More Posts On This Topic:

• Joe Lieberman's Farewell Dream
• Abraham Lincoln’s dreams
• Dreams, Society and Politics: Reference Links
• The Strange Politics of Dreaming
• Iraqi Nightmares

As reported by UPI correspondent Mike Martin, Terry McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee chairman, declared “If George W. Bush were the leader of my party, I’d have trouble sleeping at night, too.”  Not to be outdone in the game of “dream spinning,” Kevin Sheridan of the Republican National Committee quickly replied, “What do you expect after eight years of William Jefferson Clinton?”  The reaction was not limited to politicians in the U.S.: Alexa McDonough, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party (on the left side of the political spectrum), said she was not surprised by the findings of my study because true liberals follow their dreams to find creative solutions for problems: “The very essence of building a better world starts with dreaming….  Until we get politics being about chasing dreams again, we’re going to be causing people a lot of nightmares, and we’re mostly going to be implementing right-wing nightmares.”

A number of people on the left sent me emails praising my research, saying it confirmed their conviction that Republicans are by nature repressed, uptight, and insecure.  One of my correspondents explained, “Republicans tend to be more out of touch with their own feelings and emotions,” and their repudiated unconscious emotions “later arise in their dreams as nightmares.”  Several conservatives also sent me emails, angrily accusing me of being a “tree-hugging liberal” out to slander their political viewpoint.  One conservative man who visited my website was evidently disappointed to discover that I’m a man—“I thought only a woman could come up with something so stupid,” he commented, before sharing his hope of joining other Bush supporters in tearing me a new bodily orifice.

I have spoken to the hosts of several talk radio shows since the ASD conference, and every one of them has taken my research as good news for liberals and bad news for conservatives.   Radio hosts of a leftward bent enjoy lingering over the gory details of the torments suffered by Republicans in their sleep, while rightward-leaning hosts ask pointed questions about my methodology and make fun of the fact that I live near Berkeley.

I find all these reactions very interesting.  Why do so many people assume that having nightmares is a sign of a defective personality?  This implicit assumption reveals a widespread attitude toward dreams that does not square with current knowledge.  Dream researchers have gathered abundant evidence in recent decades to show that many nightmares serve the valuable function of alerting people to threats and dangers in the waking world.  Some researchers call this the “sentinel function” of nightmares, pointing to the evolutionary benefits such dreams might have in terms of promoting heightened vigilance toward potential threats.  Nightmares may be frightening and unpleasant, but they often have the beneficial effect of focusing people’s attention on real-world problems.

Seen in this light, the greater frequency of nightmares among conservatives could indicate a greater realism in their approach to life—they could be more attuned to the actual dangers and threats in the world, and more sensitive to the frailties of the human condition in the face of those dangers.   If that is so, then perhaps the dreams of liberals, which in my study had a greater frequency of bizarre and magical elements, are not indicative of greater emotional maturity but rather reflect a relatively irrational approach to life, with tendencies toward fanciful, utopian, “otherworldly” thinking.

Again, my study was much too small to decide this question with any certainty.  For the moment, I would simply say liberals should not be smug about their supposed psychological superiority, conservatives should not be insulted by the fact of their apparently darker dream life, and anyone who has a nightmare should not immediately assume they are suffering from a severe personality disorder.

Naturally, I hope to build on these preliminary findings on dream content and political ideology by conducting more research.  It would be interesting to expand the analysis to include other political parties like the Libertarians and Greens, and also to compare the dreams of politically-active people with the dreams of people who are disaffected from politics.  I must say, however, that the most interesting prospect of all, the “Holy Grail” of this line of research, would come from the answer to one simple question.  I don’t expect ever to learn the answer, but it’s worth asking anyway:

What are you dreaming about, President Bush?

As the US Presidential election enters its final tense weeks, liberals are becoming increasingly agitated in their dreams, with a rising number of nightmares featuring aggressive attacks by President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and hordes of zombie Republicans.

That is the initial finding of Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher at the Graduate Theological Union and John F. Kennedy University, both in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Dr. Bulkeley has been studying the connection between dreams and US Presidential elections since 1992, and this year he has found that people on the left side of the political spectrum are having a surprising number of bad dreams about the election:

From a 57-year old man in a Western swing state, where the political advertising barrage is inescapable: “The dream seemed to have lasted all night long.  There were thousands and thousands of photographic images of Bush like a montage of photo ops.  They were all remarkably bland and dull.  Many of the photos had a caption attaching saying things like “George Bush is President, isn’t he?”  “Yup!”  They were all very insipid and bland.”

From a 43-year old man in California: “At first I talk with President Bush, and think he’s a friendly guy.  But then I’m part of some meal ritual with a bunch of his followers.  Bush makes me eat disgusting food, meat, mustard.  I do it, though it’ll make me sick, to prove I’m tough.”

From a 22-year old college student, a liberal woman at a predominantly conservative school in a Midwest swing state:  “I’ve got to catch a flight, so I enter the airport and walk down a long, downhill hallway.  I enter into a cave/tunnel that is very dark.  I see  bloody people everywhere (lots of bright red zombie-like people) and lots of  people in blue who are clean and pure-looking.  I don’t want to be rude, so I don’t comment or ask why this is.  I come out of the tunnel into light, and am in some kind of theme-park.  Tons more people in bloody red or blue are all around.  A blue person grabs me and says she is trying to protect me from the red.  I see that she has the Kerry/Edwards logo on, and this is what all the blue people support.  All the reds are Bush supporters.  They all look like zombies, and I see them attacking people.   I hop onto the Kerry Campaign trail-literally.  It is a long line of connected wooden boats.  I climb from the back car towards the front.  I find Edwards on one boat, and Kerry is in the front boat.   I feel safe, but there is a huge disruption of some kind and I find myself alone again with all of the zombie Bush supporters pulling me in every direction and trying to feed me some kind of processed meats from their barbecue (sausage/hot dog looking things).  I don’t trust this meat and find that it is human flesh from the Kerry supporters. I try to get away and am suddenly falling down a huge waterfall or waterslide with zombies grabbing me.  I wash into the dark tunnel again, and that’s when I woke up.” (As pointed out by the dreamer, the red and blue colors match the “red state, blue state” division of the electoral map.)

From a 35-year old woman from New York City: “I’m driving through the Bush ranch in Crawford, where I pass a pen in which a couple of impossibly obese dogs snap and growl at each other, fighting over something I can’t see. At a small pond nearby, a duck swims up to me and hops into my hands, resting for a moment before it returns to the water.  I’m pleased in that way most people feel when a wild animal eats out of your hand or offers some similar display of trust. As it swims away I notice drops of blood on my hands, and then realize that the fracas in the dog pen is over ducks that are being tossed in there for no reason other than pure sadism. I feel ashamed that I had simply enjoyed holding the duck without realizing that it was looking to me for rescue.”  The woman said she felt the dream reflects “my very real concerns about the beating that the weak and helpless are getting under this administration,” and she credits the dream’s emotional power with giving her the motivation to do something socially constructive—“In fact, the dream led me to take up a weekly volunteer gig at a charity for the homeless.”

From a 34-year old woman in Pennsylvania: “The closer we get to this upcoming election, the less able I am to sleep because of the nightmares I’ve been having. They range in topic from a multi-city nuclear attack on the US on election day (though not in my city), which scares voters into staying home and therefore allowing a Bush re-election; horrible things that happen to the people I love after Bush wins re-election (people lose jobs or houses, die of diseases because they don’t have healthcare, starve to death or become homeless); futuristic dreams where humanity and the environment are in shambles and historians point to George W. Bush and this election as the catalyst; terrorists manage to take over the whole US on election day and I and my family get kidnapped, tortured, shot because I’m an elected official {in waking life]; a situation where Kerry wins the election but Bush & Co. play some sort of dirty trick to ensure his illegal re-election, and riots and other dangers ensue and I’m unable to protect all 3 of my kids, get separated from my husband, we have no food and have to eat the dog or starve, we are driven from our home by people with guns (when we own none because we are pacifists).”

Uncertainties, and Support

Other dreams reported by liberal Democrats include nagging uncertainties about their own party’s Presidential candidate.  For example, a 63-year old California woman who was a primary supporter of John Edwards dreamed that the “Kerry/Edwards” button on her purse was changed to “Edwards/Edwards.” A 52-year old Massachusetts man who detests Bush but isn’t sure Kerry is progressive enough for him dreamed that he tried to go to the Democratic convention in Boston, but couldn’t find a parking place.  Still, a few liberals have had positive dreams expressing support for John Kerry.  A particularly explicit dream of this type comes from a 77-year old man from a Midwest swing state who dreamed he let Kerry stand on his shoulders so the Democratic candidate could speak to a bigger audience at a political rally.

Conservative Dreams

What of conservative people’s dreams? Fewer conservatives than liberals have reported election-related dreams. There are several possible reasons for this: 1) the research requests are not reaching enough conservative audiences; 2) conservatives from certain Christian traditions dismiss all dreams as demonic temptations; 3) conservatives may indeed be having election-related dreams, but are reluctant to share the dreams with a stranger; 4) conservatives are simply having fewer election-related dreams to report.

The dreams of conservatives combine positive feelings of support with lingering anxieties about the President.  Here are two examples.

A 23-year old Republican woman from Pennsylvania dreamed this: I was at the White House, and for some reason there were a bunch of Rotweiller dogs being put to sleep for being too dangerous. The lady that was administering the shot was just about to inject the last dog when President Bush came downstairs to take his dog out. I asked if I could talk to him, and he said sure. I walked with him outside and told him how upset I was about the dogs being put to sleep. We were alone on the lawn, and I asked him why there was no security outside, and he just shrugged his shoulders and smiled. He told me I could have the last dog if I wanted it. We went back inside and the President grabbed the shot of out of the ladies’ hand and there was a brief struggle. The dog came running over to me and was wagging its tail, and I was so excited to be taking it home. I remember looking at the dog and seeing the colors of his fur (black with brown spots) and also when walking with the President, I saw the color of his jacket (green).   The dreamer, who has worked for the Bush campaign, said the dream accurately reflects her feelings about the “good things” the President has done in office, with Bush himself appearing as a “down-to-earth guy” whom she can trust in sharing her fears.

A 30-year old woman from North Carolina had the following dream:  “I am one of 3 daughters of the President (I am assuming it was Bush, the current President).  We are in route to board a plane, outside at night, walking in a straight line at a slow pace.  I am at the very front, my two sisters on either side, our arms locked (I have 2 sisters in our immediate/first family, I happen to be the middle).  We are leading a huge entourage with the President behind us, his secret service detail surrounding him.  The plane is also behind us, I can hear its engine and see the lights they are projecting past us.  We are moving towards the tarmac to board.  I feel like we need to stay in a close knit group, we also can’t look behind to make sure everyone is still there.  Suddenly, the lights fade, the engines die down and the sounds of the people are gone.  It is just the three daughters.  We learn the plane will not leave from this airport, we have to travel to Atlanta to get on it.  Atlanta is a few states away, the rest of the group had left for there. We are broken from the group, vulnerable, left to find our own way to Atlanta, on foot.”   The dreamer is a registered Republican and a strong supporter of President Bush’s reelection, and while the dream offers a clear image of her support, it also suggests her concern about the dangerous “single-mindedness” of the President—“not able to look behind and see what is going on, not able to see the support, just going on faith.”

Prophecies

Anyone who wants to make a prediction about the election on Tuesday has dream material to work with from both sides.  As noted, liberals are plagued with nightmarish anticipations of Bush being reelected, while at least a few conservatives foresee a Kerry victory in their dreams.  For example, a Bush-supporting 28-year old woman from North Carolina had this dream twice within a week in mid-October: “I had a dream that Bush lost.  It was actually set up like, a newspaper article I was reading.  I was reading that Bush only served one 4 year term. (which would lead me to believe he didn’t win) Then I was trying to see who was the new president, but I couldn’t find the name, I assumed it was Kerry but something told me maybe it isn’t.”    Perhaps the Biblical tradition that doubling a dream signals its prophetic truth (Gen. 41:32) enhances the credibility of this woman’s dreams, at least from a conservative Christian perspective.

Only one dream could be described as a wholly positive prophecy, from a 42-year old Pennsylvania woman who favors Kerry: “In the dream I was napping on the sofa while my daughter watched TV to see who was winning the election. Suddenly I awoke [in the dream] to lots of cheering and triumphant sounding music. I asked, “Who won? Did someone win?”  My daughter just sat and smiled at me. Again I asked her, “Who won, who won? Did Kerry win?”  Finally she answered me with, “YES!!!!”. We were overjoyed and started calling friends to make sure everyone knew.”

Future Research

Dr. Bulkeley is working on a larger-scale project examining the broader question of whether liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different kinds of dreams.  Using detailed interviews with people from both political ideologies, this project will provide the first empirical findings on such topics as who has the most dream recall, who suffers nightmares most frequently, who has more sexuality in their dreams, who dreams most often about work and money, who flies in their dreams the most, etc.  The answers to these questions (which will be presented at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, June 24-28, Berkeley, California) promise to shed a new and perhaps amusing light on the unconscious psychological roots of our country’s bitterly divided political landscape.

Purchase this Book – Hardcover
Purchase this Book – Paperback

This wide-ranging exploration of the spiritual and scientific dimensions of dreaming offers new connections between the ancient wisdom of the world’s religious traditions, which have always taught that dreams reveal divine truths, and the recent findings of modern psychological research. Drawing upon philosophy, anthropology, sociology, neurology, literature, and film criticism, this book offers a better understanding of the mysterious complexity and startling creative powers of human dreaming experience. For those interested in gaining new perspectives on dreaming, the powers of the imagination, and the newest frontiers in the dialogue between religion and science, Visions of the Night promises to be a welcome resource.

Blurbs and Reviews

“I am most intrigued by Bulkeley’s notion of dreams as root metaphors. Such a notion fits in well with an existential-phenomenological approach to dream interpretation, and also lends itself to understanding dreams in the context of spirituality. I think this text matches the quality of Bulkeley’s 1994 book (The Wilderness of Dreams), which I regard as a potential ‘classic’ in dream theory.”
—Hendrika Vande Kemp, Fuller Theological Seminary

“In Visions of the Night Kelly Bulkeley articulates a thesis which allows dreams to be accessible to the most reductive scientific analyses while concluding that they are both meaningful and religious. Punctuated by illustrations taken from a variety of cultural arenas, Bulkeley weaves a narrative that sifts through a panoply of psychological, sociological, and religious perspectives on dreams, engages cutting-edge debates, and speaks to the vicissitudes of individual and collective dreaming…. The virtue of this book lies not simply in its guiding thesis but in its scope. It provides a rich feast of perspectives on dreaming and an entry into pivotal controversies in the field.”
—William B. Parsons, The Journal of Religion

“This book, both a personal and scholarly journey, is well written, tightly argued, and evocative of the deeper regions of the human heart and mind. It covers a wide spectrum of disciplines, from the literary to the religious to the scholarly/historical, and has academic depth as well as an easy reading style. I very much respect Bulkeley’s scope of knowledge and breadth of integration.”
—Edward Bruce Bynum, author of Families and the Interpretation of Dreams

“Kelly Bulkeley offers us a series of essays on dreams and dreaming through a multiperspectival lens of several contemporary psychological and textual approaches used in religious studies….Self-contained chapters on dreams and conversion, neurophysiological models for understanding the religious meaning of dreams, dreams as play, and dreams and environmental ethics–to name just some of the thirteen topics addressed–awakened me to the many ways in which dreams deepen understanding of religion and connect us thoughtfully to issues of personal and political significance….Bulkeley is a prolific writer on dreams and religion from a psychological perspective. In this latest work beneath his erudite conversational informality lies not only a deep passtionate conviction about the contribution dreams make to human life and a human religion but a deep concern for a culture or a nation that has a perverted relationship to its dreams.”
— Chris Ross, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Varieties of Religious Dream
Experience
1. Root Metaphor Dreams
2. Dreaming and Conversion
3. Where Do Dreams Come From?
4. Sharing Dreams in Community Settings
5. Dreams and Environmental Ethics
6. Dreaming in a Totalitarian Society: A Winnicottian
Reading of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of
Dreams
7. Dreaming is Play: A Response to Freud
8. Gods, REMS, and What Neurology Has to Say about the
Religious Meanings of Dreams
9. The Evil Dreams of Gilgamesh: Interpreting Dreams in
Mythological Texts
10.Wisdom’s Refuge in the Night: Dreams in The
Mahabharata, The Ramayana, and Richard III
11.Dreamily Deconstructing the Dream Factory: The
Wizard of Oz and A Nightmare on Elm Street
12.Dreams within Films, Films within Dreams
13.Dreaming in Russia, August 1991
14.Postscript on Dreams, Religion, and Psychological
Studies
Bibliographical Essays

Nearly everyone experiences, at least once or twice in their lives, a dream of extraordinary power and intensity, a dream that strikes an emotional chord deep within them. From the dawn of history people have regarded such dreams as an important source of spiritual wisdom and insight. Modern psychology, too, has long recognized the importance of these “Big Dreams”– Carl Jung referred to them as “the richest jewels in the treasure-house of the soul.”

Transforming Dreams shows readers how to make sense of those special dreams that “by their very nature invite people to grow beyond themselves.” Drawing on Bulkeley’s own innovative research and an array of sources ranging from Eastern and Western mythologies and religions to state-of-the-art brain science and neurology, this book explores the roles that erotic dreams, nightmares, flying dreams, and dreams of dying have played in people’s lives throughout history. Transforming Dreams offers an original method of dream interpretation that integrates both spiritual and psychological approaches, helping people discover in their most memorable dreams a pathway to deepening their self-knowledge, broadening their emotional awareness, and liberating their imagination. Read an article about the book.

Blurbs and Reviews

“Kelly Bulkeley guides readers on an evocative journey through dreams that have transformed people’s lives. In clear, engaging language he shows how all dreamers can benefit from their nightly images and become receptive to their own ‘big dreams.’ Highly recommended.”
—Patricia Garfield, author of Creative Dreaming and The Dream Messenger

“An inspiring book that will transform how you understand your dreams. From Jacob’s and Achilles’ dreams to contemporary dreams, Kelly Bulkeley weaves ancient wisdom with unique and practical insights into life’s most memorable dreams and nightmares.”
—Alan Siegel, President, Association for the Study of Dreams

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part One: Tales
1. Dreams of Reassurance
2. Dreams of Making Love
3. Nightmares
4. Dreams of Death
Part Two: Pathways
5. Reflecting on Your Dreams
6. Sharing Your Dreams
7. Following Your Dreams
8. Creating Your Dreams
Conclusion: We Are All Big Dreamers

This book shows the value of dreams in helping people who have suffered a personal and/or community crisis to work through their losses and develop a new capacity for creative living. The focus is on the tremendous healing potential of dreaming in times of crisis—even the most terrifying post-traumatic nightmares are part of a healing process that ultimately leads to a deepening of spiritual wisdom and self-understanding. Dozens of examples are given of people who are trying to deal with a horrible collective disaster (like the terrorist attack of September 11) as well as people who have suffered personal catastrophes like sexual abuse, auto accidents, house fires, etc. The book’s goal is to provide readers with a basic set of skills to use in working with dreams and nightmares during times of crisis and disaster.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Post-Traumatic Stress and Nightmares
a. The PTSD Diagnosis
b. Nan’s Dream Series
c. The Therapeutic Value of Dreamsharing

2. Ripple Effects
a. Ground Zero Dreaming
b. Natural Disasters
c. Mourning

3. The Fear of New Dangers
a. More Terrorist Attacks?
b. Nan’s Fears
c. Safe Spaces

4. Flying and Falling
a. Crashing Planes
b. The Magic, and Peril, of Flying
c. Terrorists at Domenican College

5. Disease
a. Anthrax Anxiety
b. Dreaming and the Body
c. Personal Projections

6. Bad Guys
a. Unconscious Racial Profiling
b. Nan’s Dreams of Phil
c. I Am the Shadow

7. War and Protest
a. Crises of Conscience
b. On the Side of the Enemy
c. Family Battles

8. Anticipations
a. Did They See It Coming?
b. Possible Explanations
c. A Caregiving Response

9. Visions of Hope
a. Life Beyond September 11
b. Transformational Dream Analysis
c. A Conversation with Reverend Coughlin

Conclusion
a. The Practice of Dreamsharing
b. The Theory of Dreamsharing
c. Dreams of the Future

Notes
Bibliography
Index

John Adams-Benjamin Rush 1: Dream-Sharing of the Founding Fathers

“Rush set the terms for what became a high-stakes game of honesty by proposing that they dispense with the usual topics and report to each other on their respective dreams.  Adams leapt at the suggestion and declared himself prepared to match his old friend ‘dream for dream.’  Rush began with a ‘singular dream’ set in 1790 and focusing on a crazed derelict who was promising a crowd that he could ‘produce rain and sunshine and cause the wind to blow from any quarter he pleased.’  Rush interpreted this eloquent lunatic as a symbolic figure representing all those political leaders in the infant nation who claimed they could shape public opinion.  Adams subsequently countered: ‘I dreamed that I was mounted on a lofty scaffold in the center of a great plain in Versailles, surrounded by an innumerable congregation of five and twenty millions.’  But the crowd was not comprised of people.  Instead, they were all ‘inhabitants of the royal menagerie,’ including lions, elephants, wildcats, rats, squirrels, whales, sharks….At the end of the dream, he was forced to flee the scene with my ‘clothes torn from my back and my skin lacerated from head to foot.’”

Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 214-215.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to study these letters between John Adams and Benjamin Rush myself, so I’m relying on Ellis’ reading of this remarkable correspondence (which began in 1805 and continued for many years).  Adams was the country’s second President (1979-1801).  He played a central role in the country’s revolutionary birth but found himself  brusquely pushed aside by Thomas Jefferson, his erstwhile  friend and compatriot who defeated him in the 1800 election.  Rush was another “Founding Father,” a Pennsylvania doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence and who made it his personal mission to reconcile Adams and Jefferson.  He acted as an intermediary between them, writing letters to both men and trying to persuade them to restore some sense of political unity with each other, for their own sake and for the welfare of the young American republic, its visionary system of government still fragile and uncertain of long-term survival.

Why Rush made his dream-sharing proposal to Adams, where he got the idea, what made Adams so quickly agree—these are questions to which I don’t know the answer.  But it’s fascinating to discover evidence that the country’s earliest leaders evinced an enthusiastic willingness to share and discuss the insights revealed in their dreams.  Rush’s “singular” dream reflected the distaste he and Adams both felt toward the political demagoguery of their opponents, whose seductive fantasies were threatening to destroy the federal government’s ability to function as originally intended.  Adams responded with an elaborate nightmare (his reporting of the animals goes on for several paragraphs) in which he’s overcome by the tremendous power and riotous diversity of the animal kingdom.  Ellis suggests, plausibly I think, that Adams’ dream symbolized the angry emotions aroused in him by the split with Jefferson.

John Adams-Benjamin Rush 2: The End

“Rush reported his most amazing dream yet.  He dreamed that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson, congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life.  Jefferson had then responded to this magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness….Then  the two philosopher-kings ‘sunk into the grave nearly at the same time, full of years and rich in the gratitude and praises of their country’….Adams responded immediately: ‘A DREAM AGAIN! I have no other objection to your dream but that it is not history.  It may be prophecy.”

Ellis, Founding Brothers, 220.

In 1809, when Rush described his dream, Adams and Jefferson were still estranged.  However, both men had expressed to Rush a willingness to overcome their differences and bury their hurt feelings for the higher cause of national unity.  Ordinarily I would raise the skeptic’s question myself—Rush’s “dream” sounds too smooth, too allegorical, too conveniently supportive of his conscious goals to be believed.  But as a matter of historical fact, the dream came true in a way I doubt anyone could fabricate.  Adams and Jefferson resumed a cordial, respectful friendship in 1812, and for the remaining years of their lives they wrote each other detailed letters analyzing their roles in the country’s founding and articulating their best understanding of the Revolution’s core ideals and purposes.  In uncanny obedience to Rush’s dream, Adams and Jefferson died on same day—July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

(This article appears in the recent issue of Dream Time, the Magazine of the Association for the Study of Dreams)

The religions of the world have found a way to disagree on almost any subject you can think of. They’ve clashed over everything from the nature of the soul to the reality of God, from sexual morality to what foods we should and shouldn’t eat. But on one small point most religions do agree, and that’s a point about the nature of dreams. Nearly all the world’s religions share the belief that some dreams are true revelations of the Divine, bringing people into direct contact with some kind of transpersonal being, force, or reality. Not all dreams are believed to have this power; most traditions emphasize that the majority of dreams are related to ordinary daily events and have no unusual, heaven-sent meaning. But almost every religion in the world recognizes that at least once or twice in their lives people have dreams that are different, that have a special energy, vividness, and intensity to them. The Mohave Indians of the American Southwest call these dreams “sumach ahot,” or “lucky dreams,” while the Jamaa church people of Western Africa call them “mawazo,” or “holy dreams.” Medieval Islamic theologians referred to them as “clear dream visions” sent directly from God, and ancient Hindu philosophers spoke of them as “dreams under the influence of a deity.”

These unusual types of dream are not merely the relics of ancient religious superstition. People in our society today experience dreams that are virtually identical to the dream revelations reported in a wide variety of religious traditions. Although many individuals in the modern world use non-religious language to describe their dreams, the dream experiences themselves always have a vivid intensity that sharply distinguishes them from more ordinary types of dreaming. These are the dreams we never forget-the dreams we can’t help but remember, the dreams that throughout our lives linger in our memories and haunt our imaginations.

Carl Jung referred to these momentous experiences as “big dreams,” and he said that such dreams could, if people learned to appreciate their meanings, become “the richest jewels in the treasure-house of the soul.” Unfortunately, many people in modern society have no idea what to think or do when they experience a big dream. They worry that having such strangely vivid and powerful dreams must mean there’s something wrong with them. “Where did that come from?” the dreamers nervously ask themselves, “I’ve never experienced anything like that before, whether I was awake or asleep….”

For many years now I’ve been studying these kinds of extraordinary dream experiences, trying to understand where they come from, what functions they serve, and how we can interpret their meanings. My approach, in both my academic research and my experiential dreamwork, is guided by an integration of modern psychological theories with the traditional teachings of the world’s religions. In Transforming Dreams I share the basic principles of my approach, and I show how it can provide a reliable means of making better sense of your own most vividly memorable dreams. The first part of the book, “Tales,” describes four of the most striking forms that big dreams take: dreams of reassurance, dreams of making love, nightmares, and dreams of death. The book’s second part, “Pathways,” lays out the practical methods of exploration I have found most helpful in discerning the deeper meanings of big dreams. These practical methods include reflecting on a dream’s strongest sensations, sharing dreams with other people, following particular images and themes across a series of dreams, and creatively expressing the energies of dreams in waking life. Transforming Dreams is written for people who simply want to know more about their own big dreams, and it is also intended for the various professionals (psychotherapists, social workers, educators, pastoral counselors, spiritual directors) whose work might benefit from a greater familiarity with the most extraordinary and mysterious realms of the dreaming imagination.

I am not assuming the readers of the book will share any particular religious faith or spiritual worldview. Big dreams come to all people-to religious believers, diehard atheists, and all those people who don’t belong to any formal religion but who feel a yearning to discover greater meaning and purpose in their lives. I try to respect the healthy skepticism some readers may feel toward the subject of dreaming, and I also try to honor the sincere religious convictions of other readers who feel their dreams have truly Divine origins. My focus in Transforming Dreams is on the big dream experiences themselves, and I feel confident in promising readers that no matter what belief system you hold, these vivid and unforgettable dreams have the power to deepen your self-knowledge, broaden your emotional awareness, and open your imagination to new realms of vitality, freedom, and creative possibility.

One topic I discuss in the book is dreams of snakes, and this relates to the current interest of many ASD members in the questions of whether “universal dreams” truly exist and if so how they can best be understood. I present evidence in Transforming Dreams that extremely memorable dreams of snakes have been reported by people throughout history, right into the present day. Thus, in a very broad descriptive sense, I believe snake dreams are a truly universal phenomenon, and I also believe there’s a good naturalistic explanation for this. Because venomous snakes have been a real danger to humans from the earliest period of our evolutionary history, dreaming about snakes (in vivid and highly memorable ways) serves the adaptive function of keeping us alert and vigilant against this perennial waking world threat. To put it in the simplest terms, snake dreams are universal because snake dreams have tangible survival value.

But speaking in a more interpretive sense, I do not believe snake dreams have any universal meaning. The snake dreams I describe in my book express a variety of different meanings, none of which is easily reducible to a simple formula or definition. The most important practical point I emphasize in Transforming Dreams is that each dream is unique to the dreamer, with distinctive meanings that relate directly to his or her personal existence. Although it can be very helpful to hear how other people would interpret a similar dream (hence the value of dreamsharing groups), the dreamer is always in the best position to understand the unique meanings of his or her own dream experience.

Between these two positions-universal dreams, yes, universal meanings, no-lies a great deal of territory for creative exploration and discovery. Indeed, this gets to my basic belief about the essentially spiritual function of highly memorable dreams: these dreams provoke greater consciousness. Big dreams relate directly to our personal lives and they connect us to the universal cares, concerns, and desires of humankind. In this way big dreams truly expand consciousness, stretching our awareness to include an ever wider sphere of experience and meaning.

Transforming Dreams Learning Spiritual Lessons from the Dreams You Never Forget. By Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D. (John Wiley & Sons, February 2000)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471349615/kellybulkeley
Download this article as a pdf file

IASD celebrates the many benefits of dreamwork, yet recognizes that there are potential risks. IASD supports an approach to dreamwork and dream sharing that respects the dreamer’s dignity and integrity, and which recognizes the dreamer as the decision-maker regarding the significance of the dream. Systems of dreamwork that assign authority or knowledge of the dream’s meanings to someone other than the dreamer can be misleading, incorrect, and harmful. Ethical dreamwork helps the dreamer work with his/her own dream images, feelings, and associations, and guides the dreamer to more fully experience, appreciate, and understand the dream. Every dream may have multiple meanings, and different techniques may be reasonably employed to touch these multiple layers of significance.

A dreamer’s decision to share or discontinue sharing a dream should always be respected and honored. The dreamer should be forewarned that unexpected issues or emotions may arise in the course of the dreamwork. Information and mutual agreement about the degree of privacy and confidentiality are essential ingredients in creating a safe atmosphere for dream sharing.

Dreamwork outside a clinical setting is not a substitute for psychotherapy, or other professional treatment, and should not be used as such.

IASD recognizes and respects that there are many valid and time-honored dreamwork traditions. We invite and welcome the participation of dreamers from all cultures. There are social, cultural, and transpersonal aspects to dream experience. In this statement we do not mean to imply that the only valid approach to dreamwork focuses on the dreamer’s personal life. Our purpose is to honor and respect the person of the dreamer as well as the dream itself, regardless of how the relationship between the two may be understood.

Prepared by Carol Warner
International Association for the Study of Dreams
Spring, 1997

“Is Dream Interpretation a Sin?” (article)

“Penelope as Dreamer: The Perils of Interpretation” (conference presentation)

Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions (book)

Dreaming Beyond Death – Newsweek 2005

Dreams of Healing: Transforming Nightmares into Visions of Hope (book)

Transforming Dreams: Learning Spiritual Lessons from the Dreams You Never Forget (book).

The relationship between films and dreams has received a modest degree of scholarly attention over the past few decades. Some directors have described how they occasionally take images from their dreams and incorporate them into their films.[i] A handful of film critics have noted the dream-like quality of the experience of viewing movies.[ii] Several psychological studies have examined the influences of films on the dream contents of subjects sleeping in a sleep laboratory.[iii] And a number of psychologically-minded scholars have used the dream theories of Freud, Jung, and other to interpret the symbolism in various films.[iv]

In this essay I want to examine each of these dimensions of the complex interplay between films and dreams, focusing on two films in particular: The Wizard of Oz (1939, directed by Victor Fleming) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, directed by Wes Craven). Both of these films portray the dream adventures of an adolescent girl struggling to survive in and make sense of a world filled with danger, evil, and injustice. However, the two films offer strikingly different portraits of adolescent experience, with The Wizard of Oz presenting a grandly staged and highly polished fairy tale, and the low-budget A Nightmare on Elm Street telling a crude, blood-drenched horror story. While both films have enjoyed tremendous and enduring popularity among adolescent audiences, adults have generally praised the former film as a treasure of American cultural heritage, while vilifying the latter film for its corrosive effects on the moral development of our nation’s youth.

Looking at these two dream-oriented films from several different angles–considering their narrative plots, their cinematic artistry, their treatment of religion, their psychological impact on their audiences, and their relations to their social and historical contexts–will give us valuable insights into what may be called “the American unconscious.” By that somewhat mysterious phrase I mean the distinctive cluster of instinctually-rooted desires, fears, hopes, and conflicts which bond the American people together at a deep, though largely unconscious, psychological level. My goal in this essay is to show that a careful exploration of The Wizard of Oz and A Nightmare on Elm Street reveals important features of a certain realm of the American unconscious: namely, the dreams and nightmares of American adolescents.

To begin with, I’d like to look at the influence of dreaming on these two films, and at how the films make narrative use of common themes and patterns in people’s dream experiences. I trust that most readers are familiar with the three-part narrative structure of The Wizard of Oz: The film opens with Dorothy’s waking life experiences in Kansas, then follows her through a long series of fantastic dreaming experiences in Oz, and then finishes with a second, much briefer set of Dorothy’s waking experiences back in Kansas. The basic trajectory of the film’s plot involves Dorothy’s efforts to get out of Oz and return home, and it concludes with her succeeding in these efforts and passionately declaring, “Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home!” The moral of the story, then, seems to be that the waking world of home and family is the best place, the place we should be, the place we should never wish to leave, the place towards which we should always strive to return.

But the film has a second plot trajectory which parallels the first and reverses its moral message. According to this second trajectory, Dorothy temporarily escapes the dry, dusty tedium of waking life Kansas and discovers Oz, a world of dreams, a wonderous, exciting, beautiful world filled with mystery and adventure. The sharp contrast between the utter dreariness of her waking world and the enchanting magic of her dreaming world is established with stunning power by the use of a cinematic technique that will never again be used to such breathtaking effect: the sudden transformation, as Dorothy steps out of her tornado-tossed house, from the black-and-white of Kansas to the lush, vibrant, almost gaudy technicolor of Oz. Paralleling this visual contrast is a moral contrast: in Oz Dorothy finds the justice she could not find in Kansas. In the first, “waking life” section of the movie nothing can stop the cruel and socially powerful Mrs. Gulch (who, we’re told, owns “half the county”) from seizing Dorothy’s beloved pet dog, Toto. Dorothy discovers that the adult social order of the waking world cannot protect her most cherished interests, cannot care for her deepest needs. But in the dreaming world of Oz, she learns that good can triumph over evil; Dorothy and her friends do finally succeed in defeating the Wicked Witch, thereby restoring to preeminence the principles of right and fairness. So the second, more covert moral of Dorothy’s story is that while there may be no place like home, there’s no place like Oz, either: for the dream world of Oz reveals to her visions of sublime beauty and moral justice far surpassing the imperfections of her waking world.

I don’t know if Victor Fleming drew directly upon his own dreams in the making of The Wizard of Oz. But it’s clear that the film deliberately, and very effectively, evokes common features of dreaming experience: e.g., the magical animism of the dream world (e.g., talking trees, flying monkeys), the transformation of people from waking life into dream characters (Mrs. Gulch -> the Wicked Witch, the three farm hands -> the Scare Crow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, the huckster fortune teller -> the Wizard), and the exquisite sense of beauty and wonder which simply can’t be communicated to others (as Dorothy discovers when she awakens at the end of the movie and tries unsuccessfully to describe to everyone what her dream was like). In all these ways, the movie’s many references to common features of our dreams serve to intensify the audience’s emotional immersion in Dorothy’s story.

Very much like The Wizard of Oz, A Nightmare on Elm Street generates its narrative power by tapping into people’s common dream experiences–in this case, the experience of recurrent nightmares. Wes Craven, the film’s director, has acknowledged a fascination with dreams and nightmares, and has said that the basic nightmare theme of being relentlessly pursued by a malevolent antagonist is the backbone of his film’s story.[v]

I imagine that very few readers have ever seen A Nightmare on Elm Street, so let me recount the basic story. A nice, average high school girl named Nancy Thompson lives with her parents in a nice, average house on nice, average Elm Street (Nancy’s mother is an alcoholic housewife, her father the stoic chief of police of their nameless middle-American town). Nancy and her teenage friends start having the exact same recurrent nightmares of a horribly disfigured man in a dirty red and green sweater who attacks them with his razor-blade fingers. When two of her friends are found brutally murdered, Nancy desperately tries to tell her father that it’s the fiend from her nightmares who killed them, and that he’s trying to kill her, too. Her police chief father, however, refuses to believe that any such thing could possibly happen. But when Nancy mentions to her mother that she’s learned the nightmare man’s name–Freddy Krueger–her mother realizes what’s been happening. Reluctantly, she tells Nancy that ten years ago their town was terrorized by a sadistic child murderer, who turned out to be a seemingly ordinary neighbor named Fred Krueger. Krueger was caught, but he escaped conviction on a legal technicality. So the outraged parents of their neighborhood (including Nancy’s mother and father) secretly formed a vigilante group, trapped Krueger in an abandoned boiler room, and burned him to death. They all made a vow to keep the truth of what they did to punish Krueger forever hidden. When Nancy hears this story, she decides she must go back into her nightmares; with no help from her father or her boyfriend (who is the fiend’s next victim), she confronts Freddy and declares that she knows his secret now, and she isn’t afraid of him anymore. This courageous assertion finally breaks the power Freddy has had over her, and with a agonized shriek he vanishes as Nancy safely awakens to a bright, sunny morning.

A Nightmare on Elm Street does everything it can to recreate the sensation of being trapped within a recurrent nightmare. Feelings of fear, helplessness, impotence, and vulnerability pervade the film. Nancy and her friends (and we in the audience) are repeatedly startled and disoriented by abrupt shifts from waking to dreaming and back again, and we are relentlessly assaulted by sudden, shocking bursts of violence and bloody physical mutilation. Like Dorothy, Nancy is unable to convince the adults out in the waking world of the reality of what she’s experiencing in her dreams. And also like Dorothy, Nancy ultimately finds in her dreams the deep resources of personal strength to overcome an evil which the adult social world had failed to defeat.

In both films, Christianity plays a small but significant role as an emblem of the impotence of the adult world in helping adolescents fight off evil and injustice. In the first section of The Wizard of Oz, when it becomes clear that nothing will stop Mrs. Gulch from impounding Toto, Aunt Em emotionally declares that she’s been waiting for many years to tell how she really feels about Mrs. Gulch–but “being a Christian woman, I can’t.” In A Nightmare on Elm Street Nancy has a crucifix hung over her bed, which conspicuously fails to protect her from Freddy Kruger’s nightly attacks. Christianity in these two films represents the adult world’s highest ideals–and the failure of those ideals to save adolescents from the dangers that threaten them.

In evoking so powerfully a variety of common dream and nightmare sensations, the two films build upon qualities shared by all movies. Film critics have long recognized the dream-like nature of watching movies: we sit relaxed and motionless in a quiet, darkened space and become immersed in a flow of narrative, allowing vibrant waves of sound and visual imagery to wash over us. In this sense, every film works to simulate the experience of dreaming; every film draws its power from its capacity to recreate the formal experiential qualities of a dream.

This is one reason why films have been used so frequently in experimental dream research. From the earliest days of sleep laboratory examinations of REM sleep, researchers have been using films to examine the impact of waking stimuli on dream content. A number of experiments have involved subjects watching films with especially strong emotional content (e.g., pornographic films, movies showing the autopsy of a human corpse). The subjects are then awakened during their REM sleep the next night to see what impact the films had on their dreams. The basic result of these studies is that material from the films does frequently become incorporated directly or indirectly into the subjects’s dreams, although it remains unclear why some subjects have more film references in their dreams and other subjects less.[vi]

I know of no studies focusing on the impact of these two particular films on people’s dreams. However, my own research and experience suggests the following:

The Wizard of Oz has been the primary source of the American people’s fascination with the question of whether we dream in color or black-and-white. This is a question that could never have arisen in a pre-modern society, without exposure to the technologies of photography and cinema.

A Nightmare on Elm Street has helped to stimulate the capacity of American teenagers to experience lucid dreams (i.e., becoming conscious within the dream state that one is dreaming), beyond what most adults seem to have experienced in their lives. I suspect that this movie has had a huge influence on this generation’s understanding of what dreams are and what is possible within them.

One of the biggest differences between films and dreams, of course, is that while dreams are purely private experiences, films are collective experiences. We have our dreams in the privacy of our own personal imaginations (setting aside, for this chapter’s purposes, the interesting question of whether dreams can be shared), but we usually watch movies with groups of other people. This brings up another interesting feature of the two films under discussion, namely that both films have become the objects of what I would call “ritual viewing practices.” For many decades, in the pre-VCR era, the annual showing of the The Wizard of Oz on network television was an eagerly-anticipated family event. I myself still have glowing memories of getting settled on the couch with my parents and my sister and watching, for the umpteenth time, the wonderful adventures of Dorothy and Toto in the land of Oz. There are also ritual viewing practices associated with A Nightmare on Elm Street (and its half-dozen sequels), but they take a quite different form. This movie is very much a product of the VCR revolution in the viewing, and the making, of contemporary films. Produced with little money and less technical sophistication, A Nightmare on Elm Street had only a brief original run in theaters; and of course it has never been shown on network TV. The film’s spectacular success has depended entirely on the VCR rental market, and more specifically on the phenomenon of teenagers renting the movie again and again and again. I first learned about this from my brother Alex, who’s twelve years younger than I am. He knows of my interest in dreams, and several years ago, when he was in his early teens, he said, “Kelly, you’ve got to check out the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Dude, they’re all about dreams!” As I talked with Alex about the movies, I discovered that he and his friends had all seen them at least six or seven times each. The usual routine was for everyone to gather at someone’s house on a Saturday night, turn out all the lights, and (with no grown-ups anywhere around) watch yet again Nancy’s terrifying nightmare battles with Freddy Krueger.

I find one especially significant difference between the ritual viewing practices associated with these two films, and that is that the audiences for The Wizard of Oz tend to be intergenerational: parents and children all watching together, as a family. The audiences for A Nightmare on Elm Street, however, are usually composed of adolescents only, and primarily adolescent boys.

I believe this difference in ritual viewing practices gives us some insight into the bottom-line question of what the dreams in The Wizard of Oz and A Nightmare on Elm Street can be said to mean. At the most basic level, the dreams in both films are about the struggles of adolescents in American society: struggles which in our society are conceptualized as a transformation from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to independence, from innocence to sexuality, from a life of play to a life of work. The dreams in both films work to stimulate profound empathy for and identification with the fears and sufferings of adolescents as they go through this transformation. And the dreams in both films sharply criticize the failure of parents, and of the whole adult social order generally, to protect adolescents from evils, injustices, and threats to their budding sense of emotional and physical integrity.

The Wizard of Oz concludes on a note of stirring hopefulness and optimism. Dorothy ultimately survives her frightening trials in the land of Oz, and at the end of the movie returns, with a newfound sense of devotion and trustfulness, to her home and her family. This is a moral message that naturally makes the film appealing to family audiences. It’s true that this message is clouded somewhat by the fact that Mrs. Gulch is probably still around and thus is likely to continue her vendetta against Toto (unless the tornado managed to get her–a nice possibility, but we never hear one way or the other). And it’s true that what I’ve called the film’s second, covert moral message points Dorothy, and we in the audience, towards the enchanting reality of a very different kind of world. But in the end, the two messages work together to propel Dorothy (and the audience) back into waking life with renewed commitments to her community. Recalling that The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939, I think the film can be seen on one level as a response to the challenges facing adolescents of that historical period: overcoming the despair engendered by growing up during the Great Depression, resisting the temptations of escapist fantasizing, and finding the inner strength to confront the mounting danger to the American community posed by World War II.

So I would say the meaning of Dorothy’s dream is this: always remember the beauty, the friendship, and the strength of purpose you experienced in Oz–never forget that. But now it’s time to go back, rejoin your family, and do what you can to help them through their hard times.

The conclusion of A Nightmare on Elm Street is quite different. If The Wizard of Oz ends on a note of hope, A Nightmare on Elm Street ends with a mixed message at best. Yes, Nancy has defeated Freddy Krueger, and yes, she’s back with her mother and father, in their nice suburban house with the white picket fence on Elm Street. But Freddy’s not really gone. Everybody in the audience knows that Freddy is going to come back–it’s simply the nature of recurrent nightmares, and of the low-budget horror movies patterned after them, that the evil fiend will come back. Thus, the reassurance that Nancy and we in the audience receive at the end of the movie is only temporary, only provisional. We’ve got a bit of a breather, but that’s about it.

This moral message–that evil may be defeated, but it’s going to come back–has a special resonance, I believe, for the adolescent boys that tend to be the film’s primary audience. This is because they identify not simply with Nancy and her teenage friends, but with Freddy Krueger: for adolescent boys, Freddy expresses all the terribly urgent sexual desires they feel rising up within themselves. The Nightmare on Elm Street movies are brutally honest about how frightening these desires can be, stimulating fears and fantasies of violent fragmentation and destruction. By watching these horrible movies again and again, in small, furtive, emphatically non-family gatherings, adolescent boys seem to find a small measure of comfort in sharing their inner experiences of trying to come to terms with the Freddy Krueger within each of them.

The importance of this comfort should be evaluated in the context the movie’s distinctive historical period. In 1984, the year the original Nightmare on Elm Street movie was released, the U.S. economy was booming, Wall Street was awash in merger-and-acquisition money, the armed forces were busily building new planes, tanks, and missiles to defend against the “Evil Empire,” and Ronald Reagan was gliding to reelection on the theme that “It’s Morning in America.” Culturally speaking, it was a time of vigorous masculine assertiveness, when vulnerability was scorned and raw power glorified. The challenges facing an adolescent boy growing up in such a culture are portrayed quite starkly A Nightmare on Elm Street: the adults think everything is great, and they don’t want to hear anything about being scared, feeling helpless, or worrying that there’s something very powerful and very dangerous lurking in the dark. So the meaning of the dreams of Nancy and her friends, in my view, is this: there is a real and terribly powerful force of evil haunting our dreams, but the grown-ups can’t, or won’t, acknowledge it; so adolescents have to join together, use their wits, and be prepared to face that evil when it comes again–for it will come again.

Notes

[i].. See Gabbard and Gabbard 1987.

[ii].. See Ebert 1996.

[iii]..See Koulack 1991.

[iv].. This essay was originally presented at a panel titled “Cinema, Psychoanalysis, and the American Unconscious,” sponsored by the Religion and the Social Sciences Section at the 1996 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting. The other papers presented at the panel were “From Separation to Merger: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Jews in American Film,” by Fredelle Spiegel; “Euro-American (Christian) Fantasies of Love and Genocide,” by Roy Steinhoff-Smith; “The Marginalization and Destruction of the Female Body in Popular Women’s Films,” by Peggy Schmeiser; and “Terminator 1 and 2: A Cinematic Construction of Religion in Popular Culture,” by Rubina Ramji. Each of these papers drew upon psychoanalytically-oriented theoretical resources to analyze contemporary films.

[v]..Cooper 1987, p. 10.

[vi]..Koulack 1991.