According to the results of a new study, lucid dreaming is a reality in the lives of many, many people.  In a survey of nearly 3000 American adults, 64.9% of the participants reported having a dream in which they were aware of dreaming, and 34.4% said they have experienced the ability to control what happens in their dreams.

This evidence suggests that lucid dreaming is not just a Hollywood fantasy or a fringe practice of new age mystics.  Rather, the capacity for conscious awareness and/or volitional control within the dream state turns out to be a surprisingly widespread phenomenon among ordinary Americans.

The new study was conducted on my behalf in May 2010 by Zogby Interactive among 2992 American adults randomly selected to complete an online survey on their sleep and dream patterns.  A more detailed analysis of the survey results will be released in the fall.  For now, these are the initial findings about lucid dreaming:

• Overall, 64.9% of the respondents answered yes to the question, “Have you ever had a dream of being aware you are dreaming?”; 24.8% said no, and 10.3% were not sure.
• Women answered yes more often than men did, and younger people more than older people.
• Political liberals and Democrats answered yes more often than did political conservatives and Republicans.
• Overall, 34.4% of the respondents answered yes to the question, “Have you ever had a dream of being able to control a dream?”; 51.1% said no, and 14.5% were not sure.
• A similar gender pattern appeared, with more women than men and younger than older people answering yes to this question.
• People who never attend religious worship services seemed to give an especially high proportion of yes answers to the control-your-dreams question.  So did people who say they are more spiritual than religious.

These findings add new data to the growing literature on lucid dreaming (for more, see the work of Jayne Gackenbach, Stephen LaBerge, Tracey Kahan, Fariba Bogzaran, and Ryan Hurd) and expand our knowledge of its correlations with various demographic factors.

Like other dream-themed movies (Dreamscape (1984), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Matrix (1999)), Inception is trying to tap into people’s personal experiences with lucid dreaming to simulate a sense of intense realism, aesthetic wonder, and infinite possibility.

The more Inception can recreate the feelings of this paradoxical state of conscious dreaming, the more the audience will be drawn into the story, and the more, perhaps, they will be reminded of their own dreaming potentials.

Methodology:

These results come from a Zogby Interactive survey of 2992 American adults, answering a series of questions about their sleep and dream patterns in May 2010.  The participants were randomly chosen from a panel of @500,000 people available for online opinion research who were originally contacted by Zogby during a random digit dialing telephone survey.

According to the March 2010 report on online panels conducted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the key issue in evaluating online polling is whether a truly random, probability-based method is used to recruit participants, otherwise the results cannot be considered statistically representative of a broader population.  As I understand Zogby’s method, it satisfies this requirement.

Public opinion researchers are actively debating the advantages and disadvantages of online surveys in comparison to traditional telephone surveys.  For this project, the online approach had the decisive advantage of enabling the participants to provide first-person narrative reports of their 1) most recent dream, 2) worst nightmare, and 3) earliest remembered dream.  Gathering this kind of data was not feasible using a telephone survey.

However, an online panel of participants is obviously skewed toward people who are computer-literate.  This might be a problem if the current project had a different goal, for example predicting election turn-out.  But since the goal here is to develop a better demographic profile of sleep and dream patterns, the Zogby panel has more than enough diversity to suit the purpose.

On the whole, it seems fair to conclude this data set provides a reasonably representative portrait of the sleep and dream patterns of contemporary American society.  Hopefully, bigger and better studies in the future will add more detail and depth to this portrait.  Until then, this survey appears to be the largest one yet undertaken on the demographics of sleep and dream patterns.

The results cited above have been weighted according to Zogby’s standard calculations for matching the demographics of the 2992 participants with the demographics of American society as a whole.  My future work with this material, while considering the weighted results, will focus primarily on analyzing the raw data.

The questions used in this survey were drawn in part from the Typical Dreams Questionnaire used by Nielsen et al. (2003) in their article in the journal Dreaming (13:4, 211-236) about the typical dreams of Canadian University students.

It could be argued these questions are too vague—a “yes” answer could mean it’s happened only once in the person’s whole life, or it happens for them every night.  For that reason, the results here should be regarded cautiously as indicating the minimum occurrence of these types of dreams.

Another concern is that these questions allow for confabulated memories influenced by social expectations—people may answer yes if they feel it’s the kind of dream a person in their society should have experienced, whether or not they have actually had that kind of dream themselves.  Such a possibility should be taken seriously.  Most forms of opinion research are limited by the difficulty of verifying subjective self-reports and eliminating external influences.

In this project, the approach has been to gather a large number of reports from a wide variety of people and then analyze them in terms of clear, easy-to-identify patterns in the data.  This method assumes that such broad, empirically-based patterns are honest and accurate reflections of people’s actual dream experiences.

“[W]e can imagine that the [future dream] researchers will acquire the technological virtuosity to be able to influence, direct, or alter the composition process, to stop, restart, or even transpose the presentation process as it occurs, to prevent or distort the recording process.  We can even imagine that they will be able to obliterate the ‘veridical dream’ memory and substitute for it an undreamed narrative.” (134)

For Dennett this ability is a plausible, indeed logical extension of present-day research on correlations between the mental and physical aspects of dreaming.  Eventually the increased precision of mind-altering technologies will allow for the total exernal control of people’s dreaming, to the point where they can be fooled into believing they experienced dreams they didn’t, and didn’t experience dreams they did.

The movie Inception is based on the same idea, but with a dark Hollywood twist: What would happen if such dream-altering tools “fell into the wrong hands” and were used for malevolent purposes?

Ironically, Dennett did not think much of the narrative potential of his theory:

“As a premise for a science-fiction novel it would be almost pedestrian in its lack of conceptual horizon-bending.” (135)

Dennett’s main philosophical goal in this paper was to undermine the “received” view of dreaming, i.e. the traditional theory in which dreams are regarded as experiences during sleep that we later remember in waking.  As part of his larger project of constructing “a physicalist theory of consciousness” (129), Dennett argued that we may not actually experience dreams, but only assume that what we remember after awakening must have been experienced during sleep.  Perhaps “there are no dreams after all, only dream ‘recollections.’” (136)

This claim was important to him because it was part of his overarching argument that all aspects of mental life, even in sleep and dreams, can be explained in purely physical terms, without any reference to subjective experience.

Dennett has gone on to become a highly influential writer on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and religion (e.g., his 2007 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon). All his works apply a vigorously physicalist mode of explanation, consistent with his approach in this 1997 paper.

It is strange to find, then, that at the end of this paper Dennett conceded that, despite his best critical attacks, the “received view” of dreaming was likely to be proven, not disproven, by scientific evidence:

“If it turns out that sleep, or at least that portion of sleep during which dreaming occurs, is a state of more or less peripheral paralysis or inactivity; if it turns out that most of the functional areas that are critical to the governance of our wide awake acitvity [sic] are in operation, then there will be good reason for drawing the lines around experience so that dreams are included.” (146)

Dennett must have known the first condition, i.e. atonia during REM sleep, was true.  He also clearly knew there was growing evidence suggesting that complex and sophisticated aspects of waking mental functioning could be identified in dreams.  He tried to diminish the significance of lucid dreaming, but still he had to acknowledge its reality and its problematic implications for his critique.

So in the end, does Dennett, a committed physicalist, accept the preponderance of empirical evidence in favor of the received view that dreams are experiences?

Not really.  In the final lines of the paper Dennett retreats to the idea that if he can simply redescribe the mind without reference to subjectivity, then it won’t matter any longer what people do or don’t say about experience.  If people followed his approach, “the received view of dreams, like the lay view of experience in general, would not be so much disproved as rendered obsolete.” (148).

That’s a remarkably weak conclusion to draw after such an elaborate effort to prove that dreams are not experiences.  Rather than grounding his ideas in empirical evidence, he ultimately claims to offer nothing more than better rhetoric.

Dennett’s analysis of dream research does not support his larger physicalist explanation of consciousness.  Rather, it suggests that dreaming as a form of conscious experience within sleep poses a serious challenge to his physicalist theory.

####

References:

Daniel Dennett, “Are Dreams Experiences?”, in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978), 129-148.  The quotes above come from the third printing, 1986.

What amazed me about this project was how easy it was to make accurate inferences about the waking life of our participant, “Van,” without ever reading his dream narratives–just by looking at the statistical frequencies with which he used certain words in reporting his dreams.

Our findings are additional evidence in favor of the idea that dreaming has meaningful psychological structure, and against the idea that dreaming is merely random nonsense from the brain during sleep.

ABSTRACT:

Building on previous investigations of waking-dreaming continuities using word search technology (Domhoff and Schneider 2008, Bulkeley 2009a, 2009b), this article demonstrates that a blind analysis of a dream series using only word search methods can accurately predict many important aspects of the individual’s waking life, including personality attributes, relationships, activities, and cultural preferences.  Results from a study of the “Van” dream series (N=192) show that blind inferences drawn from a word frequency analysis were almost entirely accurate according to the dreamer.  After presenting these findings we discuss several remaining shortcomings and suggest ways of improving the method for use by other researchers involved in the search for a more systematic understanding of meaning in dreams.

Bulkeley, Kelly. 2009a. The Religious Content of Dreams: New Scientific Foundations. Pastoral Psychology 58 (2):93-101.

———. 2009b. Seeking Patterns in Dream Content: A Systematic Approach to Word Searches. Consciousness and Cognition 18:905-916.

Domhoff, G. William, and Adam Schneider. 2008. Studying dream content using the archive and search engine on DreamBank.net. Consciousness and Cognition 17:1238-1247.

The editor and “dream wrangler” who gathered the reports, Nick de Semlyen, did not tell me who the dreamers were–all I had to work with were the dreams themselves. 

Below are the full commentaries I sent in response, the “director’s cut” as it were.  I’ll have a pdf of the slightly shorter published article available soon.

This method of blind analysis appeals to me because it strictly focuses one’s attention on the themes, symbols, and emotional dynamics of the dream itself, without prematurely seeking connections with the known details of the dreamer’s waking life.  This was not a pure experiment, however, because I did know the dreamers were involved in the film industry in some way.

For more on the blind analysis”method of studying dreams, see the paper I recently co-authored with G. William Domhoff, “Detecting Meaning in Dream Reports: An Extension of a Word Search Approach,” which will appear in a forthcoming issue (June, I’m told) of the IASD journal Dreaming. 

1) “My favourite dream is one I had in college, I was a homeless person on a bridge, wearing very tattered layers of clothing and the world was cast in this sepia tone and I was fishing with a piece of string off the bridge into the Thames for worms, and I would pull them out and put them in my mouth.”

 (Gillian Anderson)
             For many people college marks the transition to adulthood, when we leave our families and begin living on our own.  Here the dreamer is cast as a homeless person, in a scene of apparent misery and hardship.  As a metaphor, this could reflect the concerns a typical college student might feel about difficult life changes and, in a real sense, becoming “home-less.”

            But much more seems to be going on.  Consider the setting: the River Thames is the most historic waterway in Britain, an ever-flowing source of collective life and cultural power.  The dreamer is sitting on a bridge that spans this epic river.  She is connected to the water with a string, just as the bridge connects the two sides of land.  It’s a remarkable image of elemental symmetry, with the dreamer positioned at the very center.

            Then there’s the strange business of backwards fishing. Instead of taking worms from the earth and putting them into the river to go into the mouth of a fish, the dreamer pulls worms out of the river and puts them into her own mouth.  It’s the complete reverse of normal fishing—as if she were the one being fished.

            The dreamer probably didn’t know it, but the color sepia originally derived from the brownish ink produced by a certain species of fish (sepia means “cuttlefish” in Greek).  Details like this may be just a coincidence, but sometimes they point to deeper unconscious meanings. 

            So this whole dream is enveloped in a strangely “fishy” atmosphere, with a superficial drabness masking a deeper structure and hidden purpose. 

            It sounds to me like the first chapter of a heroic myth: the youth who begins as the lowest of the low is drawing strength from the waters of her ancestors, getting ready to seek fame, fortune, and adventure out in the wide world.  

 2) “I had a really cool dream that I was doing a scene with the young Jack Nicholson.  Five Easy Pieces era Jack. We were in the desert, with this really rad-looking ’70s car, and I was really killing this scene, being super-great in it. And then the wardrobe people came over and said ‘Oh my God, he’s wearing the wrong colour shirt’ and I was really upset — all this good work I’d done was ruined because Jack’s shirt wasn’t the right colour.”

 (Millo Jovovich)

             When people dream of celebrities it usually reflects some degree of psychological identification with the public personas of those famous people.  The dreams envision us being in the company of powerful, talented people who embody the qualities and strengths we wish to possess ourselves. 

            When the theme of time travel enters the picture it suggests a quest for a deeper connection, something akin to what Australian Aborigines seek in the Dreamtime, when the ancestors still walked through a freshly created world.  An actor’s version today might be something like this dream, going back to a legendary time when movie-making was a daring, creative adventure.

            The dream turns into a nightmare, however, when the dreamer is confronted with the brutal fact of her lower status on the actor’s totem pole.  No matter how good her work may be, her career is still vulnerable to the whims of bigger stars.     

 3) “I was standing under a huge tree — it must have been on the Serengeti, somewhere in Africa — and I was watching my family being eaten by lions. I had that dream over and over again when I was a kid… I’m guessing it came from some programme I saw on the telly. For that reason I’ve never been to Africa and I would never take my family there. Even now I’m shit scared of lions and when I go to the zoo I get the feeling that they can smell me and they’re plotting to get me. I’ll tell you how ridiculous my fear of them is: my daughter had to go to South Africa last year to do a film and I was begging her not to go. Because of the lions.”

 (Ray Winstone)

            There might be something more to the symbolism of the lions for this dreamer, perhaps having to do with family aggression or masculine authority.  The persistence of this fear from a childhood dream into adulthood makes me wonder if this is a person who, for better or for worse, puts great trust in his instincts and gut-level reactions. 

4) “When I was nine years old, I dreamed I was a hippo in a ballerina skirt, like the one in Fantasia. It got worse, because I had to pee in my dream and when I woke up I’d wet my bed. That’s pretty embarrassing, right?

 (Rachel Bilson)

             It shouldn’t be.  Bedwetting in childhood is fairly common, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of.  A precocious desire to perform in the movies comes through in this dream, and also perhaps a warning that too much “fantasy” can interfere with impulse control and taking care of one’s basic physical needs.

 5) “I’m coming into a modern city and the buildings are charging each other with electricity, like big Tesla coils. Then I go on a date with two twins and they kill me at the end. Analyse that.”

 (Robert Downey, Jr.)

            The vivid image of an electrically surging city, followed by the lustful fantasy of dating twins, leads to an abrupt end with the dreamer’s death.  As a brief set of images, whether from a dream or not, it does accurately portray the up-and-down psychology of a manic episode.  During such episodes the cognitive line between waking and dreaming can effectively disappear.

 6) “I have this dream about falling all the time. People say that if you ever hit the ground in a falling dream you’ll have a heart attack and die. So I try to stay with the dream and see what happens. I’ve actually fallen from very high distances, hit the ground, gone through and ended up in water. But I can still breath and finally end up in air again. Then I start flying. It’s a very cool dream; I kind of look forward to it now.”

 (Samuel L. Jackson)

            One of the general functions of dreaming is to expand our conscious sense of possibility and keep our minds flexible, adaptive, and open to alternative perspectives.  In this case the dreamer pushes the process further than most people are willing to go.  In many religious traditions these would be considered mystical experiences, and the dreamer might be taken aside for special training as a healer or shaman.

            Some research has suggested that people who can guide their dreams like this have better physical balance and spatial coordination in waking life.  Perhaps this dreamer is a dancer or an athlete of some kind?

 7) “The recurring one from my childhood was the witch of the west walking up my road, bending each lamp post over and blowing out each lamp one by one as she got closer and closer, and when she blew out the last lamp I woke up…like wailing. It happened over and over again.”

 (Sam Mendes)

            I don’t know anything about the dreamer’s personal life, but his nightmares reveal a painful truth: death is coming to get us.  The reference to the Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz” indicates an early turn to movies as a refuge from this fear.  Movies offer the fantasy of immortality—if death is cast as the wicked witch, perhaps the dreamer can be like Dorothy and escape her clutches.

            Although it might seem cruel for a child to be confronted so early with the dark specter of mortality, such dreams mark a valuable step in the development of mature consciousness.  Most of the world’s religious traditions regard an acceptance of death as the key to true wisdom.

]]> http://kellybulkeley.com/14-weirdest-dreams-hollywood/feed/ 2 http://kellybulkeley.com/dream-book-review-jungs-seminar/ http://kellybulkeley.com/dream-book-review-jungs-seminar/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:08:26 +0000 Kelly Bulkeley http://kellybulkeley.com/?p=1506 Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940 by C.G. Jung, edited by Lorenz Jung and Maria Meyer-Grass, translated by Ernst Falzeder with the collaboration of Tony Woolfson (Princeton University Press, 2008).

            This new English translation of C.G. Jung’s seminar on the earliest remembered dreams of childhood marks a dramatic advance in the study of Jungian dream theory.  The book makes available to English readers a fascinating, informative, and thought-provoking source of insight into Jung’s practical approach to dream interpretation.  It will appeal to anyone who wants to learn more about how Jung actually worked with dreams.  The book will also serve as an important resource for teachers and researchers in their use and/or criticism of Jung’s psychology of dreams.  Although the title suggests a narrower focus, Children’s Dreams in fact provides the best single source for understanding the broader dimensions of Jungian dream theory.

            From 1936 to 1940 Jung taught the seminar at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.  The participants included some of his brightest followers, including Marie-Louis Von Franz, Aniela Jaffe, and Jolande Jacobi.  Each meeting of the seminar involved one of the participants presenting and analyzing an early childhood dream report (or brief dream series), after which Jung would comment and other participants would ask questions and respond to Jung’s ideas.  We cannot know how faithfully the transcript represents what actually happened in the seminar, but the written text does give the strong sense of a lively, intelligent, free-flowing conversation among people who knew Jung’s theories very well and wanted his guidance in applying them. 

            Virtually no mention is made of the ominous political situation in Europe at this time, i.e., the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and the outbreak of World War II.  A Jung critic might take this as a retreat from the real problems of the world into the self-reinforcing fantasy world of dream symbolism.  A more sympathetic reader might wonder if the seminar participants found this work so compelling precisely because they knew that dark forces were afoot and they wanted to gain better practical insight into the deep psychological roots of the darkness threatening their civilization. 

            The first chapter, Jung’s introductory lecture to the class, is itself worth the price of the book.  In clear, straightforward language Jung lays out the basic principles and themes of his approach to dream interpretation.  He puts special emphasis on the earliest remembered dreams of childhood because these types of dreams often relate to primordial themes in the collective unconscious and thus offer an especially good view of archetypal dynamics.  In this Jung highlights a key notion in his overall psychological system: “[T]he unconscious is older than consciousness….The unconscious is what is originally given, from which consciousness rises anew again and again.” (7)   Children have less conscious superstructure than adults and thus more direct exposure to oneiric blasts from the collective unconscious. This is not always a good thing.  On the contrary, one of the remarkable features of the dreams presented in the book is their relentlessly negative, violent, frightening character.  Most of the dreams are nightmares, many of them recurrent.  This may reflect the fact that the seminar participants drew most of the dream reports from their clinical practices with people suffering psychophysiological problems.  It may also reflect what Jung considered the numinous power of the archetypes, their overwhelming energy and consciousness-stretching impact on people, particularly early in their lives.

            In the introduction Jung lays out his method of analyzing dreams in terms of a four-part dramatic structure:

             1. Locale: Place, time, ‘dramatis personae.’

            2. Exposition: Illustration of the problem.

            3. Peripateia: Illustration of the transformation—which can also leave room for a catastrophe.

            4. Lysis: Result of the dream. Meaningful closure. Compensating illustration of the action of the dream. (30)   

             Each dream in the book is analyzed according to this structure.  This creates a helpful unity across the length of the book, which at 468 pages requires an extensive commitment of time and energy to read all the way to the end.  For teaching and reference purposes the book can be read piecemeal, in selections of one or two dream discussions (each one goes for 10-15 pages).  But we found real value in reading the book start to finish because many of the most interesting exchanges between Jung and the participants pop up unexpectedly in reference to different dreams.  As the seminars proceed Jung refers back to previous dreams and their analyses, so there is definitely a cumulative quality to the text. 

            Jung’s Children’s Dreams will not, in all likelihood, satisfy contemporary researchers who ask about the reliability of memory processes in dream recall, particularly dreams that people are remembering from many years in the past.  Nor will those who question Jung’s assumption about the universality of the archetypes find any reason to give up their skepticism.  But for those who already appreciate and value Jungian dream theory, Children’s Dreams will be a cause for joy.  The book is comparable to Freud’s epic Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in providing a rich, complex, highly detailed exposition of Jung’s psychology of dreams and dream interpretation. 

(Originally published in DreamTime 2009, co-authored with KB’s mother, Patricia Bulkley)

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

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

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

Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey.

Animals of various kinds appear in spiritually meaningful dreams. Birds, dogs, bears, wolves, fish, and even insects have come in people’s dreams to deliver important messages from the divine. But the animal that makes perhaps the most powerful spiritual impact in dreams is the snake. People from cultures all over the world report dreams in which they have intensely vivid encounters with snakes. Content analysis studies performed by Robert Van de Castle indicate that even in the dreams of modern Americans, who presumably have little direct contact with snakes, these animals appear with surprising frequency. [i] Many reports of snake dreams emphasize their strange, uncanny quality; the dreamer feels both attracted to and yet repelled by the serpent. As the following examples suggest, many people through history have regarded snake dreams as deeply spiritual experiences–for these dreams reveal the ambivalent nature of the sacred, its capacity to be a force of joyful creativity and violent destructiveness in human life.

1) A fifty year-old woman named Rosie Plummer, of the Paviotso people living on the Walker river reservation in Nevada, told anthropologist Willard Park of her shaman father. Rattlesnakes frequently came to him in his dreams and told him how to cure snake bites and other illnesses. Eighteen years after his death, Rosie started to dream about her father. “She dreamed that he came to her and told her to be a shaman. Then a rattlesnake came to her in dreams and told her to get eagle feathers, white paint, wild tobacco. The snake gave her the songs that she sings when she is curing. The snake appeared three or four times before she be lieved that she would be a shaman. Now she dreams about the rattlesnake quite frequently and she learns new songs and is told how to cure sick people in this way. [ii]

2) Lilias Trotter, a Christian missionary who worked in Algeria in the early part of the twentieth century, had these two dreams reported to her by Muslims who were converting to Christianity. A) Trotter says that an Algerian she knew named Boualem had been involved in an angry conflict with a neighbor. She wanted to help Boualem, but didn’t know how; then she says, “now God has dealt with the matter. Boualem told us that a dream had come. ‘I dreamed that a great snake was coiling round my foot and leg, and you [Trot ter] were there, and in horror I called to you. You said to the snake: “In the name of Jesus, let go.” It uncoiled and fell like a rope, and I woke almost dead with joy.’ And the shining of his face told that his soul had got free.” B) Trotter says, “Blind Houriya came this morning with ‘I want to tell you something that has frightened me very much. I dreamt it Saturday night, but I was too frightened to tell you yesterday. To-day my husband told me, “You must tell them.” I dreamed that a great snake was twisting round my throat and strangling me. I called to you [Trotter] but you said: “I cannot save you, for you are not following our road.” I went on calling for help, and one came up to me and loosened the snake from off my neck. I said: “And who is it that is saving me, and what is this snake?” A voice said: “I am Jesus and this snake is Ramadan [the Muslim ritual fasting period].”‘” [iii]

3) Henry Shipes was the son of an English father and a mother from the Maidu Indians of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Califor nia. He grew up at the end of the nineteenth century, during the gold rush era, when the indigenous Maidu culture was coming into conflict with white culture. Henry told anthropologist Arden King of various dreams in which he fought against native shamans who were jealous of his power. In one of these dreams, Henry “had a dream contest with a shaman who was also the headman at Quincy [a Sierra Nevada town]. In this dream Henry and the shaman were contesting with each other to see who had the most power. This was a fight to the death. The shaman acted first. He loosed a snake which pursued Henry Shipes, but was unable to catch him. Henry then tried his white power. This was stated by him to be specifically white. By ruse he caused the shaman to attempt the lifting of a bucket. The bucket exploded and the dream ended.” [iv]

4) The Egyptian Pharaoh Tanutamon is reported to have had the following dream experience in the first year of his reign, as presented by philologist A. Leo Oppenheim in his work on dreams in the ancient Near East: “His majesty saw a dream in the night: two serpents, one on his right, the other on his left. His majesty awoke, but he did not find them. His majesty said: ‘Why has this happened to me?’” His interpreters told him that the dream means that both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt now belong to him. “Then his majesty said: “True indeed is the dream; it is beneficial to him who places his heart in it but evil for him who does not know it.” [v]

5) In Carthage in 203 A.D. Vibia Perpetua, a newly married woman of twenty-two years, and mother to an infant son, was imprisoned and sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. As she waited in prison for the day when she and other Christians would be cast into the arena and killed by wild beasts, her brother came and told her to ask God for a vision to reveal her fate. Perpetua agrees, and says she’ll tell him what she learns tomorrow. “And I asked for a vision, and this was shown to me: I saw a bronze ladder, marvellously long, reaching as far as heaven, and narrow too: people could climb it only one at a time. And on the sides of the ladder every kind of iron implement was fixed: there were swords, lances, hooks, cutlasses, javelins, so that if anyone went up carelessly or not looking upwards, he would be torn and his flesh caught on the sharp iron. And beneath the ladder lurked a serpent of wondrous size, who laid am bushes for those mounting, making them terrified of the ascent. But Saturs [a fellow martyr] climbed up first… And he reached the top of the ladder, and turned and said to me: ‘Perpetua, I’m waiting for you–but watch out that the serpent doesn’t bite you!’ And I said: ‘He won’t hurt me, in Christ’s name!’ And under that ladder, almost, it seemed, afraid of me, the serpent slowly thrust out its head–and, as if I were treading on the first rung, I trod on it, and I climbed. And I saw an immense space of garden, and in the middle of it a white-haired man sitting in shepherd’s garb, vast, milk ing sheep, with many thousands of people dressed in shining white standing all round. And he raised his head, looked at me, and said: ‘You are welcome, child.’ And he called me, and gave me, it seemed, a mouthful of the cheese he was milking; and I accepted it in both my hands together, and ate it, and all those standing around said: ‘Amen.’ At the sound of that word I awoke, still chewing some thing indefinable and sweet.” Perpetua tells her dream to her brother, and they both understand that she is to die for her faith. [vi]

]]> http://kellybulkeley.com/dream-intepretation-snake/feed/ 21 http://kellybulkeley.com/abraham-lincoln%e2%80%99s-dreams/ http://kellybulkeley.com/abraham-lincoln%e2%80%99s-dreams/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:05:07 +0000 kb http://madbadcat.org/church/?p=862 President Abraham Lincoln provided at least four reports of his dreams: a visitation dream, a dream of parental concern, a possible prophecy of his assassination, and a series of dreams relating to military battles.  These reports appear in the biographical research cited in Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Towards None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (1994) and other historical sources. 

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.”

(Plato, The Republic, IX.571-576)

2.  For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words….For when dreams increase, empty words grow many.”

(Ecclesiastes 5:3, 7)

3.  I talk of dreams; which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy; which is as thin of substance as the air, and more inconstant than the wind…

(Mercutio, in William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.102-106)

4. Dreams are a vanity, God knows, pure error.  Dreams are engendered in the too-replete from vapours in the belly, which compete with others, too abundant, swollen tight.

(Pertelote to Chanticleer in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.)

5.  The forebrain may be making the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the relatively noisy signals sent up to it from the brain stem.

(J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, “The Brain as a Dream-State Generator,” 1977)

6.  In this model, attempting to remember one’s dreams should perhaps not be encouraged, because such remembering may help to retain patterns of thought which are better forgotten.  These are the very patterns the organism was attempting to damp down.

(Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1983)

7.  Dreaming is a free-rider on a system designed to be conscious while we are awake, and which is designed to sleep….  So far, no hypothesis put forward requires that we think of dreaming as more than a side-effect of the relevant functions of sleep.

(Owen Flanagan, “Dreaming Is Not an Adaptation,” 2000)

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