empathy Archives | Kelly Bulkeley

August 21, 2019

Empathy and Dream-Sharing: New Research Shows a Connection

Dreams, like good pieces of fiction, can induce empathy about other people’s lives.

What happens in your mind when you share a dream with another person? When they share a dream with you? How does dream-sharing impact or influence the way you think?

Modern psychologists have developed many different models of how dreams are formed and what functions they serve in the brain-mind system. But few researchers have investigated the psychological dynamics of sharing dreams in natural, healthy settings (i.e., not in a clinical or therapeutic context).

This might seem like an insignificant topic. Don’t most people get bored listening to other people’s dreams? Many people never even remember their dreams, let alone talk about them. Isn’t dream-sharing really just an obscure and esoteric practice?

In a survey that Michael Schredl and I analyzed for a recent article in the International Journal of Dream Research, we asked more than five thousand American adults about their attitudes towards dreams. Included in the survey was this question: Do you agree or disagree with the statement “I get bored listening to other people talk about their dreams”? About 8% of the participants strongly agreed with that statement, and another 17% somewhat agreed. So it is fair to say that at least a quarter of the population does not want to be involved in any dream-sharing.

It also fair to say that a larger proportion of people reject that point of view. About 19% of the participants strongly disagreed with the idea that other people’s dreams are boring, and an additional 24% said they somewhat agreed. In the middle were the remaining 31% who neither agreed nor disagreed. Overall, then, 25% of the participants in this survey could be termed “anti-dream-sharing, as opposed to 43% who were “anti-anti-dream-sharing.”

This finding parallels the results of other surveys I have been gathering for several years on the question of how often people talk about their dreams with others. The data are publicly available in the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb). With a total of more than 11,000 total participants (5,568 females, 5465 males), these are the results:

Almost every morning: 3% f, 2% m
Several times a week: 9% f, 6% m
About once a week: 9% f, 8% m
2 or 3 times a month: 15% f, 10% m
Less than once a month: 42% f, 43% m
Never: 22% f, 30% m

Although these are responses to a different question, they match up pretty well with the results from the “I get bored” question. About a quarter of the participants say they never talk about their dreams with other people. More than a quarter of the participants (much more for the females) say they talk about their dreams at least several times a month. The largest group talk about their dreams every once in a while—more than never, but less than once a month.

These results indicate that many people are not interested in dream-sharing and never do so. The results also indicate that a large number of people in contemporary American society are interested in talking about their dreams with others, and do so on a fairly regular basis. The existence of people in the former group should not deter us from studying the behaviors of the latter group. Especially when we widen the lens to include anthropological and historical research on dream-sharing in other cultures, this emerges as anything but a trivial or insignificant topic.

This is the broader context in which to welcome the appearance of a pioneering new research paper by Mark Blagrove and his colleagues in a recent issue of Frontiers in Psychology. Titled “Testing the Empathy Theory of Dreaming: The Relationships Between Dream Sharing and Trait and State Empathy,” the paper is co-authored by Sioned Hale, Julia Lockheart, Michelle Carr, Alex Jones, and Katja Valli. The paper presents results from two experiments showing how dream-sharing might have the specific psychological impact of stimulating empathy. Blagrove et al. make four claims in the summary (to which I have added brief parenthetical comments):

“Study 1 found that trait empathy is significantly correlated with frequency of telling dreams to others, frequency of listening to others’ dreams, and positive attitude toward dreaming.”

(This suggests that people who are highly empathetic also tend to be highly interested in dreams.)

“Study 2 found that dream sharing increases empathy in the listener/discusser toward the dream sharer.”

(Listening to another person tell you their dream has the effect of stimulating empathy.)

“We propose that the dream acts as a piece of fiction, which others can explore with the dreamer and that, like literary fiction, can then induce interest in and empathy about the life of the dreamer.”

(This idea enables dream research to connect with theories about the psychological effects of fiction, narrative, and story-telling, which could be a very productive new path to pursue.)

“Increased dream telling across society might decrease differences between countries in levels of empathy and counteract current societal decreases in empathic concern and perspective taking, the main two components of empathy.”

(Here, Blagrove et al. take a daring imaginative leap in suggesting that if we expand practices of dream sharing across social and cultural boundaries, the enhanced capacities for “empathic concern and perspective taking” could help in resolving problems and conflicts at larger scales of collective life.)

Some of these findings, proposals, and future visions will be familiar to people who are already deeply experienced in dream-sharing practices. If you have followed the writings and workshops of people like Jeremy Taylor, Montague Ullman, Robert Bosnak, Clara Hill, and many others over the years, you may have come to these same insights yourself. Blagrove and his colleagues have added a valuable new source of empirical evidence in favor of the positive psychological impact of sharing dreams with other people.

If you’re someone who might locate yourself in the bored by/never talk about dreams category, it’s not too late to try! Sharing dreams helps you expand your empathic awareness and broaden your moral imagination. In most cultures through human history, dream-sharing has been a normal, natural part of life. Thanks to Blagrove et al., we have more reason to appreciate the capacity of dreams to contribute not only to individual well-being but to collective health as well.

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Full citation: “Testing the Empathy Theory of Dreaming: The Relationships Between Dream Sharing and Trait and State Empathy,” Mark Blagrove, Sioned Hale, Julia Lockheart, Michelle Carr, Alex Jones, and Katja Valli, in Frontiers in Psychology (2019) 10:1351.

This essay first appeared as a post in Psychology Today, August 7, 2019.

June 22, 2018

A Festival of Dreams

Several hundred people from all over the world gathered in Scottsdale, Arizona this week to discuss the latest findings and methods in dream research. The 35^th annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams featured five days of panels, workshops, and artistic events. A lively mix of academic symposium, spiritual retreat, and collective self-experiment, the IASD conference offers a stimulating variety of approaches to the nature and meaning of dreams.

Here are several highlights from the sessions I attended.

Remington Mallet, a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Texas, Austin, described exciting new research on “the ability to communicate in real-time between sleeping and waking.” This theme has been explored in fictional form in various movies and television shows, from “Inception” and “The Matrix” to “Dream Corp. LLC.” Mallet analyzed the sleeping-waking communications portrayed in these popular media in relation to current scientific knowledge about what is and isn’t possible. Mallet concluded that the media portrayals are far ahead of the actual science, but new technologies are moving quickly in the very same directions envisioned by the movies and television shows.

Sharon Pastore and Tzivia Gover of the Institute for Dream Studies gave a moving presentation on the common themes in the dreams of those who care for people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Building on research on dreams and bereavement, they described how simple methods of exploring dreams can be helpful for the caregivers, whether professionals, friends, or family members: “Dreamwork can guide decisions in the care and communication with loved ones, as well as coping/healing.” In additional to academic research, Pastore and Gover drew on personal experiences of caring for a parent with dementia to illuminate the value of dreams for the caregiving process.

Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, gave a fascinating keynote address on the role of sleep and dreaming in memory formation. This has been a controversial topic in the field, with some researchers questioning the connection between sleep, dreams, and memory. Stickgold granted that dreams rarely include episodic memories (i.e., direct, unmodified re-playings of a waking event). But he laid out extensive evidence to support the idea that different stages of the sleep cycle are important for memory stabilization. Sleep seems to help people better remember the emotionally relevant aspects of a waking experience. He didn’t talk a lot about dreams, but he did note some studies “demonstrating the explicit incorporation of waking learning experiences into dream content… [S]uch incorporation is accompanied by enhanced sleep-dependent consolidation of the learning task.” In other words, the more people dreamed about the learning task, the better they remembered it the next day. The best part of Stickgold’s address, from my perspective, was his willingness to admit he does not have an easy answer to the “hard question” of how to relate the psychological experience of dreaming with the neurophysiological processes of sleep. It was a refreshing statement of epistemological humility, and quite a contrast to the views of his predecessor at the Harvard lab, J. Allan Hobson, who had no doubt about the right answer to the hard question.

Linda Mastrangelo, a psychotherapist with a private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, explored in detail a series of her own dreams in which she found unexpected connections with her family heritage, ancestral roots, and places of origin. She combined psychology, myth, art, and sacred geography to trace out a map of her dreaming landscapes. The frequency of certain places in her dreams inspired her to learn more about her own spiritual grounding in special features of the land, and to deepen her awareness of the wisdom traditions and ecological teachings that have grown around these places over the ages. As Mastrangelo made clear, this is a process that anyone can pursue in exploring their own symbolic connections between dreaming and place.

Mark Blagrove, a professor of psychology and director of the sleep laboratory at Swansea University in the UK, proposed a theory of dream function that centered on the evolutionary value of empathy. Drawing on the studies of Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley about fiction and empathy, Blagrove presented evidence in favor of a theory that telling dreams has the effect of eliciting greater empathy towards the dreamer, which strengthens interpersonal bonding and thus enhances reproductive fitness. Blagrove made thought-provoking use of Mar and Oatley’s psychological analyses of fictional literature as a powerful means of simulating social experience and boosting our capacity to understand other people who are different from ourselves—that is, boosting our capacity for empathy. After exploring the connections between empathy and dream-telling, Blagrove passed the microphone to Katja Valli, an assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Skvode, Sweden, who agreed beforehand to offer constructive comments on the proposed theory. This was an admirable exercise in scholarly dialogue, and a valuable opportunity for everyone in the audience to observe the kind of critical scrutiny that can help improve our ideas and sharpen our awareness.

Next year’s IASD conference will be held June 21-25 in the Netherlands, at the Rolduc Abbey conference facility in Kerkrade, about 200 kilometers south of Amsterdam. The Abbey is a glorious 12^th century structure where the IASD has hosted two previous conferences. I can’t wait!

Note: this post first appeared on June 21, 2018 in Psychology Today.

November 1, 2010

Proud to Be a Primate

“Our goodness is as deep as our darkness”—that was Kimberley Patton’s gloss on the findings of Franz de Waal, a primatologist who spoke on Saturday at the American Academy of Religion conference in Atlanta. De Waal’s new book, Age of Empathy (2010), shows that cooperation, reciprocity, and conflict-resolution are just as natural in primates as are aggression and competition. Contrary to the Social Darwinist assumption that nature is bloody “red in tooth and claw,” de Waal’s research proves that non-human animals have all the basic building blocks of morality. This means that human morality is not just a matter of controlling our violent, selfish instincts, but rather enhancing and refining our other instincts for empathy, compassion, and sociability.

Also commenting on de Waal’s research was Armin Geertz, who highlighted the core idea of evolutionary biology that “all life is continuous.” What seems unique about humans is actually an extension of abilities and behaviors we find in other animals. Looking ahead to the future of primate research, de Waal said, “the trend is toward the continuity of humans and animals.”

Is this true of religion? When elephants mourn their dead, chimpanzees dance in rainstorms, and wolves howl at the moon, are we seeing the building blocks of spirituality? Can animals have mystical experiences? De Waal said it was difficult as a biologist to address such questions, but he did not rule out the possibility of affirmative answers.

Score a point for scientific open-mindedness.

What about dreaming? Both Patton and Geertz, professors of religious studies, mentioned dreaming as a universal human experience that factors into all religious traditions. De Waal did not talk about dreams directly, but the cognitive abilities he has identified in non-human primates (empathy, imagination, pretend play, etc.), combined with the similarities in brain functioning across all primate species, strongly suggest that humans are not the only dreamers in nature.

In his earlier book Chimpanzee Politics (1998) de Waal talked about the dreams of people who study primates:

“That chimpanzees are experienced in the first place as personalities is evident from the dreams of those of us who work with them. We dream about these apes as individuals, in the same way that other people dream about their fellow human beings as individuals. If a student were to say that he or she had dreamed of an ape I would be no less surprised than if someone claimed to have dreamed of a human.

“I clearly remember the first dream I had about the chimpanzees. In it my preoccupation with the distance between them and me was apparent. During this dream the large door to their quarters was opened for me from the inside. The apes were pushing each other aside in order to get a good look at me. Yeroen, the oldest male, stepped forward and shook my hand. Rather impatiently he listened to my request to come in. He refused point blank. That was out of the question, he said, and besides, their society would not suit me: it was much too harsh for a human being.” (41)