Here is a pdf of an chapter I wrote for a book published in 2011, Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages (edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biro) (Peeters), pp. 75-85:
The 7 Worst Things Ever Said About Dreams
1. The most evil type of man is the man who, in his waking hours, has the qualities we find in his dream state.
(Plato, The Republic, IX.571-576)
2. For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words….For when dreams increase, empty words grow many.”
(Ecclesiastes 5:3, 7)
3. I talk of dreams; which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy; which is as thin of substance as the air, and more inconstant than the wind…
(Mercutio, in William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.102-106)
4. Dreams are a vanity, God knows, pure error. Dreams are engendered in the too-replete from vapours in the belly, which compete with others, too abundant, swollen tight.
(Pertelote to Chanticleer in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.)
5. The forebrain may be making the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the relatively noisy signals sent up to it from the brain stem.
(J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, “The Brain as a Dream-State Generator,” 1977)
6. In this model, attempting to remember one’s dreams should perhaps not be encouraged, because such remembering may help to retain patterns of thought which are better forgotten. These are the very patterns the organism was attempting to damp down.
(Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1983)
7. Dreaming is a free-rider on a system designed to be conscious while we are awake, and which is designed to sleep…. So far, no hypothesis put forward requires that we think of dreaming as more than a side-effect of the relevant functions of sleep.
(Owen Flanagan, “Dreaming Is Not an Adaptation,” 2000)
Word Searching as a Tool in the Study of Dreams, or, Dream Research in the Era of Big Data
I’m giving a presentation with that title on Saturday, June 23, at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, held in Berkeley, California. The presentation is part of a panel session, “What’s New in the Scientific Study of Dreams.” I’m giving an overview of the word searching method I’ve been developing over the past several years, with a special focus on four “blind analysis” studies I’ve performed with the help of Bill Domhoff. A youtube video preview of the presentation can be found here.
Here’s how I define blind analysis in the paper:
A blind analysis involves an exclusive focus on word usage frequencies, bracketing out the narrative reports and personal details of the dreamer’s life and making inferences based solely on statistical patterns in word usage—not reading the dreams at all, and basing one’s analysis strictly on numerical data. The aim is to assess the patterns of dream content with the fewest possible preconceptions, as objectively as possible, before reading through the narratives and learning about the individual’s waking activities and concerns.
Dreaming of Nature and the Nature of Dreams
The First Australian Regional Conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams starts on April 19, and I have prepared a video talk for the conference titled “Dreaming of Nature and the Nature of Dreams.” The talk can be found on Youtube, and the statistical data I reference can be found in Google docs. More info about the IASD and the Australia conference is here.
I start the talk by briefly mentioning some of my early writings about the interplay of dreaming and nature: a 1991 article “Quest for Transformational Experience: Dreams and Environmental Ethics,” my doctoral dissertation/1994 book The Wilderness of Dreams and its notion of “root metaphors,” Herbert Schroeder’s chapter on dreams and natural resource management in my edited 1996 book Among All These Dreamers, the study of politically conservative and liberal people’s dreams and views of the environment in 2008’s American Dreamers, and Dreaming in the World’s Religions, also in 2008, with several stories of the inspirational roles that dreaming play in the nature awareness of indigenous cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania.
The main focus of the talk is the findings I’ve made about the statistical frequency of nature references in dream content, using the word search methods of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb). For this presentation I created a baseline sample of 2087 dream reports of more than 50 words but less than 300 words in length, from a total of 1232 females and 855 males. The sample includes children, college students, and adults. All are American and all are educated and/or computer literate.
Using tools on the SDDb that anyone can access, I studied these 2087 dream reports for references to the following categories of nature content: Weather, fire, air, water, earth, flying, falling, and animals. (Can you guess which of the four classic elements (fire, air, water, earth) appears most often in dreams? Can you guess which animals appear most frequently?) After laying out my findings I discuss the technological and political issues involved in bringing the insights of dreaming to bear on waking world environmental problems.
About halfway through the talk, our cat Strauss makes an appearance over my right shoulder. It was a sunny day by Portland, Oregon standards, and the local birds were very active outside my window. It was hard not to look at what he was looking at!
Seeking Patterns in Dream Content: A Systematic Approach to Word Searches
Snakes, Dreams, and Jung’s Red Book
People have reported dreams of serpents and snakes throughout history in cultures all over the world. In terms of Jungian psychology, snake dreams have a powerful archetypal quality. They give people an extremely memorable and uncanny experience of the “otherness” of the collective unconscious. Jung has a few things to say about the symbolism of serpents and snakes at various points in The Red Book:
“The serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life.” (247)
“Why did I behave as if that serpent were my soul? Only, it seems, because my soul was a serpent….Serpents are wise, and I wanted my serpent soul to communicate her wisdom to me.” (318) (This comment comes after a long dialogue in active imagination with a great iridescent snake coiled atop a red rock.)
“I have united with the serpent of the beyond. I have accepted everything beyond into myself.” (322)
“If I had not become like the serpent, the devil, the quintessence of everything serpentlike, would have held this bit of power over me. This would have given the devil a grip and he would have forced me to make a pact with him just as he also cunningly deceived Faust. But I forestalled him by uniting myself with the serpent, just as a man unites with a woman.” (322)
“The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent.” (353)
These passages make it clear that Jung regarded snakes both negatively and positively, both as “chthonic devils” (318) and as indispensable guides for the soul.
From a Jungian perspective, snake dreams offer people the dangerous possibility of connecting with the wisdom of the collective unconscious and drawing strength from its archetypal energies.
If you’re interested in learning more about snake dreams in history, scroll down the list to see this post. (titled “What Do Dreams of Snakes Mean?”)
If you’d like ideas about how to interpret snake dreams, see this post.
For more information about actual snakes, take a look at the website of the East Bay Vivarium.