Among the many reasons I’m happy at the recent publication of The Spirituality of Dreaming: Unlocking the Wisdom of Our Sleeping Selves (Broadleaf Books, 2023) is its availability as an audio book. The book itself is beautifully bound and a delight to hold in the hand, but I know how many friends and family these days enjoy listening to their books. At last, I have something to offer as a literary companion for their walks, commutes, and household chores!
New Dream Posts from Psychology Today
Here are the recent posts I have written for Psychology Today, going back to the middle of last summer. Although each one is written as a stand-alone discussion of a special topic in dreaming, I now realize they also form a series of interrelated texts, like the chapters of a book I didn’t consciously know I was writing….
- The Varieties of Dream Recall – the different practices that might be helpful for people with different types of dream recall.
- The Trickster in Dreams – an archetypal figure of mischief and transformation often appears in dreams to express the chaotic energies of the unconscious.
- Dreaming and Spiritual Practice – focusing especially on big dreams and long-term dream journals.
- The Playful Art of Dream Cartoons – a look at the history of dream cartoons, up to Roz Chast’s new book I Must Be Dreaming.
- Dreams of Losing a Sports Hero – prompted by the departure of Damien Lillard from the Portland Trailblazers NBA basketball team.
- Who is Most Likely to Dream of the Dead? – some people are more likely to experience visitation dreams of those who have already died.
- Nightmares of Climate Change – dreams reflect our interactions with the increasingly disturbed natural environment.
- The Many Functions of Dreaming – a response to those who reject any claim about the alleged functions of dreaming.
- Atheism and Dreaming – why some atheists dismiss dreams, and why they might reconsider doing so if they knew about current dream research.
Sports, Dreaming, and the Cultural Dynamics of Play
A new article about dreaming and sports, co-authored by me and Michael Schredl, has just been accepted for publication by the journal Dreaming. We do not yet know in which issue of the journal it will appear, but we are very excited to share our findings at last! We analyzed the survey responses of @4500 American adults who answered questions in 2021 about their sleep, dreams, and interest/participation in sports. The results of our analysis suggest a number of practical implications for athletic training, cultural analysis, and dream research. Michael has done several previous studies on this topic, and I was glad for his collaboration. My curiosity about sports and dreams derives from ideas I have been developing about dreaming as form of play. This study offered an opportunity to see how those theoretical ideas relate to the empirical data of the survey.
Immoral Behaviors in Dreaming and What They Mean
Recently wrote a post for Psychology Today about “Taboo Dreams,” meaning dreams that involve activities or behavior that violate the moral standards of the dreamer’s community in waking life. Over the years, several people have asked me questions about these kinds of dreams, and I get the sense that many more people would like to ask but are embarrassed to do so.
A key takeaway from the post: Just because you behave a certain way in a dream does not mean that is who you “really are.” Likewise, just because you dream of doing something, it does not automatically mean you should enact it in waking life. If you take even a few moments to reflect on your dream, you will almost surely find the meanings are more complex than that. In many of these dreams the “taboo” behavior is a metaphor that relates to something else in the dreamer’s waking life. If you can get past the literal images of shocking immorality and explore the metaphors with an open mind, new insights into the depths of your own psyche will become possible.
Keeping a Dream Journal: Fly Like an Eagle
What’s it like to keep a long-term dream journal? These days I’m doing everything I can to help in developing and promoting the new app Elsewhere, an excellent resource for dream journaling. Also, my new book The Scribes of Sleep is about the history of dream journals. Thus, I’m thinking a lot about how to describe the value of keeping a dream journal to people who might be unfamiliar with the practice. How can you begin to understand the wild wonder and serendipitous magic of dream journaling if you have never tried it?
As I learned primarily from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, the power of metaphors is their capacity to use what we know to help us understand what we do not know. Here, I’m thinking that keeping a dream journal is metaphorically like being a Bald Eagle. (It could be any high-flying bird, but this is the one I saw earlier this afternoon.) We know several things about eagles that can also be accurately said of dream journaling.
When you track your dreams over time in a journal, you are able to rise above the occurrence of single dreams to see the flow of your dreaming in its entirety. From this altitude the whole of your oneiric terrain becomes visible. You can recognize large-scale patterns, shapes, and features that are simply impossible to perceive from the ground level.
As a dream-journaling eagle, you can easily move back and forth across the verdant territory of your dreaming self, soaring in whatever direction you please, circling over some places, swooping down for a closer look in others. Your perception in incredibly sharp: you notice subtle movements, hidden connections, and curious forms of life. Your consciousness expands to encompass everything you can see–the sky, the land, and the farthest horizons.
Beyond the specific insights that are possible from the eagle’s view, the summum bonum of dreaming journaling is the emergence of a more dynamic spiritual awareness and presence in the world. Perched on the top branch of the tallest tree in the forest, you can gaze over the bounteous vitality of your own personal realm of dreaming and reflect on the contours of your life from a uniquely wide-ranging perspective.
And who knows, maybe you’ll meet someone else who’s perched up there…
The Elsewhere Dream Journaling App
Elsewhere is a new dream journaling app, created by an international team of people who are avid dream journal-keepers themselves. Available for both iOS and Android systems, it’s a safe, private space to record your dreams, track them over time, and learn about their unfolding patterns of meaning. Elsewhere offers a variety of analytic tools and fun interactive features, with even better features soon to come.
There are many dream journaling apps in the world today, which is a positive sign of interest in this kind of widely-accessible oneiric resource. I believe Elsewhere stands out because of its singular focus on exploring the deepest, most dynamic dimensions of dreaming. The app can already do amazing things, providing users with:
- The ability to record dreams by writing or speaking into the app
- The ability to upload dream-related images (e.g., sketches, diagrams, photos)
- Automatic tagging of each dream, with running statistics of what contents appear most often
- AI-generated artistic images for each dream
- AI-generated analyses of patterns relating to symbols, characters, and settings
- Access to a set of more than 100 specially designed images of classic dream symbols
- Symbolic interpretations from David Fontana’s 1994 book The Secret Language of Dreams
- Multiple languages, with full functionality in English, German, Japanese, Indonesian, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Spanish, and French
Soon Elsewhere will be available in a website version, for those like me who prefer typing at a desktop for dream journaling. The website version will look and function essentially the same as the app, making it easy to move from one device to another and back again.
Most exciting is the imminent arrival of the Groups function. This will allow Elsewhere users to create private online groups for sharing selected dreams together, with all the tools and resources of the app at their disposal. The first version of this function will be quite basic, but we’re hoping to expand and improve it over time. If you’re interested in being an early tester of the Groups function—especially if you already have experience with dream-sharing groups—please sign up for Elsewhere and let us know what you think. You can find it here.
