However, just as much as James was interested in seeing what psychology could teach us about religion, he also wanted to explore what religion could teach us about psychology. Toward the end of the Gifford Lectures James brought the concept of the subconscious into his analysis, and he concluded that in psychological terms religious experiences are expressions of subconscious feelings, thoughts, energies, and desires. “[I]n religion,” James said, “we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the transmarginal or subliminal region [of the mind]….In persons deep in the religious life–and this is my conclusion–the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history” (James 1958, 366). What this means, James suggested, is that the further development of psychological knowledge will require us to explore experiential realms that have traditionally been regarded as religious or spiritual in nature. If we truly want to expand our psychological understanding of the human mind we must continue to examine in a careful and respectful fashion what the world’s religious traditions have taught about those mysteriously non-volitional, non-conscious powers that have guided, inspired, and sometimes radically transformed people’s lives.

In the twenty lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh James mentioned the subject of dreams but once, noting only that they are one of the most common expressions of that subconscious realm of the mind where religion and psychology come together (James 1958, 366). I imagine, though, that James might have devoted more attention to dreams if he had given the Gifford Lectures a few years later, after having what he described as one of the most “intensely peculiar experiences of my whole life”:

San Francisco, Feb. 14th 1906. The night before last, in my bed at Stanford University, I woke at 7:30 a.m., from a quiet dream of some sort, and whilst “gathering my waking wits,” seemed suddenly to get mixed up with reminiscences of a dream of an entirely different sort, which seemed to telescope, as it were, into the first one, a dream very elaborate, of lions, and tragic. I concluded this to have been a previous dream of the same sleep; but the apparent mingling of two dreams was something very queer, which I had never before experienced.

On the following night (Feb. 12-13) I awoke suddenly from my first sleep, which appeared to have been very heavy, in the middle of a dream, in thinking of which I became suddenly confused by the contents of two other dreams that shuffled themselves abruptly in between the parts of the first dream, and of which I couldn’t grasp the origin. Whence come these dreams? I asked. They were close to me, and fresh, as if I had just dreamed them; and yet they were far away from the first dream. The contents of the three had absolutely no connection. One had a cockney atmosphere, it happened to someone in London. The other two were American. One involved the trying on of a coat (was this the dream I seemed to wake from?) the other was a sort of nightmare and had to do with soldiers. Each had a wholly distinct emotional atmosphere that made its individuality discontinuous with that of the others. And yet, in a moment, as these three dreams alternately telescoped into and out of each other, and I seemed to myself to have been their common dreamer, they seemed quite as distinctly not to have been dreamed in succession, in that one sleep. When, then? Not on a previous night, either. When, then, and which was the one out of which I had just awakened? I could no longer tell: one was as close to me as the others, and yet they entirely repelled each other, and I seemed thus to belong to three different dream-systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either with the others or with my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide-awake. Presently cold shivers of dread ran over me: Am I getting into other people’s dreams? Is this a “telepathic” experience? Or an invasion of double (or treble) personality? Or is it a thrombus in a cortical artery? and the beginning of a general mental “confusion” and disorientation which is going on to develop who knows how far?

Decidedly I was losing hold of my “self,” and making acquaintance with a quality of mental distress that I had never known before, its nearest analogue being the sinking, giddying anxiety that one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really “lost.” Most human troubles look towards a terminus. Most fears point in a direction and concentrate towards a climax. Most assaults of the evil one may be met by bracing oneself against something, one’s principles, one’s courage, one’s will, one’s pride. But in this experience all was diffusion from a centre, and footholds swept away, the brace itself disintegrating all the faster as one needed its support more direly. Meanwhile vivid perception (or remembrance) of the various dreams kept coming over me in alternation. Whose? whose? WHOSE? Unless I can attach them, I am swept out to sea with no horizon and no bond, getting lost.

The idea aroused the “creeps” again, and with it the fear of again falling asleep and renewing the process. It had begun the previous night, but then the confusion had only gone one step, and had seemed simply curious. This was the second step–where might I be after a third step had been taken? (James 1910, 88-89, italics in original)

What strikes James more than anything else here is the overall form of his experience, the way it profoundly shakes his understanding of the ordinary structures of consciousness and personality. James provides few details about the dreams themselves, and no particular associations to the images of the lions, the cockney atmosphere, the coat, or the soldiers. Rather, it is the dizzying plurality of the dreams that unsettles him so deeply. Each of the dreams engages him in a vivid and distinct reality of its own, and yet he does not see any means of relating the dream realities to each other or to his daily life. James’s “self,” the customary center of his highly cultured and brilliantly intelligent waking life identity, is incapable of making sense of these dreaming experiences–the dreams carry him some place far beyond the boundaries, the “braces,” that have always defined and protected his selfhood.

I find many things to admire and wonder at in James’s narrative. One is his ability simply to describe what has happened to him. Despite the frightening confusion he feels, he still manages to write an evocative portrait of an experience that is utterly alien to ordinary rational thought. I’m particularly taken with his comparison of the dream experiences to the feeling of being “really lost” in the woods, as I have often drawn on wilderness metaphors when trying to describe the more extraordinary aspects of dreaming. Another remarkable element here is James’s willingness consider a variety of possible explanations for the dreams. They could be telepathic interactions with other people’s dreams, they could be products of a physiological malfunction in the cerebral cortex, they could be the beginnings of a mental breakdown, they could, perhaps, be an opening toward a kind of mystical insight or revelation. James isn’t sure what exactly has happened to him. And although no single explanation seems to fit, James clearly feels a strong impulse to understand the experience, to “attach” the dreams to someone or something.

More than anything, I marvel at James’s ability to live with the exquisitely sharp emotional tension generated by his dreams. He rejects the seductive simplicity of quick, reductionistic answers, and he chooses instead to hold all the different possibilities open, hoping that with time a better understanding will emerge that will do full justice to the mysterious complexity of his experience.

The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience is not intended to be a “Jamesian” analysis of dreaming. For one thing, I am interested not only in developing the dialogue between religion and psychology but also in expanding that dialogue to include voices from the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, neurophysiology, history, literature, and film criticism. For another thing, I am motivated in my research by somewhat different questions than those which guided James in his investigations. My key questions can be briefly stated as follows:

1. What is the role of dreaming in human development, and particularly in the development of our capacities for imaginative play? Given that all humans are “hard-wired” with a psychophysiological need to dream, what can or should a society do to educate its members (particularly its children) about the nature and the potentials of dreaming experience?
2. Why do certain dreams respond so directly and so creatively to waking life experiences of crisis, trauma, suffering, and loss? How have different cultural traditions made practical use of these “healing powers” of dreaming?
3. What is the relationship of dreaming to politics, authority, and rebellion? In what ways do dreams both reflect and challenge the structures of power that govern a dreamer’s life (at intrapsychic, geopolitical, and cosmic/theological levels)?
4. Is it ever possible to know with certainty if our dreams are revealing valuable spiritual truths or are simply deceiving us with alluring but vain fantasies? Can we develop trustworthy hermeneutic principles to guide us through the epistemologically confounding process of dream interpretation?

These four broad questions are woven throughout the thirteen chapters of The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience. Although each particular chapter uses a different interdisciplinary framework to study a different set of issues, all of the chapters are efforts to develop new perspectives on these four questions. Readers who expect a book to have a precise linear argument, marching point by point toward a specific concluding destination, may be disappointed by kaleidoscopic array of views presented in this work. Again, I can only appeal to the infinitely diverse nature of dreaming itself, and suggest that the best way to increase our understanding of dreaming is to engage in the kind of free-ranging interdisciplinary dialogue that is offered in the following chapters.

The specific focus of the first three chapters is on different ways of interpreting the religious or spiritual dimensions of dreaming. Most contemporary scholarship on dreams, even if it is friendly to religious issues and concerns, relies on conceptual models of religion that are narrow at best and erroneous at worst. In these three chapters I draw on resources from contemporary theology, the history of religions, depth psychology, and hermeneutic philosophy to promote a more sophisticated understanding of the numinous power and rich spiritual diversity of human dream life. In chapters four to six I consider the ways in which dreams relate not only to the dreamer’s personal life but to his or her social world as well. These chapters show how dreams reflect significant features of the dreamer’s cultural environment and sometimes even motivate moral and political actions that aim at the resolution of particularly troublesome problems in the dreamer’s community.

In chapters seven and eight I respond to the dream theories of Sigmund Freud and J. Allan Hobson, both of whom share a deep but in my view misguided hostility towards religion. I argue that their theories, despite their triumphant scientific reductionism, in fact provide valuable resources in helping us better understand the profoundly creative nature of dreaming.

In chapters nine through twelve I turn to the interplay of dreaming and artistic expression, and study different cultural representations of dreaming in myths, plays, and films. All of the dreams analyzed in these chapters are fictional, i.e. they are all experienced by people who are characters in an artistically-rendered narrative. My argument is that careful reading and interpretation of these “fictional” dreams can reveal intriguing new aspects of the “real” dreams we experience in our own lives.

I conclude the book with a personal narrative of my experiences at a dream studies conference I attended in Moscow, a conference that by coincidence began the very day (August 19, 1991) that a group of Red Army generals tried to seize control of the country from then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A postscript offers some thoughts on where this book fits into the ongoing scholarly discussion about the field of religion and psychological studies, a field which is in the midst of (yet another) period of transition and reorientation.
An annotated bibliography on dream research is included at the end of the book to aid readers who want to pursue the study of particular issues and themes. I have been writing regular book reviews on dreams for ten years now (first with Dream Network Bulletin and now with Dream Time) and this bibliography is intended to provide readers with a broad critical overview of the current state of dream literature.

Serious skepticism about dream research is well justified-and yet that skepticism can, and must, be answered. In my presentation today I will outline what I call a post-critical hermeneutics of dreaming, which is grounded in a direct engagement with the powerful and profound skepticism that dreaming naturally evokes. I hope to show you that the most valuable new discoveries in studying dreams, whether in religion, psychology, history, anthropology, or any other field, will come from investigations that confront the challenge of skepticism, incorporate it, and then grow beyond it.

The post-critical hermeneutics of dreaming I will outline is intended to serve in any context in which dreams and dreaming are investigated: in readings of historical, literary, and sacred texts, in ethnographic field research, in psychological experiments, in psychotherapy and pastoral counseling, and in personal reflection. Although these are radically different kinds of settings, I hope to persuade you that the nature of dreaming is such that the same basic interpretive principles can be used to good and fruitful effect in any of them.

I’d like to illustrate the use of these principles by telling a story. It’s a very old story, a story you’ve probably heard many times before, but I’d like to tell it again because even though it’s “just a story” I feel it brings to life in an exquisitely vivid way the power and the mystery of dreams and their interpretation.

The story I’d like to tell is of the meeting of Odysseus and Penelope in Book 19 of The Odyssey. In many respects this encounter is the point of greatest dramatic intensity in the entire poem, and at the heart of the scene is a dream-Penelope’s dream of the twenty geese that are suddenly slaughtered by a mountain eagle. Odysseus, after leading the Achaean army to victory against the Trojans and after enduring a seemingly endless series of trials and adventures, has returned at last to his island home of Ithaca, where he has found a mob of rude noblemen besieging his palace. The crafty warrior has disguised himself as an old beggar in order to gain entrance into the palace without being recognized, and he is plotting violent revenge against the men who would steal his throne. Penelope, who for many years has desperately clung to the hope that Odysseus would someday return to her, has invited this strange wanderer into her private chambers to ask if he can tell her any news of her husband. The beggar fervently promises the Queen that Odysseus is very close and will return very, very soon. Penelope replies to the beggar’s story by saying she wishes his words would come true, but she doubts they will. She then asks her old servant woman, Eurycleia, to bathe the stranger and arrange a comfortable place for him to sleep. The Queen steps away while the old nurse washes the beggar’s feet. Then, before parting for the night, Penelope returns to the beggar and says (all quotes are from the translation of Robert Fagles, 1996, Viking Press),

“My friend, I have only one more question for you….
[P]lease, read this dream for me, won’t you? Listen closely….
I kept twenty geese in the house, from the water trough
They come and peck their wheat-I love to watch them all.
But down from a mountain swooped this great hook-beaked eagle,
Yes, and he snapped their necks and killed them one and all
And they lay in heaps throughout the hall while he,
Back to the clear blue sky he soared at once.
But I wept and wailed-only a dream, of course-
And our well-groomed ladies came and clustered round me,
Sobbing, stricken: the eagle killed my geese. But down
He swooped again and settling onto a jutting rafter
Called out in a human voice that dried my tears,
‘Courage, daughter of famous King Icarius!
This is no dream but a happy waking vision,
Real as day, that will come true for you.
The geese were your suitors-I was once the eagle
But now I am your husband, back again at last,
About to launch a terrible fate against them all!’
So he vowed, and the soothing sleep released me.”
(The Odyssey 19.575, 603-621)

The disguised Odysseus immediately replies,
“Dear woman,….twist it however you like,
Your dream can mean only one thing. Odysseus
Told you himself-he’ll make it come to pass,
Destruction is clear for each and every suitor;
Not a soul escapes his death and doom.”
(The Odyssey 19.624-629)

Penelope’s response to the beggar is this:
“Ah my friend, seasoned Penelope dissented,
Dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things-
Not all we glimpse in them will come to pass….
Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,
One is made of ivory, the other made of horn.
Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved
Are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit.
The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn
Are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them.
But I can’t believe my strange dream has come that way,
Much as my son and I would love to have it so.”
(The Odyssey 19.630-640)

So, what has just happened here? What is going on between Odysseus and Penelope, and what is the significance of her dream and their exchange about its meaning? The traditional interpretation of this scene, shared with near unanimity by scholars from antiquity to the present, is this. Odysseus has heroically controlled his desire to rejoin Penelope and hidden his identity from her for two reasons: one, to test his wife’s fidelity during his long absence (remember Agamemnon and Clytemnestra), and two, to pick up information about how to destroy the hated suitors. Penelope’s dream of the 20 geese is a straightforward prophecy, whose true meaning the disguised Odysseus instantly recognizes. But Penelope, who has shown a stubborn skepticism throughout the story, refuses to accept the dream’s obvious meaning. Indeed, perhaps she unconsciously enjoys the attention of the suitors and does not really want Odysseus to come back.

My dissatisfaction with this widely held interpretation centers on its strange depreciation of Penelope’s intelligence. This is a woman whom several characters have praised for her unrivalled perceptiveness, cunning, and guile; this is the woman who devised the famous ruse of the funeral shroud, by which she successfully deceived the suitors for three years. All of the evidence in the poem makes it clear that Penelope is not a fool: she is extremely perceptive and capable of remarkably subtle deceptions. So why, when we come to Book 19 and her meeting with the “beggar,” should we now forget all that and regard Penelope as a pathetically unwitting dupe in the vengeful scheming of Odysseus?

Here is the moment when careful reflection on Penelope’s dream can open up new horizons of meaning. The Iliad and The Odyssey together contain, up to the point of Penelope’s dream of the 20 geese, four major dream episodes: Agamemnon’s “Evil Dream” from Zeus (2.1-83), Achilles’ mournful dream of the spirit of dead Patroklos (23.54-107), Penelope’s reassuring dream from Athena (4.884-946), and Nausicaa’s arousing marriage dream from Athena (6.15-79). Viewed in this context, Penelope’s dream is unusual in at least two ways:

• One, this is the only dream that occurs “offstage,” out of direct view of the audience. We do not “see” the dream while it is happening; we only hear the dreamer describe it, after the fact.

• Two, this is the only “symbolic” dream, with its meaning encoded in stylized imagery. The dream thus poses a riddle, which must be accurately interpreted for the true meaning to emerge.

I believe these two details suggest a very different reading of the encounter between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus. Could it be that this is not a “real” dream at all, that in fact Penelope has made it up? Could it be that Penelope is deliberately using the riddle of her dream as a test to find out the intentions of this man, whom she consciously suspects is Odysseus? Could it be that while he thinks he’s deceiving her, she’s really the one deceiving him?

This would not be the first time in Homer’s poems that dreams have been used to deceive and manipulate others-in fact, it would be the fourth time: Zeus sending the “Evil Dream” to Agamemnon, Athena sending the “marriage dream” to Nausicaa, and Odysseus (at the end of The Odyssey, Book 14) making up a story about the “real” Odysseus making up a dream in order to steal another warrior’s cloak on a cold, windy night (14.519-589).

Why would Penelope make up such a dream? The answer emerges if we think carefully about what is happening at that crucial moment when the old nurse Eurycleia is washing the beggar’s feet. Penelope has removed herself and is standing alone, after a long and intimate conversation with a man who has detailed knowledge about Odysseus, who looks and sounds very much like Odysseus, who insists with passionate certainty that Odysseus will return to the palace the very next day. The question could hardly not arise for this most intelligent and perceptive of women: is this stranger Odysseus himself? If he is, then why isn’t he revealing himself? Penelope has just poured her heart out to him, saying how terribly she has suffered over the years-why won’t he drop his disguise and reunite with her this very moment?

When Eurycleia finishes washing the beggar’s feet, Penelope returns to him and says she has one last question-what is the meaning of her dream of the geese and the mountain eagle? The disguised Odysseus eagerly agrees with the words of the mountain eagle in the dream: the dream means “destruction is clear for each and every suitor.”

Penelope, however, disagrees. Her “two gates” speech that follows is a subtle but unmistakable way of saying “I don’t think so” to the beggar’s interpretation. She cannot agree with him for a simple reason: the mountain eagle and the beggar have both misinterpreted the dream. There are 20 geese in her dream, but more, many more than that number of suitors in the palace. As we learn in Book 16.270-288, where Telemachus tells Odysseus who all the suitors are and where they come from, there are a total of 108 men besieging the palace. Penelope’s refusal to accept the interpretation of the mountain eagle and the beggar is not due to stubborn skepticism, pathetic ignorance, or unconscious desire-she rejects the interpretation because it is wrong. The true meaning of the symbol of the 20 geese is surprisingly easy to find if we do not automatically assume that the mountain eagle and the beggar are right (that is, if we do not automatically privilege the hermeneutic perspective of Odysseus). The 20 geese symbolize the 20 years that Odysseus has been away fighting the war at Troy and journeying through the world. The exact length of Odysseus’ absence, 20 years, is mentioned five separate times in the poem, and most significantly the beggar himself comments to Penelope a few lines earlier in Book 19 that Odysseus has been gone for 20 years.

Thus, the first part of Penelope’s dream symbolically, and very accurately, describes her emotional experience of what has happened between them: Odysseus, by going off to fight in someone else’s war, has destroyed the last 20 years for her. What should have been the prime years of their marriage, the wonderful years of raising a family and creating a home, the years that Penelope would have “loved to watch” and care for, have been slaughtered by Odysseus. The second part of the dream expresses Penelope’s fearful perception of Odysseus right now, still standing apart from her in the disguise of a beggar. He doesn’t recognize her, and what the last 20 years have been like for her; all he can see are the suitors and a galling challenge to his honor. By posing this dream riddle to the beggar, Penelope is in effect asking if her suspicion is true: is the “real” Odysseus as blind to her feelings and as obsessed with killing the suitors as is the “dream” Odysseus? When the beggar agrees with the mountain eagle’s words in the dream, Penelope knows the unfortunate answer.

The mysterious poetry of Penelope’s two gates speech becomes all the more powerful when it is understood as a response to Odysseus’ failure of the dream interpretation test. To his reprimanding words, “twist it however you like, your dream can only mean one thing,” Penelope replies that dreams are always difficult to understand, and they do not always come true. The danger is that we will allow our desire to cloud our perception-taking as divine prophecy what is merely human fantasy. But some dreams, she goes on to say, do have the potential to come true-though only “for the dreamer who can see them.” That is precisely what Odysseus has failed to do. He has failed to see past his own desire for revenge.

I am reluctant to finish with this story, because there is so much more to be told (and so much more to be questioned, if you happen to disagree with my admittedly unorthodox reading of this scene). But let me bring my presentation to a close by reflecting on the hermeneutic principles guiding my approach to Penelope’s dream of the 20 geese. First, I chose to privilege the perspective of the dreamer, listening empathetically to her words, looking carefully at her experience, asking critical questions of her motivations, and ultimately grounding the dream’s meaning in the conditions of her waking life. Second, I focused special attention on the details of the dream, particularly on the exact number of geese, 20. Third, I located the dream in the context of broader cultural patterns, focusing in particular on how Penelope’s dream deviates from the narrative structuring of other Homeric dreams. And fourth, I tried to look beyond the seemingly obvious and self-evident to discover the new, the surprising, the unexpected.

These four principles-privileging the perspective of the dreamer, focusing on the details, identifying cultural patterns, and being open to surprise-constitute the core of what I’m calling a post-critical hermeneutics of dreaming. I recognize the paradoxical nature of illustrating these principles with a story about a fabricated dream-a fiction within a fiction within a fiction. What could make an audience more skeptical about a speaker’s argument?

What could make you more skeptical? Well, how about ending with one of the speaker’s own dreams? In March of this year, when I was anxiously working to organize this panel, I had a dream of Kurt Cobain, the singer-guitarist from the Seattle rock band Nirvana who killed himself with a shotgun in 1994. In my dream he’s alive and well, in a classroom with me and some students. I feel a strong desire somehow to weave him into the AAR panel-I need his creative energy, yet I fear his self-destructive unpredictability. I awoke from the dream with that tension fresh and vivid in my mind. I hope my presentation today has provoked some of that same tension in each of you.

Abstract

This study examines the dreams of American liberals and conservatives in order to highlight patterns that might correlate with their opposing political views. A total of 234 participants (134 self-described liberals, 100 self-described conservatives) completed a lengthy sleep and dream survey, and their answers revealed several notable patterns:

• The liberals and conservatives in this study are not radically different species, at least when it comes to sleep and dreaming. People of both political persuasions share a common substrate of basic human sleep and dream experience.

• Conservatives sleep more soundly, with fewer dreams. Liberals have more restless sleep and a more active dream life. Conservatives sleep somewhat longer, with better sleep quality; they recall fewer dreams, but report more lucid dreams (especially conservative men). Liberals (particularly liberal women) have worse sleep quality, recall a greater number and variety of dreams, and have more dreams of homosexuality.

• Liberals and conservatives report a roughly equal proportion of bad dreams and nightmares. This is different from my earlier study (using dreams gathered from 1996-2000), when the conservatives had many more nightmarish dreams than the liberals. In the present study (using dreams gathered post-September 11, 2001 to the end of 2004), the conservative frequency of negative dreams is somewhat less, while the liberal frequency is much higher. It appears liberals have become more upset and troubled in their dreams, while conservatives have become less so in theirs.

• The dreams of liberals are more bizarre than the dreams of conservatives. This is consistent with my earlier findings. Liberals have more dreams with unusual, distorted, fantastic elements than conservatives, whose dreams are more likely to portray normal characters, settings, and activities.

The similarities and differences identified here may be artifacts of my study’s small sample size. Only future research can determine that. In the meantime, any interpretation remains provisional. With that caution in mind, if we follow the research premise that dream content is continuous with waking life emotional concerns, the results of this study may be interpreted as follows:

These dreams provide an accurate reflection of contemporary American politics. The current political weakness of liberals (especially liberal women) is reflected in their troubled sleep and varied, agitated dreaming. The current political strength of conservatives (especially conservative men) is reflected in their sounder sleep and diminished frequency and variation of dreaming.

“I was friends with George W. Bush and we were working together on his ranch. I was happy to be there.”

36-year old conservative woman from Pennsylvania

“I had a nightmare that Bush had won the Presidential election by getting 80% of the vote.”

23-year old liberal woman from Ohio

Purpose. The three major goals of this panel are to 1) present the latest research findings of religious studies scholars who have devoted sustained critical attention to the phenomenon of dreaming; 2) highlight and reflect upon the complex methodological and theoretical issues involved in the comparative study of dreams and their interpretation; and 3) stimulate new research projects in this increasingly lively area of scholarship.

Drawing upon an already considerable literature on the religious significance of dreaming (O’Flaherty 1984, Jedrej and Shaw 1991, Irwin 1994, Miller 1994, Bulkeley 1994, Hermansen 1997, Shulman and Stroumsa 1999, Young 1999), the panelists will work together to develop new approaches to dream research—critical, self-reflective approaches which do justice to the historical, cultural, and psychological singularity of particular dream experiences and to the cross-cultural patterns and structures that characterize the broader phenomenology of religious dreaming.

Outline of the Presentations. The first year’s panel will consist of six scholars, from quite different realms of the AAR, who will share the basic methods they have used to study dreams and their interpretation.  Particular attention will be given to the following issues: the various roles dreams have played in the world’s religions; the values, and dangers, of comparing dream beliefs, practices, and experiences across cultures and historical eras; the relevance of psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and neuropsychology for religious studies scholarship on dreams; epistemological questions about the distinction between dreaming and waking; ontological questions about the reality of dream experiences and the truth of what dreams reveal; hermeneutic questions about the practice of dream interpretation and its relationship to other modes of religious knowing and meaning-making; methodological questions related to J.Z. Smith’s call for “the integration of a complex notion of pattern and system with an equally complex notion of history” (Smith 1982); and self-critical questions regarding the interplay of the scholar’s own dreams with his or her research.

The six panelists for the first year’s session are:

Jon Alexander (Providence College), early American religious history.

Kelly Bulkeley (Santa Clara University), religion, psychology, and modernity.

Marcia Hermansen (Loyola University of Chicago), Islamic studies.

Lee Irwin (College of Charleston), Native American studies.

Jeffrey Kripal, (Westminster College), Hinduism and the study of mysticism.

Serinity Young (Southern Methodist University), Buddhist studies.

Fifteen-minute presentations will be given by Alexander, Bulkeley, Hermansen, Kripal, and Young, followed by a fifteen-minute response by Irwin.  The remaining hour of the session will be devoted to open discussion among the panelists and with the audience.

Implications. This panel’s collaborative exploration of dreaming will make an important and long-lasting contribution to comparative studies in religion by offering substantive data, analytic perspective, methodological guidance, and collegial support in future research on dreams and their interpretation. As the diversity of the first year’s panelists indicates, dreaming is a significant phenomenon in virtually every religious and cultural tradition in the world.  Dreaming is also, according to current sleep laboratory research, a phenomenon grounded in the core neuropsychological processes of the mind-brain system.  These twin facts make the study of dreaming a uniquely fruitful field of comparative interdisciplinary research.  To plumb the depths of dreaming is nothing less than to investigate the human soul, to explore that infinitely creative realm where body, mind, culture, and spirit come together in dynamic interaction.

Bibliography

Bulkeley, Kelly.  1994.  The Wilderness of Dreams: Exploring the Religious Meanings of

Dreams in Modern Western Culture (SUNY Press).

Hermansen, Marcia.  1997.  “Dreams and Visions in Islam,” special issue of Religion (vol. 27, no. 1, 1-64).

Irwin, Lee.  1994.  The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the

Great Plains (University of Oklahoma Press).

Jedrej, M.C. and Rosalind Shaw (ed.s).  1993.  Dreams, Religion, and Society in Africa (E.J. Brill).

Miller, Patricia Cox.  1994.  Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a

Culture (Princeton University Press.

O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger.  1984.  Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (University of  Chicago Press).

Shulman, David and Guy Stroumsa (ed.s).  1999.  Dream Cultures: Explorations in the

Comparative History of Dreaming (Oxford University Press).

Smith, Jonathan Z.  1982.  Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago Press).

Young, Serinity.  1999.  Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and

Practice (Wisdom Publications).

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.

“Critical Dialogue Between Religion and Evolutionary Psychology”

[Slide 1: specific regions of the cortex involved in word recognition, using PET scan]

Who knows what this image represents? (Don’t answer yet—just raise your hand if you know.)

I suspect few of us can explain what is happening here with any real confidence.  Yet we live in a time when such images are playing an increasingly powerful role in society.  I’m sure you’ve seen their kind in many different places—on television, in magazines, perhaps in your own experiences with the health care system.  Generated by extremely sophisticated technologies (this one comes from a PET, or positron emission tomography scan, which follows radioactive tracers in bloodflow through the brain), these colorful images are widely believed to provide “windows on the mind,” revealing fantastic new truths about language, memory, reasoning, consciousness, and yes, even religious experience.  But if we don’t know what such images mean, who does?  Who possesses the hermeneutic skill necessary to enlighten us?

The primary authority for producing these vibrant images and interpreting their meaning is the field of cognitive neuroscience (which, in my understanding, embraces evolutionary psychology in a broader, biologically-oriented study of the brain-mind system).  Cognitive neuroscientists wield a tremendous degree of intellectual authority in present-day society, and the images they create using various modes of neuroimaging—PET, fMRI, SPECT—have an almost magical impact on the general public[i].  With only slight exaggeration, cognitive neuroscience can be thought of as the greatest mantic art of our era, the most powerful divinatory practice of the 21st century.

For this reason alone, religious studies scholars need to engage in greater critical scrutiny of this field.  Most obviously, we need to respond to claims that religion as a whole is false, misguided, and/or developmentally immature.  (See, for example, Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis (Crick, 1994) and Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (Pinker, 1997).)  Because of the tremendous social prestige of cognitive neuroscience, these claims carry a weight among the general public that is far out of proportion to their intellectual sufficiency.  In my view, a vital task for religious studies is to challenge these poorly reasoned claims and raise pointed questions about the influence of anti-religion bias in the field of cognitive neuroscience.

No less scrutiny should be devoted to the works of cognitive neuroscientists who present themselves and their work as friendly to religion and supportive of human spirituality.  (I am thinking here of Herbert Benson’s Timeless Healing (Benson & Stark, 1996), James Austin’s Zen and the Brain (Austin, 1998),  and Andrew Newberg’s Why God Won’t Go Away (Newberg, D’Aquili, & Rause, 2001).)  As I will suggest later in this presentation, there are good reasons for rejecting at least some of the “pro-religious” claims of these researchers.  In good scholarship, the enemy of our enemy should not necessarily be our friend.

Now, having argued for the importance of the critical task, I want to devote the rest of my presentation to what I believe must come next—the constructive task.  I do this with an eye toward current discussions in the AAR about the uncertain future of religion and psychological studies (Jonte-Pace & Parsons, 2001).  I do not agree with those advocate cultural psychology, or post-structuralist critique, or transformational psychoanalysis as the best path to follow (Belzen, 2001; Carrette, 2001; Kripal, 2001; Parsons, 2001).  Much as I value and appreciate each of these approaches, I do not believe they are sufficient to rejuvenate the religion and psychology field and reorient it toward a more fruitful and prosperous future.  In this regard I follow the guidance of Paul Ricoeur in his book Freud and Philosophy:

[Slide 2: Ricoeur quote]

“Freud’s writings present themselves as a mixed or even ambiguous discourse, which at times states conflicts of force subject to an energetics, and at times relations of meaning subject to a hermeneutics.  I hope to show that there are good grounds for this apparent ambiguity, that this mixed discourse is the raison e’tre of psychoanalysis….The precise task…[is] to overcome the gap between the two orders of discourse and reach the point where one sees that the energetics implies a hermeneutics and the hermeneutics discloses an energetics.  That point is where the positing or emergence of desire manifests itself in and through a process of symbolization.” (Ricoeur, 1970) (65)[ii]

Using Ricoeur’s philosophical language, the contemporary study of religion and psychology is in danger of losing contact with the energetics of human existence and focusing exclusively on the hermeneutics.  Using my own terms, religion and psychology has not sufficiently kept up with the most creative new developments in the study of the brain-mind system, and thus runs the risk of losing touch with the rich insights that come from a truly “mixed discourse.”  This is painfully ironic, because three of religion and psychology’s seminal thinkers—Freud, Carl Jung, and William James—were all deeply versed in the most advanced scientific psychology of their day.  Those of us in the present who have been inspired by Freud, Jung, and James would do well to follow their example and develop an informed, critical, and constructive engagement with the most advanced scientific psychology of our day.

One path to follow in that regard is suggested by the image I showed you a moment ago [Image: Back to slide 1].  This shows specific regions of the cerebral cortex involved in language.  “A” shows what happens when subjects read a word: the primary visual cortex and visual association cortex are activated.  “B” shows subjects hearing a word, with activation in the temporal cortex and at the junction of the temporal-parietal cortex.  “C” shows subjects speaking a word, which activates Broca’s area in the medial frontal cortex.  “D” shows what happens when subjects are asked to respond to the word “brain” with an appropriate verb[iii]: Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are activated, as are regions of the frontal cortex responsible for abstract representation.

How many of you knew that already?  This is my point: very few of us in the religious studies community know about this field of research, yet it has tremendous potential for constructive new research in religious studies.  If you have an interest in language, culture, and symbolic expression (and I suspect that covers most of us here), there is a wealth of material in cognitive neuroscience on exactly these topics.  The human brain has several highly localized regions devoted to language, and many researchers believe that distinctly human consciousness has co-evolved with the linguistic abilities of our species (Deacon, 1997; Pinker, 1997; Thompson, 2000).

Of course there is much to critique in the work of these researchers.  We could spend several minutes discussing the limitations of this particular image, which holds something of an iconic place in the field.  But once that critique is made—once the limitations have been identified, the ideological interests unmasked, and the overweening ambition chastened—I contend that there remains a great deal of valuable information in cognitive neuroscience that we in religious studies can put to fruitful use in our theoretical reflections and practical works.  My approach, to put it in a phrase, is one of critical dialogue—opening both cognitive neuroscience and religious studies to the challenges of the other, applying a sharply skeptical analysis in both directions, and then following the critique with a self-reflexive attempt at constructive integration.

The study of language and symbolic communication is one area to explore using a method of critical dialogue.  In my remaining time I’d like to share with you the work I’ve been doing in another area, namely the evolution of a capacity for wonder.

Wonder, as I understand the term [Image 3: quote], is the emotion excited by an encounter with something novel and unexpected, something that strikes a person as intensely powerful, real, true, and/or beautiful.[iv]  As I will discuss in a forthcoming book, experiences of wonder have had a significant impact on many of the world’s religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions.[v]  Wonder occurs with remarkable regularity in the realms of dreaming and visionary experience [Image 4: Queen Katherine’s Dream], sexual desire [Image 5: American Beauty], aesthetic experience [Image 6: Rainbow], and contemplative practice [Image 7: People praying].   To feel wonder in any of these arenas is to experience a sudden decentering of the self.  Facing something surprisingly new and unexpectedly powerful, one’s ordinary sense of personal identity (the psychoanalytic ego) is dramatically altered, leading to new knowledge and understanding that ultimately recenters the self.  An appreciation of this decentering and recentering process led Socrates to make the famous claim in the Theatetus [Image 8: Socrates quote]  that a “sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher.  Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” (Plato, 1961) (860)

The psychospiritual impact of wonder is evident in both the intense memorability of the experiences and the strong bodily sensations that often accompany them.  People regularly speak of being stunned, dazed, breath-taken, overwhelmed, consumed, astonished—all gesturing toward a mode of experience that exceeds ordinary language and thought and yet inspires a yearning to explore, understand, and learn.  This is where the noun “wonder” transforms into the verb “to wonder,” when the powerful emotional experience stimulates curiosity and knowledge-seeking behavior.

If you take any interest in wonder as a significant feature of human religiosity, an opening immediately presents itself to cognitive neuroscience, because wonder as an emotion is clearly identifiable as a neurophysiological phenomenon that involves distinctive (if unusually intensified) modes of brain-mind activation.  This is the opening I wish to explore.  What can we say, based on current cognitive neuroscientific research, about the activity of the brain-mind system during experiences of wonder?

Let me start with some relatively large-scale, macroscopic anatomical distinctions.  [Image 9: Central nervous system]  The central nervous system is commonly divided into seven main parts: the spinal cord, medulla oblongata, pons, cerebellum, midbrain, diencephalon (which includes the thalamus and hypothalamus), and the cerebral hemispheres.  Compared to other mammalian species, the human brain is distinguished by a vastly expanded cerebral cortex [Image 10: cerebral cortex in humans, other mammals], the heavily wrinkled outer layer (“cortex” coming from the Latin for “bark”).[vi]

The cerebral cortex is conventionally divided into four lobes: occipital, parietal, frontal, and temporal [Image 11: four lobes].  Pierre Paul Broca, one of the pioneers of modern neuroscience, identified a region deep within the cerebral cortex that he called the “limbic lobe” because of its continuity with the phylogenetically more primitive regions of the brain stem (“limbic” comes from the latin “limbus,” border) [Image 12: Limbic system as seen from below].  Contemporary neuroscientists no longer speak of a separate limbic lobe, but rather of a limbic system located deep within the temporal lobe [Image 13: limbic system].[vii]  The limbic system is a “multimodal sensory association area” (Kandel et al., 2000) (350-351) that serves the twin functions of emotional evaluation and memory creation.  The limbic system receives input from all sensory systems (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch), evaluates that input in terms of its emotional salience, and then, if the input is sufficiently important, stores it in memory.  Information from the limbic system is then projected to various regions in the frontal lobes, where it is subjected to what most neuroscientists refer to as “the highest brain functions—conscious thought, perception, and goal-directed action” (Kandel et al., 2000) (350).  According to V.S. Ramachandran (co-author of Phantoms in the Brain), “the richness of your inner emotional life probably depends on these interactions” between the limbic system and the forebrain (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998) (177).

The limbic system includes several structures that have received extensive study. Most important for our purposes are the hippocampus and the amygdala.  The hippocampus (Greek for “seahorse”) is chiefly responsible for laying down new memories, particularly the spatial features of experiences with a strong emotional charge.  Damage to the hippocampus disrupts a person’s ability to form new memories (a condition portrayed with great artistry in the 2001 film “Memento,” directed by Christpher Nolan). The amygdala, so named because of its vaguely almond shape (Latin, “amygdala” = “almond”),  “appears to be involved in mediating both the unconscious emotional state and conscious feeling” (Kandel et al., 2000) (992).  The amygdala has direct connections to the body via the hypothalamus and the autonomic nervous system; the amygdala thereby influences rapid physiological reactions to novel, frightening, and/or stressful stimuli (e.g., the startle response, the orienting response, the fight/flight response).  At the same time the amygdala also has connections to the prefrontal cortex and thus to the conscious perception of emotion.[viii]

So as a first testable claim, I suggest that experiences of wonder regularly involve the selective activation of the limbic system, particularly the hippocampus and amygdala.  In addition to the extensive research literature showing the limbic system’s key role in strongly emotional and vividly memorable experiences, this claim is supported by two specific pieces of evidence:

1.                          Dreaming: [Image 14: subject in sleep laboratory] During the several stages of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep we humans experience each night, the time when most (but not all) dreaming occurs, powerful signals are automatically generated in the brainstem that directly stimulate the limbic system, activating what J. Allan Hobson calls “our spatial memory bank” (the hippocampus) and our emotion register (the amygdala)” (Hobson, 1999) (89) (see also (Hobson, Pace-Schott, & Stickgold, 2000)).  This selective activation of the limbic system during REM is very likely responsible for the frequency of extremely strong emotions and highly unusual spatial settings among those dreams that people upon awakening report with a sense of wonder. (Bulkeley, 1994, 1995, 1999a, 2000, 2001a)

2.                          Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: [Image 15: Dostoevsky] Clinical neurologists have long been familiar with the fact that people suffering epileptic seizures localized in the limbic system undergo striking changes in their emotional lives.  According to Ramachandran, “patients say that their ‘feelings are on fire,’ ranging from intense ecstasy to profound despair, a sense of impending doom or even fits of extreme rage and terror.  Women sometimes experience orgasms during seizures, although for some obscure reason men never do.  But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God.  They may say, ‘I finally understand what it’s all about.  This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.  Suddenly it all makes sense.’  Or, ‘Finally I have insight into the true nature of the cosmos.’” (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998) (179) These clinical reports of temporal lobe epilepsy have many strong descriptive similarities to my characterization of wonder, suggesting the possibility that both are related to a common pattern of neurological activation in the limbic system.

Now let me be clear—I am not saying that the limbic system is the material “place” or “location” where experiences of wonder occur.  Still less am I joining with Michael Persinger in making the grandiose claim that “the God Experience is an artifact of transient changes in the temporal lobe” (Wulff, 1997) (102).  Any kind of complex human experience involves a wide-ranging pattern of neural activation, so it’s an absurdity to speak of wonder, or religion, or God as “located in” or “caused by” a specific region of the brain.  My claim is much more limited: the limbic system plays a vital, though not exclusive, role in the distinctive pattern of neural activation that is generated in experiences of wonder.

What other neural systems play a role in wonder?  I suggest that in addition to the limbic system, the hypothalamus is also selectively activated in many experiences of wonder.  [Image 16: hypothalamus]  Located near the base of the brain, the hypothalamus controls a wide variety of bodily functions by releasing hormones that activate physiological responses to strong emotions, from fear and surprise to sexual arousal and intense pleasure (Thompson, 2000) (16-17).  To the extent that experiences of wonder involve strong physiological responses, it appears likely that the hypothalamus is directly involved.[ix]

A third likely candidate for selective activation in experiences of wonder is the large expanse of cerebral cortex known as “association cortex” (Kandel et al., 2000) (349-380).  The regions of cortex devoted primarily to sensory and motor activities “is virtually the same in all mammals, from the rat to the human” (Thompson, 2000) (23).  [Image 17: four mammals, differing amounts of association cortex]  But in the human brain there has been an immense increase in regions devoted to “higher-order integrative functions that are neither purely sensory nor purely motor, but associative…[that] serve to associate sensory inputs to motor response and perform those mental processes that intervene between sensory inputs and motor outputs” (Kandel et al., 2000) (349).

I suggest as a testable hypothesis that experiences of wonder have widespread and powerfully stimulating effects on the association cortex, expanding the functional range of those “intervening” mental processes.  Because experiences of wonder are encounters with the novel and unexpected, they defy conventional categories and exceed the normal boundaries of understanding.  More than that, they compel the creation of new, more expansive categories and new, more subtly integrated modes of understanding.  In experiences of wonder the association cortex is pushed beyond its normal range of functioning and forced to make sense of extremely unusual input.  I believe the creative results of that integrative effort by the association cortex have played, and continue to play, an influential role in the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.  I also believe that the world’s religious and spiritual traditions have played, and continue to play, an influential role in the ontogenetic development of the association cortex, that is, in prompting an expanded range of integrative functioning in this area of the brain through the course of an individual’s life.

A major turning point in the recent history of cognitive neuroscience was the research by Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzinga, J.E. Boden, and others on the assymetrical functioning of the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex (Kandel et al., 2000) (16).  [Image 18: two hemispheres]  Many important discoveries have come from this area of research—and so have many preposterous speculations.  Claims that people have “left-brain” or “right-brain” personalities are plainly unjustified by the findings of current research.  Even more outlandish are suggestions that certain religions, philosophies, or whole civilizations have a predominantly “left-brain” or “right-brain” orientation (Ashbrook & Albright, 1997) (124-127).[x]  Once again, there is an urgent need for a vigorous critical response to these sweeping claims, which cloak their biases in the universalizing mantle of science.

Having said that, asymetrical functioning in the human brain-mind system is a real phenomenon.  Indeed, it is a striking feature of our species, given that evolution exhibits a strong preference for symmetry.  While any complex cognitive function depends on the activation of both hemispheres, the past half-century of research has identified the following distinctions in their functioning (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998; Solms, 1997; Springer & Deutsch, 1998; Thompson, 2000):

n      The right hemisphere has primary responsibility for manipulospatial activities, i.e., activities involving movement in imaginal space and “mental mapping” (Springer & Deutsch, 1998) (358); the right hemisphere also has a central role in the detection of anomalies and novelties; and, the right hemisphere is more fully activated in REM sleep.

n      The left hemisphere has primary responsibility for speech, language, and the imposition of semantic structure on spoken communication; the left hemisphere is also centrally involved in tasks involving sequential analysis, and more generally in the maintenance of a consistent and coherent sense of selfhood.[xi]

Bearing in mind the limitations of this area of research, I suggest as a testable hypothesis that experiences of wonder involve a relatively high degree of activation in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.  If true, this might open new ways of understanding people’s reports from various religious and spiritual traditions that experiences of wonder defy ordinary verbal description and involve an acute awareness of highly anomalous phenomena and spatial-temporal transformations.

Lastly, I suggest there is a relative deactivation in experiences of wonder of those areas of the prefrontal cortex [Image 19: prefrontal cortex] that are responsible for goal-directed cognition, what many neuroscientists regard as the “executive” functions of the brain-mind system (Kandel et al., 2000).  These areas are typically deactivated in REM sleep (with lucid dreaming being an intriguing exception), and I believe (and propose as a testable hypothesis) that these same prefrontal areas are at least temporarily deactivated during experiences of wonder.  Wonder has an auto-telic quality; it generates a strong sense of the fullness of the present, which has the effect of “dethroning” ordinary plans, purposes, and motivations.  Many experiences of wonder are characterized by an unusual receptivity and radical openness (which is not the same as passivity), and in neuroscientific terms I suspect this quality corresponds to a relative deactivation in the prefrontal cortex.

To summarize what I’ve said so far, [Image 20: summary of neural systems involved in wonder] I’m proposing that experiences of wonder regularly involve increased activation of the limbic system (particularly the hippocampus and amygdala), the hypothalamus and autonomic nervous system, and various regions of association cortex, with a relatively greater (though not absolute) contribution of the right hemisphere and diminished activity in the prefrontal cortex.

Now if I know my audience, I suspect many of you will be wondering, when is the other shoe going to drop?  When am I going to make the leap and claim that these neuroscientific findings provide the key to all religion, the universal origin of mystical experience, the objective foundation for the perennial philosophy?

Let me try to surprise you by saying why I think that line of argument is badly misguided, and why my project is moving in a very different direction.

In addition to the analysis of macroscopic neuroanatomy—hemispheres, lobes, and so forth—a critical dialogue between religious thought and cognitive neuroscience requires careful attention to the microscopic dimensions of brain-mind functioning, specifically to the intricate interactions between and among individual neurons.  [Image 21: individual neuron]  A neuron is a biological cell that has a special capacity to transmit information. The human brain has something in the neighborhood of a trillion (10 to the 12th) neurons, and the average neuron has several thousand dendrites (10 to the 15th) that form synaptic connections with other neurons.  [Image 22: clusters of neurons]  This generates an almost inconceivable combinatorial power that, to me, is itself a source of wonder.[xii]  As Thompson says,

“The number of possible different combinations of synaptic connections among the neurons in a single human brain is larger than the total number of atomic particles that make up the known universe.  Hence the diversity of the interconnections in a human brain seems almost without limit.” (Thompson, 2000) (3)

This may be the single most important discovery to come from cognitive neuroscience, and one of its many implications is this:  Universalistic claims about human religious and psychological experience can find no support in current knowledge about the vast neural complexity of the human brain.

As an illustration of this point, we should be suspicious of the sweeping claims of Andrew Newberg in his best-selling book Why God Won’t Go Away: The Biology of Belief (Newberg et al., 2001), in which he correlates the subjective experiences of Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns in prayer with data produced by SPECT (single positron emission computed tomography) scans of their brains.  Newberg’s central argument is that his neuroscientific research proves that all forms of meditation, prayer, mysticism, and ritual activity are ultimately pointing to the same supreme revelation of what he calls “Absolute Unitary Being.”  As his book’s title suggests, Newberg presents his neuroscientific research as favorable to and supportive of the world’s religious traditions, and his work has been widely acclaimed by a spiritually eager American public.[xiii]  But I suggest to you that Newberg’s theological speculations (as distinguished from his research data) are leading us into a dead end, because the tremendously complex neural interactions in each individual’s brain means that, in neurological terms, no two people are ever having exactly the same experience.  On strictly neuroscientific grounds, a universalism like that proposed by Newberg cannot be maintained.

Indeed, I believe Newberg’s claims about the universal features of religious experience are artifacts of the current state of neuroimaging technology.  As this technology improves (and given the amount of money being poured into it, future progress will be rapid), we are sure to discover vast new realms of exquisite complexity and distinctive difference in each individual’s neural circuitry [Image 23: Increasing resolution of PET scans 1993-1998].  This makes it quite likely that at some point in the near future we will have imaging data showing how, for example, the experiences of praying Catholic nuns and meditating Buddhists are in fact quite different from one another.  Paradoxically, the very technology that Newberg uses to defend a universalistic view of religion will, I predict, become a valuable means of highlighting the radically irreducible plurality of human religious experience.

Bringing the microscopic phenomenology of the neuron into our critical dialogue, while fatal to a universalism like Newberg’s, provides additional support for my argument that experiences of wonder involve a powerful decentering and recentering of the self.  At the level of neural interactions, I suggest (as a testable hypothesis) that experiences of wonder strongly disrupt ordinary neural networks and stimulate the creation of new patterns of connectivity.  This claim seems plausible in light of the data from Mark Rosenzweig’s famous research on rats being raised in relatively stimulating or impoverished environments : [Image 24: Rosenzweig rats] The rats who were raised in the “rich” environments (a telling phrase!) had a greater density of neural connectedness than did the rats raised in “poor” environments (Diamond, 1988).  Rosenzweig’s experiment illustrates the direct impact of novel, stimulating experiences on neural circuitry; I believe something very similar is happening in experiences of wonder.

I know I have thrown a lot of information at you, and made a number of highly debatable propositions.  But whatever you think of my particular project on experiences of wonder, I hope I have at least succeeded in persuading you of the value of a critical dialogue between religious thought and cognitive neuroscience.[xiv]  If you ever make use of the concepts of consciousness and the unconscious, if you employ psychoanalytic theories of pre-oedipal development, if you study different cultural modes of symbolic expression, if you work in pastoral ministry or therapy—if you do any of these things, I can promise that your awareness, knowledge, and insight will grow tremendously by pursuing such a dialogue.

Bibliography
Ashbrook, J. B., & Albright, C. R. (1997). The Humanizing Brain. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press.

Austin, J. H. (1998). Zen and the Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ayto, J. (1990). Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Arcade.

Belzen, J. A. (2001). The future is in the return: back to cultural psychology of religion. In D. Jonte-Pace & W. B. Parsons (Eds.), Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. London: Routledge.

Benson, H., & Stark, M. (1996). Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief. New York: Fireside.

Browning, D. S. (1987). Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies: A Critical Conversation in the Theology of Culture. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Browning, D. S. (1991). A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Bulkeley, K. (1994). The Wilderness of Dreams: Exploring the Religious Meanings of Dreams in Modern Western Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bulkeley, K. (1995). Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey. Mahwah: Paulist Press.

Bulkeley, K. (1999a). Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion, and Psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bulkeley, K. (2000). Transforming Dreams: Learning Spiritual Lessons from the Dreams You Never Forget. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Bulkeley, K. (Ed.). (2001a). Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming. New York: Palgrave.

Carrette, J. R. (2001). Post-structuralism and the psychology of religion: the challenge of critical psychology. In D. Jonte-Pace & W. B. Parsons (Eds.), Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. London: Routledge.

Crick, F. (1994). The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Touchstone.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Quill.

Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. San Diego: Harcourt.

Deacon, T. W. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton.

Diamond, M. (1988). Enriching Heredity: The Impact of the Environment on the Anatomy of the Brain. New York: Basic Books.

Doniger, W. (1999). The Bed Trick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin.

Hobson, J. A. (1999). Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hobson, J. A., Pace-Schott, E., & Stickgold, R. (2000). Dreaming and the Brain: Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Conscious States. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 793-842.

Homans, P. (1989). The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Homans, P. (Ed.). (2000). Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Irwin, L. (1994). The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Irwin, L. (2001). Sending a Voice, Seeking a Place: Visionary Traditions among Native Women of the Plains. In K. Bulkeley (Ed.), Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming. New York: Palgrave.

James, W. (1958). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Mentor.

Jones, J. (1993). Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Religion: Transference and Transcendence. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jonte-Pace, D. (2001). Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud’s Cultural Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jonte-Pace, D., & Parsons, W. B. (Eds.). (2001). Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. London: Routledge.

Kahn, D., & Hobson, J. A. (1993). Self-Organization Theory and Dreaming. Dreaming, 3(3), 151-178.

Kahn, D., Krippner, S., & Combs, A. (2000). Dreaming and the Self-Organizing Brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7(7), 4-11.

Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessel, T. M. (Eds.). (2000). Principles of Neural Science (Fourth ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Kripal, J. J. (2001). Re-membering a presence of mythological proportions: psychoanalysis and Hinduism. In D. Jonte-Pace & W. B. Parsons (Eds.), Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. London: Routledge.

Newberg, A., D’Aquili, E., & Rause, V. (2001). Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine.

O’Flaherty, W. D. (1976). The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

O’Flaherty, W. D. (1980). Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

O’Flaherty, W. D. (1984). Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

O’Flaherty, W. D. (1988). Other People’s Myths. New York: Macmillan.

Parsons, W. B. (2001). Themes and debates in the psychology-comparativist dialogue. In D. Jonte-Pace & W. B. Parsons (Eds.), Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. London: Routledge.

Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton.

Plato. (1961). Theaetetus (F. M. Cornford, Trans.). In E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ramachandran, V. S., & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Mind. New York: Quill.

Rambo, L. (1993). Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (D. Savage, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shear, J. (2001). Experimental Studies of Meditation and Consciousness. In D. Jonte-Pace & W. Parsons (Eds.), Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. London: Routledge.

Solms, M. (1997). The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A Clinico-Anatomical Study. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Springer, S. P., & Deutsch, G. (1998). Left Brain, Right Brain: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience (Fifth ed.). New York: W.H. Freeman.

Tedlock, B. (2001). The New Anthropology of Dreaming. In K. Bulkeley (Ed.), Dreams: A Reader in the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming. New York: Palgrave.

Tedlock, B. (Ed.). (1987). Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, R. F. (2000). The Brain: A Neuroscience Primer. New York: Worth.

Wulff, D. (1997). Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Young, S. (1999). Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and Practice. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Young, S. (2001). Buddhist Dream Experience: The Role of Interpretation, Ritual, and Gender. In K. Bulkeley (Ed.), Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming. New York: Palgrave.

A couple of years ago I was working my way through the major works of Calvin Hall, as part of my doctoral dissertation research.  As I read Hall’s book The Meaning of Dreams (1966), I came across the following passage:

“Dreams contain few ideas of a political or economic nature.  They have little or nothing to say about current events in the world of affairs….Presidential elections, declarations of war, the diplomatic struggles of great powers, major athletic contests, all of the happenings that appear in newspapers and become the major topics of conversation among people are pretty largely ignored in dreams.” (11)

For some reason this passage bothered me.  Of course I understood Hall’s basic point, that we usually dream about personal matters like the health of our body and the relationships we have with family and friends.  And I knew that other dream experts basically agreed with Hall; most psychologists, sleep laboratory researchers, and writers of popular books on dreams also regard dreams as speaking solely to the personal life concerns of the dreamer.

But still, I was bothered.  Hall’s claim seemed too strong, too sweeping.  The more I thought about it, the more examples I found that challenged Hall.  Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1965) presents a number of his dreams that spoke directly to the political situation of his world.  Charlotte Beradt’s moving book The Third Reich of Dreams (1966) contains dozens of dreams of people living in 1933-1939 Germany–dreams that directly addressed the rising political power of Nazism.[i] Carl Schorske (1987) wrote a fascinating article on the striking political references in Freud’s “Count Thun” dream.  Cross-cultural studies are filled with dreams that have direct relevance to the dreamer’s social and political world.[ii] And I myself have had many dreams in which politicians and political events play a prominent role.

As scattered as these references to politically-relevant dreams were, I felt there were enough of them to refute Hall’s claim, at least in its simplest form: politics do appear in people’s dreams, and people do dream about the political affairs of their communities.

But now I had two new questions to ask.  First, what do such dreams mean?  Are these dreams really about politics, or are they just using political imagery to express other kinds of meaning?  And second, why are dream researchers like Hall so insistent that dreams are not relevant to political affairs, and relate only to personal, subjective realms of the dreamer’s life?

As the 1992 U.S. Presidential election approached, I realized I had a perfect opportunity to explore these questions in more detail.  This election promised to be an exciting, passionately-waged contest.  Fear about the economy, anger at incumbents, disgust with “politics as usual”, hopes for real change–no election campaign in years had stirred up such deep, powerful emotions in the American electorate.  I decided that if people did not dream about politics during this Presidential election, then Hall was right and I would just drop the subject.  But I thought that if people did dream about the election, I might be able to get a better understanding of 1) what those dreams meant and 2) why the field of dream studies has such difficulties in recognizing the political relevance of our dreams.

In the weeks leading up to the 1992 U.S. Presidential election I conducted a small study on how people’s dreams were responding to the campaign.  I asked twelve people to keep detailed dream diaries from October 25 to November 8, the two weeks straddling the election.  These people did not know what my study was about.  I also asked a second group of about 40 people to tell me if they had any dreams relating to the Presidential campaign.  The members of these two groups were quite varied in terms of age, education, occupation, geographical residence, and political outlook[iii].

My basic finding was that many people dreamed about the Presidential election.  Not everyone in my study had dreams that referred to the candidates or the election campaign, but many people did have such dreams.  Among my “blind” subjects, six of the twelve people (50%) had at least one dream relating to the election.  Of the 113 total dreams reported by the twelve subjects, ten dreams related to the election, or about 9% of the total dreams.  I want to emphasize that my study was not based on an absolutely random sample.  If my findings have any value, it is not for what they prove, but rather for what they suggest about the relationship between dreams and politics.

The Debates

A number of dreams reacted to the four Presidential and Vice Presidential debates that were held prior to the election.  The reactions were not favorable.  Hank, a government employee in his late 30’s, dreamed this right after the first Presidential debate:

“I am watching something like a presidential debate on TV…Bush is attacking Clinton because of a mistake that Clinton made in managing his financial accounts.  Clinton apparently let one of his accounts get overdrawn, and has lost the account as a result.  Bush is saying that this is bad…A woman reporter comments that Clinton’s position in the campaign was so strong that he is still a little bit ahead of the president, even after his mistake.  She says to Bush that, if it weren’t for this mistake, Clinton would have been able to “wipe your wild side for being so soft”.  Bush is enraged at this comment.  He loses control of his emotions.  He leaves his podium, goes over to the reporter and physically attacks her.  I can’t believe this is happening.  I tell my father that “George Bush just lost it.”  Some people are trying to subdue the president and get him back to his podium.  The woman reporter is very shaken, and leaves the stage.  Then there is a view of the room from straight overhead.  As some people are leaving, some other people throw food at them.  The whole situation degenerates into a fight, with people throwing things at each other and running around the room.”

Hank proudly noted that this dream came before the rambunctious Vice Presidential debate, which many pundits referred to as a “food fight”.  Maggie, an artist from Chicago in her early thirties, also dreamed of the political campaign as a kind of food fight:

“I am running down a spiral staircase.  The staircase is in the middle of a duplex office where there is a food fight/political fight going on.  I don’t want any part of it.”

This same distaste for the childish behavior of the candidates prompted Carla, a retired copywriter from Texas, to dream this the night after the Vice-Presidential debate:

“I was watching a 2-year old, blond baby boy.  I latched the screen doors, but he hit the screen door and the hook slipped free and he ran out.  I ran after him, calling, “Danny Quail, come back here.  How did you get loose?”  When I brought the child back I looked at the latch and saw the problem.  The part that held the hook wasn’t made right.  It was too thick.”

Carla says she knew in the dream that she was misspelling Vice President Quayle’s last name, and thinks it may be a reference to his infamous misspelling of “potato(e)”.

Ross Perot

The candidate who appeared most often in people’s dreams was Ross Perot.  Perot’s strong personality, controversial ideas, and roller-coaster candidacy made him the object of huge voter interest.  Thus, it is not surprising that people would dream about him.  What is surprising is that the people in my study tended to dream about him in very anxious, very skeptical terms.  Julie, a community activist in her 40’s from California, reported that

“On Oct. 22 I dreamt of Ross Perot all night!  I was with him sometimes.  I was nearby him at other times.  And I watched his face on TV also during my dream.  I woke up with a strong feeling of irritation.”

Julie’s dream seems to reflect her reaction to Perot’s late reentry into the race, and to the heavy media blitz that accompanied it.  For those last couple weeks of the campaign, Perot literally was everywhere.

Most of the Perot dreams referred to his prickly personality.  Maggie had a long dream of hurrying around New York because she was late for a breakfast appointment.  Towards the end she dreams

“I am in a big hurry but try to stop and buy olive oil and hot peppers.  I stop in a very old country store/warehouse type place.  They are very friendly and very, very slow.  Ross Perot is the shop keeper and I know if I try to rush him he’ll get angry and won’t serve me and all the time I have already waited for him will be wasted.  I think I still leave without my goods because I cannot wait any longer.”

Tim, a 30-year old writer in Los Angeles, also dreamed of being intimidated and somewhat frightened by Perot:

“Perot is in the living room of my parents’ old house…talking to about thirty people.  He’s answering some question with a parable about a horse-like Australian rodent.  He’s describing the animal in detail.  I grow impatient and interrupt him, “Fine, the thing is horse-like, Australian, and a rodent, so what?  What does it do?”  The crowd doesn’t share my impatience and I’m embarrassed.”

The following Perot dream was told to me by Jean, a young woman who works at the Marshall Fields department store in Chicago:

“For some reason I was going to work at a state mental hospital which was being closed down.  People were carrying files out, wheeling patients away.  It was a big, dingy building.  I and some others were waiting for the new boss to come.  Much to our surprise, Ross Perot arrived.  He stated that he would be running the hospital and we would work for him.  He was dressed casually in a tacky purple and white outfit.  He looked ridiculous.  The rest of the staff gathered, and instead of taking the elevator we all walked up the stairs to prove our dedication and endurance.  The climb was longer than expected and we were all complaining and some people were sick.  Ross didn’t know how much farther we had to go, anymore than we did.  One man had a fall and broke his neck…  Although there were nurses there, none would help him but me.  Ross didn’t know what to do.”

Jean said she feels the dream is a commentary on the “lunacy” of the country, and the “double lunacy” of thinking a “crazy man could be the leader of a mental hospital”.

George Bush

President Bush tried to present himself in the 1992 campaign as a champion of “family values” and of experienced leadership.  The dreams I gathered suggest that he succeeded in this.  Jean, who describes herself as a “die-hard Republican”, had the following dream:

“Bush and Quayle are in town, to give a speech, and I’m asked to set things up and cook dinner for them.  It’s fine, I’m proud to do it all.  I cook dinner for 12,000 people, set up the speaker’s hall, and work everything out with the secret service agents.  The dinner goes off, it’s finished, and they say goodbye to me.  I feel very good about it all.”

In this dream Jean plays the traditional role of a hostess: taking care of her guests, cooking their dinner, helping them to be safe and comfortable.  Although the work seems rather demanding (where do you find place settings for 12,000 people?), Jean gets great satisfaction out of it.  Her dream suggests that traditional “family values” provide her with a sense of security and fulfillment.

Of the three candidates, President Bush appeared least often in the dreams of people in my study.  This supports the conclusion of most political analysts that Bush lost the election because he was “out of touch” with the real-life concerns of voters.

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton argued that he would be an agent of change as President.  In people’s dreams Clinton often did appear as a force for change–but also as a person who is somewhat unknown, and perhaps unaware of what true changes need to be made.  Patty is a young woman working in a Chicago accounting firm.  Although her job pays well, she is not happy with it; she has begun going to cooking school at night to become a chef.  She dreamed the following:

“I am on the top of a high-rise building, looking across the way into an apartment’s picture window…I am with someone I feel comfortable with, although this person’s identity is unknown to me.  Through the apartment window I see a half dozen or more owls looking out…I then look down to my right and see Bill Clinton seated beside me.  My feeling is one of slight surprise and friendliness towards him.  I immediately say, “Oh, Hi Clinton…I’m sorry but I can’t recall your first name…You know, with the continual emphasis on the name Clinton by the media…”  He responds that his name is Bill, and we exchange conversational niceties of “glad to meet you’s”, while continuing to observe the owls.”

Patty said that the dream addresses her hopes and fears about switching jobs: the dream image of Clinton embodies the concept of change.  Interestingly, Patty does not really know Clinton that well in the dream–she doesn’t recognize him at first, and when she finally does she can’t remember his first name.  It’s as if the “change” that Clinton represents is, at the present moment, an unknown factor.

Jay, a writer from Wisconsin, also dreamed of Clinton as a figure of change.  But like Patty’s dream, Jay’s dream indicates a concern that it’s hard to grasp what exactly Clinton will do–what kind of change he will bring.

“Clinton is at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago…The aquarium is extremely dark…Some sort of voting or polling is occurring which shows Bush beating him really badly.  At this point a huge, portentous voice proclaims, “Clinton will have a huge answer!”  I understand this to be a response from “God” as to what Clinton must do to win the election–what he must “sacrifice”, offer.  Then I am catapulted into the scene, into the aquarium which is now crammed with people, followers of Clinton…I, unfortunately, am attempting to make my way against the overwhelming human dream tide flowing against me…but no matter how hard I try I make no progress against such a flow of energy…I have something, some message, some warning?  It is terribly important to deliver…”

Jay felt that Clinton’s call for a “New Covenant” at the Democratic convention was an inspiring vision of a changed, renewed nation.  But, Jay also felt that Clinton the politician might not understand, or be willing to make, the frightening sacrifices that will be required to achieve those changes.

Before the Election: Skepticism

In the days leading up to the election, people’s dreams showed a strong feeling of skepticism towards politicians and the whole campaign process.  Patty dreamed that

“I am in a large public place watching political ads on a huge video screen…The ad compares two candidates to two sandwiches–comparing and contrasting.  I recall a vision of a huge “pastrami-like” sandwich.  I begin to argue with people next to me, who prefer “sandwich A” while I prefer “sandwich B”.”

Patty’s dream reflects the feeling of many voters that political ads are nothing more than slick efforts to “sell” a candidate, as if he or she were a sandwich.  Sheri, a 51-year old administrative assistant, had a dream with a similar sense of skepticism, mixed with a degree of despair about the promises of politicians.

“I’m talking to a woman I know.  She’s at my house.  Her husband, DL, is running for office.  I ask if she thinks he’ll follow through and serve the full term if I vote for him.  She says yes.”

This is the final scene of a long dream in which Sheri deals with a troubling romantic relationship.  In waking life she had been seeing a married man for many years, and while he told Sheri he was unhappy with his marriage he had in fact done nothing to end it.  Sheri felt that her dream was illustrating her reluctance to believe the words of both husbands and politicians–they won’t be “faithful” to what they’ve said.  Sheri voted for Perot and was extremely unhappy with Clinton, which makes sense given the charges about his marital infidelities and his alleged tendency to “play loose” with the truth.

After the Election: Hopes and Disappointments

For those who voted for Clinton, his victory was cause for great celebration.  Julie, the community activist from California, dreamed

“I recall being a guest for a few days at an old friend’s home and marvelling at the remodelling job she did…She was very creative, I thought.  She put in an art gallery, a meeting room, a business environment and clean, modern furnishings with ample room for growth…I am surprised and pleased.  This is more modern and forward thinking than I expected.”

Julie said that her feelings in the dream “were exactly my feelings that resulted from the election the next day. I was surprised and pleased that we are becoming more flexible, modern, clean, and socially open.”

The clearest example of a celebratory “victory dream” comes from Maggie, the Chicago artist:

“It is very dark out.  Clinton and Gore have both given their acceptance speeches and are standing side by side.  There is a spot light on them and everything but them is black.  They have one of their arms around each other–shoulder to shoulder.  Then (while keeping an arm around each other) they position themselves so that the tops of their heads touch and they are facing me–and the rest of the audience behind me.  They sing “Amazing Grace”.  I am impressed that they sing, that they have the courage to do so alone because they have pretty bad voices–and they sing flat.”

For a person like Maggie, who had never voted for the winner of a Presidential election, Clinton’s victory truly felt like an act of divine providence.

Some Clinton voters, however, felt a twinge of anxiety mixed in with their excitement.  I had been a strong supporter of Clinton during the campaign, and I was thrilled when he won the election.  However, the night after the election I had the following dream:

“I’m with my son, sitting outside a bank building.  Clinton, Gore, and two others drive up in a car.  I hope they’ll stop and say hi, but they don’t.  They smile at us, but walk by into the bank.”

When I reflected on the dream, I realized that I felt like a homeless person in it–sitting on a sidewalk with my child, asking some affluent people for a little token of recognition, only to be politely shunned.  The dream made me look beyond my election-night optimism and ask a more sober, and sobering, question: is Clinton going to ignore the voters who had supported him and head “straight to the bank” to seize the spoils of his victory?

Those who voted for candidates who did not win were, naturally, saddened and disappointed.  Rose, a retired engineer who lives outside Washington, D.C., had this somewhat mournful dream the night after the election:

“I am at the White House, I feel, a guest at a party or reception for the President, Bush…I am allowed to take a picture of the President before he goes downstairs…In one of the upper rooms is a glass case, open at the top, into which are placed a large assortment of souveniers of the President.  Guests are allowed to take these and I’m enthralled and surprised by the variety of things…I cram my souveniers into my evening purse which is small and suitable for an evening party like this.”

Rose is an independent who voted for Bush because of his strong pro-life position.  Her dream suggests that the Bush “party” is over–the time has come to celebrate his successes, gather whatever memories his supporters want to keep, and move on.

Concluding Reflections

So to return to the first of those two questions that initially motivated my study, what do these dreams mean?  My strong impression is that the dreams express these people’s feelings about their political world.   One of the basic functions of dreaming is to help us make sense of things that are confusing, strange, or frightening[iv].  In the fall of 1992, many people felt that the political state of the U.S. was confusing, strange, and frightening.  It thus should not surprise us that people’s dreams would express their concerns and hopes about the Presidential Election.

My other strong impression is that the dreams are not simply using political images to “symbolize” personal meanings.  A Freudian interpreter might argue that a “manifest” dream about Bill Clinton is only masking a “latent” content having to do with the dreamer’s relationship with his or her father.  Similarly, a Jungian interpreter might claim that a nightmare of Ross Perot is only symbolically expressing the dreamer’s unconscious fears of the “Ross Perot-like” parts of him or herself.  I am emphatically opposed to such reductionistic, one-dimensional views.  The dreams I gathered certainly related to the dreamer’s personal lives, to their inner worlds–but they just as certainly related to the dreamer’s political lives, to the outer world.  A dream of Bill Clinton probably does say something about how one feels about one’s father; but it probably also says something about how one feels about Bill Clinton.  If there’s anything we know about dreams, it’s that they always have many dimensions of meaning.  Dreams never mean just one thing.

But why, turning to my second question, have so many dream researchers ignored, downplayed, or entirely denied the possibility that some dreams have a political dimension of meaning?  I imagine Calvin Hall might defend himself by saying people don’t dream about politics very much because politics aren’t as emotionally important to them as are more personal subjects like relationships, health, and sex.  Thus, he might argue, his claim that we do not dream about political affairs like Presidential elections is simply a description of the facts[v].

It does seem that politics are not very important to people in American society[vi].  Indeed, sociologists like Robert Bellah have argued that a serious problem in American society is the ever-worsening split between the public realm of political affairs and the private realm of personal affairs[vii].  Our society’s political system has become so complex and impersonal that many people feel alienated from it; more and more people see no point in actively participating in a system that is controlled by businessmen, lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats.  As a result many people are simply giving up on the public world of politics, and seeking fulfillment in purely private, individual affairs like shopping and watching television.  The problem, of course, is that the wider this public/private split becomes and the more alienated people feel from politics, the easier it is for the wealthy and powerful to keep their control of our political system.

So it is accurate to say that Americans do not dream much about politics because we do not care much about politics.  But it is not accurate to say, as Hall does, that dreams never relate to politics and that dreams cannot relate to politics.  On the contrary, the “facts” are that at certain times our dreams do relate, clearly and directly, to the political affairs of our community[viii].  Indeed, if Bellah and other sociologists are right about the dangerous public/private division in American society, we in the dream studies field must be very, very careful not to make that division worse.  By suggesting that dreams are only about the personal life concerns of the dreamer, and by quickly interpreting away political images in dreams as nothing more than “symbols” of those personal concerns, dream researchers may be contributing to the dangerous separation of public from private life in American society.  Instead of merely “describing the facts”, we may actually be creating them.

I will close by describing some of the constructive applications of a more careful and sophisticated study of dreams and politics.  One clear implication is that dreams can be a powerful source of political self-awareness.  Dreams provide insight into our deeper-lying feelings about politics and reveal to us the interplay of personal and political issues in our lives.  Sheri’s dream of the politician/husband who might or might not serve his whole term is a perfect example of this.  The issue of fidelity, of keeping one’s promises, is very important both in Sheri’s personal life and in the broader political world; her dream brings this connection to Sheri’s awareness, offering her an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between her feelings about personal fidelity and political fidelity.  Patty’s dream of watching the owls with Clinton is also an excellent example.  For her, it is the issue of change that connects her personal life and the political world.  Patty’s dream brings forth the interplay of her uncertain feelings about changing jobs and about Bill Clinton’s call for political change.  The dream enables her to explore the relationship between her reactions towards change in the personal and the political realms.

Another implication is that dreams could help people defend themselves against the insidious effects of negative political advertisements.  It’s one of the most distressing features of contemporary American politics that voters are so deeply influenced by ads that unfairly and dishonestly slander opposing candidates.  When pollsters ask voters what they think about such “attack ads”, people generally claim these ads have no effect on them; but when election time comes, the winning candidate is all too frequently the one who has done the best job of persuading voters to fear and distrust the other candidate.  The effectiveness of negative ads, then, seems to lie in their ability to manipulate unconscious fears: consciously, people ignore these ads; but unconsciously, the ads evidently succeed in stirring up people’s fears, and influencing their votes.  Perhaps voters could better resist the devious appeal of negative political ads if they devoted greater attention to their dreams.  If we look to our dreams with an eye for their political relevance (in addition to their psychological relevance), we can develop a better understanding of the intimate relationship between the personal and the political realms of our lives.  With that increased understanding to guide us, we may be better able to recognize how political advertisements often seek to stimulate our unconscious fears as a means of influencing our political beliefs, and our votes.

There has never been any rigorous, focused research on dreams and politics, and my study of the 1992 U.S. Presidential election is nothing more than a preliminary exploration of the issues and questions that future research might consider in more detail[ix].  But I feel strongly that we can learn a great deal from giving more attention to this subject.  It promises to expand our understanding of dreams into new areas that many dream researchers have denied even exist.  It also promises to give us insights into how Western society might overcome one of its more troubling problems–for dreams show us that the sharp division of our lives into public and private realms is nothing but an artificial separation of aspects of experience that are in fact deeply connected to each other.

References

Bellah, Robert, Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler,    Ann, and Tipton, Steven M.  (1985).  Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Beradt, Charlotte.  (1966).  The Third Reich of Dreams.  Trans. Adriane Gottwald.  Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

Bulkeley, Kelly.  (1994).  The Wilderness of Dreams: Exploring the Religious Meanings of Dreams in Modern Western Culture.  Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.

Hall, Calvin.  (1966).  The Meaning of Dreams.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Jung, Carl G.  (1965).  Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  Trans. Richard and Clara Winston.  New York: Vintage.

Moffitt, Alan, Kramer, Milton, and Hoffmann, Robert (eds.).  (1993).  The Functions of Dreaming.  Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.

Schorske, Carl E.  (1987).  “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams“.  In Harold Bloom (ed.), Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: Modern Critical Interpretations.  New York: Chelsea House.

Tedlock, Barbara (ed.).  (1987).  Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

Von Grunebaum, G.E., and Callois, Roger (eds.).  (1966).  The Dream and Human Societies.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Endnotes

From The Epic of America (1931) by James Truslow Adams

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.

Abraham Lincoln 1: Visitation of the Dead

“Mr. Lincoln said: ‘Colonel, did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that you were holding sweet communion with that friend, and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a reality?—just so I dream of my boy Willie.’  Overcome with emotion, he dropped his head on the table, and sobbed aloud.”

Henry J. Raymond, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Darby and Miller, 1865), 756.

Abraham Lincoln, elected President of a rapidly fragmenting country in 1860, reportedly confided this dream to in the spring of 1862 to his personal aide, Colonel Le Grand B. Cannon.  Just a few months earlier Lincoln’s son Willie had died, at the age of eleven.  Willie was the second son he and his wife Mary had lost (four-year old Eddie died in 1850).  Visitation dreams of deceased loved ones have been reported in many cultures around the world, reflecting the all-too-human desire to look beyond death and meet with those who have left their physical bodies.  Lincoln commented on the paradoxical quality of his experience, which I’ve found characteristic of many visitation dreams: they are joyful and heartbreaking, reassuring and distressing at the same time.  The vivid memorability of such dreams plays an important role in the mourning process, enabling the individual to envision a new kind of relationship with the dead person—an enduring spiritual connection of tremendous emotional power that carries over from dreaming into waking awareness.  Whether or not you believe such dreams represent the wishful imaginings of the mind or the actual contact between a living person and a soul of the dead, visitation dreams provide people with a kind of sad wisdom that’s profoundly reassuring, particularly in times of waking-life conflict and danger.  That would certainly describe the situation Lincoln faced in 1862.  The Civil War had begun the previous year, and he felt the unimaginable weight of personal responsibility for the country’s political survival.  As painful as these dreams of his dead son Willie may have been, I suspect Lincoln wouldn’t have given them up for anything.

Abraham Lincoln 2: Parental Concern

“Think you better put “Tad’s” pistol away.  I had an ugly dream about him.”

Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), Volume 6, Note of June 9, 1863.

Lincoln sent this brief note to Mary regarding their youngest son Tad, ten years old at the time.  No details are given about this “ugly dream,” and apparently no details were required.  Mary would have immediately understood her husband’s worry, accepted its source, and taken the necessary precautions.  Lincoln’s parental anxiety dream, in today’s language, represented “actionable intelligence.”  Mary took great interest in dreams and other kinds of unusual psycho-spiritual phenomena, and historians have been tempted to blame her for her husband’s dalliances with the supernatural.  But I think we should credit Lincoln with possessing at least as much innate dreaming power as any other human, including the capacity of his nocturnal imagination to simulate realistic threats to himself and his family.  The psychological potency of dreaming appears very clearly in Lincoln’s brief report.  The “ugly dream” provoked greater awareness of a danger to one of his children, and it prompted greater vigilance in his waking life to defend against that danger.

Abraham Lincoln 3: Who Is Dead in the White House?

“About ten days ago I retired very late.  I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front.  I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary.  I soon began to dream.  There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me.  Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping.  I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.  There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.  I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.  It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?  I was puzzled and alarmed.  What could be the meaning of all this?  Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered.  There I met with a sickening surprise.  Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments.  Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully.  ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers.  ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’  Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd.”

Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 425-426

During the second week of April 1865, a few days before his assassination, Lincoln told this dream to his wife, his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, and one or two other people sitting with him in the White House.  According to Lamon, who wrote down the conversation immediately afterwards, a downcast Lincoln said the weird dream had haunted and possessed him for the past several days.  Mary and Lamon both became alarmed at the ominous implications, and Lincoln tried to reassure them by saying it probably meant nothing.  He doesn’t seem to have believed that himself, though.  Death by assassination was a real and constant threat; Lincoln knew for a fact that Southern sympathizers were eagerly plotting to kill him.  He also knew from his close reading of Shakespeare and the Bible that especially memorable dreams can portend the imminence of death.  His earlier night visions focused on the well-being of his children, but now his dreaming imagination turned to the dangers looming over his own life.

After Lincoln was shot the night of April 14, an anguished Mary was heard to exclaim , “His dream was prophetic!”

Abraham Lincoln 4: Victory

“At the Cabinet meeting held the morning of the assassination, it was afterward remembered, a remarkable circumstance occurred.  General Grant was present, and during a lull in the discussion the President turned to him and asked if he had heard from General Sherman.  General Grant replied that he had not, but was in hourly expectation of receiving dispatches from him announcing the surrender of Johnston.  ‘Well,’ said the President, ‘you will hear very soon now, and the news will be important.’  ‘Why do you think so?’ said the General.  ‘Because,’ said Mr. Lincoln, ‘I had a dream last night; and ever since the war began, I have invariably had the same dream before any important military event occurred.’  He then instanced Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, etc., and said that before each of these events, he had had the same dream; and turning to Secretary [of the Navy] Welles, said: ‘It is in your line, too, Mr. Welles.  The dream is, that I saw a ship sailing very rapidly; and I am sure that it portends some important national event.’”

Francis Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 292.

Here’s another instance of pre-battle dreaming, an apparently frequent occurrence in Lincoln’s life as military commander of the Northern army.  He had learned to associate the dreaming image of a ship speeding across the sea with the imminent arrival of momentous news, and on this Good Friday morning of 1865 he felt the impulse to share his dream omens with his military commanders.  The final triumph of the Union over the Confederacy lay just weeks away, and Lincoln knew the war had been won.  His optimism seems tragically misplaced in light of his murder that very night, but I’m more interested in his imparting of oneiric wisdom to the victorious generals.  In speaking so openly about his dreams as legitimate sources of warning and knowledge that helped him in his efforts to keep the Union together, Lincoln offered his generals (including the man who would be President from 1869-1877, Ulysses S. Grant) an example of truly visionary leadership.  He also offered to the rest of American history an example of someone who relied on his dreams to help him overcome the most serious challenges in both his personal and collective life.

But Lincoln did not say…

“My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last, best hope of earth.”

This quote is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but that’s apparently incorrect.  I could not find it in any of Lincoln’s known writings, and several Lincoln scholars agreed that the sentence is apocryphal.  The last six words, without the comma, appeared at the conclusion of Lincoln’s address to the U.S. Congress on December 1, 1862.  The meaning and spirit of his actual words point to an idealistic hope for America’s future that has long (but not that long) been associated with a special kind of dream:

“We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free–honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just–a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”