Dreams

Methodological challenges for studying dreams are daunting, beginning with dreams’ ephemerality and insubstantiality. The memory of a dream may disappear in a flash upon awakening. Even if the dream is remembered, there seems to be no direct evidence of its occurrence beyond what the dreamer reports. Dream reports are vulnerable to extraneous influence and distortion, including faulty memory, willful changes and omissions, social expectations, and biases that are built into language. In waking life, people lie and prevaricate for many reasons; we can’t ignore that people may also lie about what they do and do not dream. This adds inevitable uncertainty about the veracity and trustworthiness of any dream report as a source of meaningful insight.  

For skeptics, admitting this much is fatal for the legitimacy of dream research. This uncertainty, however, can be managed by using multiple methods to study large and varied collections of dreams from diverse populations, including contemporary databases of dream reports. Unless everyone is lying about their dreams (an extreme claim that itself should be viewed with skepticism), the power of large numbers and multidisciplinary investigation diminishes the adverse impacts of non-dream material on efforts to illuminate broad patterns and recurrent themes.  

Each method used by dream researchers has characteristic advantages and disadvantages. Dream reports from historical sources can expand our understanding of oneiric patterns over time, but the reports often come from a small number of socially powerful people. Dream reports from anthropological studies open up the cultural variability of dream contents, and they can include profoundly revealing dialogues with dreamers, but these studies are also limited by the small number of dreamers included and the difficulties of cross-cultural analysis. Demographic surveys asking people questions about their dreams can provide reports from thousands of people from diverse backgrounds, although the responses can be shallow and impersonal. Sleep laboratory studies correlate dream content with the neuro-physiological patterns of the sleep cycle; the expense and invasiveness of sleep lab technologies limits the number of people who participate. Excellent studies have been done by clinicians and psychotherapists using a single interpretive method to analyze just one person’s dreams, even if it can be difficult to generalize about dream patterns beyond a single case study to the broader public. To summarize the essence of the multidisciplinary approach, the more dream reports you have and the more methods incorporated in your research, the better your results will be.[5]  

There is one important exception to these methodological limits in the study of dream reports—your own dreams. Unlike other people’s dreams, which are accessed only through intermediate forms of language, your own dreams offer direct experiential knowledge of the oneiric realm. Nowhere but in personal dreaming can you feel the deepest qualities that characterize the dream state: vividly immersive realism, ineffable moments of numinous discovery and uncanny horror, variable dimensions of pointillist detail and otherworldly abstraction, deep relational memories about special people and places, and the subtle blending of events from past, present, and future. Virtually all dream researchers—from Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and onward—have made primary use of their personal dream experiences to formulate theories.[6]  

As Freud and Jung teach, there are limits to how much we can know about our own dreams. For Freud, the self-protective forces of denial and resistance interfere with accurate dream understanding. For Jung, the narrow and arrogant perspective of waking consciousness makes it difficult to recognize the wider range of unconscious energies animating our dreams. Taking those limits into account, a familiarity with your own experiential history as a dreamer continues to be a valuable source of comparative insight when studying other people’s dreams.  

A host of factors complicate the process of understanding any dream or specific sets of dreams. These factors include differences between interpreters and the dreamers in terms of age, gender, language, cultural background, historical context, religious outlook, and other variables that separate one person’s life experiences and dream experience from other dreamers. A skeptic might see these differences as a sufficient reason to reject the legitimacy of all dream research, since you can never really know what other people’s dreams mean to them in their own life circumstances. Unless we assume there can never be any valid understanding of people who are different from ourselves—another instance of extreme skepticism that deserves critical scrutiny—we are left with the conclusion that studying dreams is not fundamentally different from all social science research in which the careful systematic analysis of first-person narratives leads to valuable and trustworthy knowledge.  

Dream sources are not infallible, but dream researchers have developed a reliable set of methodological principles to gain the most knowledge about dreams with the least risk of being misled, just as other social scientists have developed methodological principles appropriate to the conditions of their work. In the study of dreams, these principles include trying to gather and analyze as many dream reports as possible, drawing on many different analytical methods, comparing results with the findings of other researchers, and preserving critical self-awareness about the limits of one’s own perspective.  

Every dream is like a snowflake. It bears the distinctive shape and imprint of the dreamer, whose personal qualities and individual life circumstances provide raw material for a dream’s formation. Every dream and every dreamer is unique: Those who study dreams should keep this principle in mind. That being said, ancient religious teachings and modern psychological research agree that individual dreams contain recurrent themes and motifs that are also found in other people’s dreams, including dreams reported from other times and places.  

The study of dream typologies is an important topic in its own right. The simplest and perhaps most common distinction is between good and bad dreams, those dreams that portend a favorable outcome versus those dreams that portend an unfavorable outcome. This binary schema appears in ancient dream interpretation manuals such as the Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams) of Artemidorus. A binary framework also characterizes Jung’s distinction between big dreams and little dreams, although the difference is not between favorable and unfavorable outcomes but rather the archetypal intensity of the dream. Big dreams are marked by extraordinary vividness and experiential impact, in contrast to little dreams that tend to be mild, mundane, and forgettable.[7] Christian and Islamic interpreters sort dreams into three groups: trivial dreams from the human mind, deceptive dreams from the Devil, and revelatory dreams from God. Other typologies have been developed worldwide. All these typologies have claims to validity and usefulness, for they reflect the broad diversity of dreams and dreamers.  

For a modern perspective on the “multiplicity of dreaming,” Harry Hunt’s work is especially helpful.[8] Unlike other cognitive psychologists, Hunt argues that, in addition to current scientific studies, if we want to do justice to the full range and diversity of human dreaming, we must take seriously those dream reports recorded in historical, anthropological, and religious sources. One of Hunt’s core claims is that dreams are truly variable in their formation, function, and experiential impact. This means that a theorist can be right about the nature and meaning of one type of dream but wrong about others. It also means that our best hope for new discoveries and insights will come from the multidisciplinary efforts of a community of researchers from different fields, all united in a quest to bring this innate source of wisdom more fully into collective awareness.  

I outline below a four-part typology of dreaming based on a combination of research methods and empirical data sources: aggressive, sexual, gravitational, and mystical.[9] I also present examples of these dreams from a range of literary and religious sources. There are four common forms or prototypes that inspire unusually intense, highly memorable dreams. Reports of these prototypical dreams are not only found in historical and anthropological sources but are frequently reported by contemporary dreamers. Dream prototypes are rooted in the activation of specific brain-mind systems during sleep, and the prototypes often make their occurrence known by dramatic carry-over effects in which emotions and feelings from the dream state do not disappear upon awakening and carry over into waking consciousness. Intense forms of dreaming are most often associated with religious and spiritual experience, even if their manifest contents do not obviously reflect conventional instances of religiosity.  

Aggressive 

The dreams many people remember most vividly are nightmares, intense dreams in which the dreamer is a victim of a physically threatening violent act from another dream character, and/or the dreamer acts aggressively towards another character. Whether victim or perpetrator, the dreamer experiences these interactions with an overwhelming surge of negative emotions, especially anger and fear. An acute sense of helplessness and vulnerability can be the most memorable feature of these dreams, which are especially frequent in childhood and adolescence.  

Aggressive dream nightmares must be differentiated from other negative sleep experiences. Researchers and clinicians distinguish between nightmares and sleep paralysis, a sleep disorder with an uncanny feeling of paralysis combined with brief disturbing images and the feeling of a nearby unknown presence.[10] Although the experiences can be unsettling, some sleep paralysis episodes involve encounters with spiritual entities who, over time, provide the individual with beneficial guidance and insights.[11] A distinction should also be made between nightmares and the recurrent bad dreams that accompany post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dreams characterized by static repetitions of the initiating trauma.[12] Despite their associations with sleep disorders and psychopathology, PTSD-related dreams can be experienced and understood as spiritually significant phenomena depending on the life circumstances of the dreamer, insofar as they reveal new potentials for growth beyond the damage and suffering of the original trauma.  

To be clear, not all nightmares are a sign of PTSD or other mental illnesses associated with disturbed dreaming, such as anxiety disorders, depression, and schizophrenia. Nightmares and upsetting dreams of the aggressive prototype are a fairly regular and normal phenomenon for the general population. The most common version of this prototype, the chasing nightmare, is one of the most widely reported types of dreams. Although distressing and unpleasant, these dreams can have a beneficial impact. The Book of Job gives a classic statement of this paradoxical effect:  

For God speaks in one way, and in two, though man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, while they slumber on their beds, then He opens the ears of men, and terrifies them with warnings, that He may turn man aside from his deed, and cut off pride from man; He keeps back his soul from the Pit, and his life from perishing by the sword (Job 33:14–18). 

Many researchers today, building on the findings of evolutionary biology, subscribe to a version of the “threat simulation” theory to explain violent, aggressive dreams.[13] The idea is that frightening nightmares of dangerous vulnerability serve as a kind of psychological rehearsal function, prompting our minds upon awakening to be more alert and sensitive towards the kinds of threats encountered in our dreams. These dreams exercise our fight-flight response system, making sure it is ready and in good functional condition whenever it might be needed. Although this kind of evolutionary reasoning can lead to overly reductionistic analyses of religious beliefs and practices, in the study of dreams and particularly the history of nightmares, it has explanatory benefits that complement rather than conflict with religious perspectives. Indeed, in many religious and spiritual traditions, the sphere of nightmare-prompting threats can be much wider than those found in ordinary waking life, including potential attacks from demons, ghosts, spirits, evil shamans, and the unruly passions of one’s own animal nature.  

Sexual 

From intensely anti-social behavior to intensely pro-social behavior, many people experience dreams with highly arousing sexual and romantic images, feelings, and interactions. Carry-over effects of this dreaming prototype can be physically tangible in the form of actual orgasms, “wet dreams” that occur for both biologically male and female dreamers. Sexual dreams arise in early adolescence, prior to any actual sexual experience, and they continue throughout life, though perhaps with less intensity. One curious finding of modern sleep science is that during phases of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when most but not all dreaming seems to occur, increased respiration and blood flow leads to genital swelling and endogenous arousal for both males and females. This suggests that, at a physiological level, all dreaming may be an expression of procreative energy. Even in dreams without any explicit references to sexuality, their form and contents may still reflect the influence of deep sexual energies, what Freud and Jung referred to as libido, that connect us to the primal yearning for life over death. For this reason, dreams of pregnancy and birth are also versions of the sexual prototype, as are dreams about parties, celebrations, and social festivities. These are not overtly sexual dreams, but they are all reflections of an innately pro-social capacity to create new life and to seek and experience intimacy, connection, and communitas with other people.  

The sensual qualities of sexual dreams may be pleasurable within the dream, and yet people can awaken with uncomfortable, guilty feelings about what they experienced—hard to forget due to unmistakable evidence on bedsheets. The history of religions provides examples of ascetics and monks who pledged themselves to celibacy but found they could not resist positively responding to sexual situations in their dreams. In his autobiographical Confessions, the Christian theologian Augustine laments the fact that, even though he has adopted a celibate life after his conversion to Christianity, he cannot help dreaming about past sexual experiences: 

When I am awake they [his sexual desires] obtrude themselves upon me, though with little strength. But when I dream, they not only give me pleasure but are very much like acquiescence in the act. The power which these illusory images have over my soul and my body is so great that what is no more than a vision can influence me in sleep in a way that reality cannot do when I am awake.[14] 

Augustine’s lament is, from our perspective, eloquent testimony to the power of the dreaming imagination to simulate sexual experience with overwhelming realism. Freud is often given credit for highlighting the importance of sexual desires in dreaming, but this basic insight goes back much further in history, earlier even than Augustine, to include Plato’s Republic in which sleep is said to set loose the “bestial and savage” part of the soul: 

You know how in such a state it will dare everything, as though it were freed and released from all shame and discernment. It does not shrink from attempting incestual intercourse, in its dream, with a mother or with any man or god or beast. . . .In a word, it falls short of no extreme of folly or shamelessness.[15] 

For people other than monks and ascetics, the discomfort with this dreaming prototype comes not simply from having an intense sexual dream but from having a sexual dream that conflicts with their moral beliefs in waking life. This includes dreaming about having sex with someone you should not, in a place you should not, and/or performing acts you should not. Such taboo dreams can shock and shame the waking mind. It might even be said that Freud developed psychoanalysis as a way of exploring the mental space between the moral beliefs of consciousness and the immoral dreams of the unconscious.  

There may be a parallel between sexual dreams and the evolutionary basis of aggressive nightmares as threat simulations with ultimate benefits for the dreamer. We can speak of “opportunity simulations” in which dreams pursue possible scenarios for sexual fulfillment as a form of psychological practice and preparation for whatever procreative opportunities might present themselves in waking life, whether or not society approves of those opportunities. The sexual dreaming prototype seems deeply programmed in our minds and mostly independent from conscious control, much to the dismay of those who seek to strictly limit and manage sexuality in all facets of life. The close association of dreaming with unconventional sexuality, although embarrassing to the waking ego, can be taken as an honest reflection of the primal strength of our desires.  

Gravitational 

This dreaming prototype encompasses our encounters with the elemental powers of the physical world. It can take a variety of nightmarish forms, but these forms are different from the aggressive dream prototype. In gravitational dreams, fear and danger arise not from the violent actions of characters but from impersonal forces that feel impossible to fight or escape and that elicit the emotions of fear and sadness. Foremost among these dreams, and one of the most common experiences of dreaming in all cultures, is the dream of falling, and upon waking these dreams are often accompanied by extremely vivid sensations of actually falling.  

Gravity itself becomes the source of danger in these dreams, but gravitational dreams also take the form of a dreamer witnessing things falling apart, becoming lost, ruined, collapsing—all themes that involve loss of order and the rise of chaos. Some of the most intense versions of this prototype involve death and dying, the ultimate victory of entropy over animate existence. In the Hindu epic The Ramayana, Bharata, brother of the great hero Rama, reports a terrifying gravitational nightmare: 

Hear the reason for my present sadness! In a dream, my father appeared to me in faded apparel, his hair disheveled, falling from a mountain peak into a pit of dung!... And in my dream I saw the ocean dry up and the moon fall on the earth, the world being plunged into darkness . . . This is what I beheld during this terrible night![16]  

Other just as disturbing variations of the gravitational prototype include tidal wave dreams, fearful experiences of an inescapable mass of water; apocalyptic dreams of mass destruction and the end of the world; and what I refer to as titanic dreams that seem separate from the human realm entirely and portray highly abstract, cosmically vast forces and dimensions of primal physics. An example of a titanic dream comes early in the epic poem of Gilgamesh from ancient Sumeria, when the mighty hero suffers a strange nightmare of vulnerability and impotence. He shares his dream with his mother, the goddess Ninsun:  

Last night, Mother, I saw a dream. There was a star in the heavens. Like a shooting star of Anu it fell on me. I tried to lift it; too much for me. I tried to move it; I could not move it.[17] 

Titanic dreams generate a feeling of reaching the edge of animate existence and encountering a realm of pure physics that spans from the atomic to the cosmic dimensions of reality. As in Gilgamesh’s case, they are typically unpleasant and even vertiginous experiences, pushing the dreaming imagination to unusual and almost unbearable extremes. 

In general, dreams of the gravitational prototype are accompanied by great fear, as great as the worst chasing nightmares in aggressive dreams. But unlike the aggressive prototype that is angry and fearful, a more distinctive emotion for gravitational dreams is sadness. Falling, gravitational force, and entropic decay generate painful feelings of loss, absence, sorrow, and grief. Bharata’s dream from The Ramayana illustrates this mournful theme when he interprets his dream to portend an imminent death in his family, a loss so destabilizing that their royal dynasty might collapse.  

The distressing qualities of gravitational dreams may, depending on the dreamer’s religious worldview, eventually yield existential insights. In a Buddhist context, a dream of physical death might herald a spiritual birth. In another context, dreams of physical dismemberment can accompany the initiatory ordeals of shamanic training. In all its different forms, the gravitational prototype of dreaming recognizes the fragility of mortal life, a painful recognition that may paradoxically provide spiritual wisdom, power, and understanding. That which falls and dies becomes a generative force whose gift is to prepare the way for that which will rise and live anew.  

Mystical 

At the other end of the entropic scale from gravitational dreams, some dreams portray realities in which ordinary physical laws do not apply. The term “mystical” is used here to refer to the various ways that dreams push beyond the limits of the waking world to reveal alternative possibilities and perspectives. The simplest version of this prototype is an oneiric theophany, a direct dream revelation from a divine being, such as the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose IV’s dream of the Sphinx or the Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg’s dream encounters with Christ.[18] This prototype also includes dreams about magical flying, which many people consider their most enjoyable of all dream experiences. The physical sensations in such dreams can be incredibly vivid yet totally inconsistent with what a dreamer’s conscious mind knows is possible in waking life. The ancient Roman dream interpreter Artemidorus recorded the following dream in the Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams):  

A man who was living in Rome dreamt that he flew around the city near the rooftops and that he was elated by his adept flying. And all those who looked at him were struck with admiration. But as a result of a certain pain and palpitations of the heart, he stopped flying and hid in shame.[19] 

The surprising ability to fly can suggest hidden powers that are real and potent, even if they defy conventional beliefs. The exhilarating release from the shackles of gravity, as opposed to the crushing forces of gravitational dreams, can suggest that our true condition is one of profound freedom and independence of spirit. This is one of the lessons of the Daoist sage Zhuang Zi’s butterfly dream: 

Long ago, a certain Zhuang Zi dreamed he was a butterfly—a butterfly fluttering here and there on a whim, happy and carefree, knowing nothing of Zhuang Zi. Then all of a sudden he woke up to find that he was, beyond all doubt, Zhuang Zi. Who knows if it was Zhuang Zi dreaming a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming Zhuang Zi? Zhuang Zi and butterfly, clearly there’s a difference. This is called the transformation of all things.[20]

Another version of the mystical prototype is what researchers call visitation dreams in which the finality of death is overcome and someone who is dead in waking life appears in dreams as if alive. The remarkable verisimilitude of these dreams inevitably gives rise to fundamentally religious questions about the nature of the soul and its fate after death. Some visitation dreams are joyful reunions with a loved one, others may be sad, confusing, and even frightening. Whatever emotions they elicit, the impact of visitation dreams regularly includes an expanded sense of life and death and the mysterious relationship between the two.  

Other versions of the mystical prototype—including dreams of amazing natural beauty, of otherworldly journeys, and of being able to breathe underwater—share the qualities of liberated human potential, going beyond what is in order to envision what might be. Seen in the context of this prototype, the most bizarrely unrealistic dreams may be understood as especially vivid expressions of our ultimate spiritual freedom.  

As long as people have been dreaming, they have engaged in practices to help benefit from what dreams and dream experiences teach. Found in various forms in many cultures and periods of history, these practices seek to cultivate a greater flow of creative energy between dreaming and waking worlds and to channel that energy in specific directions that will benefit personal and collective life. Anthropologists and historians have shown that dreaming is highly sensitive to cultural context and influence: An encouraging cultural context can enhance dreaming, while a discouraging culture can diminish or disrupt dreaming.[21] This means that researchers will benefit from paying close attention to the details of what people are doing before and after they dream. 

The recognition of potentially valuable insights in dreaming has led many people through history to develop proactive techniques for gaining more direct access to those insights. Researchers use the generic term “dream incubation” for these pre-sleep ritual practices.[22] The best documented system of dream incubation focuses on the worship of the ancient Greek healing god Asclepius in whose temples people prayed and slept in hopes of receiving a healing dream. In his studies of the practices at the Asclepian temple in Epidaurus, Greece, the Jungian analyst C. A. Meier found a spiritual precursor to modern forms of psychotherapy: 

The place is beautifully situated far out in the country with a via sacra five miles long connecting it with the port. Its buildings are world famous for their beauty . . . The place swarms with harmless snakes . . . After having performed certain purificatory rites, ablutions, and preliminary sacrifices, you would go to sleep on your kline [bed] in the abaton, “the place not to be entered by the unbidden” . . . Apparently he [the patient] was always cured if in his dream he experienced an epiphany of Asclepius.[23] 

Although the details of dream incubation practices vary from one tradition to another, a few common elements can be identified across cultural and religious differences. Dream incubation is typically practiced in places far removed from ordinary life. Temples, caves, forests, graveyards, and mountain tops are suitable locations for a special dream to occur that will be responsive to the dreamer’s intention. An individual may perform certain activities before sleep—fasting, bathing, wearing special clothes, saying special prayers, sleeping in a special posture. Most important is that dreamers focus on a question of great urgency and make efforts to crystalize their pre-sleep intention on that question.  

People generally do not engage in dream incubation for trivial concerns. The goals are usually relief from suffering, guidance when making a difficult decision, or gaining prospective knowledge about future dangers and opportunities. The practice is not automatic, and it does not always work. Sometimes, people awaken from a dream incubation ritual and have no dreams to remember; the absence of an answer from the dreams may in fact be a dream’s answer. Many religious and cultural traditions testify that dream experiences can be influenced, stimulated, and cultivated. It is much more difficult, however, to control dreaming in any meaningful fashion. Conscious awareness in dreaming, what current researchers call “lucid dreaming,” has been known and discussed in many religious traditions through history, especially in classic Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist texts.[24] In these Asian religious settings, lucid dreaming extends out of meditation practices into sleeping states, emphasizing the maintenance of conscious mindfulness not only when awake but also in sleep and dreaming. Here, the goal is not control of the dreams but maintaining awareness in the dreams. Many shamanic traditions teach practitioners to cultivate lucid dreaming experiences in which they communicate with ancestral spirits, learn new healing methods, and occasionally engage in spiritual combat with rival shamans.  

Present-day research on lucid dreaming demonstrates that lucidity can occur spontaneously and also can occur as a result of pre-sleep preparations, i.e., a version of dream incubation.[25] Researchers find that lucid dreaming encompasses a range of mental states and levels of self-awareness and is not simply being conscious or not. The study of dreams has benefitted from the psychology of metacognition that considers the sophisticated mental systems by which we “think about thinking” and we reflect on our own thoughts, feelings, memories, and intentions.[26]The pervasive occurrence of metacognition in dreaming is strong evidence against the skeptic’s claim that dreaming is nothing but a lower, more primitive form of psychological activity. What we generally regard as the most advanced forms of mental activity—thinking, reasoning, remembering, comparing, judging, and choosing—are present and active in dreaming, albeit in different forms and combinations from what we experience in waking. The key point is that dreams are not mentally degraded or deficient. They do not lack reason, nor are they essentially irrational. Dreaming is reason operating in a different mode, a mode that takes advantage of the conditions of sleep to extend its reach far beyond the perceived limits of ordinary reality. The more we learn about the mind’s functioning in sleep and dreaming, the more apparent it becomes how little we know about the deepest potentials of the oneiric imagination.  

The emergence of incredibly powerful technologies of data analysis in recent years has enabled the exploration of these themes, topics, and questions in more detail than ever possible. Artemidorus and other ancient dream interpreters intuitively recognized the presence of basic patterns in dream content, and they understood the value of identifying those patterns, even if their resources for doing so were limited. Today, we have tools that allow us to sift through huge collections of dream reports and to highlight recurrent features and patterns of meaning with unprecedented speed, precision, and objectivity. We also have the means, thanks to a new generation of dream journaling apps, to record our dreams with an ease never before possible and to track dreams’ meaningful patterns over time.  

My initial reaction to these technologies when they first emerged was skepticism; you could call me a hater. It seemed highly unlikely that a computer system could be useful in studying the subtleties and nuances of human dream experience. After experimenting with the resources of the DreamBank, an online collection of dreams administered by G. William Domhoff and Adam Schneider, it became clear that I was wrong—these new tools have enormous potential when properly developed and deployed. This conviction has been strengthened by working on the development of the Sleep and Dream Database, an online archive of more than fifty thousand dream reports, and by experimenting with the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app, used by thousands in countries all over the world to record their dreams.  

Two principles have already proven valuable for exploring dreams using these powerful new tools. First is the principle of continuity: The frequency with which something appears in a person’s dreams is an indication of its emotional importance in their waking life. Using this principle, it becomes possible to map out, with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy, the individual dreamer’s greatest concerns, interests, fears, and desires based on recurrent patterns in dreams. Second, and more importantly from a spiritual perspective, is the principle of discontinuity: Elements of dream content that are radically inconsistent with the waking world can signal the emergence of new insights, potentials, and paths for growth, especially in regard to spiritual matters. We know from studying their many continuities that dreams can simulate ordinary waking reality with great accuracy, and this is why it becomes so worthwhile to reflect deeply whenever the dreaming imagination goes beyond the ordinary world to envision new scenarios and alternative perspectives. In the weird, unrealistic, bizarre discontinuities of dreaming we often find the earliest green shoots of our future psycho-spiritual development. 

In terms of how to best gather suitable collections of high-quality dream reports and how best to archive them, analyze them, and make them available for present and future researchers, many challenges remain to be worked out with these technologies. We must also protect the privacy of the dreamers and respect their interests and concerns when sharing their dreams for research purposes. Even accounting for these important open questions, a new era has clearly dawned for the study of dreams, one in which potent tools for exploring the fundamental rhythms of dreaming are available to an ever-widening range of people.  

[1] Synesius, The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, trans. A. Fitzgerald (Oxford University Press, 1930).

[2] See G.E. Von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Society (University of California Press, 1966); Barbara Tedlock, ed., Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jeannette Mageo and Robin Sheriff, eds., New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming (Routledge, 2022); Kelly Bulkeley, Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (NYU Press, 2008).

[3] Meir H. Kryger, et al., Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine (Elsevier Saunders, 2005); Katie Glaskin and Richard Chenhall, eds), Sleep Around the World: Anthropological Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Pierre Maquet et al., eds, Sleep and Brain Plasticity (Oxford University Press, 2003).

[4] David M. Pena-Guzman, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton University Press, 2022).

[5] According to G. William Domhoff, a set of 100–125 dreams from an individual is usually sufficient to enable an analysis that can reveal the basic patterns of that person’s dream life. This number varies depending on the type of content analyzed. Fewer than one hundred dreams may be needed to determine the most important personal relationships in the dreamer’s life, but more than one hundred dreams may be needed to gain a reliable insight into their food and drink preferences. The works of G. William Domhoff devote valuable attention to questions about how best to analyze large collections of dreams. See Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach (Plenum, 1996); The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis (American Psychological Association, 2003); and Domhoff with his colleague Adam Schneider, “Studying Dream Content Using the Archive and Search Engine on DreamBank.net,” Consciousness and Cognition, no. 17 (2008): 1238–1247.

[6] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (Avon Books, 1965); C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston (Vintage Books, 1965).

[7] See C.G. Jung, Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1940, trans. Ernst Falzeder and Tony Woolfson (Princeton University Press, 2008).

[8] Harry Hunt, The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination, and Consciousness (Yale University Press, 1989).

[9] The following is drawn from Kelly Bulkeley, Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2016).

[10] See David Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).

[11] Ryan Hurd, Sleep Paralysis: A Guide to Hypnagogic Visions and Visitors of the Night (Hyena Press, 2010).

[12] Deirdre Barrett, ed., Trauma and Dreams (Harvard University Press, 1996).

[13] Antii Revonsuo, “The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dreaming,” in Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsiderations, eds., Edward Pace-Schott, Mark Blagrove, and Stevan Harnad (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 85–109.

[14] Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Books, 1961), 233–34.

[15] Plato, The Republic, trans. A.D. Lindsay (Dutton, 1957), 336.

[16] Valmiki, The Ramayana of Valmiki, chapter 69, trans. Hari Prasad Shastri (Shanti Sadan, 1985).

[17] Gilgamesh, trans. John Gardner and John Maier (Vintage Books, 1984), 81–82 Table 1, Column 5.

[18] A. Leo Oppenheim, “The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 46 (1956), 179–373, 251; Emanuel Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, trans. J.J.G. Wilkinson (Swedenborg Foundation, 1986), 160.

[19] Artemidorus, Oneirocritica [The Interpretation of Dreams], trans. Robert J. White (Noyes Press, 1975), 238.

[20] Zhuang Zi, The Inner Chapters, trans. David Hinton (Counterpoint, 1998), 34-5.

[21] Tedlock, Dreaming; Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, trans. Damion Searls (Princeton University Press, 2025).

[22] Kimberley Patton, “A Great and Strange Correction: Intentionality, Locality, and Epiphany in the Category of Dream Incubation,” History of Religions 43 (2004): 194–223.

[23] C.A. Meier, Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy, trans. Monica Curtis (Northwestern University Press, 1967), 314–315.

[24] See Serinity Young, Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and Practice (Wisdom, 1999).

[25] See Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley, eds., Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (ABC-Clio, 2014).

[26] Tracey Kahan and Stephen LaBerge, “Dreaming and Waking: Similarities and Differences Revisited,” Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011): 494–515.

Artemidorus. Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams). Translated by Robert J. White, Park Ridgem NJ: Noyes Press, 1975.

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin Books, 1961.

Barrett, Deirdre, ed. Trauma and Dreams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Beradt, Charlotte. The Third Reich of Dreams. Translated by Damion Searls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.

Bulkeley, Kelly. Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Bulkeley, Kelly. Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Domhoff, G. William. Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach. Plenum Press, 1996.

Domhoff, G. William. The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003.

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