Interpretation Archives | Kelly Bulkeley

February 9, 2024

Freud, Jung, and AI-generated Dream Interpretation

This is a post I recently wrote about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the practice of dream interpretation. In coordination with the team at the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app–Dan Kennedy, Gez Quinn, and Sheldon Juncker–we have been experimenting with “Freudian” and “Jungian” modes of interpretation, and the results are very encouraging. Maybe more than encouraging… I don’t highlight this in the post, but the AI interpretation in “Jungian” mode used the phrase “confrontation with the unconscious,” which was not part of the prompting text for the AI. In other words, the AI seems to have identified this phrase as a vital one in Jungian psychology (it’s the title of the pivotal chapter 6 of his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections) and, without any direct guidance, used it accurately and appropriately in an interpretation . I might even suspect a sly irony in using this phrase in reference to a dream of Freud’s, but that might be too much…

Freud and Jung Sharing Their Dreams: An AI Revival

New technologies are transforming the practice of dream interpretation.

In 1909, on their way by steam ship to give lectures at Clark University in the United States, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung passed the time by sharing and interpreting each other’s dreams. This was a truly a peak moment in the history of dreaming—yet a fleeting moment, too. Soon afterward, their disagreements about psychoanalytic theory worsened, and they finally broke off all relations with each other.

Ever since, we have been left to wonder… What if these two giants of twentieth-century psychology had continued sharing their dreams? What if, instead of becoming estranged rivals, they had collaborated in developing a meta-method that deployed each of their interpretation systems in a flexible yet integrated practice?

An answer to these questions is suddenly coming into focus, thanks to emerging uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in the study of dreams. It is now possible for a carefully trained AI system to generate distinctly Freudian and Jungian interpretations of a dream. We can thus revive the spirit of their epic 1909 dream-sharing journey by offering one of their (already-published) dreams for interpretation by the other and reflecting on the interplay of their dual perspectives.

Freud would likely be curious about the dream Jung reports in chapter 5 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which occurred just before their falling out. Set in a bustling Italian city, the dream centers on the anomalous presence of a medieval knight. Jung is shocked at the sight–“suddenly to see in a modern city, during the noonday rush hour, a crusader coming toward me”—especially because Jung realizes only he can see the knight, who is invisible to everyone else. Jung said the dream anticipated his turn away from Freud and towards a more meaningful search for higher truths, comparable to the Grail Quest.

How might Freud interpret this dream? Using an AI system crafted with the developers at the Elsewhere dream journaling app, where I am an unpaid research advisor, we can apply a “Freudian mode” of interpretation to Jung’s dream. I will quote the first and last few sentences of the AI response:

“The dreamer’s description of a knight in full armor walking through an Italian city suggests a possible egocentric wish. The knight, a figure associated with power, honor, and bravery, might symbolize the dreamer’s desire for recognition and admiration. The fact that the knight is visible only to the dreamer could indicate a feeling of uniqueness or a wish to stand out from the crowd… This dream seems to primarily reflect the dreamer’s egocentric wishes and possibly repressed sexual and aggressive desires. The dreamer might be yearning for recognition and admiration, while also grappling with fears of being overlooked or ignored. The knight in armor could symbolize these conflicting desires and fears.”

This may not be the most profound reading of the dream, but it is easily recognizable as a Freudian approach, with clear connections to psychoanalytic theory. It also happens to be consistent with biographical information about Freud’s view of Jung after the split—as a grandiose savior bent on turning psychology into religion.

Jung, in turn, might want to explore a vivid childhood nightmare that Freud mentions off-handedly near the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. It’s a short dream of his mother, “with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with birds’ beaks and laid upon the bed. I awoke in tears and screaming.” The bird figures referred to strange illustrations from an old family Bible. Freud offers the dream as a self-evident example of an anxiety dream rooted in a sexual wish (i.e., an Oedipal desire for the mother).

How might Jung have interpreted this dream? Using the same AI system in its “Jungian mode,” the interpretation begins like this:

“The dream presents a potent mix of archetypal and personal symbols that indicate a deep process of transformation and individuation occurring within the dreamer’s psyche. The image of the mother, a universal symbol of nurturing, care, and life itself, is presented in a peaceful, sleeping state. This suggests that some aspect of the dreamer’s relationship with the nurturing, caring part of their psyche is in a dormant or inactive state.”

The interpretation goes on to highlight the religious symbolism of birds:

“Birds are often symbols of spiritual messengers or intermediaries between the earthly and the divine. In the Bible, they can represent both divine providence and impending doom.”

And it offers surprisingly sensitive words of encouragement to endure the inevitable struggles of psychological growth:

“The dreamer’s intense emotional reaction upon awakening – tears and screaming – indicates that this transformation is not easy or painless. It’s a significant upheaval, a profound shift in the dreamer’s self-concept and understanding of their place in the world. But this upheaval, this confrontation with the unconscious, is a necessary part of the individuation process. It’s through such confrontations that we come to know ourselves more fully, to integrate the disparate aspects of our psyche into a more cohesive, more authentic whole.”

This AI-generated interpretation can be readily identified as a Jungian approach and a plausible application of his theory to Freud’s dream. Moreover, it accords with what we know of Jung’s post-split view of Freud—that he never found a way to integrate the aggressive authority of the father with the intuitive wisdom of the mother.

The significance here is not just revealing alternate perspectives on these two dreams and their famous dreamers. This little experiment with Freud and Jung is like a horseless carriage, using a new technology to solve old problems. What will happen when these tools are applied to new problems, when they are used by a wide range of people to explore currently unknown opportunities? What new models of the mind and practices of healing will emerge? What new theories of art, culture, religion, and social change will appear on the horizon?

Maybe it’s time to start developing a “Prophetic mode”…

Note: Originally posted in Psychology Today, February 8, 2024.

January 21, 2024

New Dream Posts from Psychology Today

Here are the recent posts I have written for Psychology Today, going back to the middle of last summer. Although each one is written as a stand-alone discussion of a special topic in dreaming, I now realize they also form a series of interrelated texts, like the chapters of a book I didn’t consciously know I was writing….

The Varieties of Dream Recall – the different practices that might be helpful for people with different types of dream recall.
The Trickster in Dreams – an archetypal figure of mischief and transformation often appears in dreams to express the chaotic energies of the unconscious.
Dreaming and Spiritual Practice – focusing especially on big dreams and long-term dream journals.
The Playful Art of Dream Cartoons – a look at the history of dream cartoons, up to Roz Chast’s new book I Must Be Dreaming.
Dreams of Losing a Sports Hero – prompted by the departure of Damien Lillard from the Portland Trailblazers NBA basketball team.
Who is Most Likely to Dream of the Dead? – some people are more likely to experience visitation dreams of those who have already died.
Nightmares of Climate Change – dreams reflect our interactions with the increasingly disturbed natural environment.
The Many Functions of Dreaming – a response to those who reject any claim about the alleged functions of dreaming.
Atheism and Dreaming – why some atheists dismiss dreams, and why they might reconsider doing so if they knew about current dream research.

May 31, 2021May 31, 2021

How to Begin a Dream-Sharing Process

When someone is about to share a dream with me, either in a group setting or one-on-one, I always ask for two things. First, please tell the dream in the present tense, not the past tense, so the dream feels immediate, like it’s happening right now. And second, please share the dream twice. After you have told it once, tell the whole thing again.

Most people are fine with the first request. It’s pretty easy to notice the difference between past vs. present tense, and to appreciate the benefits of the latter. Compare “I walked on a beach where birds were flying and saw my friend” with “I walk on a beach where birds are flying and see my friend”—the present tense brings the action of the dream right into the here-and-now, which is a big goal in my way of working with dreams (influenced by Jeremy Taylor and Montague Ullman). If the dream is a terrifying nightmare, it might be more comfortable for the dreamer to use the past tense, to maintain a healthy distance from the anxious feelings. But in almost all other circumstances, the use of the present tense in sharing a dream has enormous benefits in terms of improving the empathetic quality of the ensuing discussion.

The second request is a harder sell. After someone tells me a dream, they are usually eager to hear my response. Especially if the dream is a long and intricate one, the dreamer is probably relieved to have reached the end of the narration. It takes real energy to share a dream in full detail with someone else, a real commitment to personal self-revelation. And what do I say at this moment? “Thanks, now would you please tell it again? From the start?”

Almost always, there’s a brief flash of disappointment when I ask this. The dreamer’s face falls a little bit, and they might even say “Really? You want me to repeat the whole thing?” They don’t say it, but I know they’re thinking, “Hello? Did you not hear the words that were coming out of my mouth?” When I shrug and say I know it seems awkward, but please, I’d appreciate it, the dreamer usually takes a deep breath and starts again, with a slightly put-upon tone of voice, and none of the gusto from the first telling.

And then a few seconds in, their tone of voice changes. We’re back in the dream again, and now the dreamer’s interest in what’s happening grows beyond what arose in the first telling. New features and elements emerge, as the dreamer focuses more on qualities of the experiential space within the dream, and less on making sure to give an accurate narration of the beginning, middle, and end of the dream. By the time the dreamer has finished with the second telling, we are fully immersed in that dream space, and ready for a deeply reflective conversation about its possible meanings.

Telling the dream twice at the outset of a dream-sharing process has at least two specific benefits. First is the surprising appearance of new details. The second telling inevitably differs in various ways from the first telling, and these differences can be a source of fruitful exploration. To be clear, this is not meant to be a “gotcha!” game to challenge the dreamer’s memory. Rather, it’s a way of allowing the dreamer to re-enter the dream space as fully as possible, and thus better able to describe the multi-sensory complexities of that environment.

The second benefit of the re-telling is helping to develop what I think of as a “holistic awareness” of the dream. The first time I hear someone else’s dream, it’s a journey of total surprise and discovery. I have no idea what’s coming next. I’m trying to listen carefully to the dreamer, notice and remember each detail, and keep up with the narration. The second time I hear the dream I already know what’s going to happen, so when the dreamer begins the description, I can now appreciate each detail in the context of the whole. Dreams rarely take the form of simple linear narratives. More often, they have multiple dimensions of activity and awareness, mixing up the conventional elements of story-telling. Things can happen out of chronological order, or in weird patterns of simultaneity. The first telling of the dream inevitably squeezes all of that into a single form, while the second telling enables each detail of the dream to be appreciated within a holistic awareness of the dream in its entirety.

None of this guarantees that important meanings will emerge from the discussion. But if you start a dream-sharing process by following these two principles—tell the dream in the present tense, twice—you will be in the best position to hear whatever potentially valuable meanings the dream may be expressing.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, April 19, 2021.

August 28, 2019February 25, 2024

Dreams and Politics 2020: Preparing for New Research

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, and I’ve published several articles and a book documenting my findings up to now. Although I’m not the only scholar looking into these issues, I think it’s fair to say no one else has devoted more research effort towards illuminating the connections between people’s sleep and dream patterns and their political views in waking life. Perhaps everything I have found so far is wrong and misguided; hopefully I have at least clarified some of the right kinds of questions that should be addressed.

Guided by almost thirty years of experience, these are some of the questions I will be asking in 2020:

In what specific ways are political beliefs, concerns, and issues reflected in dreams?
How do people relate to politicians as characters in their dreams?
Do liberals and conservatives sleep and dream differently from each other?
Can dreams help people think more clearly and creatively about politics?
Do dreams have special relevance for political progress on environmental issues?

I have several projects in the works aiming at gathering new data to help answer these questions. Many of these projects are collaborations with other researchers, which will hopefully expand the scope of the studies and open up new perspectives on this relatively unexplored area of dreaming experience. More on these projects soon….

Below is a list of my previous publications on this topic, with brief descriptions of the contents and findings.

Attitudes Towards Dreaming: Effects of Socio-Demographic and Religious Variables in an American Sample. (Co-authored with Michael Schredl.) International Journal of Dream Research 12 (1): 75-81.

https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/IJoDR/article/view/54314

Using data from a survey of 5,255 American adults, we looked at correlations between people’s attitudes towards dreaming and numerous demographic variables. We found an especially intriguing link between positive attitudes towards dreaming and high levels of concern about global climate change, one of the most prominent political issues in the world today. People who report little or no concern about climate change also tend to have negative attitudes towards dreaming.

Lucrecia the Dreamer: Prophecy, Cognitive Science, and the Spanish Inquisition (Stanford University Press, 2018)

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27061

Lucrecia’s story is the most dramatic and well-documented case in history regarding the intersection of dreaming, politics, and prophecy. She was a young, illiterate woman in 16^th century Spain whose prophetic dreams accurately foresaw a national catastrophe, and yet King Philip II ordered the Inquisition to arrest her on charges of heresy and treason. A vivid cautionary tale about what can happen when dreamers speak truth to power.

Three blog posts about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the 2016 election

https://bulkeley.org/199-dreams-donald-trump/

https://bulkeley.org/dreams-of-hillary-clinton-and-donald-trump/

https://bulkeley.org/dreams-of-the-2016-u-s-presidential-election/

These are reports on dreams I was gathering and analyzing during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign. Included are some dream reports grouped around thematic categories: friendliness with a candidate, anticipations, political disagreements, opposition to Trump, openness to Trump, and work & place. The study of 199 dreams specifically about Donald Trump involved a statistical analysis of the word usage in the dreams, and a comparison of the results with other kinds of dreams. Here is my conclusion: “To summarize these findings, it seems that when Trump appears as a character in people’s dreams, he does not disrupt the whole process; people continue dreaming more or less the way they typically do. But he does have a tangible and measurable impact on certain aspects of those dreams. A dream about Donald Trump typically involves fewer women and more talking, touching, and references to money and work. Men seem to become pacified around Trump in their dreams, while women seem to become more instinctually primed.”

A March 2016 blog post about “The Sleep Deprivation Hypothesis”

https://bulkeley.org/donald-trump-the-sleep-deprivation-hypothesis/

A response to media discussions about the then-candidate’s admitted lack of sleep, with psychological speculations about his public behavior in light of empirical research about the effects of chronic sleep deprivation.

Dream Recall and Political Ideology: Results of a Demographic Survey. Dreaming 22(1): 1-9.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-28147-001

Using data from a survey of 2,992 American adults, the study found a significant difference between political liberals and conservatives on questions of dream recall. People on the political left consistently reported higher recall on all types of dreams than people on the political right.

2008 Election Dreams: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain

https://bulkeley.org/2008-election-dreams-clinton-obama-mccain/

A collection of blog posts about dreams gathered by Sheli Heti and posted on her metaphysicalpoll.com website. The Obam dreams in particular are notable for their unusually mystical qualities.

2008 Dreams Shed Light on Obama’s Values. San Francisco Chronicle (August 17)

https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Dreams-shed-light-on-Obama-s-values-3272948.php

Reflections on the two fascinating dreams then-candidate Barack Obama described in his memoir Dreams From My Father, with psychological speculations about the future potentials of his Presidency.

American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else (Beacon Press, 2008)

https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2008/04/unravelling-mea.html

This is a book-length study of dreams and politics in American society during 2006-2007. A group of ten people from various parts of the country, six of them political conservatives and four liberals, kept a year-long journal of their dreams, which they discussed with me in relation to their political views and the dire situation of the country at that time (Iraq and Afghanistan wars, housing crisis, impending recession). The book offers a summary of the research I had done on this topic so far.

Sleep and Dream Patterns of Political Liberals and Conservatives. Dreaming 16(3): 223-235.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-11853-006

Using data from a collection of detailed surveys from 234 American adults (134 liberals, 100 conservatives), several patterns emerged in relation to their sleep and dream behaviors. Here is what I found: “Conservatives slept somewhat more soundly, with fewer remembered dreams. Liberals were more restless in their sleep and had a more active and varied dream life. In contrast to a previous study, liberals reported a somewhat greater proportion of bad dreams and nightmares. Consistent with earlier research, the dreams of conservatives were more mundane, whereas the dreams of liberals were more bizarre.”

Dreaming in Christianity and Islam: Culture, Conflict, and Creativity (co-edited with Kate Adams and Patricia M. Davis) (Rutgers University Press, 2009)

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/dreaming-in-christianity-and-islam/9780813546100

This is an edited book, written in the shadows of 9/11, as an effort to find common ground across religious and national differences. We started the project in the early 2000’s, and it took a long time to pull all the different chapters together. Patricia wrote a brilliant chapter on a significant auditory dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., his “vision in the kitchen” of 1956.

Dreaming of War in Iraq: A Preliminary Report. Sleep and Hypnosis 6(1): 19-28.

http://www.sleepandhypnosis.org/ing/Pdf/d2b0fb2ad2c247cab33ccd64a45d737f.pdf

A study of dreams related to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began on March, 19, 2003. The dreams I gathered came from various sources, and I grouped them into several thematic categories: personal symbols, op-ed commentaries, political transformations, empathetic identifications, and fearful anticipations.

The Impact of September 11 on Dreaming. (Co-authored with Tracey L. Kahan.) Consciousness and Cognition 17:1248-1256.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810008001141

During the fall quarter of 2001, Prof. Tracey Kahan was teaching a class at Santa Clara University on sleep and dreaming, and she had asked the students to keep a dream journal during the quarter. After the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 in New York City, Tracey and I engaged in a study of the students’ journals. We found that the 9/11 attack appeared in several people’s dreams, both directly and indirectly. We also found that on all the basic measures of people’s cognitive functioning during their dreams, there was no difference between the dreams that did or did not have 9/11-related content. In other words, the terrorist attack impacted what people dreamed about, but not the way they dreamed.

Dream Content and Political Ideology. Dreaming 12(2): 61-78.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015398822122

I called this a “pilot study,” involving 56 people, divided into four equal groups: liberal males and liberal females, conservative males and conservative females. I had a most recent dream from each person, and a content analysis of the dreams suggested an intriguing difference regarding political ideology: “people on the political right had more nightmares, more dreams in which they lacked personal power, and a greater frequency of “lifelike” dreams; people on the political left had fewer nightmares, more dreams in which they had personal power, and a greater frequency of good fortunes and bizarre elements in their dreams. These findings have plausible correlations to certain features of the political ideologies of people on the left and the right, and merit future investigation in larger-scale studies.”

It’s All Just a Bad Dream. San Francisco Chronicle (December 6): A27.

https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/It-s-All-Just-a-Bad-Dream-2723578.php

An Op-Ed article I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle about people’s dreams during the agonizing wait to determine who would be the winner of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, Al Gore or George W. Bush. Most of the dream reports I gathered were nightmares from liberals: “Aliens taking over the Earth and turning all humans into slaves; terrorists attacking the country with biological weapons; the dreamer falling into the ocean and being chased by a hungry shark or losing control of a car and driving off a cliff — these are some of the distressing images that are filling Democratic imaginations.”

Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society (Editor) (State University of New York Press, 1996)

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-2346-among-all-these-dreamers.aspx

This book gathers the best researchers I could find on the theme of dreams and social justice. Included are chapters on dreams in relation to education, sexual abuse, ecology, crime, race, gender, religion, and cross-cultural conflict. In chapter 10 I present a report on my first direct research project devoted to dreams and politics: “Political Dreaming: Dreams of the 1992 Presidential Election.” The chapter describes several dreams about the 1992 candidates (Ross Perot, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton), the debates, the media coverage, voting, and all the fears, hopes, and disappointments surrounding the election. The goal of this project was to prove Calvin Hall wrong in his claim that dreams “have little or nothing to say about current events in the world of affairs” (The Meaning of Dreams, 1966).

Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion, and Psychology (State University of New York Press, 1999)

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-3023-visions-of-the-night.aspx

The final chapter of this book is titled “Dreaming in Russia, August 1991,” an essay originally published in the Stanford University alumni magazine. It recounts my waking and dreaming experiences at a conference of dream researchers in Moscow, right in the midst of the failed military coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Quest for Transformational Experience: Dreams and Environmental Ethics. Environmental Ethics 13(2): 151-163.

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-3023-visions-of-the-night.aspx

One of the first articles I ever published, this also appears as chapter 5 in Visions of the Night. In response to environmental philosophers who point to Western dualistic thinking as a primary source of our society’s mistreatment of nature, I suggest that dreaming is a psychologically innate and highly effective means of stimulating the transformation of dualist thought and the opening of new conscious awareness towards the environment.

Dreaming in a Totalitarian Society: A Reading of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams. Dreaming 4(2): 115-126.

https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1994-43941-001

This was based on a paper I wrote for a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago Divinity School, perhaps in 1988 or 1989. The course was taught by Peter Homans, and it focused on the neo-psychoanalytic theories of D.W. Winnicott and Heinz Kohut. I had been reading The Third Reich of Dreams on my own, and for the final paper of the class I used Winnicott’s ideas about play, transitional space, and the True vs. False Self, to analyze and reflect upon the dreams gathered in Beradt’s book. Here was my core Winnicottian claim: “Dreams are one of the ways that humans, from childhood to adulthood, develop the relationship between their inner psychic reality and external social reality. Beradt suggests that dream studies can be a potent means of studying troubled societies, and of helping those societies overcome their problems.”

October 4, 2014February 25, 2024

Digital Dream Analysis: A New Article on Word Search Methods

The latest issue of the journal Consciousness and Cognition has an article of mine titled “Digital dream analysis: A revised method,” that’s the fruition of several years of data-driven work. It lays out the latest developments in testing and refining the word search template programmed into the Sleep and Dream Database, a digital archive and search engine designed to promote scientific dream research. The original article I wrote using this word search method was in a 2009 issue of Consciousness and Cognition, titled “Seeking patterns in dream content: A systematic approach to word searches.” The new article builds on that earlier piece and extends it in two ways.

First, it presents a revised, 2.0 version of the word search template that has many improvements on the 1.0 version presented in the 2009 article. I’m sure there will be more refinements in the future, and hopefully more researchers developing their own templates as well. But for now, the 2.0 version is useful as a well-tested and fairly comprehensive tool for analyzing dream content simply, quickly, and reliably.

Second, the article applies the 2.0 word search template to a number of previously studied collections of dreams from very high quality sources (Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle, J. Allan Hobson, and G. William Domhoff). In doing so I followed the advice of Kurt Bollacker, database engineer for the SDDb, who suggested I take “classic” studies in dream research from the past and try applying my new method to their same data. That’s what I have done in this article: use the word search method to analyze the same sets of dreams those researchers studied, so we can see what the new method can and cannot tell us about meaningful patterns in dream content.

Here is the abstract for the article. The whole thing, I’m told, is available for free download until November 22, 2014.

“This article demonstrates the use of a digital word search method designed to provide greater accuracy, objectivity, and speed in the study of dreams. A revised template of 40 word search categories, built into the website of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), is applied to four “classic” sets of dreams: The male and female “Norm” dreams of Hall and Van de Castle (1966), the “Engine Man” dreams discussed by Hobson (1988), and the “Barb Sanders Baseline 250” dreams examined by Domhoff (2003). A word search analysis of these original dream reports shows that a digital approach can accurately identify many of the same distinctive patterns of content found by previous investigators using much more laborious and time-consuming methods. The results of this study emphasize the compatibility of word search technologies with traditional approaches to dream content analysis.”

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.