Tag: dream research

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Reflections on Among All These Dreamers (1996)

The first time I attended an annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams was in Santa Cruz in 1988. For the next several years (London in 1989, Chicago in 1990 (which I hosted), Charlottesville, Virginia in 1991) these conferences gave me an opportunity to learn more about the various ways in which people were exploring the origins, functions, and meanings of dreaming. One thing that struck me right away was that several people were looking at dreams not only as a source of personal insight but also as a source of insight into collective issues and concerns. Based on my own studies so far, this seemed like an important idea for dream researchers to develop further, even if it ran counter to the predominantly individualistic approach of most psychologists at that time.

Inspired by these colleagues at the IASD, I put together an edited book, Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society, which was published in 1996 by State University of New York (SUNY) Press as part of the Series in Dream Studies edited by Robert Van de Castle. Each of the chapters is a written version of material presented at an IASD conference and shaped by those conversations. Here are the chapter titles:

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

The conclusion presents what I consider a “Soc. 2 Manifesto,” drawing upon ideas developed during the teaching I did at the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1993 in the yearlong Social Sciences core sequence titled Self, Culture, and Society (Soc. 121-121-123), commonly known as Soc. 2. Max Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the modern world is a central notion here, which I believe casts a new and more urgent light on the cultural value of dreaming and its innately spiritual qualities.

The title came to me in a flash. One day while working on the book I thought, maybe I could use a phrase from Nietzsche. I stood up, took The Gay Science from my bookshelf, flipped it open, and almost immediately landed on Aphorism 54 and the following paragraph:

“Appearance for me is that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it make me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more—that among all these dreamers I, too, who ‘know,’ am dancing my dance; that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence; and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all and thus also the continuation of the dream.” (translation by Walter Kaufman, emphasis in original)

The book’s cover was not my design, although I’m okay with the trippy interplanetary image and vibrant magenta color. The SUNY Series in Dream Studies had a house style they wanted each new book to use, and that’s what we did here. The back cover endorsement from Montague Ullman was especially appreciated since he is one the true pioneers in the application of dream interpretation methods to group programs for community mental health.

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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.