Dreaming and Technologies of the Sacred

This is the written version of the presentation (with a 7-minute time limit) I made on Sunday, January 11, to the attendees of the Dream x Engineering Symposium at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thanks to Adam Horowitz, Michelle Carr, Karen Konkoly, and all the others who organized and participated in the symposium.

Dreaming and Technologies of the Sacred

Thank you, it’s an honor to be here.

I’d like to share with you a working hypothesis, drawn from the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, that I believe has practical importance for dream engineering:

Any dream technology will be more effective the more sacred, and the less profane, the experiential context in which it is deployed.

Here is a quote from his 1959 book:

The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane… The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are heirophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere… The sacred is saturated with being.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane (1959), 12

I can gloss this passage by saying:

The sacred is conceived as a break into ordinary time and space, a rupture in the monotony and homogeneity of profane existence.

The sacred brings us closer to the really real, the time of origins, the center of the cosmos.

Without having more time to elaborate on this concept in the abstract, let me offer two sources of empirical evidence in favor of my working hypothesis.

First are the religious rituals of dream incubation practiced throughout history, in cultures all over the world, all of which share the goal of moving the dreamer away from the profane, and towards the sacred: by means of fasting, prayer, and purifications, and by means of sleeping in a special place, like a mountain, cave, or graveyard.

Dream incubation is the original form of dream engineering, and its guiding principle is maximizing the sacred qualities of the dreamer’s experience.

To be clear: It doesn’t matter if you believe it is an experientially sacred context, it matters if the dreamer believes it’s an experientially sacred context.

The second source of evidence is the “lab effect” that has bedeviled scientific sleep research from its earliest days.

I’ll share three comments that sleep lab researchers have made to me over the years:

Robert Van de Castle: after thousands of nights of sleep lab observations, he only heard of one reported wet dream.
Allan Hobson: he admitted the most interesting and intense types of dreams usually happen outside the lab.
Ernest Hartmann: he found that when chronic nightmare sufferers slept in his lab they had fewer nightmares, because they knew they were being observed all night and felt safer because of it.

From the perspective of Eliade and the working hypothesis I’m offering to you, the lab effect is a measure of how a profane setting can homogenize dreaming by diminishing its range and intensity.

In closing, I will mention two new efforts to develop dream technologies that put the working hypothesis into practice.

First is the Elsewhere.to app for dream journaling, for which I serve as a research consultant and investor.

There is, of course, a profane quality to the cell phone for many people. But starting with its name, Elsewhere invites users to go beyond the profane space of the “this-here,” and to open themselves to another, more sacred way of perceiving and experiencing the world and their lives, through the prism of their dreams and the deep archetypal patterns that emerge when you track them over time.

The design, graphics, layout, features, image styles, and interpretation modes of Elsewhere have all been crafted by people who share this deep respect for the innate wisdom of the dreaming mind.

The second new effort represents a much older form of technology, a library, which I’m calling the Dream Library, nearly completed, intended as a long-term archive of books, journals, and art works related to dreaming.

Set in a rainforest, in a building of hand-crafted wood, the Dream Library will offer a permanent physical space for projects and gatherings devoted to the study of dreaming.

It is designed to be as non-profane as possible, and to elicit a tangible sense of the sacred potentials in everyone’s dreams.

And perhaps, one day, it will be the site of a future gathering of dream engineers.

Thank you.

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August 25, 2025

Why the Elsewhere Dream Journaling App Is the Best

As both a dreamer and a researcher, I find myself completely enchanted by the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app. Amazed. Smitten. Blown away. Impressed beyond all reckoning. And very excited about the future for dreamers all around the world.

For the longest time, I wondered what it would take to create a dreamer’s playground: a private, safe, fun place to gather your dreams and freely explore them using a variety of high-quality tools and methods. It always seemed like an impossible fantasy… And now, Elsewhere has made that vision a reality by creating a garden of oneiric delights where you can play with your dreams, celebrate their multiplicities of meaning, and follow your curiosity wherever it leads.

The Ethics of Online Dream Interpretation

Anything that has great potential for good also has great potential for harm. I would not be involved with Elsewhere were it not for its total commitment to an ethically minded approach, which I translate as simply doing your best to respect the dream and the dreamer. Treat the dream and the dreamer as ends, not means, as gifts to be honored rather than resources to be exploited. That’s the spirit that animates every aspect of the app’s design, from the back-end coding to the front-end user interface.

In practice, this underlies the policy that all information entered by Elsewhere users is privacy protected and will never be sold to a third-party. If for any reason you want your dreams back, you can have them, and all records of them will be removed from the app.

None of the tools or features within Elsewhere will tell you in a single, definitive way what your dreams mean. Instead, you are offered a variety of suggestions and possibilities from multiple perspectives. Hopefully some of these interpretations will lead to helpful insights, but the ultimate authority is always held by you, the dreamer. Only the dreamer knows for sure what their dream means.

New Features

Elsewhere is now available in more than 30 languages, which means these tools are potentially accessible to more than 99% of the human population. This bodes well for the future spread of dream awareness and education all around the world.

The primary function of the app, beyond recording and storing your dreams, is offering you a variety of tools to analyze their contents. These tools include ways to track the appearance of recurrent characters (e.g., parents, friends, celebrities), places (e.g., a beach, classroom, family home), and symbols (e.g., water, gun, mirror).

By recording your dreams on a regular basis, you build up an awareness of psychological rhythms that you may never have noticed within yourself before. You may also notice in reflecting on a long series of dreams that you can distinguish your unusual, highly memorable “big dreams” even more clearly, now that you have a better sense of the basic patterns underlying all your dreaming.

Elsewhere users have become very creative in combining different features to enhance their dream journaling practice. In the past two years, the resources of artificial intelligence (AI) have been built into the app, providing what I now find are its two most stimulating features:

AI image generation: Elsewhere will create AI-generated images based on your dream and rendered in your chosen aesthetic style: Woodblock, Surreal Collage, Retro Camera, Storybook, Comic Book, Modern Illustration, Old Illustration, along with the option to write your own prompt. For me, this is the tool that yields the most surprising and intriguing results. The images are sometimes bizarrely different from my dreams, but even weird images can be thought-provoking if I look more closely at the image, not for what is missing but rather for what has been enhanced and highlighted beyond what I first noticed in the dream.

AI interpretations: Elsewhere also offers AI-generated interpretations of dreams in several different modes: Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, Biblical, relational, spiritual, Lacanian, and the Elsewhere house mode, “Shadow.” These interpretations do not substitute for sharing dreams with other people, but they can provide multiple perspectives quickly and easily, giving the dreamer valuable input to consider while reflecting on their dream. Some of the interpretations are obvious, and others are completely off-base, but here, too, I am frequently surprised by the system offering ideas and viewpoints I have not considered and appreciate being brought to my awareness.

Natural Therapy

The phrase “natural therapy” comes from Robert Kegan’s classic work of developmental psychology, The Evolving Self (1982). In the final chapter of this book, Kegan talks about the simple, non-specialized resources in ordinary life that support our psychological welfare, resources he believes have naturally therapeutic effects even if they are not administered by mental health professionals. He urges us to study these resources more closely:

“Rather than make the practice of psychotherapy the touchstone for all considerations of help, look first into the meaning and makeup of those instances of unselfconscious ‘therapy’ as these occur again and again in nature…[and seek] an understanding of ‘natural therapy’–those relations and human contexts which spontaneously support people through the sometimes difficult process of growth and change.” (256)

Although Kegan does not directly mention dreams in this chapter, I believe that dreaming and dream-sharing have these exact qualities and benefits. There is a tremendous amount of evidence from history and anthropology supporting the connection between dreams and healing. This connection is natural in the sense of being universally accessible and emerging without conscious intention, and yet it is also culturally amplified in responding creatively to the shared symbolic world of the dreamer’s waking reality.

Now, with the help of the powerful tools available in Elsewhere, more people can explore this resource in greater depth than ever before. This will hopefully be of special value to people who may not need formal psychotherapy but can still benefit from gaining more awareness and insight into their unconscious fears, conflicts, and desires.

To be clear, if you need for help from a mental health professional, you should seek it out right away. As a matter of policy, Elsewhere explicitly says it does not claim to provide the services of a psychotherapist. However, in line with Kegan’s thinking, I suggest that Elsewhere does contribute to a form of “natural therapy” by supporting and enhancing people’s access to the beneficial powers of their own dreams. As these potentials begin to emerge into realities, it is worth remembering that dreaming has huge advantages for promoting the collective mental health of large communities insofar as it is free, accessible to everyone, and highly personalized in its relevance to the lived experiences of each individual.

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Here is an introductory post I wrote about Elsewhere two years ago:

The Elsewhere Dream Journaling App

August 24, 2025

The Importance of Dreaming for Memory

It may seem hard to believe for those who rarely remember their dreams, but psychologists have found strong evidence that sleep and dreaming are closely intertwined with the dynamics of memory. Whether or not the dreams are consciously recalled in waking, the dreaming process seems to play a valuable role in the underlying system by which our memories are created, stored, and retrieved.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that different stages of sleep support different aspects of memory consolidation, and that sleep deprivation can severely disrupt learning, memory, and other cognitive functions. According to the “ontogenetic hypothesis” of Howard Roffwarg and colleagues, the high proportion of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in infancy and early childhood contributes to healthy brain development, which includes processing new experiences and building a foundation of primal memories. And new research by Deniz Kumral and colleagues has provided neuroscientific evidence to support the direct involvement of dreaming in the learning and memory formation process.

Dreaming of the Past

Even a brief look at the content of dreams confirms this close connection with memory. Dreams are often filled with vivid and realistically detailed images of past experiences with people, places, and activities, sometimes years or even decades later. Some past experiences, especially from childhood and adolescence, can recur in dreams throughout one’s life. These early memories become a kind of template for future dreaming, a filter through which dreams evaluate new experiences and weave them into our ongoing sense of self. Sigmund Freud made it a cardinal principle of psychoanalytic interpretation to look for a dream’s roots in the dreamer’s memories of early childhood experiences and fantasies.

In addition to personal memories, dreams sometimes include references to family and cultural memories. Particularly in cases with traumatizing events in the communal past, the memories evoked in such dreams can be painful. However, these dreams may also provide an opportunity for generational witnessing, for keeping these sad historical truths alive in present-day awareness and documenting them for the benefit and understanding of those in the future.

Dream Journaling as a Practice of Memory

Keeping a dream journal makes it easier to remember previous dreams and track their patterns over time. Many people find it enjoyable, and even healing in a way, to review a long series of their dreams from the past and reflect on what has changed or evolved in their lives and what has remained stable and consistent. Especially in our later years, a dream journal becomes a kind of time machine that enables people to revisit the most meaningful moments and relationships from their distant past. It becomes possible in this process to discern the great arc of one’s life journey along what Carl Jung called the path of individuation, at the end of which we hopefully find a sense of wholeness and final actualization.

This is true even for those people who rarely remember their dreams. Dream recall tends to increase simply by means of an increased interest in and awareness of dreaming. In other words, the more dreams you want to remember, the more you probably will remember.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, August 11, 2025.

May 5, 2025

Reflections on An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming (1997)

Early in my career, I had attitude about writing “secondary” texts. I didn’t want to write about what other people thought, I wanted to write about my own ideas. That’s why when the opportunity arose to write a book intended as an introductory textbook for college students, I hesitated. The offer came by way of Sybe Terwee, a psychoanalytic philosopher from the Netherlands who had recently co-hosted the 1994 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams at the University of Leiden. Sybe had been contacted by Greenwood/Praeger, an American publisher with a large psychology catalog, asking him if he would be interested in writing an introductory text on dream psychology. He was unable to do so, but he suggested me as an alternative, and put them in touch with me. This was a big thrill for a young scholar, and I wanted to show Sybe I was worthy of his trust.

But…there was the secondary text issue. The change of mind and heart came when I recognized the creative opportunities in writing an overview of the history of modern dream psychology. As I looked at other versions of this history, and there were not many, I became increasingly confident that I could write a good, clear, multidisciplinary version of this story, whether or not it amounted to a secondary text. And then, once I got going, it was a very quick writing process. I’d say it took ten years of continuous study to be able to write the book in about three months.

As a way of orienting myself within the tremendous breadth and diversity of the field, and thus being able to explain its contours in clear terms to students new to this subject, I settled on three basic questions that I would ask at each new point in the story:

How are dreams formed?
What function or functions do dreams serve?
Can dreams be interpreted?

These three questions give the book a tight analytic structure that makes it easy to compare similarities and differences among the various theories. To illustrate how the three questions are used going forward, I apply them in the Introduction to the ancient dream teachings found in the Bible, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the Oneirocriticon of Artemidorus. I’m trying to give readers a sense of how many of the ideas and theories of modern dream psychology did not appear out of the blue but have deep roots in the Western cultural tradition.

The order of chapters follows a by-now conventional chronology, starting with the dream theories of Sigmund Freud, then Carl Jung, then branching out into different versions of psychoanalytic psychology with a clinical focus (Alfred Adler, Medford Boss, Thomas French and Erika Fromm, Frederick Perls). Next are chapters about the findings of sleep laboratory researchers like Eugene Aserinsky, Nathaniel Kleitman, and J. Allan Hobson, and experimental psychologists like Jean Piaget, Calvin Hall, David Foulkes, Harry Hunt, and Ernest Hartmann. The last chapter is titled “Popular Psychology: Bringing Dreams to the Masses,” which chronicles the contributions of people who, beginning in the 1960’s and 1970’s, expanded the horizons of dream psychology both in the way they practiced dream interpretation (in group settings, not just in psychiatric sessions or sleep labs) and in the dreamers they included (all people in all cultures, not just Western therapy patients). This chapter profiled the work of Ann Faraday, Patricia Garfield, Gayle Delaney, Jeremy Taylor, Montague Ullman, Stephen LaBerge, and ends with the “Senoi Debate” between Kilton Stewart and G. William Domhoff.

The cover was entirely out of my hands. It’s fine, I’ve come to like the blue-to-indigo colors and the cloudy sky imagery, it’s all rather trippy. We persuaded two eminent sleep laboratory researchers, Ernest Hartmann and Wilse Webb, to write back-cover endorsements. Hartmann and Webb were both in the first generation of psychologists who studied how the new findings about REM and NREM sleep relate to psychoanalytic insights about the nature of dreaming. If they were happy with the book, then mission accomplished.

January 12, 2025

The Meanings of Houses in Dreams

Houses and homes are among the most frequent elements appearing in dreams, with a wide range of literal and symbolic meanings.

According to the Baseline frequencies of the Sleep and Dream Database, 47% of women’s dreams and 42% of men’s dreams include at least one architectural reference, with house, room, and home being mentioned the most often. These references are much more frequent than mentions of food and drink (14% women, 12% men), clothing (14% women, 11% men), and sexuality (4% women, 6% men). Among the vital necessities of life, the need for shelter seems to make the biggest impact on our dreaming experience. (Big Dreams, 104-105)

The frequency of houses in dreams surely reflects the large amount of time that many people spend in their homes. In literal terms, a house provides its occupants with safety, privacy, comfort, and warmth. As an enclosure built of durable materials, it separates inside from outside, domestic from public, family from stranger. For many homeowners, their house is their most valuable asset, a physical repository of their financial resources. This is why dreaming of a threat to one’s house, such as from fire or flooding, can be so disturbing. Especially in an era of rapid climate change, these kinds of worrisome house-danger dreams are likely to increase.

Dreams of houses also carry important symbolic meanings, in at least two different ways. One is the house as a symbol of family relations and childhood experiences. Dreams often cast us back into the homes we lived in as children many years ago, reminding us of how those experiences still shape and influence us today. A house can embody deep memories and formative events, both joyful and scary. What makes a house “haunted” in waking or dreaming is the uncanny presence of residents whose energies are still living even if they physically died long ago. When you dream of a childhood home, there may be a symbolic connection between something important that happened in that house and a difficult or challenging situation you are facing right now.

House dreams can also symbolize aspects of your mind and body. For instance, Carl Jung once dreamed of exploring a house with many different levels; as he descended from one floor to another, the décor changed from modern to ancient to paleolithic. Jung interpreted his dream as a symbolic portrayal of the human psyche, with modern consciousness at the “top” of the structure, and the depths of the collective unconscious at the “bottom.” Other psychologists treat house dreams as metaphors of the human body, with its various openings/orifices, its outer façade (“curb appeal”), secret inner spaces, plumbing and wiring, etc. If you have a house dream, it is worth considering how the condition of the building in the dream compares to the condition of your mind and body in waking life. Perhaps you discover the house needs maintenance or repair; maybe something especially tasty, or horribly nasty, is being cooked in the kitchen; you might find whole new rooms you have never explored before. Such dreams can use the familiar features of a house to help you better understand subtle, easily overlooked aspects of yourself.

House references in dreams can have both literal and symbolic levels of meaning, and the two levels often overlap. In American society, many people aspire to private home ownership in order to satisfy their literal need for shelter and also to mark their symbolic achievement of the “American Dream.” The common association of home ownership with the American Dream reflects an admirable striving for a good, settled, independent life. However, narrowly reducing the ideal of the American Dream to owning a private home can lead to an excessive focus on material gain and social status.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on January 6, 2025.

August 18, 2024August 18, 2024

Bizarreness, Nightmares, and Play

The bizarre contents of dreaming can easily seem like the products of mental deficiency. “Children of an idle brain” is what Mercutio calls them in Romeo & Juliet (I.iv.102). Many scientists today essentially agree with Mercutio that the weird absurdities of dreams are evidence of diminished cognitive functioning during sleep.

But what if the “bizarreness” of dreaming is a sign of health and not disorder? What if, in some conditions at least, the increasing weirdness and unpredictability of dream content heralds genuine healing from serious psychological distress?

At the recent annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Robert Hoss and Alwin Wagener analyzed a 45-year long series of PTSD nightmares from an American veteran of the Vietnam War. They found that over time, as the veteran healed from his psychological wounds, his nightmares included fewer direct or literal references to wartime violence and more references to other kinds of content, with a rising frequency of metaphorical and symbolic content. In other words, his nightmares gradually became dreamier. Instead of unrelenting graphic repetitions of the traumatizing event, he now experienced dreams involving new characters, settings, scenarios, and emotions.

This fits well with the findings of Harry Wilmer and others that long-term recovery from PTSD corresponds with changes in the frequency and contents of trauma-related nightmares. Wilmer observed that, “the emergence of an ordinary nightmare after prolonged recurrent reliving of the exact trauma in dreams is a healing process… It is the psyche’s attempt at healing.” (1996, 89)

It remains unclear which comes first, the shifts in dreaming or the psychological healing. But their close connection suggests an underlying process by which increasing dreaminess signals a loosening of the trauma’s grip and a return to the natural variability and freedom of dreaming experience.

This process also accords well with the theory that dreaming is a kind of play, the play of the imagination in sleep. Typical PTSD nightmares can be seen as the antithesis of play. Fixed in content and inescapable in their repetition, they are symptoms of an imagination paralyzed by the harsh reality of the trauma. But with time and the support of caring others a more playful spirit returns, bringing a renewed experiential awareness of creative freedom and the capacity to grow in the future.

A key implication for therapists is the value of monitoring changes in nightmare frequency and content as a potentially helpful window into the healing process. Those who already have active practices in play therapy or art therapy may find this insight especially congenial to their efforts, but any therapist who works with trauma can benefit from more attention to the vicissitudes and playful dynamics of dreaming.

Note: This post first appeared in Psychology Today on June 14, 2024.