sexuality Archives | Kelly Bulkeley

Reflections on Spiritual Dreaming (1995)

Kelly Bulkeley — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:43:59 +0000

An academic dissertation is written in compliance with a host of official requirements designed to focus the project and give it the best chance of successful completion. Those requirements definitely influenced how my dissertation and first book, The Wilderness of Dreams (1994), came to be what it is. As I sat down to write my …

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Friendly Dreams

Kelly Bulkeley — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 22:59:54 +0000

Dreams with explicitly sexual and/or violent interactions tend to get the most attention, but dreams actually tend to have surprisingly high proportions of friendly content, too. According to an analysis of the nearly 35,000 dream reports collected in the Sleep and Dream Database, 47% of the women’s dreams have at least one reference to a …

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Basic Patterns in Dreaming

Kelly Bulkeley — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:08:01 +0000

The basic patterns of dream content are coming into sharper focus, thanks to new technologies of digital analysis. By using these tools to study large and diverse collections of high-quality dream data, and then making those tools and data publicly available, we can illuminate recurrent frequencies of dream content that others can easily review, replicate, …

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A Dream of Love: Interpreting the Dream Ballet in OSF’s Oklahoma!

Kelly Bulkeley — Thu, 03 May 2018 23:24:11 +0000

Peeling away Freudian assumptions to reach a deeper human truth about the capacity to love. A radiant new production of the musical Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival re-interprets a classic American love story for contemporary audiences. With bold innovations in casting, staging, and choreography, the OSF production differs in many ways from the 1943 …

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The Horrors of the Dream Ballet in “Oklahoma!”

Kelly Bulkeley — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 01:02:30 +0000

A brilliant exploration of the dark psychological depths of sexual desire appears in an unlikely place—a country musical from the 1940’s. Oklahoma! was the first collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the duo who went on to write many of Broadway’s most famous mid-century musicals. A new production of Oklahoma! at the Oregon …

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Dreaming in Adolescence: A “Blind” Word Search of a Teenage Girl’s Dream Series

Kelly Bulkeley — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 16:25:14 +0000

Here’s a pdf file of the word search study I did with “Bea,” published in Dreaming (2012), Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 240-252: Dreaming in Adolescence

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Sexual Dreaming Before Sexual Activity

Kelly Bulkeley — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 17:26:10 +0000

Sexual dreams have long been part of human experience, as we know from historical sources. For example, the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, an ancient manual of dream interpretation, devoted several pages to the various types and classes of sexual dreams. However, we do not know how widespread sexual dreams are, who has them most often, …

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Tracking Robert Bosnak’s Dreams

Kelly Bulkeley — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:41:57 +0000

The Sleep and Dream Database has just added a new series of dreams to its collection, thanks to the generosity of Robert Bosnak. In his 1996 book Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming he included an appendix with a series of 51 dreams recorded during a seven-week period of travel and personal transition. With his …

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Cosmo Romance Dreams

Kelly Bulkeley — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 22:04:21 +0000

A couple of years ago a reporter from Cosmopolitan magazine sent me a list of dream types she had gathered from other women in her office. I can’t remember if an article ever appeared, but I thought the dreams were interesting as expressions of the concerns many women feel about their romantic relationships. Here is the …

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A Lucid Dreaming Cautionary Tale: Graham Joyce’s “Dreamside”

Kelly Bulkeley — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:22:13 +0000

Later this month (3-23) I’m joining British novelist Graham Joyce at the Rubin Museum in New York City to discuss “Are Dreams Pure Fantasy?” as part of the museum’s “Brainwave” lecture series on dreams. I’ve just read Joyce’s first novel, Dreamside, and it’s a hauntingly beautiful tale, both frightening and inspiring. It raises vital questions about the …

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