This is an article from the journal Pastoral Psychology 58 (2009), 93-106. It was the first time I tried applying word search methods in the analysis of a specific aspect of dream content in a series of dreams from a particular individual. Although I don’t foreground the idea, it’s an early attempt at “blind analysis” in terms of an approach to identifying continuities between dream content and the individual’s concerns and activities in waking life.
The Technology of Dreaming
“For myself I never found need of more than four or five hours’ sleep in the twenty-four. I never dream.”
So said the famously hard-working inventor Thomas Edison in 1921 in his Diary and Sundry Observations. Edison claimed the only truly restful sleep was totally unconscious, and he regarded dreaming as a waste of mental energy that could be put to more productive use in waking life.
Nearly a century later Larry Page, another iconic figure of technological progress, offered a very different approach to dreams. In a 2009 commencement address at the University of Michigan he said, “You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning? Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23.” Page awoke from his dream and immediately began writing notes about downloading the entire worldwide web with all links intact—the seed idea for what he later built into Google. His advice to the graduates: “When a really great dream shows up, grab it!”
Which of these two world-changing innovators had it right? Should we strictly limit our sleep and ignore our dreams as Edison did? Or should we listen to our dreams and try to follow them as Page recommended?
The world is filled with people trying to be like Edison, working nonstop and vowing to “sleep when I’m dead,” but this behavior appears foolish and self-defeating in light of current research in sleep medicine. Numerous studies over the past several decades have shown that inadequate sleep has a negative impact on human health, with harmful effects on our emotional, cognitive, physical, and immunological well-being. What counts as “adequate” differs for each individual, but only a tiny portion of the population can sleep four or five hours a night and function the next day in an optimally healthy way.
The basic message of this research: A sure way to make yourself less productive is to artificially limit your individual sleep needs.
We can’t do without sleep. But can we do without dreams?
The scientific evidence is less clear on this point. Some people insist they never remember their dreams, although closer investigation usually finds they can recall a few dreams, just very infrequently. (Even Edison mentioned a couple of dreams in his diary.) Demographic surveys indicate most people remember one or two dreams a week. Women tend to remember more dreams than men, and younger people more than older people.
Intriguingly, researchers have found that dream recall can be dramatically increased with little more than simple encouragement and having a pad of paper and pen by one’s bedside, as Page did. It’s fairly easy, in other words, to remember more dreams if that’s what you want. Build it and they will come.
Neuroscientists have begun to fill in the picture of what happens in the brain while we’re dreaming. During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when most dreams seem to occur, activity slows down in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible for focused rational thought. Activity increases in the limbic system, an older part of the brain involved with emotions, memory formation, and instinctual responses (e.g., fight/flight, sexual arousal). Neural activity also increases in regions of the brain devoted to visual processing.
These findings make perfect sense in relation to empirical studies of dream content showing it to be loosely structured, highly associative, emotionally varied, and filled with intense visual images. The neuroscience of REM sleep matches up well with people’s subjective experiences of dreams, giving us more confidence there’s a real connection here between brain and mind.
Dreaming now seems best understood as the psychological expression of a distinctive mode of brain functioning devoted to memory, emotion, and playful meaning-making. It is inherently and powerfully creative, not only in producing experiential worlds of astonishing depth and realism but also in stretching our minds to make surprising new connections between disparate ideas, feelings, and impressions. Contrary to the stereotype of dreams as nothing but random nonsense, current research shows their content is meaningful at many levels, accurately reflecting our most important concerns and activities in waking life.
Edison was right to this extent: We can ignore our dreams, if we so choose. But Page was right on the bigger point. Dreaming is not wasteful; it has its own neurological integrity and psychological value. It taps into a deep inner wellspring of creative thinking that leads us beyond what is to imagine what might be.
In this sense we can think of dreaming as a kind of innate technology of the mind, a natural tool of creative consciousness.
The question for dream researchers then becomes, how can we use that tool better? How can we refine it, improve it, make it stronger?
This might sound like the start of a Dr. Frankenstein tale, with mad scientists rashly meddling in mysteries they don’t understand. But we are not the first to ask these questions. Throughout history, in cultures all over the world, people have used a variety of techniques to actively stimulate their inborn capacity for powerful dreaming.
For example, the Native American ritual of the vision quest involves several days and nights of solitary fasting in the wilderness as a means of inviting a revelatory dream. The Muslim practice of istikhara uses special prayers, purifications, and sleep positions to elicit a dream that helps resolve an important question or decision. The Indian sage Naropa taught his followers how to control their dreams through yogic methods of chanting, breathing, visualizations, and bodily postures. Temples devoted to the Greek god Asclepius thrived for centuries as holy sites where people came to worship, diet, exercise, and sleep in hopes of receiving a healing dream.
Cultural practices like these represent time-honored, ethically sensitive techniques for intensifying dreams and deriving more insight from them.
Eventually we will integrate our best models of dream content with highly advanced neuroscientific maps of brain activity during sleep, and this will set the stage for a new generation of technologies that directly stimulate the brain to produce more creative dream experiences. By fine-tuning the neural parameters of sleep we’ll be able to filter out the noise and amplify the signals of the dreaming imagination.
Undoubtedly this will be good news for the movie business. As George Lucas recently said at the USC School of Cinematic Arts when asked to predict the future of film, “The next step is to be able to control your dreams. You’ll just tap into a different part of your brain. You’re just going to put a hat on or plug into the computer and create your own world… We’ll be able to do the dream thing 10, 15 years from now. It’s not some pie-in-the-sky thing.”
That timeline seems about right to me, although I would envision devices that generate a more interactive and mutually respectful process between waking and dreaming, with a focus on awareness and growth rather than control for control’s sake.
Beyond their entertainment value, these dream technologies of the not-so-distant future will help us cultivate a more unified consciousness that takes advantage of our brain’s amazing creativity throughout all phases of the sleep-wake cycle.
####
Note: This essay also appears on the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-bulkeley-phd/the-technology-of-dreaming_b_4378041.html
New Dissertations in the Study of Dreams
This year I’ve had the honor of serving as an advisor for three doctoral dissertations in the study of dreams. Dianne Jackie Frost at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Cynthia S. Sauln at Sofia University, and Mary Walsh at San Francisco Theological Seminary have done highly innovative work in exploring some of the most important and potentially transformative aspects of dreaming experience. Each of them has shown amazing devotion and diligence, and their findings are truly original contributions to the field.
Dianne Frost’s dissertation for her Ph.D. in Depth Psychology is titled “Engaging With the Imaginal: A Study of Women’s Dreamwork.” Her study focuses on six women at a counseling center who participated in a group process of sharing dreams, exploring their images, and following their changes over a seven-week period (using methods drawn from the works of Steven Aizenstat, Jack Zimmerman, Virginia Coyle, Mary Watkins, and others). Each of the women came to the process from a place of pain and crisis (interpersonal violence, depression, addiction, body image issues, etc.), and Frost shows how their dreams accurately reflect their emotional concerns and give witness to their suffering. More importantly for therapeutic purposes, the dreams point the way towards healing, towards potentials for new life and new growth beyond the challenging conditions of the present. As the women shared their dreams and discussed possible dimensions of meaning, Frost found they developed a new depth of trust in their own strength, resilience, and creativity.
My favorite quote comes from the woman using the pseudonym “Cadence.” Cadence told Frost she had always looked to outside sources for guidance and advice in her life, but the insights she was gaining from her dreams made her realize she has a reliable source within herself:
“I felt like I needed someone else to guide me through, and this process really allows me to do that on my own. It’s like I’m my own innate healer, with knowledge and images that only I can tap into and create a relationship with and learn from.”
Nothing in Frost’s approach limits it to women with these kinds of problems; her way of working with dreams could be usefully applied with many other groups of people who are striving for greater health and wholeness.
“In My Dreams I Am the Hero I Wish to Be: A Mixed Methods Study of Children’s Dreams, Meaning-Making, and Spiritual Awareness” is the title of Cynthia Sauln’s dissertation for her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Sofia University (formerly the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology). Sauln recruited 32 children between the ages of 6 and 12 who were willing, with their parents’ permission, to describe a vivid or unusual dream. She invited the children to draw pictures of their dreams, and she asked them to fill out two surveys designed to assess their spiritual and religious beliefs. Sauln says in her introduction,
“For the purpose of this study, children’s spirituality is defined as an awareness of the divine or something larger than themselves that can provide meaning for waking life events and understanding of the world around them. Especially for children, it is a personal experience that may be expressed as a ‘knowing’ and an interpretation of the mysteries found in nature, animals, relationships and connections with people, dreams, and/or in their religious practices and beliefs.”
Drawing on the work of Kate Adams, C.G. Jung, and others, Sauln argues that dreams can play a vital role in children’s spiritual development. She shows the close connection between spirituality, health, and creativity in childhood, with dreams as a mode of experience bringing them all together. Ironically, many teachers and parents were so skeptical about dreams in general that they would not give their children permission to participate in Sauln’s study, even though the children themselves were invariably curious about their dreams and eager to discuss and draw pictures of them. This made the data-gathering process much more difficult than Sauln expected.
However, there was a silver lining to these difficulties. Her extra efforts to recruit participants led her to ultimately gather a group of children with an unusual degree of ethnic diversity. There were several Hispanic children in her study whose dreams seemed especially significant in relation to their waking spiritual beliefs. In my SDDb research I’ve found some evidence of relatively high Hispanic interest in spiritually meaningful dreams. I wonder if future research from Sauln or others might explore Hispanic dream experiences in more detail.
Mary Walsh’s dissertation for her Doctor of Ministry in Advanced Pastoral Studies from San Francisco Theological Seminary is titled “Prophetic Imagination and the Neuro-physiology of Trauma in Substance Abusing Adolescents.” Walsh is a practicing psychotherapist whose doctoral studies have examined the theological dimensions of suffering, caregiving, and healing. For two years she worked as a therapist at a high school for troubled adolescents, with a focus on their dreams in relation to several other measures of mental and physical health. The students at her school came from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds, and many of them were suffering multiple symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In addition to talking about their dreams, she measured the students’ heart rate variability to track their neuro-physiological coherence during the treatment process. Walsh’s use of sophisticated biofeedback technology will make it possible to illuminate new dimensions of dreaming and its role in mind-body healing. I’m very curious to see what further uses can be made of biofeedback technologies like these.
Walsh has gathered an extremely valuable set of data that provides unique insights into the life experiences of young people at the most neglected margins of society. Although she still has some writing to do, her project is putting together a compelling argument in favor of the therapeutic effectiveness of group dreamsharing for this poorly-served population.
It should be obvious I’m very proud of these three researchers! Each of them has stayed true to her original vision and persevered in her scholarly work despite all manner of obstacles and static from uncomprehending administrators, teachers, etc. Their success bodes well for the future of dream studies.
The Wondering Brain: Dreams, Religion, and Cognitive Neuroscience
Here is a pdf of an chapter I wrote for a book published in 2011, Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages (edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biro) (Peeters), pp. 75-85:
The Distinguishing Features of Big Dreams
If someone presented you with two sets of dreams, one of most recent dreams and one of highly memorable dreams, you could predict with a high degree of confidence which type of dream was in which set, based only on word usage frequencies.
The set with more references to flying, air, family, animals, fantastic beings, Christianity, and death is more likely to consist of highly memorable dreams.
This is a testable hypothesis that emerges out of a comparison of the SDDb baselines for most recent dreams (MRDs) and highly memorable dreams (MemDs), available here. To be clear, it’s a prediction of probability, not certainty. Some highly memorable dreams have none of these elements, while some most recent dreams have several of them. But according to the SDDb baselines, it is the statistical tendency of highly memorable dreams to contain significantly more of these elements than we generally find in most recent dreams.
Whether or not this hypothesis has any practical application, it adds new evidence in support of the theoretical claim that dreams are meaningfully structured not just for the individual dreamer but also in relation to each other. There really are different types of dreams, and their differences can be expressed in increasingly precise terms.
Other researchers such as Harry Hunt and Don Kuiken have proposed psychological models to account for different types of dreams (what Hunt calls “the multiplicity of dreams”). I am not yet at the point with the SDDb baselines to feel comfortable engaging directly with their approaches, but that is definitely a long-term goal.
At this stage I want to look more closely at the higher-frequency MemD elements and try to understand what they might contribute to the dreams’ long-term impact on waking awareness.
Flying: Not all dream references to flying involve magical powers–some relate to the flight of birds, or flying on airplanes, or floating in water, or time “flying” by. But many of the references are indeed about people flying magically, and I think it makes good sense that overall, MemDs have significantly more flying references than MRDs. I would be surprised if it were otherwise, based on the recurrence of magical flying dreams through cross-cultural history. Genuine flying dreams tend to be quite vivid and realistic, and it’s reasonable to assume that such unusually stimulating sensations would make a lasting impact on waking awareness.
Air: Some of the air references occur in flying dreams, but in most MemDs the air references appear in different contexts: the dreamer is struggling to breathe, or facing a tornado, or noticing the wind blowing. I don’t know about dreams of wind, but certainly with dreams of tornados and potential suffocation the memorability of the experience is likely to be very high. A tornado is the most powerfully destructive form of air in nature, and suffocation is a perennial threat to human life, perhaps especially in sleep for people who snore or have apnea.
Family: References to family members appear often in MRDs; they appear even more often in MemDs. I think it’s fair to say that most people’s strongest emotional relationships (both positive and negative) are with family members. Thus it makes sense that their appearance in a dream correlates with high memorability. Looking in more detail at the word search results, references to parents (e.g., mother, father, mom, dad) tend to be the highest, suggesting that dreams in which the individual is cast as a child or in a child’s role are more likely to be memorable.
Animals: Based on any of several different theories (psychoanalytic, developmental, evolutionary), it could be expected that MemDs would have a higher proportion of animals than MRDs. Psychoanalytically, animals symbolize powerful instinctual energies. Developmentally, animals appear more often in children’s than in adults’ dreams, and MemDs are often recalled from early in childhood. In evolutionary terms, animals in dreams may reflect ancestral threats that we are innately primed to notice and remember.
Fantastic Beings: This category by definition includes characters who are not “real,” so their appearance in dreams naturally arouses some degree of heightened awareness and emotional impact. Many of them are perceived as extremely frightening and dangerous to the life of the dreamer. I was surprised by the SDDb baseline results that the MemDs do not have more fear-related emotions than the MRDs, but perhaps what makes some MemDs different is the supernatural source of the fear. There is a connection to be made here with the notion of “minimally counterintuitive supernatural agents” as used in the cognitive science of religion–dreaming is a rich experiential source of people’s religious and spiritual beliefs about such beings.
Christianity: Many references to Christianity in both MRDs and MemDs are relatively trivial references to Christmas, or mild oaths, or a person’s name. But more often in the MemDs there are direct references to interactions with Jesus, battles with demons, visiting heaven, and worshipping in church. In a majority-Christian country like the U.S., where all the SDDb baseline participants reside, this seems like an expectable result. Insofar as Christianity, like most religions, is concerned with deep questions of morality, suffering, and faith, any dream that refers to religious teachings is likely to register more memorably in the dreamer’s awareness.
Death: Whether considered in religious or secular terms, death surely counts as a major existential concern of human life. Dreaming itself has long been mythologically associated with death, and cultural traditions all over the world have stories about dreams as a portal to the afterlife. In MemDs the theme of death takes many forms: other characters dying or being killed right in front of the dreamer, dead relatives appearing as if alive (i.e., visitation dreams), and, more rarely, the dreamer him or herself dying. When the prospect of mortality arises in a dream, it’s not surprising that the individual takes notice and remembers.
What do these seven higher-frequency MemD elements have in common?
For one thing, several of them involve “counter-factuals,” i.e., phenomena that are literally impossible in ordinary waking life. Magically flying in the air, encountering fantastic beings, seeing people who are dead appear as if alive–these are strikingly anomalous experiences that stand out from ordinary life and make a big impression on memory.
Secondly, several of the MemD themes involve dire threats to the individual’s life and well-being. Dreams of death, demons, monsters, wild animals, suffocation, and tornados naturally arouse a host of psychological and physiological responses that can literally seize the dreamer’s attention and hold it long after waking.
Thirdly, a few MemD themes relate closely to the prominent themes of children’s dreams generally, with more animals and higher family references. As I noted earlier, the SDDb baseline for MemDs includes numerous childhood-era dreams reported by children and adults, so it is definitely skewed toward children’s dream content. That means the differences between MRDs and MemDs could be explained as artifacts of the differences between adults and children. I grant there will be a large degree of overlap between highly memorable dreams and children’s dreams–precisely because the most memorable dreams people often recall are dreams from childhood.
Not all children’s dreams are big dreams–but many big dreams are dreams that have been remembered from childhood.
Dream Education = Religious Studies Education
This is an excerpt from a panel on dream education at the recent conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. My co-panelists were Phil King and Bernard Welt, with whom I wrote Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education.
Any class on dreams that occurs within a school context must, at a minimum, provide educational benefits consistent with the school’s mission. These benefits usually include critical thinking, literacy skills, knowledge acquisition, global citizenship, etc. All of us on the panel agree that classes on dreams can do a wonderful job of providing these educational benefits and contributing to the general goals of almost any kind of school.
But dream classes can do more than that. Indeed, dream classes are always doing more than that, whether or not the teacher and students are explicitly aware of it. Something happens when dreams enter the classroom, something very different from other topics of study. Each of us on the panel has different ways of talking about that educational surplus. For me, what’s interesting is how every class on dreams becomes at some level a class on religious studies. By that I mean a class that studies human expressions of ultimacy via symbols, metaphors, and myths. The historical aspect of this may be most obvious. Prior to the rise of psychology as a Western academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, the primary arena in which people shared, discussed, and explored their dreams was religion–in Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the spiritual traditions of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Any class that’s trying to provide a solid base of knowledge about dreams can’t ignore the history of religions. This is true whether you are teaching in psychology, literature, biology, or any other discipline—as soon as you start telling your students about dreams, you’ll need to talk about religious history, too.
I understand this might seem daunting to educators without any training or background in comparative religious studies. I’m not saying you have to include large amounts of this material in your curriculum. But I am saying you should think carefully about how you’re going to present the topics of your class within this bigger historical framework. You should let your students know there IS a bigger historical framework, even if that’s not the specific focus of your class.
There’s another way that dream classes become religious studies classes, even more important than the historical aspect. Whenever dreams become a topic of classroom discussion, the students are inevitably prompted to reflect on their private dream experiences. The class may not explicitly involve personal dream sharing, or keeping a journal, or anything directly about the students’ own dreams—but I guarantee you, the students are thinking about their dreams in relation to what’s coming up in the class. Especially if the teacher is a good one and gets the students excited about the topic, they’re going to be curious to explore their own dreams. And once they do that, they’re very likely to come across themes, questions, and experiences that go to the heart of many of the world’s religions—for example, the prospect of death and an afterlife, the struggle of good and evil, the illusory nature of reality, prophetic anticipations of the future, nightmarish suffering and existential dread, haunting encounters with supernatural beings, and so forth.
Teachers can ignore all this if they wish, but I think it’s better if they at least recognize that their students are wondering about these kinds of issues in their dreams and thinking about how the class is, or is not, helping them make better sense of their experiences. Again, this doesn’t mean you have to devote extensive class time to the religious implications of dreams in people’s lives. You could devote some time to this topic, of course, and I think you’d be surprised at what your students would say if given the chance! But it’s enough if you simply let the students know that, just as people in the past drew religious inspiration and philosophical insight from dreams, so do many people today. It’s not a matter of ancient superstition carrying over into the modern world, but rather a recognition that humans in all times and places, up to and including us today, are dreamers, and our dreams bring us into contact with ideas, feelings, and energies that most cultures through history have regarded as religiously meaningful. Whether or not we use religious language, the personal impact of certain dreams can be intensely meaningful and even transformative. As dream educators, we have to give our students some degree of informed awareness of those spiritual dimensions of dreaming potential.