Tag: dreaming

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Dreaming and Technologies of the Sacred

This is the written version of the presentation (with a 7-minute time limit) I made on Sunday, January 11, to the attendees of the Dream x Engineering Symposium at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thanks to Adam Horowitz, Michelle Carr, Karen Konkoly, and all the others who organized and participated in the symposium.

Dreaming and Technologies of the Sacred

Thank you, it’s an honor to be here.

I’d like to share with you a working hypothesis, drawn from the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, that I believe has practical importance for dream engineering:

Any dream technology will be more effective the more sacred, and the less profane, the experiential context in which it is deployed.

Here is a quote from his 1959 book:

The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane… The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are heirophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere… The sacred is saturated with being.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane (1959), 12

I can gloss this passage by saying:

The sacred is conceived as a break into ordinary time and space, a rupture in the monotony and homogeneity of profane existence.

The sacred brings us closer to the really real, the time of origins, the center of the cosmos.

Without having more time to elaborate on this concept in the abstract, let me offer two sources of empirical evidence in favor of my working hypothesis.

First are the religious rituals of dream incubation practiced throughout history, in cultures all over the world, all of which share the goal of moving the dreamer away from the profane, and towards the sacred: by means of fasting, prayer, and purifications, and by means of sleeping in a special place, like a mountain, cave, or graveyard.

Dream incubation is the original form of dream engineering, and its guiding principle is maximizing the sacred qualities of the dreamer’s experience.

To be clear: It doesn’t matter if you believe it is an experientially sacred context, it matters if the dreamer believes it’s an experientially sacred context.

The second source of evidence is the “lab effect” that has bedeviled scientific sleep research from its earliest days.

I’ll share three comments that sleep lab researchers have made to me over the years:

  • Robert Van de Castle: after thousands of nights of sleep lab observations, he only heard of one reported wet dream.
  • Allan Hobson: he admitted the most interesting and intense types of dreams usually happen outside the lab.
  • Ernest Hartmann: he found that when chronic nightmare sufferers slept in his lab they had fewer nightmares, because they knew they were being observed all night and felt safer because of it.

From the perspective of Eliade and the working hypothesis I’m offering to you, the lab effect is a measure of how a profane setting can homogenize dreaming by diminishing its  range and intensity.

In closing, I will mention two new efforts to develop dream technologies that put the working hypothesis into practice.

First is the Elsewhere.to app for dream journaling, for which I serve as a research consultant and investor.

There is, of course, a profane quality to the cell phone for many people. But starting with its name, Elsewhere invites users to go beyond the profane space of the “this-here,” and to open themselves to another, more sacred way of perceiving and experiencing the world and their lives, through the prism of their dreams and the deep archetypal patterns that emerge when you track them over time.

The design, graphics, layout, features, image styles, and interpretation modes of Elsewhere have all been crafted by people who share this deep respect for the innate wisdom of the dreaming mind.

The second new effort represents a much older form of technology, a library, which I’m calling the Dream Library, nearly completed, intended as a long-term archive of books, journals, and art works related to dreaming.

Set in a rainforest, in a building of hand-crafted wood, the Dream Library will offer a permanent physical space for projects and gatherings devoted to the study of dreaming.

It is designed to be as non-profane as possible, and to elicit a tangible sense of the sacred potentials in everyone’s dreams.

And perhaps, one day, it will be the site of a future gathering of dream engineers.

Thank you.

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Why the Elsewhere Dream Journaling App Is the Best

As both a dreamer and a researcher, I find myself completely enchanted by the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app. Amazed. Smitten. Blown away. Impressed beyond all reckoning. And very excited about the future for dreamers all around the world. 

For the longest time, I wondered what it would take to create a dreamer’s playground: a private, safe, fun place to gather your dreams and freely explore them using a variety of high-quality tools and methods. It always seemed like an impossible fantasy… And now, Elsewhere has made that vision a reality by creating a garden of oneiric delights where you can play with your dreams, celebrate their multiplicities of meaning, and follow your curiosity wherever it leads. 

The Ethics of Online Dream Interpretation

Anything that has great potential for good also has great potential for harm. I would not be involved with Elsewhere were it not for its total commitment to an ethically minded approach, which I translate as simply doing your best to respect the dream and the dreamer. Treat the dream and the dreamer as ends, not means, as gifts to be honored rather than resources to be exploited. That’s the spirit that animates every aspect of the app’s design, from the back-end coding to the front-end user interface.

In practice, this underlies the policy that all information entered by Elsewhere users is privacy protected and will never be sold to a third-party. If for any reason you want your dreams back, you can have them, and all records of them will be removed from the app.

None of the tools or features within Elsewhere will tell you in a single, definitive way what your dreams mean. Instead, you are offered a variety of suggestions and possibilities from multiple perspectives.  Hopefully some of these interpretations will lead to helpful insights, but the ultimate authority is always held by you, the dreamer. Only the dreamer knows for sure what their dream means. 

New Features

Elsewhere is now available in more than 30 languages, which means these tools are potentially accessible to more than 99% of the human population. This bodes well for the future spread of dream awareness and education all around the world.

The primary function of the app, beyond recording and storing your dreams, is offering you a variety of tools to analyze their contents. These tools include ways to track the appearance of recurrent characters (e.g., parents, friends, celebrities), places (e.g., a beach, classroom, family home), and symbols (e.g., water, gun, mirror).

By recording your dreams on a regular basis, you build up an awareness of psychological rhythms that you may never have noticed within yourself before. You may also notice in reflecting on a long series of dreams that you can distinguish your unusual, highly memorable “big dreams” even more clearly, now that you have a better sense of the basic patterns underlying all your dreaming. 

Elsewhere users have become very creative in combining different features to enhance their dream journaling practice. In the past two years, the resources of artificial intelligence (AI) have been built into the app, providing what I now find are its two most stimulating features:

  • AI image generation: Elsewhere will create AI-generated images based on your dream and rendered in your chosen aesthetic style: Woodblock, Surreal Collage, Retro Camera, Storybook, Comic Book, Modern Illustration, Old Illustration, along with the option to write your own prompt. For me, this is the tool that yields the most surprising and intriguing results. The images are sometimes bizarrely different from my dreams, but even weird images can be thought-provoking if I look more closely at the image, not for what is missing but rather for what has been enhanced and highlighted beyond what I first noticed in the dream.
  • AI interpretations: Elsewhere also offers AI-generated interpretations of dreams in several different modes: Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, Biblical, relational, spiritual, Lacanian, and the Elsewhere house mode, “Shadow.” These interpretations do not substitute for sharing dreams with other people, but they can provide multiple perspectives quickly and easily, giving the dreamer valuable input to consider while reflecting on their dream. Some of the interpretations are obvious, and others are completely off-base, but here, too, I am frequently surprised by the system offering ideas and viewpoints I have not considered and appreciate being brought to my awareness. 

Natural Therapy

The phrase “natural therapy” comes from Robert Kegan’s classic work of developmental psychology, The Evolving Self (1982). In the final chapter of this book, Kegan talks about the simple, non-specialized resources in ordinary life that support our psychological welfare, resources he believes have naturally therapeutic effects even if they are not administered by mental health professionals. He urges us to study these resources more closely:

“Rather than make the practice of psychotherapy the touchstone for all considerations of help, look first into the meaning and makeup of those instances of unselfconscious ‘therapy’ as these occur again and again in nature…[and seek] an understanding of ‘natural therapy’–those relations and human contexts which spontaneously support people through the sometimes difficult process of growth and change.” (256)

Although Kegan does not directly mention dreams in this chapter, I believe that dreaming and dream-sharing have these exact qualities and benefits. There is a tremendous amount of evidence from history and anthropology supporting the connection between dreams and healing. This connection is natural in the sense of being universally accessible and emerging without conscious intention, and yet it is also culturally amplified in responding creatively to the shared symbolic world of the dreamer’s waking reality. 

 Now, with the help of the powerful tools available in Elsewhere, more people can explore this resource in greater depth than ever before. This will hopefully be of special value to people who may not need formal psychotherapy but can still benefit from gaining more awareness and insight into their unconscious fears, conflicts, and desires. 

To be clear, if you need for help from a mental health professional, you should seek it out right away. As a matter of policy, Elsewhere explicitly says it does not claim to provide the services of a psychotherapist. However, in line with Kegan’s thinking, I suggest that Elsewhere does contribute to a form of “natural therapy” by supporting and enhancing people’s access to the beneficial powers of their own dreams. As these potentials begin to emerge into realities, it is worth remembering that dreaming has huge advantages for promoting the collective mental health of large communities insofar as it is free, accessible to everyone, and highly personalized in its relevance to the lived experiences of each individual. 

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Here is an introductory post I wrote about Elsewhere two years ago:

The Elsewhere Dream Journaling App

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The Importance of Dreaming for Memory

It may seem hard to believe for those who rarely remember their dreams, but psychologists have found strong evidence that sleep and dreaming are closely intertwined with the dynamics of memory. Whether or not the dreams are consciously recalled in waking, the dreaming process seems to play a valuable role in the underlying system by which our memories are created, stored, and retrieved.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that different stages of sleep support different aspects of memory consolidation, and that sleep deprivation can severely disrupt learning, memory, and other cognitive functions. According to the “ontogenetic hypothesis” of Howard Roffwarg and colleagues, the high proportion of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in infancy and early childhood contributes to healthy brain development, which includes processing new experiences and building a foundation of primal memories. And new research by Deniz Kumral and colleagues has provided neuroscientific evidence to support the direct involvement of dreaming in the learning and memory formation process.

Dreaming of the Past

Even a brief look at the content of dreams confirms this close connection with memory. Dreams are often filled with vivid and realistically detailed images of past experiences with people, places, and activities, sometimes years or even decades later. Some past experiences, especially from childhood and adolescence, can recur in dreams throughout one’s life. These early memories become a kind of template for future dreaming, a filter through which dreams evaluate new experiences and weave them into our ongoing sense of self.  Sigmund Freud made it a cardinal principle of psychoanalytic interpretation to look for a dream’s roots in the dreamer’s memories of early childhood experiences and fantasies.

In addition to personal memories, dreams sometimes include references to family and cultural memories. Particularly in cases with traumatizing events in the communal past, the memories evoked in such dreams can be painful. However, these dreams may also provide an opportunity for generational witnessing, for keeping these sad historical truths alive in present-day awareness and documenting them for the benefit and understanding of those in the future.

Dream Journaling as a Practice of Memory

Keeping a dream journal makes it easier to remember previous dreams and track their patterns over time. Many people find it enjoyable, and even healing in a way, to review a long series of their dreams from the past and reflect on what has changed or evolved in their lives and what has remained stable and consistent. Especially in our later years, a dream journal becomes a kind of time machine that enables people to revisit the most meaningful moments and relationships from their distant past. It becomes possible in this process to discern the great arc of one’s life journey along what Carl Jung called the path of individuation, at the end of which we hopefully find a sense of wholeness and final actualization.

This is true even for those people who rarely remember their dreams. Dream recall tends to increase simply by means of an increased interest in and awareness of dreaming. In other words, the more dreams you want to remember, the more you probably will remember.

 

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, August 11, 2025.