Tag: psychology

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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.

 

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Works in Progress

Despite the many crises afflicting the world right now, or perhaps because of them, my Muses have been quite active recently. Urgent, even. They have inspired several writing projects I hope to share soon. 

“Dreams, race, and the Black Lives Matter movement: Results of a survey of American adults” – an article co-written with Michael Schredl, in production with the journal Pastoral Psychology, appearing in the next couple months. Here’s the abstract: “This study considers the relationship between dreaming and race in light of the public protests following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.  Findings are presented from an online survey about dreams and the Black Lives Movement (BLM), gathered from 4,947 demographically diverse American adults sampled between June 15 and June 19, 2020. The results show that the people most likely to have dreams about the public protests were those who support BLM, who are highly educated, and/or who have high dream recall.  The dreams themselves tended to be anxious, fearful, and nightmarish, with several recurrent themes: references to George Floyd, participating in protests, threats to one’s home, concerns about the pandemic, and conversations about BLM. The findings of this study contribute to a growing research literature showing that dreams, dream recall, and dream sharing can vary significantly depending on people’s racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. This study also provides new evidence that dreams have meaningful content relating directly to current events and public affairs. Practical implications for therapists and pastoral counselors are discussed.”

Escape from Mercury – a science-fiction novel, co-edited with T.A. Reilly, in production with a private publisher, to be released on 1/1/22 at 13:00 ICT. The novel portrays an alternate history in which NASA launches a manned mission to the planet Mercury on December 3, 1979, using Apollo-era rocketry that was specifically designed for post-Lunar flights. In the present “real” timeline, those plans were abandoned. The novel reimagines the US space program continuing onward and aggressively pushing beyond the Moon, and suddenly discovering dimensions of our interplanetary neighborhood  unforeseen by any but the darkest of Catholic demonologists. “The Exorcist in Space” is the tagline.

2020 Dreams – a digital project co-authored with Maja Gutman, under contract with Stanford University Press as part of their new Digital Projects Program. We are looking at a large collection of dreams that people experienced during the year 2020, and using a variety of cutting-edge tools of data analysis and visualization to highlight patterns in the dreams and their meaningful connections to major upheavals in collective life–the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental disasters, protests for social justice, and the US Presidential election. We have just reached an agreement with the Associated Press (AP) to use their news data from 2020 as our waking-world comparison set. Our hope is to expand on the findings of Charlotte Beradt and others who have shown how dreams can reflect the impact of collective realities on individual dreams, thus providing a potentially powerful tool of social and cultural analysis.

The Scribes of Sleep: Insights from People Who Keep Dream Journals – a non-fiction book in psychology and religious studies. Currently being written, under contract with Oxford University Press, likely publication in early 2023. This book brings together many sources of research about people who record their dreams over time, and what they learn from the practice.  Seven historical figures are the primary case studies in the book: Aelius Aristides, Myoe Shonin, Lucrecia de Leon, Emanuel Swedenborg, Benjamin Bannecker, Anna Bonus Kingsford, and Wolfgang Pauli. A close look at their lives, their dreams, and their creative works (religiously, artistically, scientifically) suggests that keeping a dream journal seems to appeal to people with a certain kind of spiritual attitude towards the world. The stronger argument is that keeping a dream journal actively cultivates such an attitude….

Here Comes This Dreamer: Practices for Cultivating the Spiritual Potentials of Dreaming – a non-fiction book addressed to general readers interested in deeper explorations of their dreaming. Currently being written, under contract with Broadleaf Books, likely publication in the latter part of 2023. The challenge here, both daunting and exciting, is explaining the best findings from current dream research in terms that “curious seekers” will find meaningful and personally relevant. The book will have three main sections: 1) Practices of a Dreamer, 2) Embodied Life, and 3) Higher Aspirations. The title of the book signals a key concern I want to highlight: to be a big dreamer, like Joseph in the Bible (Gen. 37:19), can be amazing and wonderful, but it can also be perceived by others as threatening and dangerous. Sad to say, the world does not always appreciate the visionary insights of people who naturally have vivid/frequent/transpersonal dreams. I want to share what I hope are helpful and reassuring ideas about how to stay true to your innate dreaming powers while living in a complex social world where many people are actively hostile to the non-rational parts of the mind.

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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 16th 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.”

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The Cultural Dimensions of Dreaming

Psychologists and anthropologists share a lot of common ground when it comes to the study of dreams. Dreaming clearly emerges out of the brain, mind, and personal life experiences of each individual. Yet dreaming also clearly reflects the individual’s cultural environment–the languages, customs, concepts, and practices of his or her broader community. To understand dreams, we have to find ways of understanding both of these dimensions of meaning.

A new wave of anthropological research is expanding our knowledge of how dreams reflect and actively respond to cultural, social, political, and religious influences in people’s lives. Especially in times of collective change and crisis, dreams become a powerful source of insight into the dynamic interplay of psyche and culture.

At a recent gathering of professional anthropologists with an expertise in psychology, dreams were the subject of a lively panel discussion. The Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) held its biennial conference in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico in early April, and the session titled “New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming” was convened by Jeannette Mageo and Robin Sheriff. I was the lone non-anthropologist on the panel, and even though I knew most of the presenters beforehand, I was not really up-to-date with current thinking in their field. What transpired at this panel makes me very excited for the future of anthropological dream research and its potential to contribute to bigger interdisciplinary conversations about the nature and function of dreaming.

Bruce Knauft (Emory University) explored how the practices of dream yoga and deity-identification among practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism produce qualities of consciousness that Western psychologists have recently recognized as “lucid dreaming.” Knauft described the meditative practices, elaborate visualizations, and mantra recitations that Tibetan Buddhists use to achieve dreams of transcendent consciousness. Such dreams, he argued, can fundamentally alter people’s experiences of subjectivity and facilitate the realization of greater levels of self-awareness. Western psychologists are slowly realizing that cognitive processes like these are indeed possible in the sleeping state, in ways that religious traditions have been actively teaching, cultivating, and documenting for centuries.

Roger Ivar Lohmann (Trent University) shared a conversation he had about dreams and religion with one of his informants from the Asabano people of Papua New Guinea. The Asabano live in small hamlets in the forest, where colonial missionaries have converted many of them to Christianity, although with numerous hold-over characteristics from their traditional spiritual beliefs and practices. The Asabano take their dreams very seriously and regard them as valuable evidence supporting their fundamental beliefs about death, heaven, and the spiritual conditions necessary for good hunting. Lohmann described how the reality of dreaming for the Asabano creates a “night residue” effect in their lives—their memories of dreaming directing influencing their waking behaviors and personal ontologies. Especially during times of cultural crisis (e.g. the imposition of colonial ideologies and governmental controls), such dreams creatively integrate new experiences with past memories and traditions to produce what Lohmann called an “autonomic culture updating process.”

Matt Newsom (Washington State University) described his study of a collection of dreams from contemporary college students in Germany, with a focus on collective memories and identity formation in the shadow of World War II. Newsom gathered several hundred dreams from a school in Berlin and found that many of them revolved around struggles with resurgent German nationalism and violence towards immigrants and refugees. In this sample from people living in a predominantly liberal city, the students felt profoundly anxious about these cultural tensions, and they were trying to develop identities that were grounded in some other source of collective meaning and social connection. The question of “where do I belong?” seemed to be at the forefront of their dreaming minds, even though this concern was rarely discussed openly in their waking lives. Newsom said these findings supported the idea that dreams have value “for identifying unspoken social and historical anxieties present in a given society.”

Jeannette Mageo (Washington State University), the co-convener of the session, focused on the importance of image-based metaphors in dreams, and what they can reveal about the mental models we use to make sense of our lives. These models derive from cultural sources, and they shape how we think, feel, and behave. We do not accept them passively, however. Cultural models can produce tensions in an individual’s life, and these tensions are revealed with special clarity and eloquence in dreams. Mageo’s work with contemporary American college students has revealed that problematic cultural models of gender make it painfully difficult for some young adults to develop a strong and authentic sense of identity. In their dreams these models of gender (e.g., “super-masculinity,” “Cinderella”) can be observed, and they can potentially be changed through the introduction of novel metaphors and spontaneous imagery that challenge or defy the models’ strictures.

Robin Sheriff (University of Hampshire), the other co-convener, has been exploring dreams as a source of insight into the experiences of contemporary American college students with social media, celebrity culture, digitally-mediated realities, and emerging adult identities. In this presentation Sheriff described a subset of dreams from young women dealing with the theme of “stranger murder,” e.g., being randomly attacked by a serial killer. Sheriff explored the anxieties, tensions, and conflicts being expressed in these dreams, which relate in complex ways to the highly popular podcast genre of lurid stories about stranger murders. At one level, the dreams function as threat simulations in Revonsuo’s sense of the term, preparations in dreaming for a danger that might actually strike in waking. At another level, Sheriff showed how these dreams critique the cultural practices and social pathologies that give rise to those threats and dangers. Her larger claim was that dreaming offers a special window into the turbulent developmental dynamics of 21st century digitally-mediated subjectivity.

Douglas Hollan (UCLA) was the panel’s designated respondent, and he acknowledged that in recent years, the field of anthropology has not paid enough attention to dreams. The present panel was thus an important step forward towards encouraging anthropologists to pay more attention to a truly cross-cultural phenomenon, one that is deeply rooted in the minds and cultural environments of all humans. Hollan noted the recurrent theme of dreaming as a powerful resource during crises and conflicts, with both personal and collective aspects of meaning. To the degree that these meanings are brought into conscious awareness and integrated with waking life identity, a kind of natural therapeutic process can emerge with potentially transformative effects for individuals and communities. All of the panel presentations gave evidence of this possibility, suggesting many new paths for inquiry, exploration, and research.

Anyone interested in dreams will find the works of these scholars enormously helpful in understanding the cultural dimensions of dreaming. Based on the quality of this panel’s presentations and the mutual enthusiasm of the presenters, it seems likely the future will bring more discoveries and insights from this group and their colleagues.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on April 19, 2019.

 

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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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Keeping a Dream Journal

For anyone interested in learning more about dreaming, I have a simple piece of advice: keep a dream journal.  Record your dreams on a regular basis, track their themes and patterns over time, and you will discover through your own experience many of the key psychological principles that shape the general process of dreaming.  

Beyond that, you may find your journal becomes a unique personal treasure—an invaluable source of insight into your most important concerns, activities, and relationships in the waking world.

You can start a journal at any time by making some retroactive entries.  For example, write out the earliest dream you ever remember, even if it was just a tiny fragment or wispy image.  There it is, the beginning of a dream journal!

Have you ever had a dream of flying, or being chased, or having an intense sexual experience, or seeing someone who is dead appear as if they were alive again?  Write those out, too.  Do you remember any recurrent dreams?  That’s very important to note, because recurrent dreams provide one of the best points of entry for a study of the long-term themes and patterns in your dreaming.

Recording especially memorable dreams from the past can be a good way of initiating a dream journaling practice going forward into the future.  Regular journal-keepers typically place a pad of paper and a pen next to their bedside, and when they wake up with a dream in mind they immediately write it down.  Because these bedside notes are often scrawled in semi-legible form, people will usually transcribe their dreams later in the day, into either better handwriting or a computer word processing system.

People today may want to use voice-to-text programs on their cell phones, which can be just as effective for those who know how to manage the technology.  Whatever method is used, the main goal is to set up a smooth, friction-free process to record as much of the dream as can be remembered, as soon upon awakening as possible.

It is worthwhile to include information about one’s sleep patterns in the journal, since the conditions of sleep often make a significant impact on the dreaming process.  Ideally, each entry has the date, the location where you are sleeping, the time you go to sleep, the time you wake up, and a subjective assessment of the quality of your sleep (e.g., good, fair, poor).  If you do not remember any dreams for that night, at least you have gathered some useful information about your sleep.

If you do remember a dream, the key is to record it in as much detail as you can manage, including aspects of your internal experience (e.g., what you were thinking or feeling during the dream).  When people narrate their dreams they typically leave out numerous details that seem too trivial or obvious to mention.  Yet it is precisely these seemingly worthless details that often become highly significant in later explorations.

Take your time when initially recording a dream, and don’t worry if some aspects of the dream are vague, fragmentary, or impossible to describe.  Just write them out as best as you can.  All of these fragments can be sources of unexpected significance when you look at the dreams over time.

Along with the dream report, a journal will typically include thoughts, memories, and associations that come to mind in relation to the dream.  These comments can be brief or very extensive, depending on your time and inclination.

I find it helpful to give each dream a title, as if it were a poem or short story.  It’s a way of crystallizing in a phrase or image something important about the dream.  The titles also make it easier to refer back to the dreams and sift through the series for recurrent threads of meaning.

One of the greatest values of a dream journal is the way it grows in power and depth over time.  The ever-expanding pool of dreaming experience creates an evolving network of meaningful connections.

Carl Jung, one of the pioneers of Western dream psychology, proposed back in the 1930’s that a series of dreams can provide an extremely useful means of exploring an individual’s life.  In his essay titled “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy,” he presented his analysis of “over a thousand dreams and visual impressions coming from a young man of excellent scientific education.” (116) Jung described his method in these terms:

“[H]ere we are not dealing with isolated dreams; they form a coherent series in the course of which the meaning gradually unfolds more or less of its own accord.  The series is the context which the dreamer himself supplies. It is as if not one text but many lay before us, throwing light from all sides on the unknown terms, so that a reading of all the texts is sufficient to elucidate the difficult passages in each individual one… Of course the interpretation of each individual passage is bound to be largely conjecture, but the series as a whole gives us all the clues we need to correct any possible errors in the preceding passages.” (119-120, italics in original)

Jung’s insight has been actively explored by many people who study dream series over time, and in a future post I will say more about their findings.

For now, I will leave you with this thought: keeping a dream journal is a priceless gift to your future self.

 

Reference:

C.G. Jung, Dreams (trans. R.F.C. Hull), Princeton University Press, 1974.

This post first appeared in Psychology Today, May 27, 2017.