Category: Society and Politics

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Dreaming with the Founding Fathers

The friendly dream-sharing of Benjamin Rush and John Adams took an eerie prophetic turn.

This Fourth of July not only marks America’s 250th birthday. It also represents the 200th anniversary of the deaths of country’s second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who passed away within five hours of each other on July 4, 1826. 

 

More remarkable than the patriotic timing of their deaths is the fact that several years earlier Dr. Benjamin Rush, a mutual friend and signer of the Declaration of Independence, foresaw their simultaneous deaths in a dream.

 

Despite both serving as visionary leaders during the early, perilous days of the country, Adams and Jefferson became political enemies with drastically differing ideas about America’s future and how to get there. This caused distress for other revolutionary figures like Rush who feared their titanic disagreements would be too much for the fragile nation to endure. 

 

Rush then took it upon himself in 1805 to engage with Adams, initiate a regular correspondence with him, and nudge him towards an eventual reconciliation with Jefferson. To accomplish this delicate diplomatic mission, Rush used a surprising method: he suggested to Adams that, instead of discussing common issues of the day in their letters, they share their dreams with each other. 

 

As Joseph Ellis recounts in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book “Founding Brothers” (2002) “Adams leapt at the suggestion and declared himself prepared to match his old friend ‘dream for dream.’” (214).

 

There followed a remarkable exchange of dreams, interpretations, and insights both personal and political. Rush, a physician acting here as a kind of proto-psychoanalyst, slowly but surely brought Adams around to a more charitable and balanced view of Jefferson. Then, in 1809, Rush reported to Adams “his most amazing dream yet”:

 

“He dreamed that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson, congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life. Jefferson had then responded to this magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness… Then the two philosopher-kings ‘sunk into the grave nearly at the same time, full of years and rich in the gratitude and praises of their country.’”

 

According to Ellis, Adams sent Rush an immediate and enthusiastic response: “‘A DREAM AGAIN! I have no other objection to your dream but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.’” (220)

 

At this time, Adams and Jefferson were still estranged; they did not resume their friendship until 1812. Rush’s dream thus pre-dates their eventual reconciliation by three years and their “nearly at the same time” deaths by seventeen years. To anticipate the former in a dream is impressive; to anticipate the latter in a dream is uncanny.

 

However, not even Rush’s evidently fertile prophetic imagination could foresee the poetic wonder of these two American giants entering the grave together on the Fourth of July, 1826, fifty years after the signing of the country’s founding document.

 

Other than adding a kind of mystical halo to early American history, what can we today learn from this remarkable process of dream-sharing among the Founding Fathers? For one thing, it sounds like they were having fun. The dreams they described to each other are as wild and bizarre as anyone else’s, and both Rush and Adams clearly enjoyed devoting their formidable mental powers to analyzing the curious meanings of each other’s oneiric experiences.

 

It also sounds like their dream-sharing provided them with a genuinely new understanding of recent political history and their roles in it. In addition to making valuable discoveries about their personal lives, Rush and Adams found their dreams led them to a deeper appreciation for the psycho-spiritual significance of the epic events they had helped to bring into being.

 

Perhaps of greatest relevance for our concerns two hundred years later, a practical outcome of their process was the healing of a bitter political division—E pluribus unum, with an assist from dreaming. This was Rush’s initial goal, and he achieved it spectacularly. Of course, the reconciliation didn’t happen overnight; it took several years of patient dream-sharing to get there. But once resumed, the Adams-Jefferson friendship remained strong and respectful till their symbolically appropriate end. On the bicentennial of their deaths, it seems fitting to highlight their admirable, dream-mediated willingness to set aside their political conflicts and find common ground in supporting and celebrating the highest ideals of our nation.

 

Note: this first appeared in Psychology Today, July 1, 2026.

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Reflections on Among All These Dreamers (1996)

The first time I attended an annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams was in Santa Cruz in 1988. For the next several years (London in 1989, Chicago in 1990 (which I hosted), Charlottesville, Virginia in 1991) these conferences gave me an opportunity to learn more about the various ways in which people were exploring the origins, functions, and meanings of dreaming. One thing that struck me right away was that several people were looking at dreams not only as a source of personal insight but also as a source of insight into collective issues and concerns. Based on my own studies so far, this seemed like an important idea for dream researchers to develop further, even if it ran counter to the predominantly individualistic approach of most psychologists at that time.

Inspired by these colleagues at the IASD, I put together an edited book, Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society, which was published in 1996 by State University of New York (SUNY) Press as part of the Series in Dream Studies edited by Robert Van de Castle. Each of the chapters is a written version of material presented at an IASD conference and shaped by those conversations. Here are the chapter titles:

  1. Dreams and Social Responsibility: Teaching a Dream Course in the Inner-City –Jane White-Lewis
  2. The 55-Year Secret: Using Nightmares to Facilitate Psychotherapy in a Case of Childhood Sexual Abuse – Marion A. Cuddy & Kathryn E. Belicki
  3. Seeking the Balance: Do Dreams Have a Role in Natural Resource Management? – Herbert W. Schroeder
  4. Reflections on Dreamwork with Central Alberta Cree: An Essay on an Unlikely Social Action Vehicle – Jayne Gackenbach
  5. Black Dreamers in the United States – Anthony Shafton
  6. Sex, Gender, and Dreams: From Polarity to Plurality – Carol Schreier Rupprecht
  7. Traversing the Living Labyrinth: Dreams and Dream-Work in the Psychospiritual Dilemma of the Postmodern World – Jeremy Taylor
  8. Invitation at the Threshold: Pre-Death Spiritual Experiences – Patricia Bulkley
  9. Western Dreams about Eastern Dreams – Wendy Doniger
  10. Political Dreaming: Dreams of the 1992 Presidential Election – Kelly Bulkeley
  11. Healing Crimes: Dreaming Up the Solution to the Criminal Justice Mess – Bette Ehlert
  12. Let’s Stand Up, Regain Our Balance, and Look Around at the World – Johanna King

The conclusion presents what I consider a “Soc. 2 Manifesto,” drawing upon ideas developed during the teaching I did at the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1993 in the yearlong Social Sciences core sequence titled Self, Culture, and Society (Soc. 121-121-123), commonly known as Soc. 2. Max Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the modern world is a central notion here, which I believe casts a new and more urgent light on the cultural value of dreaming and its innately spiritual qualities.

The title came to me in a flash. One day while working on the book I thought, maybe I could use a phrase from Nietzsche. I stood up, took The Gay Science from my bookshelf, flipped it open, and almost immediately landed on Aphorism 54 and the following paragraph:

“Appearance for me is that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it make me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more—that among all these dreamers I, too, who ‘know,’ am dancing my dance; that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence; and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all and thus also the continuation of the dream.” (translation by Walter Kaufman, emphasis in original)

The book’s cover was not my design, although I’m okay with the trippy interplanetary image and vibrant magenta color. The SUNY Series in Dream Studies had a house style they wanted each new book to use, and that’s what we did here. The back cover endorsement from Montague Ullman was especially appreciated since he is one the true pioneers in the application of dream interpretation methods to group programs for community mental health.

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Dream Library construction update

The remaining exterior work at the Dream Library is down to roofing and painting. The focus will turn soon to the interior finish work of electrical, plumbing, and bookcase installation. Designing and installing a spiral staircase from the second floor to the third floor tower will be a special aesthetic and practical task. When the weather becomes less soggy, careful attention will go to perimeter landscaping, with the top priority of long-term fire safety–a vital concern for a  building full of paper, built of wood, and surrounded by a forest.

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Sports, Dreaming, and the Cultural Dynamics of Play

A new article about dreaming and sports, co-authored by me and Michael Schredl, has just been accepted for publication by the journal Dreaming. We do not yet know in which issue of the journal it will appear, but we are very excited to share our findings at last! We analyzed the survey responses of @4500 American adults who answered questions in 2021 about their sleep, dreams, and interest/participation in sports. The results of our analysis suggest a number of practical implications for athletic training, cultural analysis, and dream research.  Michael has done several previous studies on this topic, and I was glad for his collaboration. My curiosity about sports and dreams derives from ideas I have been developing about dreaming as form of play. This study offered an opportunity to see how those theoretical ideas relate to the empirical data of the survey.

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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….