Tag: dream research

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SDDb Upgrade

At long last, after many twists and turns, a new and improved version of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb) has been released, just in time for spring! Many thanks to the Elsewhere.to team–Gez Quinn, Kat Juncker, Dan Kennedy, and Victoria Philibert–for their help in the upgrade process.  The SDDb is a growing archive of dream reports and survey data, with analytic tools designed to be used by anyone, from curious newcomers to advanced researchers. The SDDb offers two basic methods of studying dreams. One is to analyze the database’s collection of 18 demographic surveys to discover patterns of sleep and dreaming in relation to variables like age, ethnicity, sex assigned at birth, and religious beliefs. The second is to search the database’s collection of more than 45,000 dream reports gathered from many sources and available to study using built-in tools for identifying, analyzing, and comparing the frequencies of different categories of content.

Many features still need attention, along with better labeling for various questions and categories. Soon I will create written and video tutorials to help users navigate the SDDb’s collections and tools. With so much focus on the upgrade, I’ve been waiting to upload a few new series, and those should now get into the database in the very near future. If you have any suggestions to offer and/or problems to point out, I’d be grateful to hear them.

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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.

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Building the Dream Library

Construction is going well so far on the Dream Library, a stand-alone structure on a rural, forested property near Portland, Oregon. As many friends and colleagues know, the project has taken a long time to reach this stage, but at last it’s beginning to take actual shape. The building will provide a long-term archive for dream-related materials such as journals, books, and art. The journal & book collections of Jeremy Taylor and Patricia Garfield will form the core of the library, along with other donated materials and my own collections.

To help with future activities involving the library, I have established the Dream Library Foundation. The mission of the Dream Library Foundation is to promote dream research, dream-related art, and public education about dreaming. Everyone has innate potentials for dreaming, so everyone can potentially benefit from the Foundation’s mission. To enact this mission, the Foundation will focus its resources on four areas of activity:

1.    Maintaining a physical archive of dream journals, books, art, and other dream-related materials (the Dream Library);

2.     Maintaining a digital archive of sleep and dream-related information (the Sleep and Dream Database);

3.     Providing funding and support for researchers, artists, and educators working with dreams (Dream Library Grants);

4.     Sponsoring in-person gatherings on dream-related topics (Symposia at the Dream Library).

It’s likely that construction will not finish until summer of 2025. We have much to do between now and then…

 

 

 

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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….

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Your Dream Journal: A Gift to Future Researchers

Simple steps you can take to help the future study of dreams.

Sooner or later, people who keep a dream journal realize they are creating a document of more than just personal interest.  They realize their journal is an amazing window into the lived experiences of a unique individual, offering potential insights for psychology, history, anthropology, and many other fields. And they wonder if it would be helpful, under the right conditions, to offer their journals to researchers for study and exploration.

It’s true, dream journals can be profoundly helpful to researchers who want to better understand the powers of the human mind. Some of the most important questions about the nature and meaning of dreams can only be answered by looking closely at the natural flow of dreaming during the course of a person’s life—that is, by looking at a well-tended dream journal.

This, I believe, is the most exciting horizon in the future study of dreams, and we can make huge progress in this direction by gathering high-quality journals from diverse people and exploring them with a variety of creative methods of analysis.

Not everyone who keeps a journal wants to go down this path, and that’s fine. The primary audience of a dream journal is the dreamer him or herself, and it really doesn’t have to expand any further than that.

But if you do have an interest in contributing your journal to the general study of dreams, there are a few simple steps you can take to prepare your journal, and yourself, for the process.

1. Record your dreams well.

The goal is to record your dreams in a way that works best for you, and that researchers can understand and study. Legible handwriting is a good start; many great projects begin with nothing more than a collection of handwritten journals. Audio recordings are another possibility. A file written in a digital word processing format is ideal, and most researchers will want to study a digital transcription of the dreams, in addition to the original recordings.

Make sure to include the date of the dream with each report. Some people date each dream from the day of the morning they wake up; I date my dreams from the day of the night I go to sleep. Either way is fine, just be clear and consistent.

At this point, English is the most widely used language for scholarly analysis.  That will eventually change, but in the meantime, the ideal formatting of your journal would include the original language(s) of the dreams, along with an English translation if needed.

Each dream report should be just that, a report of a dream. It’s best if you include no associations, memories, or comments in the report. Just the dream, please. All of the further associations, etc., can be included in a separate file (see below).

The most helpful dream reports are written in as much detail as possible, especially about the settings, characters, thoughts, and feelings you experience within the dream. And, although it’s not necessary, I think it’s best to report the dream in the present tense—“I see my friend and we say hello,” rather than “I saw my friend and we said hello.”

2. Include additional material.

If you have the time and willingness to collect additional information about your dreams and their context in your life, that would of course be of great interest to anyone studying your journal. The key here is to be organized, and make it clear how the extra material is connected to the dream reports. Otherwise, a researcher could easily get overwhelmed by all the non-dream information, and lose track of the dreams themselves.

It’s helpful, both for the dreamer and for researchers, to know the following: 1) The location of where you were sleeping when you had the dream (the city is usually enough) and the level of familiarity (e.g. home vs. a hotel); 2) The length and quality of your sleep during the night of the dream; 3) The ages of the characters in the dream and their relations to you in waking life.

Drawings, sketches, and diagrams can be very effective for some people in describing their dreams.

Most researchers will be curious about your personal background, family upbringing, etc., so you might consider writing a brief account of your life, sharing whatever you think is most relevant for understanding your dreams.

3. Think about what you want.

Before contacting a researcher, make sure you’ve given some thought to the arrangements you would like to have in place. You should be aware that, sadly, there are very few institutional resources in the world devoted to the study of dreams. Most libraries, universities, and schools of psychology do not have the facilities or financial resources to accept donations of dream journals. However, there are individual scholars in various fields who have experience in working with participants in projects like this. Ideally they would be able to help you with expenses for formatting, translation, etc.

There is currently no commercial value to dream journal data.  Most people are content with two non-financial benefits from the research process. First, they receive a greatly expanded vision of the meaningful patterns in their dreams. No researcher can ever predict where exactly the process will lead, but most people find intrinsic satisfaction in learning more about the deeper meanings of their dreams.

Second, they enjoy the feeling of tangibly helping the cause of dream research and broadening public awareness of dreaming. Once someone learns from personal experience about the transformative powers of dreaming, they naturally wonder how the world might change if more people became familiar with this potent inner source of creativity….

Very important: Think about how much confidentiality screening you want for your dreams. Some people do not mind allowing others to read their “raw” dream reports, while other people prefer to delete some passages and change the names of people and places, to preserve their privacy and the privacy of others. Once the real names in your dreams have been replaced with pseudonyms, it becomes difficult if not impossible to identify with certainty the real characters in the dreams.

And if there are a few dreams in the journal you simply don’t want anyone else to see, that’s okay, go ahead and remove them from what you share.

4. Make sure the arrangements are fair, ethical, and mutual.

Only get involved with researchers you trust. Make sure they understand that if at any point you want to end the research process, that’s it, you’re done, no questions asked.

Take a look at the ethics statement of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and confirm that anyone you deal with is acting in accordance with these principles.

The researchers should report any significant findings to you, and they should consult with you on possible publications that reference your dreams. If you request, the researchers should treat you as a co-investigator, offering you regular updates and opportunities for your feedback and giving you as much public credit as you want to receive.

Your dreams, and your dream journal, are primarily for you. That’s a foundational principle, never to be forgotten. And, in addition to that, beyond the sphere of your personal life, your dreams have an amazing potential to teach many important lessons to other people, now and far into the future.

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Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on November 2, 2018.

 

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What Kinds of Technology Do People Dream About Most Frequently?

50.ford_.crestlinerThe past one hundred years of human history have been dramatically transformed by the invention of several new technologies, each of which has impacted people’s lives in profound and complicated ways.

In light of empirical research showing strong continuities between waking and dreaming, we can hypothesize that modern technologies have also made a tangible impact on the content of people’s dreams.

And indeed, there is evidence in support of that idea. By analyzing a collection of more than 16,000 dream reports available for study on the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), it becomes possible to examine which kinds of technology have most influenced people’s dreams in terms of their frequency of appearance.

The results suggest the newest technologies are not necessarily the most important ones in the world of dreams.

To explore this question I looked at all the dream reports on the SDDb of 25 words or more in length for Females (N=10,168) and Males (N=6,590), and selected the “Technology and Science” category from the 2.0 word search template.

This is a quick and dirty approach, but it has the virtue of providing an easy and relatively straightforward means of getting an evidence-based response to the question.

The results for the Females were 990 dream reports with at least one reference to a word in the “Technology and Science” category, approximately 10% of the total number of dreams. The figures for the Males were 602 and 9%.

Looking in more detail at which terms appeared most frequently (these include singular and plural uses of the term), the results for the Females were these:

Phone, 3.55%

Movie, 3.18%

Video, 1.26%

Computer, 1.2%

Machine, .91%

Radio, .65%

Camera, .62%

Television, .26%

And for the Males:

Phone, 2.69%

Movie, 2.47%

Video, 1.27%

Computer, 1.03%

Machine, 1.02%

Radio, .47%

Camera, .49%

Television, .36%

I did a parallel search with the same two sets using the SDDb 2.0 word search template category for Transportation. These results—24% of the dream reports for both Females and Males had at least one reference to a Transportation word—are much higher than the Technology and Science frequencies.

Looking more closely at specific forms of transportation appearing in people’s dreams, these were the results for the Females:

Car, 9.12%

Boat, 1.92%

Bus, 1.81%

Airplane, 1.49%

Truck, 1.26%

Elevator, 1.16%

Bicycle, .86%

And for the Males:

Car, 8.18%

Boat, 2.12%

Bus, 1.65%

Bicycle, 1.56%

Airplane, 1.46%

Truck, 1.37%

Elevator, .67%

The first thing to note is the remarkable gender balance. On almost all the categories and word clusters, the Female and Male frequencies are extremely close. (The main exceptions are slightly more Bicycle references for the Males, and slightly more Phone, Movie, Car, and Elevator references for the Females.) This consistency across so many terms suggests that modern technologies have impacted men and women about equally.

Secondly, the analysis indicates that the most frequently appearing modern invention in dreams is the automobile. It seems that technologies of transportation have had more of an impact on people’s dreams than have technologies of communications and entertainment.  Add in trucks and buses to cars, and the predominance of the internal combustion engine in dreaming becomes even greater.

Why might this be? I’m not sure, but I wonder if technologies of transportation have more of a visceral impact on people’s lives. Telephones, movies, videos, and computers can be fascinating and absorbing, but they do not directly affect a person’s body with the kind of sensory intensity that people feel during a car ride.

Whatever the explanation, the results of this brief study indicate that the most frequently appearing type of modern technology in dreams is one that was invented more than one hundred years ago. Newer technologies like computers and videos have not (yet) made as big an impression on the dreaming imagination.

Maybe future developments in virtual reality will enable a more powerful stimulation of people’s physiological responses, prompting a rise in VR-related dreams. But that remains a far-off possibility.

Until then, cars remain for most people the dream technology of choice.

 

Note: here are the word strings for the specific technology and transportation searches:

Phone: phone phones telephone telephones iphone iphones. Video: video videos. Computer: computer computers. Machine: machine machines machinery. Radio: radio radios. Camera: camera cameras. Television: television televisions tv tvs.

Car: car cars auto autos automobile automobiles. Boat: boat boats ship ships. Bus: bus buses. Bicycle: bicycle bicycles bike bikes. Airplane: airplane airplanes plane planes. Truck: truck trucks. Elevator: elevator elevators.