Tag: religion

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Religious and Non-Religious People: A Survey of their Dreams

People who are not Christian and not religiously observant report higher dream recall and a higher frequency of most typical dreams. That’s one of the initial findings from a study I’m doing on the demographics of dreaming, based on survey results from 2992 American adults.  Most religious traditions regard dreams as spiritually significant.  But the people who are most engaged with their dreams in present-day America tend to be those who are not affiliated with mainstream Christianity and who rarely or never attend worship services.

Compared to Protestant and Catholic Christians, people who answered “Other/None” to the question of their religious affiliation reported the highest frequency of dreams of chasing, sexuality, falling, flying, and being able to control their dreams.  Similarly, people who never attend religious worship services have higher dream recall and higher frequencies of many types of dreams as compared to people who attend worship services once a week or more.  These findings are consistent with the results presented in chapter 3 of my 2008 book American Dreamers:

“Non-religious people report more of every type of dream, especially sexual dreams.” (91)

That finding came from a survey in 2007 of 705 American adults.  The appearance of the same pattern in the 2010 survey suggests the correlation may be worth pursuing for the new light it can shed on the psychology of religion.

The new survey has the advantage of including narrative dream reports from many of the participants.  I’m just beginning to sift through this data using word searches and other methods of analysis.

Here are a couple of short nightmares from the “Other/None” people who never attend worship services:

“I often have nightmares about spaceships, or unknown forces coming across a horizon, often with a sense of impending doom. The anticipation of death lasts and lasts and lasts…eventually i wake up.”

“I was being chased by a huge blob monster that looked like purple jello. I shot it with a rifle, but it broke up into several monsters. I ran into a house that looked like a Disney castle, and it swallowed the house.”

Here are two from Born-again Christians:

“I was falling in a fast freefall with no end in sight and as I went further I know I was trying to scream but only a low gutteral sound was coming out. I heard myself make that noise and sat up sweating and scared.”

“I was chased and attacked by demons. I tried to “rebuke” them in the name of Christ, as I’ve heard you should do in real life if ever confronted by demons, but they just kept coming toward me. They were hitting me, throwing me around and otherwise tormenting me. I woke up in a cold sweat; only time I can remember that happening. I was a teenager at the time, but I was so freaked out, I woke up my mother. She came and slept in my bed the rest of the night.”
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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)

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Freud and Neuroscience: A Return to Origins

A chapter I wrote with that title appears in the recently published book Disciplining Freud on Religion: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Gregory Kaplan and William B. Parsons (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).  Here is the abstract: “Freud developed psychoanalysis on the basis of a neurological model of human mental functioning. Scholars and clinicians who value Freud’s theories but disagree with his materialist reductionism have generally tried to downplay the neurological roots of psychoanalysis by suggesting that his scientific rhetoric merely reflects a nineteenth-century worldview that Freud’s own ideas were destined to transform. Meanwhile, critics of psychoanalysis have insisted on the inseparability of Freud’s later theories from their earlier medical context, the better to reject psychoanalysis as outmoded pseudoscience. In neither case are Freud’s original interests in the neural underpinnings of psychological life examined with a fair and respectful eye. This chapter aims to recover and update the neurological foundations of psychoanalysis, with a special focus on the implications for Freudian theories and methods in the study of religion.”

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Dreaming in Christianity and Islam

Bulkeley_LAt a time when Christianity and Islam appear to be mortal enemies locked in an increasingly bloody “clash of civilizations,” new insights are needed to promote better mutual understanding of the two traditions’ shared values.  Dreaming in Christianity and Islam: Culture, Conflict, and Creativity (edited by Kelly Bulkeley, Kate Adams, and Patricia M. Davis (Rutgers University Press, 2009) provides exactly that.  This new book is a collection of articles by international scholars who illuminate the influential role of dreaming in both Christianity and Islam, from the very origins of those traditions up to the present-day practices of contemporary believers.

Dreams have been a powerful source of revelation, guidance, and healing for generations of Christians and Muslims.  Dreams have also been an accurate gauge of the most challenging conflicts facing each tradition.  Dreaming in Christianity and Islam is the first book to tell the story of dreaming in these two major world religions, documenting the wide-ranging impact of dreams on their sacred texts, mystical experiences, therapeutic practices, and doctrinal controversies.

The book presents a wealth of evidence to advance a simple but, in the contemporary historical moment, radical argument:  Christians and Muslims share a common psychospiritual grounding in the dreaming imagination.  While careful, sustained attention will be given to the significant differences between the two traditions, the overall emphasis of the book is on the shared religious, psychological, and social qualities of their dream experiences.

Throughout their respective histories Christians and Muslims have turned to dreams for creative responses to their most urgent crises and concerns.  In this book the contributors apply that same imaginative resource to the current conflict between the two traditions, seeking in the depths of dreaming new creative responses to the global crisis of religious misunderstanding and fearful hostility.  Included in the book are chapters on dreams in the Bible and Qur’an; on the early history of Christian and Muslim beliefs about dreaming; on religious practices of dream interpretation; on the dreams of children, women, college students, and prison inmates; and on the use of dreams in healing, caregiving, and creative adaptation to waking problems.

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Sleep, Dreaming, and Human Health

250px-AlbertusMagnusDominican University’s Albertus Magnus Society will present a lecture titled “Sleep, Dreaming, and Human Health” by Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, on Thursday, February 11 at 7:00 p.m. The lecture will be held in Priory Campus Room 263, 7200 W. Division Street, River Forest. The event is free and open to the public.

     Bulkeley will explain how sleep and dreaming are natural processes hard-wired into the human brain, as well as universal portals into religious experience and spiritual insight. He will describe current scientific research on the health benefits of sleep and the evolutionary functions of dreaming. He will integrate these findings with philosophical and religious teachings about the healing power of dreams.

     Established in 2006 by the Siena Center of Dominican University, the Albertus Magnus Society pursues new information and insight in a setting that is both scholarly and congenial, and reflects the Dominican understanding of the compatibility of religion and science. The society was named for Albertus Magnus, patron saint of scientists, and thirteenth century Dominican famed for scientific discoveries and a theology reflective of the emerging science of his day. For more information on the Albertus Magnus Society, please call (708) 714-9105 or visit the website at http://www.dom.edu/ams.

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American Dreamers: How Sleep, Dreams, and Religion Intersect

Interested in the ways that sleep, dreams and religion intersect for American Dreamers?  Below are some of the data charts from my book American Dreamers.

Religious Attendance x Sleep

More than once a week Never
Sleep Less than 6 hours a night 11 18
6-8.9 hours a night 84 76
More than 9 hours a night 2 6
Insomnia Never 70 51
1-2 nights a week 13 19
3 or more nights a week 13 27

Religious Attendance x Dream Prototypes

More than once a week Never
A person who’s now dead appearing alive 29 41
Magically flying in the air 25 29
Being chased or attacked 33 45
Falling 40 44
Sexual experiences 34 50
Being in a situation exactly like your regular waking life 53 63
Being aware you’re dreaming and able to control the dream 37 47

Chapter 3 discusses these findings in relation to the religious and spiritual dimensions of the dreams of the journal keepers. For more on dreaming and religion generally, see Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History.