anxieties about your finances, your health, or a personal relationship. To understand your dreams you need a flexible mind that can perceive these kinds of metaphorical connections between dream imagery and your emotional concerns in waking life.

One of the most important functions of dreaming is to look ahead, to anticipate what might happen in the future and prepare us for possible dangers and threats. This isn’t a simple matter of “prophecy,” although that’s what ancient people called the same basic process. Scientists today have found that many of our most memorable dreams revolve around visions of worst-case scenarios, and it seems that these kinds of dreams are like fire drills, getting us ready in case those dangers actually occur in the waking world. Even though many of our dreams are negative and disturbing in this way, they are still promoting our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

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This article appears on pp. 22-23 in the August 2011 special issue on Sleep and Dreams in Vintage Newsmagazine, a publication in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thanks to editor Betsy Troyer for inviting me to contribute.