Dreams and Dreamers in the Odyssey

The Odyssey warns against seeing in dreams what we want to see.

Among the many gifts of Homer’s two epic poems are vital insights into the nature and meaning of dreams, insights that are still relevant today. The story of The Odyssey was preceded by The Iliad, whose dream references provide a helpful context for the later tale.

In just the second book of The Iliad, a god-sent dream plays a pivotal role. However, in this case the dream is a cruel deception sent by Zeus to the Greek leader Agamemnon, encouraging him to launch an attack he is destined to lose. This incident in The Iliad, one of the most influential works of all antiquity, shows that people of this time were aware of the danger of believing too easily in the pleasing fantasies of dreams.

Women Dreamers

The dreams reported in The Odyssey all come from women, and they all have multiple dimensions of meaning. The first comes to Queen Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who falls into despair when she realizes her son Telemachus has secretly left home to seek his long-lost father. That night the goddess Athena sends Penelope a dream in the reassuring form of her sister to deliver a message of comfort and reassurance. When Penelope awakens she feels remarkably better, “her spirit warmed now that a dream so clear had come to her in darkest night” (4.945-946). This is a slightly deceptive dream, in that an external agent deliberately shapes a familiar dream image to elicit a specific emotional reaction from the dreamer. The result is clearly favorable for the dreamer, and yet the story also provides the audience with a higher critical awareness of the subtle dynamics of external (divine) influences on the dreaming process.

Athena is also behind the next dream reference. She sends a dream to Nausicaa, a young princess, using the form of Nausicaa’s best friend who urges Nausicaa to go to the river to wash her finest clothing in readiness for her wedding day. When Nausicaa awakens, “still beguiled by her dream” (6.54), she goes with her laundry to the river, and there she suddenly encounters a wild, magnificent, naked man—Odysseus himself. The great warrior is lost and alone, and so Athena has helpfully sent a dream that puts the king’s daughter in an amorous mood and guides her to where she, and only she, will find Odysseus and personally escort him back to the safety of the royal palace.

This is a dream that in its primary purpose is intended by Athena to serve the needs of Odysseus, not Nausicaa. Athena is using Nausicaa as a means of enabling Odysseus to continue his journey home. And yet, the dream does not harm or mislead the dreamer. It may even help her in prompting a greater degree of self-awareness of her latent romantic desires. The goddess, the warrior, and the princess all benefit from this dream in different ways.

The Odyssean Fallacy

The most dramatic dream scene in The Odyssey occurs near the end, when Odysseus finally returns home after twenty years but does not yet reveal himself to his wife Penelope. Disguised as a beggar, he meets with Penelope to gain information about the brutish men, the “suitors” (108 of them), who have invaded his palace to press their affections on the apparently widowed Penelope. During this meeting, the queen shares a dream with the beggar. “Listen closely,” she says (19.603). In the dream, she tends her twenty geese—“I love to watch them all” (19.605)—when suddenly a mountain eagle swoops down and kills all the geese, then flies away again. Then a voice in the dream says, the geese are the suitors and Odysseus the eagle, about to return and kill them all.

When Penelope finishes, the beggar/Odysseus instantly replies, “Dear woman, twist it however you like, your dream can only mean one thing” (19.625-626): death to the suitors. But Penelope says, “Ah my friend, dreams are hard to unravel” (19.630), and she goes on to give a remarkable speech about the two gates of dreams, one of ivory for false dreams and one of polished horn for dreams “fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them” (19.638).

The meaning of Penelope’s dream and her two gates speech depends on what we think is happening between these two people. If we accept that Odysseus has successfully disguised his identity from Penelope, then we are likely to accept his interpretation, wonder at her puzzling resistance, and regard the subsequent slaughter of the suitors as validating his reading of her dream.

However, if we remember that Penelope has proven herself to be the most savvy and intelligent of women, a different possibility emerges. She does know who the beggar really is, and she poses her dream to him as a riddle. The twenty geese in her dream, in this view, symbolize not the 108 suitors, but the twenty years that Odysseus has been gone from her and their family, fighting in someone else’s war. He has killed those twenty years of their life together—does he see that? Does he see her?Sadly, no. He sees what he wants to see, in what I call the Odyssean Fallacy of dream interpretation. He offers a self-validating analysis of her dream that ignores her lived reality and foregrounds his own selfish desires. Penelope’s two gates speech, in this reading, is a subtle but unmistakable way of saying he has failed her test. Immediately after this, she announces the contest of the bow and axes. He could have won her back right then if he had properly understood her dream; now, alas, he must prove himself in another, much more dangerous way.

Not all retellings of The Odyssey include these dream scenes. But the oneiric wisdom in these passages from Homer’s ancient epics continues to shape and inspire the way we think about dreams today.

Note: this first appeared in Psychology Today, July 15, 2026.

July 29, 2026July 29, 2026

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.

July 29, 2026

The Uses of AI for Interpreting Dreams

New evidence points to the potential benefits of AI dream interpretation.

A recent study by Mark Blagrove and colleagues at Swansea University in the UK found that an AI system provided dream interpretations that participants rated “as moderately accurate and as enabling some personal insight.” (105) The participants gave answers to the Gains from Dream Interpretation (GDI) questionnaire that were then compared to answers from participants in previous studies of dream interpretation in live therapy and groups. Using the ChatGPT system, the participants in this study rated the interpretations lower on the “exploration-insight” subscale, which considers the levels of waking life relevance highlighted by the interpretation. Nevertheless, Blagrove et al. observe that “the mean rating of GDI item 1 (‘My dream has been explored thoroughly by the ChatGPT interpretation’) was 7.90 on the 1-9 scale, indicating that participants saw the process as very thorough.” (111)

This study offers an early piece of evidence to support the development of more finely calibrated AI tools for interpreting dreams. First, however, several concerns and limits must be addressed.

What’s Missing from AI Dream Interpretation

Blagrove and his colleagues noted the limits of their study in its minimalist input/output process, with participants simply entering their dream (plus waking life details and associations) and receiving an AI response. There was none of the kind of extended dialogue and exploration that typically occurs in live modes of dream interpretation. But even if this process could be extended with a series of interactive responses between the dreamer and the AI system, more fundamental aspects of dream interpretation would still be excluded. In a thoughtful commentary on Blagrove et al.’s article, Leslie Ellis points out that,

“A dream group or a therapy session does much more than produce a correct interpretation. The real work happens in staying with an image long enough for the body to respond, in hearing how a phrase lands in someone else’s ear, in noticing what shifts when an emotion is named out loud. It depends on a back-and-forth that includes silence, breath, and the small adjustments people make when something feels true.”

These qualities of embodied presence and empathetic sensitivity highlighted by Ellis seem beyond the range of even the most optimistic visions of AI.

To this, I would add that a vital element in the best, most dynamic forms of live dream interpretation is a willingness, even an eagerness, to say and openly engage with hard truths, critical insights, and taboo subjects. Current AI models like ChatGPT, however, are constrained by a variety of internal and, to the public, invisible boundaries around controversial topics, which means efforts to use these systems to interpret the full range of human oneiric experience may be impossible with dreams involving certain types of content (e.g., sexual, racial/ethnic, political) and may in general lead to a subtle homogenizing of all AI interpretations. Precisely where dreams become most dramatic and interesting, current AI systems are forbidden from responding.

Where AI Dream Interpretation Can Go From Here

Several new possibilities beckon for research on this topic, along with new potentials for applying these insights in practical contexts of therapy, education, and public welfare. The greatest progress will likely come from projects that pursue the following paths:

Experimenting with AI systems other than ChatGPT, systems that have been trained with higher ethical standards and are more tailored to the purposes of dream interpretation. More and more of these systems are currently available, and some of them may offer better resources for interpreting dreams. Ultimately, the best systems will be built on a foundation of focused, systematic training with large collections of high-quality dream data.
Developing more detailed and nuanced prompts for the AI systems, beyond simply asking them “What does this dream mean?” or “What is a Freudian interpretation of this dream?” Writing fruitful prompts for AI systems is an emerging 21^st century art form, a kind of linguistic neo-wizardry that can make a huge differential impact on the results of research in this realm.
Widening the interpretive lens. As with live dream groups, where the value is hearing a variety of people’s perspectives, AI systems can also provide a broad range of possible interpretations. For instance, the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app, which I help to administer, currently offers ten different interpretation modes, from Jungian and Lacanian to Biblical and Astrological. Giving people access to a multiplicity of views can empower them to trust their own judgment and discern their own best understanding of their dream given the various possibilities. It might even spark a new interest in learning more from actual people who are experts in these approaches.
Distinguishing between the circumstances in which people can benefit from live therapy and group dream interpretations, and those in which they can benefit from AI interpretation. For instance, a particularly rich and memorable dream, what Jung would call a “big dream,” would surely benefit from the deep, extended exploration of a live interpretation in therapy or a group. For other dreams, which may not merit the time or effort of a live interpretation but still contain valid and meaningful insights, an AI interpretation system might offer a useful approach.

Caution is certainly warranted in this area, but so is a sense of reasonable hope. At their best, AI systems offer radically expanded access to a growing variety of high-quality methods of dream interpretation. This should be a cause for optimism among those who believe in the benefits of greater public awareness of dreaming. Rather than replacing therapists or groups, AI dream interpretation tools can enhance their efforts, connect them to new resources, and point them in directions of deeper meaning that ultimately only humans can pursue.

Note: this first appeared in Psychology Today on May 27, 2026.

July 29, 2026

When You Know Too Much About Dreams

What if you know more about the meanings of another person’s dreams than they know?

What should you do when a friend shares a dream with you, and you immediately see vital meanings in the dream that your friend doesn’t seem to see? If you are someone who is a naturally insightful dreamer and/or has studied methods of dream interpretation, you may suddenly find yourself in these awkward positions of unequal knowledge and awareness. What’s your best approach in responding?

Let’s call the dreamer your friend, whether it’s a friend, a family member, a slight acquaintance, or even a stranger. In this moment of talking about dreams, this person is your friend.

So, your friend shares a dream with you, and right away you get a strong sense of what the dream is about. You also realize this is very sensitive personal territory. What do you do?

First and foremost, don’t avoid or ignore it. Say something in response, simply to let your friend know you’re present and giving them your full attention. Whether they know it consciously or not, your friend has just shared an important truth about themselves and their experience of life and the world. You can honor that truth and show your friend immediate respect with a few encouraging words—

“Wow, that’s amazing…”

“That’s so weird…”

“That sounds incredibly scary…”

“What an intense experience…”

After that, what else might you say? Maybe nothing. Maybe you’ve said enough already.

Your friend may never have told anyone this dream. Indeed, they may never have talked about their dreams in any social setting. That’s why it is good to let you friend know how much you appreciate their willingness to trust you with this glimpse into their inner world.

“Thanks for sharing that…”

“I’m really glad you told me…”

Perhaps your friend does actually recognize the deep meaning you see so clearly in the dream, and no more needs to be said. You helped your friend just by listening, and that is all you have been asked to do.

If your friend seems open to further comments, go ahead, but always remember that you could be wrong. No matter how clear and obvious the meaning of the dream might seem to you, the fact always remains that you could be incorrect about its relevance to the dreamer. This is one good reason to proceed with humility and use a cautionary preface, something like “if it were my dream,…” when offering your friend comments and possible interpretations.

“If it were my dream, I’d be scared about losing control of a situation…”

“If I had a dream like that, the house might symbolize…”

“If I dreamed about tumbling cats, I would see them as…”

To the extent you may be right about the deeper meaning of the dream, it’s best to express your insight in terms of curiosity and wonder, suggesting to your friend the ways in which their dream offers a potential opening to new discoveries. Rather than stating what the dream means, as if you are an oracle from on high, you give your friend a sense of the dream as their own special opening to mind-enhancing possibilities.

“If it were my dream, I’d wonder if …”

“If I had a dream like that, I’d be curious about…”

“If I could go back in the dream, I’d look around and explore…”

A variation in the discussion could be to compare your insight about the dream to a similar theme in a cultural form, like a movie or tv show:

“That reminds me of the ending of Game of Thrones, when…”

The downside of making a cultural reference is leading your friend away from the dream itself. But this is the potential upside, too. Temporarily moving away from the dream can help your friend continue thinking about the deeper issues but without such a direct spotlight on the personal content.

Keep in mind that your friend may have unconsciously been seeking a way to share this dream and bring it into the world, even if consciously they don’t understand it. They chose you to share it with, probably because they sensed (accurately) that you are one of the rare people who can help with strange or difficult dreams. In this sense, you function in these conversations as a kind of oneiric midwife. You help bring a new being into the world, namely your friend’s heightened awareness of their dream, now a living part of their waking consciousness.

Note: this first appeared in Psychology Today, February 3, 2026.

May 4, 2025

Interpreting Dreams with AI-Generated Imagery

The image-generating power of new AI systems has huge untapped potential for the practice of dream interpretation—and some potential downsides. Even more than AI interpretive texts, the dramatic power of AI interpretive images may open new vistas for exploring the meanings of dreams.

The Value of Dream-Sharing

The difficulty most of us have in understanding our dreams is not because they are random nonsense but because dreams express our unconscious sense of open-ended possibility. Almost by definition, dreaming goes beyond the limits of our waking ego to consider new angles and alternate perspectives on our past experiences, current concerns, and future potentials. It is hard to understand dreams because they are continually reaching beyond where we are to explore what we might become.

This is why it can be so helpful to share dreams with other people, to benefit from the insights of their different points of view. Jeremy Taylor and Montague Ullman each developed methods for sharing dreams in virtually any social setting, whether you know the other group members or not. Their methods were designed to maximize the information gleaned from the group while minimizing the imposition of their views on the dreamer and preserving the dreamer’s sense of safety and control of the process.

New AI technology can now provide a kind of virtual dream-sharing group, offering interpretations of a dream from multiple angles. I know this best from using the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app, which has AI tools offering several interpretive modes. If you enter a dream and try each of these modes (Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, etc.), you can experience an interesting virtual variant of a dream-sharing group, learning from the multiplicities of meanings generated by different modes.

AI Imagery

Already, AI can provide a decent simulation of a dream-sharing group in which the dreamer benefits from diverse comments and ideas. What AI can also now do, which would be very difficult to arrange with humans, is to provide in response to a dream with a variety of images in different styles. This offers an exciting new source of feedback for the dreamer, in a visual/imagistic rather than verbal/written form. For some dreams and some dreamers this may be an even more powerful interpretive method than a text-only approach.

To test the idea, I tried it with one of my own dreams, one with a strong central image that would hopefully make it easier to compare and evaluate different visual renderings. Here is the dream, titled “Space Tub”:

Some people are in space, in a space station, and their job is getting astronauts ready for their missions. But wait, I realize something is different, not right—they are preparing the astronauts to go down, not up; and when I see the vehicle in which the astronauts are to travel, I am very disappointed. It is a large white plastic tub, big enough for one person to sit in. Not very complex at all, just thin hard plastic. I am confused, this is such a simplistic device, I can’t imagine it will actually work.

The first image, above, came from Elsewhere’s Retro Camera style.

It’s a white tub, for sure. No astronauts, no space station, although it is very simple and unlikely to do what’s needed for the astronauts. Looking at the image, I realize I don’t know what the astronauts actually need. Would they like this?

Next was the Old Illustration style:

There’s a basic anachronism in asking AI to use the style of one era to illustrate events from another era. Here, it’s a kind of steam-punk mechanism on a non-Earth planet somewhere in space. The white tub appears as a classic Victorian-era footed bathtub. This image foregrounds the themes of time and technology and makes me think of the tub in relation to water and bathing.

My favorite was the Surrealist Collage:

This one has a beautiful space station, a host of astronauts, and a cheap plastic bowl. It’s the only one of the three that picks up on the down/up anomaly. The tub has water in it, which isn’t the case in the dream, but the previous image also associated the tub with water, so that’s something new I can think about. It’s a very amusing image, like a party of astronauts in an orbital hot tub. That whimsical quality makes me think of the astronauts as liminal beings, or as liminal modes of being human, living in the space between heaven and earth.

None of these images is a perfect replica of my dream, but that’s okay. It’s much more stimulating to look at how the different images highlight some features and obscure others, bringing out details I might not have noticed so quickly on my own. As with any form of dream-sharing, the results can vary. Sometimes the image is completely off the mark, to the point where I get annoyed at the AI for being so obtuse. But sometimes the image is so rich and multi-faceted that I feel an immediate “aha!” of grateful insight and recognition.

Downsides

Most of the AI image-generating tools available today are enmeshed in the ethical quandaries surrounding this technology, including its smash-and-grab approach to intellectual property and its massive hunger for energy. How we resolve those issues is still an open question. Also concerning is the bias of AI systems toward the expected and familiar, for instance determining what’s the next most likely word. The creative freedom of dreaming means you never know what the next word is going to be. At some point, the basic determinism of AI may clash with the basic indeterminism of dreaming. Finally, it could be problematic if the AI-generated images were so vivid that they replaced people’s own internal memories of their dreams, like when you see a photo of a childhood event that shapes and perhaps even takes over your memory of the event. Whatever tools you use for dream interpretation, your own experience of the dream should always remain at the center.

[Note: this post first appeared on Psychology Today’s website on April 30, 2025. The additional text below only appears here.]

I tried each of the available Elsewhere styles with this dream, and here’s what the other ones look like:

Comic Book:

This one is pretty good–it gives a sense of how the tub is an improbable vehicle for astronauts to travel. There’s no space station, although the up-down dynamics are strong. I find the faux text distracting.

Modern Illustration:

Ouch. It’s white, there’s something like a space station, and something like a tub. But no astronauts, no space, no movement, no weirdness, none of the atmospherics of the dream.

Storybook:

Aesthetically pleasing, and there’s a white tub… And a few stars, if you look closely. Otherwise it has nothing to do with my dream. I do like the celestial feline in the top right.

Woodblock:

This one has a lot going for it. I didn’t expect the Woodcut style to do much with a space scene, but this one is very close to the perspective I felt in the dream, and it’s good on the use of the tub for astronauts traveling down. The space station is disappointingly simple, however, and I don’t like the two-tone coloring.

I’ll close by saying this is a really fun way of playing with a dream and exploring different possible meanings. With the downsides mentioned above still in mind, I look forward to trying this again soon.

January 30, 2025

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.