content analysis Archives | Kelly Bulkeley

Reflections on The Wilderness of Dreams (1994)

Kelly Bulkeley — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 20:11:48 +0000

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 …

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Aggression in Dreams

Kelly Bulkeley — Mon, 31 May 2021 22:54:48 +0000

Hitting, fighting, chasing, shooting, killing—these are not only common themes in the news each day, they are also recurrent features of our dreams at night. Few studies have focused specifically on aggression in dreaming, even though Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, claimed that “the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in …

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Dreams and Politics 2020: Preparing for New Research

Kelly Bulkeley — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:29:26 +0000

To prepare for a new study of dreams during the 2020 U.S. Presidential election campaign, I am doing a brief review of my previous work in this area, to remind myself of what I have learned so far and what seems most important to investigate next. I have been studying dreams and politics since 1992, …

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Reflecting on my 2018 Dream Journal

Kelly Bulkeley — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 23:18:28 +0000

The value of keeping a dream journal is inherent in the practice itself. Simply recording your dreams on a regular basis will increase your dream recall, deepen your self-knowledge, and help you maintain emotional balance in waking life. You can enjoy these benefits even if you never look back at your journal after recording each …

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1,001 Nights of Dream Recall

Kelly Bulkeley — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 21:18:16 +0000

Between January 8, 2015 and October 4, 2017, I remembered and recorded a dream every night for 1,001 consecutive nights. Now I’m studying the dreams and trying to find insights that can help in exploring the dream series of other people. I don’t expect anyone to accept my personal dreams as conclusive evidence for any …

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Dreaming in Adolescence: A “Blind” Word Search of a Teenage Girl’s Dream Series

Kelly Bulkeley — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 16:25:14 +0000

Here’s a pdf file of the word search study I did with “Bea,” published in Dreaming (2012), Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 240-252: Dreaming in Adolescence

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The Distinguishing Features of Big Dreams

Kelly Bulkeley — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:58:17 +0000

If someone presented you with two sets of dreams, one of most recent dreams and one of highly memorable dreams, you could predict with a high degree of confidence which type of dream was in which set, based only on word usage frequencies. The set with more references to flying, air, family, animals, fantastic beings, …

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A Primal Difference (Part 3 of Creating a Baseline for Studying Patterns in Dream Content)

Kelly Bulkeley — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:57:09 +0000

What makes unusually memorable dreams different from average, ordinary dreams? Putting it in Jungian terms, how are big dreams different from little dreams? The SDDb baselines for most recent dreams (MRDs) and memorable dreams (MemDs) give a very precise and empirically based answer to this question. MRDs tend to use more words relating …

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SDDb Baselines for Recent Dreams and Memorable Dreams (Part 2 of Creating a Baseline for Studying Patterns in Dream Content)

Kelly Bulkeley — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 23:38:28 +0000

“Dreams are not mysterious, supernatural, or esoteric phenomena. They are not messages from the gods nor are they prophecies of the future.” That’s what Calvin Hall said in his 1966 book The Meaning of Dreams (New York: McGraw-Hill, revised edition, p. 120). Hall’s secular beliefs may or may not be justified, but what’s certain is that …

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Creating a Baseline for Studying Patterns in Dream Content (Part 1)

Kelly Bulkeley — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:23:44 +0000

Compared to what? That’s a question I’ve learned from Tracey Kahan to ask whenever I study a set or series of dreams. If I find, for example, that 13% of a given collection of dreams include words related to fire, I can only assess the significance of that number in comparison to some other …

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