Category: Religion & Spirituality

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Reflections on Spiritual Dreaming (1995)

An academic dissertation is written in compliance with a host of official requirements designed to focus the project and give it the best chance of successful completion. Those requirements definitely influenced how my dissertation and first book, The Wilderness of Dreams (1994), came to be what it is. As I sat down to write my second book, I remember a moment of almost dizzy uncertainty about taking the first steps forward. I knew even before finishing WD that I wanted to write a book about the religious and spiritual aspects of dreaming through history. The first chapter of my dissertation offered a survey of that material, but I had accumulated a larger store of references, much more than could be presented in a single chapter. A book-length study seemed worthwhile, but what exactly would it look like?

What emerged was a first foray into the typologies of dreaming. Shaped and inspired by the ideas of Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, Wendy Doniger, and Harry Hunt, I cast a wide net across historical and cross-cultural sources for references to dreams and dreaming. Then, taking into account the provisional nature of all such typologies, I grouped these references into what seemed to me to be natural categories, natural in the sense of sharing core features (of imagery, emotion, and carry-over effects) across differences of time and place. In this sense, Spiritual Dreaming was a history of religions project, using dream research as the means of comparison. These are the categories I identified and discussed, one per chapter:

  1. The Dead
  2. Snakes
  3. Gods
  4. Nightmares
  5. Sexuality
  6. Flying
  7. Lucidity
  8. Creativity
  9. Healing
  10. Prophecy
  11. Rituals
  12. Initiation
  13. Conversion

For each dream category, I gathered examples from multiple cultures, religious traditions, and periods of history and discussed them in relation to current dream research, from Freud and Jung to current brain-mind science. These categories and my initial ideas about their psycho-spiritual coherence remain vital influences on my work. The four appendices are especially important in formulating several early theses about dreaming and philosophy that I hope to expand upon at some point in the future.

This was also an important text for me in trying to create a space to talk about dream-related beliefs, practices, and experiences that can be described as religious and/or spiritual. I think it helps clarify the true nature of dreaming to include religious and spiritual perspectives, and after explaining what I do and don’t mean by these terms at the beginning of the book, I put the analytic emphasis on the dreams themselves to see what we can learn from them.

 

My friend and mentor Jeremy Taylor had published Dream Work (1983) with Paulist Press and spoke highly of their editor, Lawrence Boadt. That’s how I came to make an arrangement with Paulist to publish Spiritual Dreaming, with back-cover endorsements from Patricia Garfield and Lewis Rambo. Patricia was a co-founder of the IASD and author of several well-regarded books on dreams, and Lewis was a professor of religion and psychology at San Francisco Theological Seminary and my faculty sponsor at the Graduate Theological Union, where I had become a Visiting Scholar after leaving Chicago.

The front cover is a painting from Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818), a classic of early Romantic aesthetics, although I didn’t know that at the time—I just liked the way this image balanced the cover of WD, which was set deep inside a Redwood-lined creek; here with SD, we’re reaching the top of the ridge and discovering a big open view to enjoy.

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Reflections on The Wilderness of Dreams (1994)

Writing has always been a relational process for me. Relationships with an imagined audience, with the people who have taught and influenced me, sometimes with co-authors, and always with the energies of inspiration I personify as Muses—without them, I would never care enough to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. With them, I’ve found lifelong joy and a singular sense of purpose in crafting ideas into tapestries of written language that can be shared with others.

Not just writing, but writing about dreams: that’s always been my focus. The subject of dreaming has proven an inexhaustible wellspring of creative motivation. Writer’s block has never been a problem; there are so many interesting aspects of dreaming, so many innovative ways of exploring dreams and helping others understand their meanings, that my biggest worry is not having enough time to write all I feel capable of producing.

As I consider the list of works I still hope to write, it seems a good time to re-consider the books I’ve already written. Each one has organically flowed from the one before it, which may not be obvious to readers but has certainly shaped my approach in every instance.

My first book, The Wilderness of Dreams, was my doctoral dissertation from the University of Chicago Divinity School, which I completed in 1992. The dissertation was, at its core, addressed to the four members of my doctoral committee: Don Browning and Peter Homans, who together formed the Religion and Psychological Studies department at the Divinity School; Wendy Doniger, of the History of Religions department at the Divinity School, and Bertram Cohler, a practicing psychoanalyst and chair of the Human Development Committee at the University of Chicago. Each of them was a brilliant scholar who deeply influenced the book, even if the topic of dreaming was not a primary concern for any of them. That turned out to be both a blessing and a curse; a blessing, because I had relative freedom to follow my instincts and develop my own approach; a curse, because I had no single mentor who really knew or understood what I was trying to do. And to be honest, I didn’t really know what I was trying to do, either. But even at that earliest stage of my career, I trusted my Muses to point me in the right direction, and I’ve never regretted that decision.

All four of my committee members were very supportive of the dissertation and encouraged me after graduation to seek a publisher for it.  The State University of New York (SUNY) Press had recently launched a series in Dream Studies, with Robert Van de Castle as series editor, and I was very fortunate to enter the dream studies field at this moment. The manuscript was accepted with only a handful of editorial changes and published by SUNY in 1994.

It took some persuading, but SUNY agreed to use as cover art a painting from my good friend Josh Adam, who has become one of the great landscape painters of our generation. Generous back-cover endorsements were provided by Jeremy Taylor and Tore Nielsen, a Unitarian-Universalist Minister and neuroscientist respectively, which was helpful in establishing the interdisciplinary credibility I was seeking.

The guiding metaphor in the book’s structure is the idea of dreaming as a kind of wilderness that has been explored in modern times along eight different paths, each of which reveals important topographical features but none of which provides an overall understanding of the terrain. Eight figures and their works stood for these eight paths: Sigmund Freud for psychoanalysis, Andre Breton for surrealism, Carl Jung for analytical psychology, Calvin Hall for content analysis, J. Allan Hobson for neuroscience, Stephen LaBerge for lucid dreaming, Barbara Tedlock for anthropology, and Harry Hunt for cognitive psychology. An initial review highlighted both the values of each approach and their mutual incompatibility. This, I argued, poses a problem for the field of dream studies because we can hardly expect others to take our findings seriously if these findings fundamentally contradict each other. The interdisciplinary nature of dream research was a big theme here: we need multiple disciplines to do justice to the full complexity of dreaming experience, but we also need to find a way to integrate these different perspectives or else we risk collapsing into incoherence and irrelevance.

In an effort to overcome these contradictions, each of the approaches was analyzed in light of its stance on 1) the nature of dream interpretation and 2) the potential religious significance of dreaming. To evaluate their ideas about dream interpretation, I relied on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. To assess their ideas about dreams and religiosity, I drew on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s metaphor theory as adopted by the theologies of Don Browning and Sallie McFague. By the end of the book I developed the notion of “root metaphors” as a resource for understanding how dreams can best be understood in their religious potentiality.

Over the years, I’ve come to see this book as the starting point for virtually everything I’ve written and still hope to write. The interdisciplinary nature of dream research, the deep connection between dreaming and the environment, the playful dynamics of dreaming, the spiritual potentials of dreams for both individual and collective transformation—all these themes are still resonant in my work today, more than thirty years later. Maybe I’m just stuck in the world’s biggest rut! But maybe I’ve been right to trust my Muses and follow them where they lead.

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The Scribes of Sleep – A New Book about the History of Dream Journals

My latest book, The Scribes of Sleep, has just been published by Oxford University Press. It’s a work dedicated to people who keep dream journals, as a new resource for learning more about the fascinating and largely unknown history of dream journal practices. The book is also intended as an argument in favor of dream journals as a valuable source of empirical data for scientific research into the nature and functions of dreaming.

If you are passionate about your dreams and tracking them over time, The Scribes of Sleep is written specifically for you.

Seven remarkable historical dreamers are the core of the book:

  1. Aelius Aristides (117-181), a Roman speaker and writer whose health crisis in his 20’s brought him to seek help at the temples of the healing god Asclepius. Aristides began recording his dreams in response to a direct command from the god.
  2. Myoe Shonin (1173-1232), an ascetic Japanese monk who advocated for reforms in the Kegon school of Buddhism. He kept a journal of his dreams, visions, and meditation experiences for forty years.
  3. Lucrecia de Leon (1568-?), an illiterate young woman who grew up in Madrid, Spain during the imperial reign of Philip II. Catholic priests recorded a series of her dreams over a period of three years, dreams that accurately foresaw the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
  4. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish scientist and philosopher who recorded his dreams over several years, leading to a spiritual awakening and the founding of a new church of mystical Christianity.
  5. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), a free African-American scientist, inventor, surveyor, and author of impressively accurate almanacs. One of the most brilliant minds of his time, Banneker kept a regular dream journal through his adult life, only fragments of which still exist.
  6. Anna Kingsford (1846-1888), a crusading English doctor, anti-vivisectionist, theosophist, and women’s rights advocate. She wrote a journal of her dreams from her early 20’s to her death at 41.
  7. Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), a Swiss theoretical physicist whose original work on quantum theory won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945. He was a therapy client of C.G. Jung’s, and for many years he kept a dream journal and shared its contents with Jung for analysis and interpretation.

To help in exploring the dream journals of these seven amazing figures, I bring them into dialogue with three broad methods of dream study: digital data science, depth psychology, and religious studies. Drawing together the findings from all these methods, I advocate for the importance of keeping a dream journal as both a unique practice of spiritual self-discovery and a vital source of scientific evidence.

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Dream Journaling as a Contemplative Practice

Most people who keep a dream journal are initially motivated by simple curiosity and the hope they will gain insights into their waking lives. But as they continue with the journaling and track the emerging patterns of their dreams over time, they often find the process becomes something more than that, something that develops a life of its own and opens into a new relationship with the unconscious realms of their minds.

Recently I was talking with Ryan Hurd, who manages the site dreamstudies.org, about the experience of keeping a dream journal, and he mentioned the idea that dream journaling can be thought of as a kind of contemplative practice, similar in many ways to meditation and prayer. This idea immediately resonated with my own feelings about the impact of dream journaling, and as we talked further it seemed worthwhile to share this line of thinking with others who might find it helpful.

At first sight, of course, this might seem like an implausible comparison. Dream journaling is not addressed to a deity like prayer, nor does it involve emptying the mind of all contents like some forms of meditation. There are no formal traditions or established schools of dream journaling, comparable to the ancient teachings about prayer in Christianity or meditation in Buddhism.

All of this is true, and yet the similarities remain striking. Consider the following features that characterize the long-term practice of dream journaling:

  • It cultivates a capacity for sustained, focused self-reflection.
  • It cultivates an ability to suspend your ego and listen to your inner voice of intuition, your true self.
  • It brings forth a more honest awareness of your greatest challenges, conflicts, and vulnerabilities.
  • It increases your sensitivity to the symbolic potentials of waking experience.
  • It will surprise you with sudden discoveries and realizations.
  • It is enjoyable and mentally transformative no matter what actual insights may come.

These core features of the practice of dream-journaling also characterize many forms of meditation and prayer. This was pragmatic gist of my conversation with Ryan. In our lives, at least, keeping a dream journal plays a role very similar to the one that meditation and prayer seems to play in other people’s lives. As much as we value the insights we learn from particular dreams, we are most drawn to dream journaling as a practice, as an ongoing dialogue with the transcendent powers of the psyche.

Setting aside time each day to record your dreams, reflect on their images and feelings, sort and categorize their contents, analyze them for their broad patterns and odd singularities—these activities generate a contemplative flow in themselves, a flow that when experienced on a regular basis becomes a powerful resource for creativity in all aspects of life. Although much less studied than meditation and prayer, keeping a dream journal is a kindred practice of deep, long-term psychological and spiritual growth.

 

(This post was first published on the website of Psychology Today, March 2, 2023.)

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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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The Inevitable Spirituality of Dreaming

People make many strange and unexpected discoveries when they begin exploring their dreams. Of these discoveries, perhaps the most surprising is an uncanny encounter with images, themes, and energies that can best be described as spiritual or religious. It’s one thing to realize you have selfish desires or aggressive instincts; it’s another thing entirely to become aware of your existence as a spiritual being. Yet that is where dreams seem to have an innate tendency to lead us—straight into the deepest questions of human life, questions we find at the heart of most of the world’s religious traditions.

Consider as an example “visitation dreams,” dreams in which a loved one who has died appears as if alive again. These dreams are often extremely vivid and realistic. After awakening from such an experience, it’s almost impossible not to wonder, did I just have a real encounter with the soul or ghost of that person? And then to wonder, do I have a disembodied soul of my own? Is that what will happen when I die?

According to cross-cultural surveys of typical dreams like this, visitation dreams appear quite frequently across a wide spectrum of the population (the statistics cited below come from my Big Dreams book in 2016). For instance, in a 1958 study (Griffith et al.) of American and Japanese college students, 40% of the American males and 53% of the American females reported having had at least one visitation dream. In a 1972 study (Giroa et al.) of Israeli Arabs and Kibbutz residents, the figures were 39% for the Kibbutz males, 52% for the Kibbutz females, 70% for the Arab females, and 73% for the Arab males. In a 2001 study (Nielsen et al.) of Canadian college students, the figures were 38% for the Canadian males and 39% for the Canadian females. A 2004 study (Schredl et al.) of German college students yielded the figures of 38% for the German males and 46% for the German females.

These findings show that the experience of visitation dreams is remarkably common and widely distributed. This suggests a large number of people in every culture and community have had at least one intense personal experience that naturally invites spiritual reflection on life, death, and the existence of the soul.

Another example are “flying dreams,” which often bring incredibly strong feelings of elation, freedom, and transcendence. Like visitations, flying dreams also have a dramatic intensity and hyper-realism that makes them highly memorable after awakening, and they just as naturally prompt the conscious mind to imagine radical new possibilities and powers that overcome the limits of ordinary reality.

The cross-cultural frequency of having had at least one flying dream is similar to that of visitation dreams. For the American males it was 32%, and for the American females, 35%. For the Japanese males, 46%, and Japanese females, 46%. For the Kibbutz males, 61%, and Kibbutz females, 40%. For the Arab males, 44%, and Arab females, 43%. For the Canadian males, 58%, and Canadian females, 44%. And for the German males, 66%, and German females, 63%.

The high frequency of flying dreams might not seem like big news. But the point here is to emphasize the implications of this fact for the presence of an innately spiritual impulse and potentiality in our dreaming. These cross-cultural findings suggest that large numbers of people in societies all over the world  are innately stimulated in their dreams to recognize their own potentials for transcendence, joy, and powers beyond what our waking minds believe is possible.

Horrible nightmares might not seem to have any spiritual significance, yet the darkest of dreams can sometimes have a tremendous impact on people. Vivid nightmares certainly have as much emotional intensity and unforgettable imagery as visitation and flying dreams, and they also naturally stimulate the individual’s waking mind to ponder existential and moral questions with deep religious relevance—questions about evil, suffering, justice, violence, and death.

The cross-cultural research shows that nightmares of being chased or attacked are one of the most commonly experienced of all the “typical” dreams. Here are the figures from the studies cited above: American males, 77%, American females, 78%; Japanese males, 90%, Japanese females, 92%; Kibbutz males, 69%, Kibbutz females, 70%; Arab males, 66%, Arab females, 51%; Canadian males, 78%, Canadian females 83%; German males, 87%, German females, 89%.

Nightmares may cause distress and discomfort, but they also quite effectively force the waking mind to pay attention to real dangers, both out in the world and deep within oneself, that require greater awareness and attention. Such dreams can provide moral orientation and guidance in difficult, frightening situations. In some cases, nightmares offer experiences of radical empathy, providing insight into the feelings and sufferings of others and thus opening the individual’s mind to a wider sphere of moral care and responsibility—precisely the goal of many religious traditions.

If you track your dreams over time, or if you have therapy clients who tell you about their dreams, religiously-charged issues will almost certainly come up, sooner or later. Visitation dreams, flying dreams, nightmares, and many other types of dreams offer an open invitation to spiritual inquiry and existential self-reflection. Dreams are metaphysically insistent, but not dogmatic. They illuminate, reveal, and stimulate, but they leave the answers and practical applications to waking consciousness. And best of all in this ultra-commodified age, they are free and available to everyone! Dreams provide a neurologically hard-wired, universally accessible, yet exquisitely personalized portal into realms of awareness and insight that humans have traditionally regarded as a path towards sacred wisdom. Not everyone recognizes or cares about this aspect of their dreams. But the path is always there, opening and beckoning to us every night when we sleep.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today 9/21/21.