Category: Areas of Research

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Four Ways to Keep Dreaming Into Old Age

Many adults dream less as they get older, and they miss it. They miss the pleasantly curious feeling of waking up with an alluring new message from the unconscious in their minds. A drastic drop in dreaming is not, however, an inevitable feature of aging. People can continue having vibrant, inspiring dreams all through their lives if they follow a few simple practices.

The typical trajectory of dreaming through the life cycle starts with the highest levels of dream recall in childhood and adolescence, and usually diminishes in the later stages of adulthood. According to a 2018 survey of 5,255 American adults on their attitudes towards dreams (available in the Sleep and Dream Database), 57% of men between 18 and 34 years of age remember at least one dream a week. For men between 35 and 54 the figure is 50%, and for men 55 and older it’s 45%. For women, recall is even higher in early life, with 60% between 18 and 34 remembering at least one dream a week, then the drop-off is sharper, with a figure of 53% for women between 35 and 54, and 41% for women 55 and older.

For both men and women, the percentage of people who say they rarely or never remember their dreams increases with age. With men, 27% of 18-34 year olds have little or no dream recall, but that rises to 30% for men between 35 and 54, and 36% for men 55 and older. With women, little or no dream recall is reported by 23% of 18-34 year olds, 28% for women between 35 and 54, and 36% for women 55 and older. It’s also important to note that many older people still have very frequent dream recall: 7% of men and 8% of women age 55 and older remember a dream nearly every morning.

These survey findings indicate that age is not destiny with your powers of dreaming. If you follow the four simple practices below, you will be able to remember more of your dreams and discover new ways of bringing their creative energies into your waking life, no matter what your age.

  1. Wake up slowly. When we are asleep and dreaming, our brains operate in a distinctive mode that’s different from normal waking consciousness. If you wake up too abruptly (for instance, to a loud alarm clock), your mind does not have enough time to transfer your experiences from the dreaming mode into the waking mode. So try this: when you wake up, either after a long night’s rest or an afternoon nap, give yourself a few calm moments to make the sleep-wake transition. Try not to jump out of bed, turn on the light, or check your phone for at least a minute or two, so the dreams you were just experiencing have a better chance of crossing the memory threshold into your waking awareness.
  2. Keep a dream journal. Even the most vivid dreams can fade soon after waking. If you place a pad of paper and a pen or pencil by your bedside, you can record your dreams quickly and conveniently. Voice-to-text apps can also work well for dream recording, but they have the downside of relying on a phone, with its many distracting features. Keeping a dream journal has at least two big benefits. One it enables you to preserve your dreams over time so you can study them for meaningful patterns. Two, it invites new dreams by making it easier for them to enter into the waking world.
  3. Share your dreams with others. One of the most natural forms of human communication is dream-sharing. Throughout history, in cultures all over the world, people have made a regular practice of sharing and discussing their dreams with family, friends, and members of their community. Sharing dreams can provide unique opportunities for developing more empathetic understanding between different people, with more emotional honesty and authentic self-expression. Talking about dreams with people who are important to you will deepen your relationships with them, and further stimulate your recall capacities.
  4. Welcome visitation dreams. The one exception to the age-related decline of dreaming is the experience of visitation dreams, in which someone who has died appears as if alive again in a dream. All other typical dreams (flying, falling, being chased, sexuality) tend to diminish through the life span, but visitation dreams become more frequent later in life. This makes sense, because older people are more likely than younger people to have close friends and family members who have died, and who can thus appear in these kinds of dreams. Although strange and uncanny, visitation dreams often bring positive feelings of reassurance and consolation to the dreamers regarding the death of their loved ones. Even if it remains uncertain where these otherworldly dreams ultimately come from (is it a ghost? A spirit? An image from the unconscious?), their emotional benefits make them among the most meaningful types of dreams people experience in the latter years of life.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, March 15, 2022.

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Threat Simulations in War Dreams

An outbreak of war and violent conflict is very likely to prompt a wave of nightmares of traumatic experiences, mournful losses, and threat simulations. This seems to be part of our internal crisis-response system when the external world descends into chaos and bloodshed, and our minds struggle to make sense of what is happening and find a way to survive the dangers.

A few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I had a conversation with two journalists from Eastern Europe who were working on a project relating to dreams. The focus of their project was not the war, but it inevitably came up in our conversation. They shared a couple of dreams with me, and afterwards sent me another from a friend of theirs.  With their permission, I am sharing the dreams below. I find the dreams haunting, horrifying, profoundly creative, and ultimately hopeful.

P., 27 years, male, a semiotics graduate from Czechia

A few days after the start of the war in Ukraine I had this dream:

I went to visit my parents at their house in a Czech village. I wanted to talk to them that night about everything that happened after the war started, but the conversation didn’t go as well as I had hoped and it wasn’t a very warm meeting. I felt disappointed.

Then I was all alone in the room when suddenly I heard a crackling sound from outside. I turned to the window and I saw a great rising glow that blinded me completely. I knew it was a nuclear bomb explosion, and at that moment time seemed to stop for a while. I realized that these were the last moments of my life. (I even recalled some fragments of my life passing through my mind.) Then I woke up.

At first, I wanted to forget about the dream, it felt too horrifying, but then I realized that maybe it is useful in something. It allowed me to imagine an absolute ending, the worst-case scenario. The next morning, I felt different, as if I had to do everything in my life from now on to ensure, such a situation would never happen.

P., 27 years, male, a semiotics graduate from Czechia

I was walking down a street of a historic town, alone or with a friend. I saw two political marches going against each other, one with banners over their heads with microscopes drawn on them, and the other with wooden swords. There was a tension rising, and I wouldn’t expect they would attack each other, which they did, and suddenly it was chaos everywhere on the street. I thought, ok well maybe there was a chance I would expect they could start fighting, but still I wouldn’t expect it would get so harsh, given the fact that their wooden swords were clearly only replicas of the real medieval weapons. So I went on to hide in a back street, but it was noise all over the place, it was a nightmare. I woke up.

R., 27 years, female, Slovak student of filmmaking and French philology

Personally, I can only recall one fragment of a dream linked with tanks. The dream contained some banal everyday story, which I don’t remember and meanwhile, tanks were coming in the night by streets accompanied by something between fireworks and airstrikes, the night sky over the tanks was spectacularly on fire. In the dream, the tanks that kept coming felt like everyday routine.

The interesting thing is, I’ve heard from three more friends from Prague, that they also dreamed about tanks in particular. My first guess “why” is about something deeply rooted in the historical memory of local people. When someone says “when tanks arrived”, or just “the tanks” most of the time it refers to the Occupation of Czechoslovakia in the August of 1968. In general, mostly the older generations use this term(s). Also, many people at protests or in the media are making this reference nowadays- between the tanks of the Warsaw Pact troops back in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and Russian tanks in the war with Ukraine now.

M., 27 years, female, Slovak translator and student

(I experience the worst intrusive images of violence associated with war during the day, probably also tied to the fact that I work as a translator for Memory of Nations, thereby I work with recollections of torture (by Nazis), hiding before Russian soldiers liberating Czechoslovakia, who were looting and looking for women to rape, interrogations by State Secret Services etc daily.)

“Amongst the few dreams about the war in Ukraine, I can most vividly recall the following. At that time, I had a fever, it was approximately 4 days after the war started and we were preparing some items to donate to a local charity.

Dream: I work in the local charity, we are collecting the items and sorting them for transport to the Ukrainian border. Lorries with new items keep coming, the hall is full of boxes with clothes, sleeping bags, toys, food, we are working day and night to sort the incoming material help, but it is impossible. We start to receive many calls, amongst them also video calls from Ukrainian president Mr Zelenskyj. In the style of his famous video-addresses to the world and his own citizens, each of the calls are like a short vlog, in which he encourages Ukrainians to fight, calls others to help and reprimands us for not working efficiently. With every call, the addresses become more bizarre, Zelenskyj becomes angrier and at the end, the calls purely consist of Zelenskyj absurdly scolding us for being lazy, disorganized, responsible for many deaths because we cannot even sort out material help properly.”

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Basketball Diary #5: The Court of Greg Brown III

This has been a rough season for fans of the Portland Trailblazers basketball team. The players are learning a new system from their rookie head coach, Chauncey Billups, in his first season in that role. Their star player, Damien Lillard, plays poorly (by his standards) at the outset, then is forced to undergo season-ending surgery. Three other players in the original rotation—Cody Zeller, Larry Nance Jr., and Nassir Little—go down with injuries. The General Manager of the team, Neil Olshey, is summarily fired after years of internal conflict, leaving the operations in the hands of neophyte executives and detached ownership. Just before the trade deadline they deal away three of their best remaining players—Norman Powell, Robert Covington, Jr., and the beloved C.J. McCollum. In return the Blazers receive some promising guys (Josh Hart, Justice Winslow, Keon Johnson), plus draft picks and salary cap flexibility (an aspect of the game I don’t understand and don’t want to understand). In the midst of it all, the team wins a few surprising games, but loses many more, often by huge margins. Now, with a season-ending injury to Jusuf Nurkic, the lone remainder from the starting line-up at the beginning of the season, the Blazers have been reduced to a fragment of what they hoped to become this year.

Perhaps the green shoots of new growth that signal better things for the future can be observed in player performances today, even in recurrent circumstances of dispiriting defeat. Three guys in particular—C.J. Elleby, Trendon Watford, and Greg Brown III—have been interesting to watch this year, as their roles have shifted dramatically from regular “DNP (coach’s decision)” benchwarmers to starters and vital rotation players. Each of them has an impressive set of skills and abilities they are testing and honing against the toughest competition they’ve ever faced. Sometimes it’s painful to watch, but just as often there are flashes of potential that seem to be harbingers of future greatness. Twenty-year old Greg Brown III, for instance, has so much athletic talent and basketball intuition, I can easily imagine him continuing to grow and eventually becoming a dominant player in his own right. When he’s on the court now, there’s always a sense he might do something amazing, some huge, leaping feat of blocking a shot, stealing a pass, or slamming an alley-oop dunk on a fast break. He and C. J. Elleby are the best on the team at that latter move, one that electrifies a crowd and pumps up the whole team.

My dreams about the Blazers this year have been vague and impersonal, but this brief one (following a 124-92 blowout loss to the Denver Nuggets) expresses special hope for the future play of Greg Brown III:

Lots of Energy

I am helping Greg Brown III with his basketball court, the game that is happening there….Lots of energy, with players moving quickly back and forth on the court….

The feeling is that the court is his, Greg Brown III’s. Like he owns it and reigns over whatever happens on it. Hmm. It’s true, now that I think about it, GBIII is the only player on the team right now who is emotionally demonstrative when he makes an amazing play. After dunking hard over another player, he doesn’t pretend to be cool and nonchalant. No, he lets everyone in the arena know what he just did. He expresses authentic, heartfelt enjoyment of these heroic moments, which is really all that we fans want, a chance to share in those moments of enjoyment. It also makes it easier to sympathize when he tries to dunk or block a shot and fails spectacularly, which happens rather frequently, too.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the ownership and management of the Trailblazers have essentially given up on this season, and on this group of guys. That’s too bad, because we may be seeing a glimpse of the future court of Greg Brown III—that is, a glimpse of what he and the guys like him could do with their potentials if fully supported and developed. It’s worth noting that the Blazers are still in contention for the tenth and last seed in the playoffs. And there’s more than a month of regular season games to go….

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The Essence of a Dream Library

A Dream Library is a playground for studying and dreaming: for studying while dreaming, and dreaming while studying. It’s a spatial technology for stimulating your oneiric imagination. It’s not a shrine to dreaming, but it’s not not a shrine to dreaming, either. It’s your personally crafted portal into the intuitive depths of your own mind.

What exactly makes a library a Dream Library? What are the essential elements that create a library of dreaming, in all senses of that term? This may seem abstract, but it has potential benefits for anyone who pays attention to their dreams. You can easily create a Dream Library for yourself, and if you do so you’ll find it opens doorways to new dimensions of insight and understanding. There are, in my experience, four essential elements to a Dream Library: books, numinous objects, a cup of tea, and a candle. I’ll describe each in more detail, in reverse order.

A candle: The soft golden light of a candle creates a human-scale sphere of illuminated space. The gently flickering flame brings a dynamic, unpredictable natural force into your presence. Multiple candles can be fun, but one is enough to serve the candle’s essential role in creating a Dream Library. Throughout history the candle has been a classic companion of scholars and sages, symbolizing the enlightenment that slowly emerges from a deep immersion in a collection of wisdom literature. Lighting a candle is a ritual act that opens the Library anew; blowing the candle out is a ritual closing. Of course, a candle with its open flame poses a danger, too (see: Library of Alexandria), so its role in the Dream Library is also to stimulate vigilance and respect for the elemental powers.

A cup of tea: Whether it’s black, green, or herbal, or even some variant of coffee or cocoa, the presence of a hot beverage also plays a vital role. Sure, you might say, but is tea necessary? Is it essential to a Dream Library? Yes, I believe so. Tea can be conceived as an ideal provision for the journey ahead. Entering the Library means a significant commitment of your time and presence. It’s not a quick, in-and-out kind of place. And if you stay there for a while, eventually you will get thirsty. Plain water is fine, but adds nothing atmospherically. A cup of hot tea, however, poured fresh and then brought straight to the Library so the first blooming swirls of redolent steam can fill the immediate surroundings, enhances your experience at many levels. It’s another small but meaningful ritual act that signals a new entry into the Library, and a new commitment to spend time there, to become enveloped for a while within that space. Again, this runs counter to typical library practice, as liquids of any kind can easily damage or destroy books. Water and Fire compete for the title of gravest threat to libraries of all kinds. So you have to be careful. Think about where you can and can’t safely place your cup, stick to that plan, and you’ll be fine.

Numinous objects: This is a broad, potentially infinite category of small material objects that carry special memories, meanings, and values for you. Examples can be a beautiful seashell, a ceramic bowl made by your grandfather, a favorite toy from childhood, or a framed photo of you and a friend on a faraway trip. They can be as simple as a small piece of weathered wood, a cool rock, or an old piece of metal. They can be as elaborate as crystals, antiques, mandala images, and mechanical curiosities. Unusual teacups and candleholders can also double as numinous objects. With this element of a Dream Library, multiplicity matters. The combined effect of these objects is to stimulate wonder and playful curiosity, inviting your mind to wander far beyond the here-and-now, towards distant horizons of exploration and discovery.

Books: There can be no library without books, of course. But for a Dream Library, having books simply means having more than one volume. Two books together already constitute a library. This is a key point: The dynamic vitality of a Dream Library arises from the quality of interaction between books and reader, not the total quantity of books. Naturally, at the center of this Library are various books about dreams. Classic and contemporary, famous and obscure, academic and popular, books you know well and books you hope to read soon. I always suggest including a few texts from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, not because they were right about everything (they weren’t), but because they knew so much about ancient dream traditions and expressed those insights in ways that can still enlighten us today. I’d also suggest including your favorite books of all time, not just about dreams. What was your favorite fairy tale from childhood? What novel did you love as a teenager? What non-fiction book has given you a sense of wonder about the world? Those should also be at the Library’s core. You might add other anthologies of fairy tales, other novels by that same author, other non-fiction works on that same topic, thereby expanding and deepening your collection. But again, it’s quality that matters, not quantity. A rich, vibrant Dream Library can have just four or five volumes, if they are the books that speak most powerfully to you.

A Dream Library may be enhanced in other ways, too—e.g., with a comfortable chair, a window with a view, cats. The four elements named here have special appeal because they can be inexpensively acquired, easily transported, and endlessly refined, elaborated, and expanded. Every one of us is a dreamer, and thus everyone can benefit from spending time in a self-created, self-curated library of dreaming.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, November 30, 2021.

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Basketball Dream Diary #4: My Blazers Hat

Of SUVs, prosperous males, and watching witches.

On Monday night, the Blazers beat the Toronto Raptors, 118-113, in an exciting, closely-fought contest. The Raptors came out hot, taking a 13-3 lead before the game was barely two minutes old. The Blazers looked slow and hesitant, the Raptors young and springy. Damien Lillard had missed the previous game with a nagging abdominal injury, and even though he was starting tonight, he did not look 100% healthy. The Raptors’ brilliant small forward, Og Anunoby, made four 3-point shots in the first quarter alone, as Toronto soon pushed their lead to fourteen. But Portland gradually figured it out and got themselves back into the game. They mostly gave up on playing their two biggest guys, Jusuf Nurkic and Cody Zeller, and went instead with a rotation of smaller players who could keep up with the Raptors’ speed. Larry Nance, Jr., played especially well off the bench, scoring 15 points and making an impact at both ends of the court. He’s someone who’s big enough to defend the post in a small-ball lineup, and quick enough to take a rebound and dribble up court like a point guard on a fast break. This was a great game for him. C.J. McCollum was stellar as usual, with 29 points, 5 assists, and one amazing block at the rim. Despite being double-teamed every time he touched the ball, Damien finally warmed up and scored 24 points to go with 8 assists. He and C.J. each played 40 of the 48 minutes, a heavy load. But the Blazers bench made the difference in the game, with ten guys in the rotation throwing a constant series of new looks and fresh bodies at the Raptors, who only had one guy off the bench with significant time. Their starters all played 38+ minutes, and at the end of the close game, they didn’t have enough juice to overcome Portland’s two all-star guards and good-enough team defense.

Later that night, I had the following dream:

My Blazers Hat

Someone gives me a Blazers hat….it says “Suvvies” on it? Or the person says that when they give it to me?….I do like the gift, but that word is weird….Later, I see written on a paper to my left, “The witches are watching”….

(11/15/21)

Upon awakening, I didn’t see much meaning to this. Last night while I was getting dressed before the game, putting on a Blazers t-shirt and red-and-black Nike shoes (they haven’t lost yet when I’ve worn this pair), I had noticed a Blazers hat in my closet. I bought it earlier in the season, but immediately regretted it, as I realized I didn’t like the way it fit and looked. A twinge of self-criticism about the hat lingered after I closed my closet door and set off for the game.

The word “Suvvies” seems to be a way of saying multiple SUVs, like sports utility vehicles. When I was first thinking about it after waking, I wondered if “Suvvies” might be a variation on “Subbies,” which might refer to “substitutes,” and thus a reference to the Blazers bench players…?

Hmm.

If the dream wanted the hat to say “Subbies,” it would have done so. But the hat says “Suvvies,” apparently referring to SUVs. I don’t drive an SUV, but going in and out of stadium traffic last night, I was surrounded by them. In cultural terms, SUVs bespeak size, power, self-protection, and a disregard for fuel efficiency. Their prevalence at the game made me think of a recent survey I commissioned about dreams and interest in sports (full analysis and discussion to come), in which my first scan of the results found that high interest in sports correlates with, among other factors, being male, having a high income, and having a higher educational degree.

Hmm.

Then I start thinking about the symbolism of the hat. And I remember that the first dream of Wolfgang Pauli’s that Jung analyzes in his text on dream symbolism and alchemy is about a hat: “the dreamer is at a social gathering. On leaving, he puts on a stranger’s hat instead of his own.” Jung says the hat in general epitomizes the head, “the leading idea,” covering the whole personality. He referred to rituals of royal coronation in which a crown is placed on the sovereign’s head as an emblem of the solar disc. In Pauli’s case (which I’m writing about in my in-progress book The Scribes of Sleep, so it’s not such a random association), Jung interpreted the hat as a prefiguration of the mandala, symbolizing the whole actualization of the personality. What seems strange to Pauli in his dream is in fact the gradual emergence of his true Self, from which his waking ego is currently alienated.

Hmm.

And then, in my dream, there are the witches. Three of them, at least. I don’t actually see them, I’m just aware of their presence as I read their words on the paper. So, does this mean that while I am watching the basketball games, the witches are watching me? As I immerse myself in a realm favored by other prosperous, socially powerful males, am I drawing the attention of darker anima energies at the other end of the psychological spectrum? Do the witches have other ideas about proper coverings for one’s head?

 

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The Jumbotron Critique of Lucid Dreaming

As a dream researcher, I try to promote public interest in dreaming and its many exciting possibilities. And yet also as a dream researcher, I try to highlight potential problems and misleading claims that can do more public harm than good. This creates a dilemma with the topic of lucid dreaming, which is increasingly popular and yet has pitfalls and drawbacks that its advocates rarely mention or even seem to know exist.

The crux of the problem is this. Lucid dreaming as experienced by people in present-day Western society is not equivalent to the practices of consciousness in dreaming among non-Western cultural traditions through history. Anyone who suggests otherwise is very likely trying to add an appealing veneer of foreign exoticism to an essentially modern Western practice.

To explain what I mean by “an essentially modern Western practice,” here’s an analogy that came to mind while attending a recent NBA game: Lucid dreaming is like a basketball player who stops in the middle of the game, finds a television camera, and then spends all his time posing so he can see himself on the Jumbotron video screens hanging down in the center of the arena. It is self-centered, self-inflating behavior that disrupts the spontaneous creative flow of the game/dream and substitutes ego grandiosity for immersive play and openness to new experience.

This is not how other cultures have approached consciousness within dreaming. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, for example, the goal of dream awareness is conceived as an extension of the spiritual discipline of meditation—a process of dissolving the ego, not pumping it up. In the shamanic traditions of Siberia, Australia, and the Americas, conscious awareness within dreaming is motivated by the desire to serve one’s community through healing, gaining knowledge, and communicating with the ancestors. Many of the “witches” persecuted by the Inquisition in medieval Europe were agrarian mystics whose plant-based methods aimed to stimulate consciousness in dreaming as a path towards deeper natural wisdom and spiritual maturity.

By contrast, people in the modern West often approach lucid dreaming with the goal of extending their individual feelings of ego gratification and control over reality. Hence the Jumbotron analogy: Look at me, look at me, I’m dreaming and I can see myself dreaming! In many other cultural traditions through history, this would be regarded as an entirely trivial insight that would be dismissed as a distraction from more important pursuits.

I can imagine friends and colleagues responding to this critique by saying they teach their students precisely what I’m suggesting as an alternative—a slower, more self-reflective approach, with less emphasis on ego control and more on opening one’s awareness to the dream world. Yet this misses the bigger point about the distinctive cultural environment of the modern West, an environment that prods, spurs, and stimulates in countless ways people’s desires for personal pleasure and fantasies of control. Whatever teachers of lucid dreaming are saying, many modern Westerners are hearing what they have been culturally prepared to hear, which is that “going lucid” in dreams is fun because it can give you a new experiential rush of control and power. To ignore the realities of this context is sociologically naïve and does no credit to the field of dream research.

If you happen to be someone who lives in the modern West and feels curious about lucid dreaming, what can you do that is true and authentic to your context? Here are three questions to ask yourself.

First, have you paid any attention to your non-lucid dreams? If not, I wonder if your interest has anything to do with actual dreams, rather than the various fantasies you’ve heard are possible in lucid dreaming. Instead of rushing into aggressive practices to induce lucidity, maybe you can use that energy first to follow your dreams over time and observe their natural, spontaneous patterns of content. Pay attention to what is happening, rather than pushing so hard to make something else happen.

Are you engaged in any serious meditation or prayer practices? If not, I wonder if you have done enough to prepare for the kinds of experiences and sensations that can arise in lucid dreams. In most non-Western traditions, people take years to train their minds for effective dreaming consciousness. Have you been doing any kind of preparatory practices like that?

Do you have a teacher, guru, or therapist who has been working with you for a long time? If not, what happens if you get in over your head? Who would tell you if you were? Again, most non-Western traditions provide specially trained guides who help newcomers navigate their personal paths into these expansive realms of dreaming. In almost all cases, the path requires shedding the individual ego and throwing oneself wholeheartedly into a larger dynamic interplay of unconscious power, intelligence, and intentionality.

In other words, you can’t move forward on the path of enlightened dreaming if you’re stuck at the beginning, staring at yourself on the Jumbotron.

 

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on November 9, 2021.