culture Archives | Kelly Bulkeley

April 2, 2025

Reflections on Among All These Dreamers

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:

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

November 12, 2021

The Jumbotron Critique of Lucid Dreaming

As a dream researcher, I try to promote public interest in dreaming and its many exciting possibilities. And yet also as a dream researcher, I try to highlight potential problems and misleading claims that can do more public harm than good. This creates a dilemma with the topic of lucid dreaming, which is increasingly popular and yet has pitfalls and drawbacks that its advocates rarely mention or even seem to know exist.

The crux of the problem is this. Lucid dreaming as experienced by people in present-day Western society is not equivalent to the practices of consciousness in dreaming among non-Western cultural traditions through history. Anyone who suggests otherwise is very likely trying to add an appealing veneer of foreign exoticism to an essentially modern Western practice.

To explain what I mean by “an essentially modern Western practice,” here’s an analogy that came to mind while attending a recent NBA game: Lucid dreaming is like a basketball player who stops in the middle of the game, finds a television camera, and then spends all his time posing so he can see himself on the Jumbotron video screens hanging down in the center of the arena. It is self-centered, self-inflating behavior that disrupts the spontaneous creative flow of the game/dream and substitutes ego grandiosity for immersive play and openness to new experience.

This is not how other cultures have approached consciousness within dreaming. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, for example, the goal of dream awareness is conceived as an extension of the spiritual discipline of meditation—a process of dissolving the ego, not pumping it up. In the shamanic traditions of Siberia, Australia, and the Americas, conscious awareness within dreaming is motivated by the desire to serve one’s community through healing, gaining knowledge, and communicating with the ancestors. Many of the “witches” persecuted by the Inquisition in medieval Europe were agrarian mystics whose plant-based methods aimed to stimulate consciousness in dreaming as a path towards deeper natural wisdom and spiritual maturity.

By contrast, people in the modern West often approach lucid dreaming with the goal of extending their individual feelings of ego gratification and control over reality. Hence the Jumbotron analogy: Look at me, look at me, I’m dreaming and I can see myself dreaming! In many other cultural traditions through history, this would be regarded as an entirely trivial insight that would be dismissed as a distraction from more important pursuits.

I can imagine friends and colleagues responding to this critique by saying they teach their students precisely what I’m suggesting as an alternative—a slower, more self-reflective approach, with less emphasis on ego control and more on opening one’s awareness to the dream world. Yet this misses the bigger point about the distinctive cultural environment of the modern West, an environment that prods, spurs, and stimulates in countless ways people’s desires for personal pleasure and fantasies of control. Whatever teachers of lucid dreaming are saying, many modern Westerners are hearing what they have been culturally prepared to hear, which is that “going lucid” in dreams is fun because it can give you a new experiential rush of control and power. To ignore the realities of this context is sociologically naïve and does no credit to the field of dream research.

If you happen to be someone who lives in the modern West and feels curious about lucid dreaming, what can you do that is true and authentic to your context? Here are three questions to ask yourself.

First, have you paid any attention to your non-lucid dreams? If not, I wonder if your interest has anything to do with actual dreams, rather than the various fantasies you’ve heard are possible in lucid dreaming. Instead of rushing into aggressive practices to induce lucidity, maybe you can use that energy first to follow your dreams over time and observe their natural, spontaneous patterns of content. Pay attention to what is happening, rather than pushing so hard to make something else happen.

Are you engaged in any serious meditation or prayer practices? If not, I wonder if you have done enough to prepare for the kinds of experiences and sensations that can arise in lucid dreams. In most non-Western traditions, people take years to train their minds for effective dreaming consciousness. Have you been doing any kind of preparatory practices like that?

Do you have a teacher, guru, or therapist who has been working with you for a long time? If not, what happens if you get in over your head? Who would tell you if you were? Again, most non-Western traditions provide specially trained guides who help newcomers navigate their personal paths into these expansive realms of dreaming. In almost all cases, the path requires shedding the individual ego and throwing oneself wholeheartedly into a larger dynamic interplay of unconscious power, intelligence, and intentionality.

In other words, you can’t move forward on the path of enlightened dreaming if you’re stuck at the beginning, staring at yourself on the Jumbotron.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on November 9, 2021.

May 31, 2021

Aggression in Dreams

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 man” (Civilization and its Discontents, 1930). A combination of old and new methods of research can shed light on how this primal instinct plays out in our dreams.

Who Has Aggressive Dreams?

The Hall and Van de Castle system (1966) of dream content analysis has codes for three kinds of social interactions: friendly, sexual, and aggressive. Research using the HVDC system has suggested a few basic patterns in the frequency of aggression in dreams:

Men have more aggression, especially physical aggression, in their dreams than do women.
Women are more likely to be victims than initiators of aggression in dreams.
Children have more aggression in dreams than do adults, especially involving attacks by animals.
Older people have less aggression in dreams than do younger people.

Hundreds of studies have used the HVDC method over the past several decades, and their findings support the basic idea that aggression is an innate feature of human dreaming.

Why Do We Have Aggressive Dreams?

An additional perspective comes from using word search technologies to identify significant patterns of meaning in dream content. The Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb) has a template with a category for physical aggression, and a large collection of dreams to study for a specific theme like this.

The SDDb Baseline dreams are a good place to start—a set of 5,321 dreams (3,227 females, 2,094 males) that represent a composite portrait of dreaming in general (the reports were given in response to a question about “your most recent dream”). Although limited in many ways, the Baseline dreams offer an empirical basis for making comparisons across different sets of dreams. This can help in identifying trends and patterns that would be difficult to see otherwise.

Applying the word search category for physical aggression to the female Baselines, we find that 15.1% of the dreams include at least one word relating to physical aggression. Applying the same word search category to the male Baselines yields a result of 21.5% of the dreams with at least one reference to physical aggression. (The combined Baselines figure is 17.6%.) So this analysis confirms the finding of the HVDC system that men’s dreams, on average, seem to involve more physical aggression than do women’s dreams. The top ten words used in these dreams were the following: Hit, kill, fight, chasing, killed, shot, fighting, chased, war, shooting.

Turning to the dreams of individuals who have kept track of their dreams for a lengthy period of time, a great deal of variation appears in the frequency of physical aggression. For example, “Tanya,” a young woman, has a relatively high proportion of physical aggression in her dreams (25.4%, in 563 reports), about the same as “Lawrence,” an older man (25.7%, in 206 reports. Another young woman, “Jasmine,” has low physical aggression in her dreams (10.5%, in 800 reports), just like “RB,” an older man (11.8%, in 51 reports).

There is clear evidence that experiences with physical aggression in waking life can increase the frequency of its appearance in dreaming. The best examples are “Mike,” who served as a medic during the Vietnam War and whose collection of dreams includes a very high proportion of physical aggression (76.3%, in 97 reports). In the four sets of dreams from “Beverley” from 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016, the first set has much more physical aggression (11.9%, in 253 reports) than in the other three (5.7%, in 687 reports), which accurately reflected her involvement in that earlier time period with a violent religious cult.

To help shed light on the role of culture in dreams of physical aggression, the SDDb also includes sets of dreams from non-Western people, which can be analyzed in the same way. For the Mehinaku people of the Amazonian rain forest, a collection of 383 dreams had 22.5% with at least one reference to physical aggression. For a group of Nepalese college students, their dreams (535) had 18.1% with a reference to physical aggression. Three groups of African church members reported dreams (142) with a 19% frequency of physical aggressions. These findings are close enough to the SDDb baselines overall figure of 17.6% to suggest that culture is not a decisive factor in this aspect of dream content.

Concluding Insights

Aggression appears to be a normal feature of human dream content, across different cultures.

Men seem to have more physical aggression in their dreams, although some women have high levels, too.

Dreams of physical aggression can accurately reflect actual aggressions in waking life, so an unusually high level of dream aggression, or a sudden change in dreams to a higher level of aggression, might be a therapeutically valuable sign.

Many dreams of physical aggression do not, however, reflect actual experiences of aggression. These dreams may use violence as a metaphor (e.g., a dream of physical attack as a metaphor of feeling emotionally vulnerable). They may reflect instances of fictional aggression (e.g., seen in a movie). They may be anticipations of violence that may happen at some point in the future (e.g. a threat simulation).

Aggression in dreaming can be viewed as an internal form of play-fighting—the most common form of play in the animal kingdom, and very frequent among humans, too. Play-fighting functions as a way of preparing for future challenges, and also for diminishing and defusing emotional tensions that can lead to actual violence. The same psychological dynamics of play-fighting seem to be operative in dreaming, too.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, May 31, 2021.

September 12, 2019

Nightmares of a Smart Home

Dreams from Germans in the 1930’s highlight the danger of new home technologies.

I have always been a strong advocate for the creative potentials of dreaming and its capacity to envision future realities. Now, however, I worry that dreams from an earlier era may have predicted a new technology with frightening potentials for abuse in our world today.

One of the most important books in 20^th century dream research was The Third Reich of Dreams by Charlotte Beradt, published in English in 1968. Beradt was a journalist in Germany, and when the Nazis rose to power she, as a Jew, could no longer find work. Instead, from 1933 until 1939, when she and her husband fled Germany to the United States, Beradt collected people’s dreams about the Nazis. She cast a wide net among friends and acquaintances, asking for dreams about their country’s increasingly dire political situation. The resulting book was not only searing testimony of the psychological brutality of the National Socialist regime. It also illustrated how dreams can accurately reflect collective fears during times of social crisis.

Many researchers have been deeply moved by The Third Reich of Dreams and inspired to explore new ways of drawing cultural insights from individual dreams. When I first encountered Beradt’s book in the 1980’s during graduate school, I was struck by the poignant reflections in these dreams of people’s experiences in an increasingly totalitarian environment where “others” were attacked as inhuman, racial purity and blind loyalty were exalted, and no one could escape the pervasive atmosphere of fear and vulnerability.

I was especially intrigued by a type of dream that Beradt described as the ultimate example of political toxicity. These were nightmares in which the oppressive power of the state reached directly into people’s homes and turned their own possessions against them. From a woman described as a housewife, in 1933:

“A Storm Trooper was standing by the large, old-fashioned, blue-tiled Dutch oven that stands in the corner of our living room, where we always sit and talk in the evening. He opened the oven door and it began to talk in a harsh and penetrating voice. It repeated every joke we had told and every word we had said against the government. I thought, ‘Good Lord, what’s it going to tell next—all my little snide remarks about Goebbels [Nazi Minister of Propaganda]?’ But at that moment I realized that one sentence more or less would make no difference—simply everything we have ever thought or said among ourselves is known.” (45)

Reading Beradt’s commentary on this dream today sounds eerily prescient, and uncomfortably resonant with current concerns about new home technologies. Remember, she was writing more than fifty years ago, about events that happened thirty years before that:

“Here we see a person in the process of being fashioned by a very elusive and even today not fully understood form of terrorization, a terrorization that consisted not of any constant surveillance over millions of people but rather the sheer uncertainty about how complete this surveillance was…. What dream could better suit the purposes of a totalitarian regime?” (47)

She went on:

“A greengrocer had exactly the same type of dream about a cushion he placed over the telephone when the family gathered in the evening for a cozy chat, a precaution everyone took in those days. The atmosphere of coziness became one of terror: the cushion—a sentimental keepsake cross-stitched by his mother and ordinarily kept in his easy chair, his domestic throne—began to talk. It testified against him and went on and on, repeating family conversations ranging from the price of vegetables and the midday meal to the comment ‘Old Potbelly [Hermann Goering, Nazi Party leader] is getting fatter by the day.’” (49)

Such dreams expressed a catastrophic loss of privacy and safety, even within the personal confines of one’s own home. Objects which used to give people pleasure and comfort now turned against them and became their enemies. She continued:

“I received quite a few reports about similar dreams involving household objects—about a mirror, a desk, a desk clock, an Easter egg. In each of these cases, all that remained in the recollection was the fact that the object concerned would denounce people. The frequency of such dreams may have increased as people became more and more aware of the methods the regime employed.” (49)

Beradt did not rely on any psychological theories in her approach to these dreams. Indeed, she did not try to interpret the dreams at all, at least in a conventional sense. Rather, like the journalist she was trained to be, she focused on reporting the cases that gave the most vivid illustrations of life in a totalitarian society. She used the political ideas of Hannah Arendt and George Orwell (especially his novel 1984) as guides in connecting the personal dream imagery to collective political realities.

“The following singularly grotesque example of this type of dream was dreamt by a young girl: ‘I dreamt I awoke in the middle of the night to discover that the two cherubs that hang over my bed were no longer looking upwards but were instead staring down at me. I was so frightened that I crawled under the bed.’” (50)

These nocturnal visions from another place and time offer an uncanny foreshadowing of present-day anxieties about the dystopian dangers of new household technologies. It takes no great leap of imagination to see connections between Beradt’s haunting collection of dreams and the latest generation of “smart” lamps, appliances, thermostats, and the like. People are inviting into their homes devices that were the stuff of surreal nightmares in Nazi Germany. The marketing for Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri emphasize their power to relieve us of domestic toil, increase our comfort, and save us money. And yet, despite the many benefits of these systems, recent reports (here, here, here, and here) have shown how easily they can be abused in exactly the ways foreseen by Beradt’s dreamers—secretly recording private conversations and revealing embarrassing, immoral, and incriminating behavior.

For people living in Germany in the 1930’s, their futuristic dreams of smart devices reflected a terrifying realization of the intrusive power of the state and its dominance over the most intimate personal aspects of their lives. The challenge today is preventing their nightmares from becoming our realities.

Note: This essay first appeared in Psychology Today on September 12, 2019.

August 24, 2013

Trouble on the Night Shift: Bad Dreams About Work

“Sleep, the gentlest of the gods, the spirit’s peace, whom care flies from: who soothes the body wearied with toil, and readies it for fresh labors.”

That’s how the Roman poet Ovid described sleep in his first century CE masterpiece the Metamorphoses.

Many people today desperately seek the restorative blessings of sleep just as Ovid described, but instead they find themselves plagued by bad dreams about work. Rather than providing a peaceful respite from the burdens of waking life, sleep for many people has become a battleground of job-related stress and financial anxiety. In a recent online survey I conducted with Harris Interactive, 2252 American adults were asked to describe a dream relating to their work or employment status. All the reports are available via the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb) website. (Here’s a link to the reports of 10+ words in length.) These dreams offer a fascinating window into the workplace experiences of people across a wide demographic swath of American society.

Reading through the dream reports, it becomes clear that each job or profession has its own distinctive type of nightmare:

A trucker dreamed of a car cutting him off, so he had to slam on the brakes and then fight to control his rig as it started to jack-knife.

A nurse dreamed of her patients unhooking themselves from their monitoring equipment and wandering off, which led to the nurse getting fired for incompetence.

A waiter dreamed about having too many customers to serve, forgetting where the tableware was, and losing track of all the orders.

An electrician had vivid recurrent dreams about needing to fix strange gadgets with hundreds of wires, none of them labeled.

Several teachers had bad dreams about being unprepared for class, dealing with uncooperative students, and struggling with new technologies.

Numerous office administrators had nightmares of phones not working, desks piling up with unfinished work, and calculators streaming out endless amounts of rolled paper.

Whatever makes people feel powerless, overwhelmed, or out of control in their particular type of work, that’s going to drive the content and emotions of their dreams.

Sometimes people’s anxieties are transformed by the dreaming imagination into bizarre scenes that reflect a kind of surrealistic commentary on their employment situation. Ovid would surely be delighted by metamorphic dreams like these:

A 30-year old woman from Arizona dreamed that “giant staplers were chasing me down the hall” at the school where she works.

A 35-year old software developer from Minnesota dreamed of going to apply for a job and finding the interviewer was an alien with green skin and a large almond-shaped head.

A 62-year old woman from Illinois dreamed that a computer was chasing her yelling “Program me!”

A 64-year old man from Minnesota who recently lost his job dreamed he had gone back to his office, but instead of the familiar building it was a strange storehouse for used furniture: “I think the dream meant that my former job was basically warehousing people who needed to move on.”

Weird and troubling as these dreams may be, they in fact make perfect sense in light of scientific research showing that dream content tends to accurately reflect people’s waking life emotional concerns. Anything that worries us in waking life will likely show up in our dreams, either literally or metaphorically. This idea of meaningful continuities between dream content and waking life concerns has a lot of data to support it, much of it generated by G. William Domhoff and available on his dreamresearch.net website.

For many people today, worries about their jobs and personal finances top their list of emotional concerns in waking life. Several of the survey participants spoke of their fears about losing their jobs or trying to find a new one. A 27-year old Arizona man who has recurrent nightmares of being attacked by bears said, “You never know if you will have employment the next day.” In such a tenuous economic environment, dream content will naturally reflect people’s job-related worries and preoccupations.

There seems to be a rough evolutionary logic to these kinds of bad dreams. Several researchers, most recently Antii Revonsuo and Katja Valli, have proposed that one of the functions of dreaming is to simulate possible threats in the waking world, helping to prepare the individual to better handle those threats if they ever actually occur. In this view nightmares give us a safe opportunity to mentally practice survival-related behaviors and get ready for potential dangers. The short-term pain of upsetting dreams is outweighed by their long-term gain in promoting greater vigilance and preparedness.

It should also be noted the same powers of imagination that generate vivid work nightmares can also generate many other kinds of dreams as well. Here too there is good scientific evidence to support the idea that dreaming is an inherently creative and multidimensional activity. During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the time of the sleep cycle when most dreaming occurs, the brain becomes hyper-associative. The constraints of externally focused consciousness loosen, allowing innovative possibilities to emerge out of wide-ranging connections between perceptions, memories, instincts, and cultural influences. This is why dreaming seems so crazy and scattered—and why it’s occasionally the source of brilliant flashes of creative insight.

If you have recurrent nightmares about work, try this: After getting in bed each night and turning off the light, take a moment to think about the amazing creative powers in your own dreaming imagination. If your dreams can create vividly realistic scenarios of work, what other kinds of scenarios could they create? What are the strangest, most otherworldly dreams you’ve experienced in the past? What would you like to dream about now?

Your dreams may feel like foes, but with an open mind and playful spirit you can persuade them to become allies.

July 22, 2013

The Dream Logic of Twin Peaks

A cool new book has just been published, with special appeal to David Lynch fans. Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks, edited by Marisa C. Hayes and Franck Boulegue, was released this month by Intellect Books in the UK. Other titles in the Fan Phenomena series include Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dr. Who, and Batman. We’re in great company!

Here’s a passage from the editors’ introduction: “When we refer to a show’s impact within the realm of fan phenomena, we move far beyond the game of numbers that determines the initial airtime of any given series. The shows and films that persevere do so because they strike a chord within a dedicated, passionate group of followers. Such programmes are often rejected by mainstream audiences or studios for being too ‘inaccessible,’ ‘offbeat,’ or ‘controversial,’ as witnessed with Twin Peaks. The show’s vibrant and richly layered dream sequences, for instance, resemble what general audiences might stereotypically expect to find at a video art exhibition, not on network television. Yet, it is often these very elements that are credited with building and extending a show or film’s lasting cult following.”

My chapter in the book has to do with the portrayal of dreams in the initial episodes of the series, especially Agent Cooper’s dream at the end of the third episode. Apparently the ratings numbers went down precipitously right after this episode! Too weird for some people, but a breath of fresh air for many others.

Other chapters in the book include “Peaks and Pop Culture” by Shara Lorea Clark, “Audrey in Five Outfits” by Angela K. Bayout, “Embodiment of the Mystery: Performance and Video Art Go Twin Peaks” by Gry Worre Hallberg and Ulf Rathjen Kring Hansen, “The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Cultural Artifacts in Twin Peaks” by Andrew Howe, “‘Yeah, But the Monkey Says, Judy’: A Critical Approach to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” by Scott Ryan and Joshua Minton, “Twin Peaks and the ‘Disney Princess’ Generation” by David Griffith, “Bond on Bond: Laura Palmer and Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks” by David Bushman, “Strange Spaces: Cult Topographies in Twin Peaks” by Fran Pheasant-Kelly, and “Gothic Daemon BOB” by Chris Murray.