“In a lucid dream I flew to the Moon, landed, but when looking back to the Earth I saw my dog Shazam flying through space to join me . . .”

How do animals dream?

Research has shown that many animals dream very much like humans do, with REM cycles and dream imagery. When it comes to psi – the ability to mentally transcend time and space – with respect to research done on some animals at least, most humans come in a very distant second.

In the 40 years since the Maimonides studies it has become clear, through both scientific research and first-hand reports, that humans can become telepathically linked in dreams, and can even experience one another in a consensual way in a shared intersubjective dreamspace. Considering the many key similarities between animals and humans, it should not surprise us that psi-dreaming might connect humans with the animals they care about – and who care about them – as well.

Below are a few of the lucid dreams I’ve had with my dog Shazam.

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Animal Dream Telepathy?

“I see Shazam, and to my surprise he talks to me.

I respond, “All right! So long as you can talk here, tell me what you do want – crunchies, chewies, what?” However, instead of responding Shazam just looks peeved, and walks through the glass door out onto the deck.”

A year earlier, for various reasons I had decided not to feed Shazam any commercial pet foods, but to instead make up his food myself. I came up with a particular formula and pretty much made up the same food week after week. The day after the dream I added some sardines, which he went after with great enthusiasm, and I made an effort to keep his meals and treats both interesting and healthy from then on. I must have succeeded, as he never complained to me about his food in a lucid dream again!

Mutual Dreaming?

“I fly from the Earth to the Moon, something I’ve meant to do in a lucid dream for years. I land on the Moon, feeling rather proud of myself for accomplishing this goal, and look back through the blackness of space to Earth. However, to my surprise, aside from a spectacular view of the Earth floating in space,

I feel a little worried as to how he’ll get back, but he nonchalantly lands on the moon next to me, looking quite pleased with himself. He holds up his mouth to show me he’d brought his yellow jingle ball with him, just in case I wanted to do something really important, like throw it for him. I find this very funny – of course, even on the Moon, what else would my dog want to do but have me play ball with him!”

I kept Shazam’s toys in a large bowl on the top shelf of a cupboard. It had well over a dozen toys in it, at least a half dozen balls, including three rubber jingle balls in red, blue, and yellow, plus a variety of squeaky toys. The next morning, as a sort of impromptu experiment, I felt curious as to which of the toys he would pick. Without hesitation, he picked out the yellow jingle ball.

What happens when dogs learn to fly?

I see my Yorkshire terrier Shazam – he’s accompanied me into the dreamworld. Having seen me flying, he apparently decides to try doing it himself.

He goes over to a curtain and takes a whiz on the top of it while floating about 10 ft off the ground, which I find very funny.

All his life, as a small dog Shazam always had to leave his mark at the bottom of things, but he had no choice. So naturally after having learned to fly, he took advantage of his new ability to pee on the top! Although in retrospect this makes perfect sense, at the time in the dream it took me by complete surprise, so much so, that I almost woke myself up laughing!

Healing Dreams?

” . . . I decide to try healing Shazam’s ear using an Energy Beam chant. I find it hard to get a good effect, at first. I get a thin red beam of light that I direct towards his left ear – I have to will it. Then the beam becomes blue. His ear grows larger as I work on it.”

Shazam had a growth on the inside flap of his left ear that I thought might seem cancerous. After the dream I found I could now scrape it off with my fingernail, and it did not grow back as it had before. Although that spot on his ear always looked a little odd, with lighter colored skin, the growth never came back.

How do you know if it’s a psi dream?

Do you think that you may have had a psi-dream with, rather than of, a pet or animal? Although hard to validate – most animals find it difficult to give detailed verbal feedback – you might look for potential psi-dreams by these characteristics:

1. A strong feeling of recognizing the animal, or of feeling a bond with the animal while dreaming;

2. The animal does something spontaneous and unexpected in the dream, which somehow seems clearly characteristic of them;

3. Something occurs after the dream, in waking physical reality, that validates the dream in some way as having a psi-component.

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That people sometimes engage in complex behaviors during sleep has been known for centuries.

As an example, Shakespeare’s Macbeth contains a widely known episode of sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, during which a guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth tries to wash imaginary bloodstains from her hands while speaking of the crimes she and her husband have committed.

But what, exactly, is sleepwalking?

The symptoms that characterize this unusual and at times dramatic sleep disorder can vary greatly across affected individuals; even in the same person, the symptoms may vary from one episode to the next.

Episodes can be mundane and stereotyped, such as sitting up in bed, pointing at a wall, fingering bed sheets, and walking about a room, or they can be surprisingly complex, such as rearranging furniture, cooking, getting dressed, or playing a musical instrument.

Consequently, episodes may last from a few seconds to a few dozen minutes.

Sleepwalkers typically have their eyes open throughout an episode and, contrary to common depictions of the disorder, do not move about with their arms stretched out before them!

Sleepwalking and Dreamlike Experiences

Whereas most children do not remember their sleepwalking episodes, it is not unusual for adult sleepwalkers to remember perceptual, cognitive, emotional, or behavioral aspects of their episodes.

It should be noted, however, that whereas sleepwalkers are aware of their immediate physical environment during an episode and can interact with other people nearby, this is not the case in normal dreaming.

Also, sleepwalking arises out of deep, slow-wave sleep, and never out of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the sleep stage most strongly associated with vivid dreaming.

How Common Is Sleepwalking?

Sleepwalking is more common in childhood than in adulthood, but childhood somnambulism is typically benign and nonviolent, and usually does not require any intervention.

The peak incidence of sleepwalking, approximately 29% of children, appears around 11 to 12 years of age, before rapidly decreasing during adolescence.

Sleepwalking affects 2% to 4% of the general adult population, and is associated with considerable harm potential, including placing oneself in dangerous situations, such as running into walls and furniture, trying to escape imaginary threats, or leaving one’s house.

It may also include destroying property or having episodes result in serious injuries to the sleeper, bed partner, or others.

In fact, a history of aggressive and/or injurious behavior during sleep is what leads a strong majority of adult sleepwalkers to consult a medical specialist.

Genetics and the Sleepwalking Brain

Among the general factors known to contribute to the occurrence of sleepwalking, genetics appears to play a key role.

About 80% of somnambulistic patients have at least one family member affected by this disorder, and the prevalence of somnambulism is higher in children of parents with a history of sleepwalking.

One study of more than 300 pairs of twins found that monozygotic, or identical, twins are concordant for the disorder six times as often as dizygotic, or nonidentical, twins.

The sleeping parts include the associative cortices, which help us integrate visual, auditory, and other sensory stimuli into our conscious experience; their deactivation is typical of sleep.

At the same time, networks in the motor cortex and, in the limbic system deeper in the brain, the cingulate cortex are activated.

That is typical not of sleep but of emotionally guided motor behavior, or movement, during wakefulness.

It is this coexistence of deep sleep and wakefulness that explains the unusual mental state in which sleepwalkers find themselves.

Treatment and Safety

Treatment for sleepwalking is unnecessary when the episodes are benign and not associated with potential injury.

In this case, reassuring the patient and his or her family about the benign nature of the episodes and demystifying the events is often sufficient.

In addition, while stressors can precipitate sleepwalking in predisposed individuals, sleepwalking is not a sign of deep-seated anxiety or other forms of mental illness.

However, attention should be paid to potential precipitating factors, such as sleep deprivation, stress, and environmental disturbances that may fragment sleep, so that such factors can be avoided.

For patients with a history of more agitated, less benign somnambulism, precautions should be taken to ensure a safe sleep environment.

Preventative measures can include the removal of obstructions in the bedroom, securing windows, arranging for the sleepwalker to sleep on the ground floor, installing locks or alarms on outside doors, covering windows with heavy curtains, using a nightlight, placing barriers in stairways, and removing all sharp or otherwise dangerous objects.

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Treatment Options

Controlled clinical trials for the treatment of somnambulism are lacking.

Hypnosis, including self-hypnosis, has been found to be effective in both children and adults presenting with chronic sleepwalking.

Relaxation exercises, such as autogenic training or progressive muscle relaxation, if carried out regularly before bedtime, can also help decrease the number of episodes.

In children, the preferred treatment for somnambulism consists of a behavioral technique called anticipatory or scheduled awakening.

Parents keep a diary of their child’s episodes and determine the approximate time at which the episodes typically occur.

They will then awaken their child about 15 to 20 minutes before the episode’s typical time of occurrence, every day for one month.

This simple intervention can yield rapid and lasting results, possibly by reducing a build-up of deep sleep early in the night, a condition that can give rise to episodes in predisposed children.

Sleepwalking in adults can also be triggered by a primary sleep disorder such as sleep apnea.

In these cases, treatment of the primary sleep disorder often results in the alleviation of sleepwalking.

Pharmacological treatments, such as benzodiazepines, should be considered only if the behaviors are very frequent, hazardous, or extremely disruptive to the bed partner or other household members.

However, pharmacotherapy does not always result in adequate control of sleepwalking.

It is recommended that treatment approaches always include instructions on sleep hygiene, avoidance of sleep deprivation, and stress management.

Originally published by IASD in 2018. © Antonio Zadra, PhD. This piece is shared as part of IASD’s living archive.

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Editor’s Note

Stanley Krippner is one of the great pioneers of dream research, consciousness studies, and parapsychology. Originally published in DreamTime (Winter 2020), this essay explores Shakespeare’s treatment of dreams, apparitions, and other phenomena that continue to intrigue dreamers and researchers alike.

The International Association for the Study of Dreams is composed of members spanning various perspectives about dreams, their nature, and their meaning.

This resembles the various perspectives that exist regarding the identity, work, and impact of William Shakespeare, the 17th century English playwright, poet, actor, and entrepreneur whose work is celebrated annually at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and elsewhere around the world.

Shakespeare has been rightly hailed not only as a literary giant but as a social commentator, psychologist, and linguist, the latter appellation due to the numerous phrases and proper names he introduced into the English language.

However, the case can be made that Shakespeare had an uncanny knowledge about what are today called parapsychological phenomena, and depicted them in a way superior to dramatists of his time, and even since his time.

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Shakespeare’s plays have endured over the centuries because of their cogent portrayal of the human condition.

Parapsychological, or “psi,” phenomena are an integral part of the human condition. Psi phenomena are not always veridical, and some scoffers would say that they are never veridical. Nonetheless ostensible precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, and post mortem survival are a part of human nature.

As a result, they are grist for the playwright’s mill, and Shakespeare made good use of them.

Dreams, Psi, and Shakespeare

Psi phenomena, veridical or not, are often found in nighttime dream reports.

Contemporary investigators have found that people report alleged psi experiences that occurred in dreams more frequently than those that took place while they were awake.

Sigmund Freud, a notable explorer of the human condition, alleged that dreaming provides a suitable setting for telepathy to occur and wrote several essays on the topic.

Richard III and Precognitive Dreams

In The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, dreams are used as foreboding omens, what parapsychologists would call precognitive dreams about future events.

When the king’s brother, George Duke of Clarence, is asked why he looks “so heavily,” he responds:

“I have pass’d a miserable night, so full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams…”

He need not have worried, because a short time later, King Richard had him murdered.

This play contains more dreams and dream references than any other Shakespearean play, typically to forecast future events and monitor present activities.

Romeo and Juliet

Early in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and his friend Mercutio discover that they had both remembered dreams the previous night.

Mercutio remarks:

“I see Queen Mab has been with you. She is the fairies’ midwife.”

Later he dismisses dreams entirely:

“True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy.”

Yet Shakespeare does not leave the matter there. Romeo later experiences what appears to be a precognitive dream foretelling his own death.

“If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep, my dreams presage some joyful news at hand.”

Romeo’s dream may be interpreted as both a warning and a wish fulfillment fantasy.

When news arrives of Juliet’s apparent death, Romeo ignores the warning and attempts to defy fate.

The tragedy unfolds exactly as his dream seemed to foretell.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Despite its title, A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains no sequence that meets the modern psychological definition of a dream.

Instead, Shakespeare presents an alternate reality inhabited by fairies, magical potions, enchantments, and altered states of consciousness.

Characters awaken with only fragments of memory from the night before, recalling what seems to have been:

“A most rare vision.”

The play closes with Puck apologizing if the audience found the events unbelievable, suggesting they should regard them as nothing more than a dream.

Julius Caesar

In Julius Caesar, dreams and omens surround the emperor’s assassination.

Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, experiences disturbing dreams and repeatedly warns him of impending danger.

Her dreams are accompanied by reports of ghosts, prodigies, and supernatural signs.

Caesar dismisses them all.

After his assassination, Caesar himself returns as a ghost, becoming one of the many apparitions that appear throughout Shakespeare’s works.

Hamlet and the Ghost

Hamlet features perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous ghost.

The murdered king appears to his son and claims he was murdered by his brother.

Rather than accepting the apparition’s testimony immediately, Hamlet seeks evidence.

His famous “play within a play” becomes an experiment designed to test the ghost’s claim and expose the truth.

From this perspective, Hamlet becomes an investigator, testing extraordinary claims before accepting them.

Cymbeline

Cymbeline is filled with disguises, hidden identities, dream motifs, and symbolic deaths and rebirths.

The central character, Imogen, consumes a potion that places her into a deathlike trance.

Upon awakening she remarks:

“The dream’s here still.”

Dream and waking life become increasingly difficult to separate as the play moves toward reunion and revelation.

Troilus and Cressida

Often considered Shakespeare’s bleakest and most neglected play, Troilus and Cressida contains another example of ignored dream warnings.

Andromache warns Hector:

“My dreams all sure, prove ominous to the day.”

Hector rejects the warning and proceeds toward his death.

As in several Shakespearean tragedies, dreams offer insight that characters choose not to heed.

The Winter’s Tale

In The Winter’s Tale, dreams play a subtler role.

King Leontes mistakes fantasy for reality, claiming he has “dreamed” of his wife’s unfaithfulness.

Yet these are not nighttime dreams but waking delusions.

His inability to distinguish between imagination and reality leads to devastating consequences.

Later, a genuine dream appears that foreshadows restoration and reunion.

Conclusion

The dream is a central image throughout Shakespeare’s plays.

His characters are often guided less by reason than by emotion, intuition, and symbolic experience.

At their worst, dreams reflect confusion and self deception.

At their best, they become transformative experiences leading characters toward knowledge and self acceptance.

As scholar Marjorie Garber observed:

“Shakespearian dreams are always ‘true,’ when properly interpreted, since they reflect a state of affairs which is as much internal and psychological as it is external.”

In Shakespeare’s later plays, dream and life, art and nature, become increasingly inseparable.

Shakespeare saw the dream as a play within a play, anticipating some contemporary models of consciousness.

It is no wonder that his work continues to be revisited, yielding new insights and new delights with every reading.

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References

Garber, M. (2013). Dreams in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (Rev. ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hutchins, R. M. (Ed.). (1952). Great Books of the Western World (Vols. 26–27). New York, NY: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Reichbart, R. (2019). The Paranormal Surrounds Us: Psychic Phenomena in Literature, Culture and Psychoanalysis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Ullman, M., & Krippner, S. (1973). Dream telepathy. New York, NY: McMillan.

VandenBos, G.R. (Ed.). (2007). APA Dictionary of Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Wright, W.A. (Ed.). (1936).

The complete works of William Shakespeare. Garden City, NY: Doubleday

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From the IASD Archive | Dreaming, 1994

The catastrophic consequences to the onset of blindness are illustrated by castration dreams, dreams of darkness and dreams of death… all the elements of grief represented by these images are opportunities for expression of feelings which the newly blind must process in order to overcome depression.

I am a 52-year-old college teacher and psychotherapist who was blinded at the age of 25. Dream experiences played a very important role in my recovery from depression after the onset of surgically induced blindness. Being able to see in my dreams was the first step in the conscious recognition that sight and vision were different phenomena.

Seeing Dreams

The most common seeing dreams in the experience of newly blinded persons are reminiscent and undoing dreams. The following is an example of an undoing dream.

Duck in Time

We do not know at this time how or if such undoing dreams help a person overcome the shock of trauma, but experience with post-traumatic-shock syndrome supports the fact that they are signs of improvement. They coincide with a shift in attitude which allows the victim to place the trauma in a more peripheral mental set.

Reversal Dreams

In a reversal dream, the blind person is sighted and blindness is projected onto other dream characters.

Night Visitor

Being an invisible ghost is a common image among the terminally ill. It is clear that this dreamer’s conception of blindness is that it is worse than death and that the true self would sacrifice bodily existence in exchange for sight. This specific dream was very instrumental in an encounter which helped the dreamer give expression to his rage and bring him closer to acceptance.

Reminiscent Dreams

In reminiscent dreams, the imagery is cast to a time prior to the onset of blindness. Their prominence in the dream life of a person is an indication of a past or anticipated major life stressor. Such reminiscent dreams decline in frequency very rapidly after the first year of blindness. For some persons they never recur.

In my own experience and that of four other blind persons with whom I have discussed this, who have been blind for more than ten years, they occur once or twice a year. They tend to occur when one is out of his normal routine or associated with some special emotionally provocative event in waking experience. In my reminiscent dreams, the imagery and script tend to be pleasant and happy as in the following example.

Pizza on the Beach

Despite, or perhaps because of, the feelings of security and affection, as well as the happy imagery, such dreams always create powerful feelings of regret and sadness upon awakening in me. Nevertheless, remembering what it was to see, plays a very important and stimulating role in maintaining the psychological capacity to visualize realistically.

The most important function of dreams in my waking visual experience is what I think of as the consolidation of visual imagery. In my waking experience, I imagine what a new situation must appear like. Such waking visualization requires deliberate attention, effort and concentration. When my daughter gets her hair cut short, I will Braille it, appreciate it, comment on it. However, the next time she crosses my path, or that I think about her, in my spontaneous waking image of her she will be still wearing long hair, regardless of which hairdo I prefer. Once I dream of her in her new hairdo, that is, once I have seen it, she will appear to me in it pretty much consistently from that time on.

~Adapted from “The Role of Dreams in the Rehabilitation of the Adventitiously Blind” by Raymond E. Rainville, originally published in IASD’s journal Dreaming, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1994. In sharing this piece from IASD’s living archive, we remember Raymond and his contribution to the study of dreams.

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From the ASD Newsletter, Fall 1993

Dreams have proven to be valuable aids in promoting the healing, growth, and wholeness of individuals. But can the study of dreams do anything to help society?

Can dreams be of any use in addressing social problems like sexism, crime, ethnic and racial conflict, environmental degradation, and the worsening education of underprivileged children?

The question I would like to pose is this: what, if anything, can we in the field of dream studies contribute to the process of social transformation?

The most common answer to this question is that studying dreams helps society by helping certain individuals learn more about themselves; the growth and maturation of these individuals then ripples through society, promoting the welfare of all.

This answer is legitimate, but inadequate.

It smacks too much of psychological Reaganomics, of "trickle down" social activism, especially when we notice that the majority of people involved in dream studies are middle-to upperclass whites. Is this really the only answer we can give? No, it's not.

There are a number of specific ways in which the study of dreams can make direct, practical, and effective contributions to the process of social transformation, fundamentally changing our society so as to create a more just, more balanced, more humane community.

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1. Dreamwork as Social Action.

Modern Western society is suffering from so many crises and problems that we often feel overwhelmed by them all.

How, we wonder, do we even start trying to resolve all these crises?

At a certain point, we must simply face the ethical challenges posed by our society's problems and act-act as practically and effectively as we can to end these problems.

Jane White-Lewis has demonstrated that dream studies can deeply enrich efforts to improve the education of inner city children. She taught a class on dreams at a public high school in New Haven, Connecticut.

She found that by encouraging the students to bring their dreams into the classroom space, she was able to stimulate, deeply and powerfully, the development of the students' imaginations.

Given that social critics frequently lament the feelings of despair and hopelessness that plague underprivileged children, Jane's work is powerful social medicine.

Another example of dreamwork as social action comes from Marion Cuddy and Kathy Belicki, who have shown that nightmares can help society respond to the horrors of sexual abuse.

Not only does dreamwork aid in the therapeutic treatment of abuse victims; it also provides society with important information on this deeply disturbing and heatedly debated problem.

Marion and Kathy have found that the victims of sexual abuse suffer from nightmares with distinctive images, themes, and emotions. Their research on the strong connection between nightmares and abuse is directly relevant to the debates raging through our society about whether sexual abuse is "real" or just a product of "false memory."

Two other examples of dreamwork as social action range into terrain even farther removed from the conventional bounds of psychology. Herb Schroeder, а researcher with the U.S. Forest Service, has pointed to the practical relevance of dreams for addressing the environmental crisis.

He argues that we should not always interpret dream images of animals, trees, lakes, etc. as symbols of our "inner nature"; such dream images may also bе reflecting the outer wilderness, and may be telling us about our (often troubled) relationship with the natural environment.

1To the extent that the environmental crisis has been caused by humans forgetting their vital connectedness to nature, Herb's work indicates that dreams with nature imagery can be valuable means of renewing that connectedness.'

And Bette Ehlert has revealed the potential of dream study to aid in the reform of prison inmates and criminal offenders on parole (see this issue, page 14).

Bette has led dreamwork groups in various New Mexico correctional facilities, and she has found that dreams bring forth very clearly the symbolic context of the offender's particular crime-its roots in the person's usually trauma-filled life history, and its meaning for his or her potential growth and rehabilitation.

Bette's work promises to deepen our understanding of why crime occurs, to help criminal offenders keep from committing more crimes, and perhaps even to suggest ways to prevent crimes from occurring in the first place.

These examples prove that the study of dreams can help move us beyond what Martin Luther King called "the paralysis of analysis" and towards truly practical, concrete responses to society's most pressing troubles.

2. Dreams and Dialogues with "Other" Cultures.

One of the major challenges facing Western society as we enter the new millenium is learning how to live in multicultural world-a world of extremely diverse races, religions, and social systems.

2The study of dreams can play a powerful role in helping us understand and relate better to "others".

On the one hand; dreaming is a universal experience that unites all humans, no matter what their cultural background.

On the other, dreams are intricately shaped by the dreamer's particular cultural world, meaning that to study other people's dreams is an excellent way to learn about their society. Many dream researchers have begun journeying across this bridge, sharing dreams with people from different cultures.

Jayne Gackenbach's fascinating work with the Cree Indians of Northern Alberta-teaching them about Western dream theories and, in turn, being taught by them about their own Native dream theories-shows that dreams can be a wonderful means of reaching out across cultural differences (see this issue, page 18). Jayne's experiences raise the hope that.cross-cultural dream sharing can be a means of healing some of the conflicts that have arisen between "modern" and "native" cultures.

Along the same lines, Anthony Shafton's thought-provoking studies of the role of dreams in African-American culture raises important questions about subtle racial biases that are built into our major dream theories and practices (see ASD Newsletter Vol.8, No.4). He finds that African-Americans tend to express, share, interpret, and apply their dreams in ways that "deviate" from the norms established by leading dream psychologists, most of whom are white.

If we become more conscious of these biases, Shafton suggests, we may discover the power of dreams to promote greater interracial understanding.

The work of Jayne, Anthony, and the many anthropologists now studying dreams all illustrate the extremely valuable discoveries that can be made by the cross-cultural study of dreams. These discoveries are directly relevant to our society's task of learning to understand and relate better to people from different ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds.

3. Dreams, Spirituality, and the Modern World.

Many social commentators have said that modern Western society is suffering from a deep crisis of values, what can only be described as a spiritual crisis.

The spectacular rise of modern science has undermined many people's faith in traditional religious values, but modern science has not provided any alternative values to give people moral guidance and spiritual sustenance.

The spiritual vacuum created by the "triumph" of modern science over religion has, ironically, prompted the ominous upsurge of religious fundamentalism.

Here again, the study of dreams offers excellent resources.

People like Morton Kelsey, John Sanford, Louis Savary, James Hall, and Jeremy Taylor have demonstrated that the study of dreams can give people exactly this sort of spiritual guidance an orientation.

Dreams can reinvigorate the beliefs of people already in a religious tradition, and they can offer valuable new spiritual insights to people who are not conventionally "religious."

But exploring the spiritual dimensions of dreams does not mean that we must abandon the findings of modern science.

As I argue in The Wilderness of Dreams3 modern scientific dream research actually supports and legitimates the idea that dreams have spiritual meaning.

Dream researchers like Calvin Hall, J. Allan Hobson, and Harry Hunt have shown that the meaningfulness of dreams stems from vivid metaphorical images that are generated in the process of dream formation; this discovery fits perfectly with the view of leading scholars of religion4 that religious or spiritual meanings first emerge in the form of vivid metaphorical images.

Thus, scientific research supports what the world's religious traditions have taught throughout history, that dreams are a primary source of the metaphorical images (what I call root metaphors) that inspire, nurture, and sustain human spirituality.

The study of dreams opens the way to a spirituality that may, by transcending the old "religion vs. science" debate, help guide us through the confusing, frightening years leading to the close of the 20th century.

4. Dreams and Critical Reflections on "Our" Culture.

Working to overcome social problems requires practical action, but it also requires an analysis of the deep-lying cultural assumptions, biases, and prejudices that have generated those problems.

Without this kind of cultural analysis, efforts at social reform only attack symptoms instead of root causes.

The study of dreams can promote such analysis because the particular ways in which modern Westerners have approached dreams reveal a great deal about our culture's basic values and assumptions, what Fredric Jameson calls "the political unconscious.”5

For example, Johanna King has shown how a kind of "narcissism" pervades Western dream research, leading us to focus on internal, "subjective" meanings in our dreams and to ignore those meanings with external, "objective" aspects of reality (see ASD Newsletter Vol. 10, No. 1).

Johanna's analysis raises important questions about the narcissism of modern Western culture as a whole-questions about our culture's tendency to reduce complex social problems to matters of individual behavior.6

Similarly, Carol Schreier Rupprecht has examined the often hidden but absolutely devastating effects of gender and class inequalities on dream education in American colleges and universities.

Her findings give us new insights into the pervasive influence of such inequalities throughout modern Western society.

And my study of people's dreams during the 1992 Presidential election enables us to see the complex interplay between the "personal" and the "political" realms of life.

While our society tends to split the private world of the individual from the public world of the community, I found that people's dreams revealed an intimate relationship between their personal experiences (e.g., involving marital fidelity or a change of jobs) and their political attitudes (e.g., regarding the trustworthiness of politicians or a possible change of administrations).

The analyses conducted by Johanna, Carol, and myself are all evidence of how the study of dreams provides an excellent window onto the "political unconscious" of the modern West.

These, then, are some of the ways that the study of dreams does have social relevance and can contribute to the process of social transformation.

None of this means that dreams are "the solution" to the world's problems, however.

Indeed, this is the unsettling reality of the post-Cold War world-there is no one great, universal solution to our social problems.

The study of dreams has already provided some of these tools. We can hope that the future development of the dream studies field will bring forth still greater contributions to the process of social transformation.

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Notes

6

For example, the tendency to see AIDS as caused by gay sex, the drug crisis as caused by people failing to “just say no,” unemployment as caused by laziness, and sexual harassment as caused by provocative clothing.

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Originally published as “Dreams of Social Transformation” by Kelly Bulkeley, PhD, in the ASD Newsletter, Volume 10, No. 4, Fall 1993. This piece is shared as part of IASD’s living archive.

This issue’s column is devoted to five film versions of Winsor McCay’s classic dream cartoon strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which was published from 1905 to 1926.

If you are not familiar with the cartoon, check it out—it’s brilliant. In each strip, Nemo falls asleep and travels to Slumberland—often in a flying bed. (In one famous episode, a stilt-walking bed.) He has a series of exquisitely drawn adventures and then awakens—often falling out of bed in synch with some tumble in the dream world.

Little Nemo remains in print as a collected volume, as has McCay’s equally beautiful, adult-targeted, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. Little Nemo has been adapted into plays multiple times, and was rendered once as an opera and once as a video game. There was actually a sixth studio-produced Little Nemo (Sadao Tsukioka, Japan, 1978) that was never publicly released and reportedly is lost, but I’ll just address the five viewable films here. Most of them were released under two titles, hence the liberal aka’s here.

Little Nemo aka Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (1911),

is a black and white silent film written and drawn by Windsor McCay. The first of several projects to bring his popular Little Nemo comic strip to the movie house, it features a combination of live-action film and animation, and a story-within-a-story narrative.

The opening live scenes depict McCay’s colleagues gathered around him laughing at his claim that he can make his cartoon characters (including Little Nemo) move. Then follows cinema’s first ever speed draw sequence in which we see McCay rendering the first of the frames in fast motion.

Eventually one of the characters begins to draw the others—decades ahead of Banksy’s utilization of this trompe l’oeil. This transitions to watching the rest of the 4,000 frames as animation. The film returns to live action in as the finished pages are accidentally spilled around McCay’s office, setting off a frantic attempt to reorder them. The drawings are of necessity not executed in the extreme detail of the comic strip, but it’s still masterful.

Unfortunately, and unlike all later adaptations of Little Nemo, this one does feature his grass skirted ‘Jungle Imp’ character from the strip in all its racial caricature, reminding us of all the blackface characters of that period.

The film is usually posted on YouTube as well as other streaming sites. 11 ½ minutes.

Little Nemo, first pilot film (1984), directed by Kondo Yoshifumi.

This is the first product of an eleven year meandering development of the feature length Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989). At the time of this first pilot, the animation was slated to be done by Hayao Miyazaki and colleagues, who soon formed the acclaimed animation company Studio Ghibli— best known for Spirited Away, 2001. Many film buffs bemoan these original filmmakers departing the project—this short is all we have left of a Ghiblistyle Nemo. Intended as a sequence for the beginning of the feature film, the pilot serves well as a self-contained little story.

It opens with Nemo’s bedroom bedecked with early airplanes hanging from a high ceiling. The collection of flying machines is not direct from McCay, but in keeping with how often pre-sleep objects show up in transformed ways in Little Nemo’s dreams.

The main new character invented for the film plot is Icarus, who pilots a da Vinci like glider and serves as a guide in showing Nemo how to fly his bed.

It’s lovely and ground-breaking imagery: several of its discarded-from-the-feature scenes showed up in later Ghibli animation. The pilot was shot on 70mm film, so it’s especially spectacular when screened, but there are generally multiple uploads of it on YouTube and other streaming sites. 3:34 minutes.

Little Nemo, second pilot film (1987). Directed by Osamu Desaki.

In this pilot, the character named Icarus from the earlier version is nominally retained, but he’s now a flying squirrel instead of a boy. Just as with the former short, it opens with Nemo dreaming he leaves his house through a window on his flying bed.

He experiences some of the same joy in the early stages of flight but begins to fly into darker landscapes foreshadowing the Nightmareland that the feature will add to McCay’s Dreamworld.

This pilot is much closer to classic anime visually than the later feature. Many segments of it were incorporated into final film though they were redrawn by other animators in a more Disney-like style. This film was not available on YouTube but was streaming on Dailymotion.com at press time. 10:31 minutes.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, released in Japan as Nemo, (1989).

Directed by Masami Hata and William Hurtz. This American/Japanese film is the culmination of eleven years of development which burned through screen writers including Ray Bradbury; animators including Studio Ghihi founder Hayao Miyazaki; and directors including—very briefly—George Lucas; before settling on the final crew.

It features many characters from McCay’s strip: in addition to Nemo, green-faced cigar-chomping Flip is here—voiced by Mickey Rooney, albeit with less emphasis on his drinking and less Irish stereotyping. King Morpheus and the Princess of Slumberland play major roles.

The dream scene from the two pilots, which was meant to open the film, is here split into two different dreams.

First Nemo finds himself floating out of his bedroom window from his bed, and the exhilarating and then scary trip ends in a false awakening where he tries to tell his mother about it, as a killer locomotive from the dream menaces them. Then Nemo awakes from the dream and spots a circus parade going by his house.

The second night’s dream has many characters from the parade transformed into Slumberland denizens. But first, there is another departure from his bedroom, this time in a dirigible like the one hanging from his bedroom ceiling in the style of Morpheus’s fl ight in the first pilot.

(1984). Directed by Arnaud Selignac.

This British/French production is loosely based on Windsor McCay’s comic strip. A little boy named Nemo, dressed in pajamas reminiscent of McCay’s drawings, is left with a butler as his parents go off to the opera. Nemo asks the butler to tell him a bedtime story that includes his favorite characters from Alice in Wonderland, Zorro, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Before the butler can formulate the story, Nemo opens a closet door and descends into something like Slumberland.

Given the McCay etiology, I prefer to interpret this as Nemo falling sleep and dreaming; other possibilities include Nemo fantasizing about the story he’s about to be told or that it’s the story the butler came up with even though we don’t see him start to tell it.

This is the first of many surreal, primary-process style transitions and events throughout the film. Nemo meets Alice and Legend, a Zorro-like character played by Harvey Keitel. Jealous over the attention Alice pays Legend, Nemo transforms from a young child actor into a bare-chested teenage Jason Connery (Sean’s son).

Nemo, Legend, Alice and the gorilla proceed through a series of loosely plotted adventures reminiscent of Wonderland, Slumberland, and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.

Near the end, in another bit of spot-on dream fluidness, Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine shows up on a beach; Nemo, who was clearly based on McCay’s Little Nemo until now, heads off commanding the vessel as Captain Nemo.

So, is this any good? It’s uneven—dreamlike often. The costumes and a few of the sets are beautiful and surreal. Other sets and scenes are amateurish and the special effects for spaceship and submarine are laughable—cruder than most from the 1940’s though this is an 80’s film. Keitel’s fairly good in his Zorro-like persona, but Connery’s acting is rather leaden. The film is not on any streaming web film site currently, but it was released on both VHS and DVD, so copies of those are sometimes available.

Dr. Deirdre Barrett

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What dream films, surreal animations, or imaginal worlds stayed with you over the years?

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DreamTime

In the past couple of decades, the idea that dreaming simulates the waking perceptual world has become widely accepted among dream scientists.

The spatial and temporal organization of dreams – with characters, objects, physical settings, events, and interactions among characters – follows the same basic principles as waking reality.

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Theories that dreaming has an evolutionary purpose take a different approach than psychological theories, which focus on the psychological well-being and mental health of an individual and suggest that dreams help us feel better, eventually, by helping us function better psychologically. The evolutionary theories regard dreams as simulations, and suggest that what is simulated in dreams, and how, will help us to understand why we dream – what function they serve.

Function in the evolutionary sense simply means that dreaming about particular things in a particular way would have helped our ancestors practice skills that enhanced their chances of survival and reproduction.

Dreams are thus understood as virtual reality (VR) in which various aspects of waking life are not only simulated but also practiced, without any of the risks associated with training.

However, this means that dreams might not be psychologically beneficial or help us feel better in any way – even the contrary: dreaming might be all about difficult processes of survival.

But what exactly is being practiced in dreams? This is where the various evolutionary simulation theories differ.

Dreams as the first form of consciousness

The protoconsciousness theory, proposed by psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson in 2009, focuses on the form and organization of dreams, not so much on the specific content.

“Proto-” means beginning, or first-formed. We know that in children and adults, the most vivid and elaborate dreams occur in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. Babies cannot be studied in the same way, but we do know that fetuses spend much of their time in a REM-sleep-like state.

Hobson suggests that this means consciousness, in its primitive form, arises for the first time in utero.

He speculates that protoconscious REM sleep provides a virtual world model where the proto-self is embedded in an internally generated environment, which includes perceptions, sensations, and emotions.

An idea called predictive processing says the brain constantly adjusts and fine-tunes this same sort of simulated model based on feedback from external, real-world scenarios, using the model to predict what’s going to happen next.

The role of dreams and REM sleep in the predictive coding theory is to maintain and enhance the inner world model by improving predictions and integrating waking experiences into the model.

However, experimental tests of the theory are impossible with current technologies, and we have no means to investigate experiences in fetuses and babies. Whether protoconsciousness exists, and what it is like if it does exist, remains therefore a mystery at the moment.

Dreams as threat and social simulation

While the protoconsciousness theory doesn’t say much about the content of dreams, other simulation theories are based on the most prominent dream content.

The threat simulation theory, proposed by cognitive neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo in 2000, suggests that dream consciousness specializes in the simulation of various threatening events that our evolutionary ancestors were exposed to.

Encounters with real, threatening events are stored into long-term memory; when we sleep, the dream production system automatically selects for simulation the memories containing the highest negative emotional charge, and does so over and over. Thus, the experience of threats in waking life triggers the threat simulation system by offering it raw materials.

This threat simulation function is most evident in post-traumatic dreams, but applies to all dreaming.

This way, dreams lead to enhanced performance in waking reality. There is plenty of evidence from dream content studies that dreams frequently do include both the perception and the recognition of things that have threatened in waking life, and the choice and use of ways to counter the threats. Thus, the threat simulation theory is supported by empirical evidence.

Another theory is the social simulation theory, which Antti Revonsuo, Jarno Tuominen, and I first presented in 2016. According to this view, in our dreams we practice perceiving, recognizing, and interacting with other people.

The most socially adept individuals tend to have more friends who can offer support and assistance when needed, and also have higher status and better access to resources. The simulation of social interactions in dreams could serve to rehearse pro-social behaviors that, in waking life, strengthen important social connections – helping the dreamer survive as well as satisfy the social need to belong to groups.

The social simulation hypothesis is, to some extent, compatible with what we know about the social content of dreams.

Our dreams often present human characters and give plenty of opportunities to practice social perception and interactions.

Nevertheless, the social simulation theory has not yet been thoroughly tested. Whether it will receive empirical support remains to be seen.

A simulation theory that is compatible with both the threat simulation and the social simulation hypotheses is that dreaming is a form of play.

This theory was suggested by psychologist Kelly Bulkeley in 2004, and is based on the observation that species that engage the most in play tend to have large brains, a long childhood, and dense social networks. These features reflect the need and capacity to learn many different skills important to survival.

Play behaviors provide a safe environment where young animals can practice the instinctually driven behaviors typical for their species (such as fighting, procreating, and bonding socially), which they will need in adulthood to survive.

Dreams do the same thing, in the safe environment of sleep.

And yet…

Although the simulation theories have opened new vistas to the possible evolutionary function of dreaming, there is always the possibility that dreams have no function in a biological sense. Our dreams might be merely reflections of waking thoughts and experiences, without providing any training benefits.

Whether or not dreams have a biological function remains unresolved.

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Originally published by IASD in 2018. ©Katja Valli, PhD.

One hundred inspiring dream stories

The great luminary Carl Jung taught us that a natural guiding tendency is at work in our dreams; a journey of inner growth and transformation, becoming who we are meant to be, whereby a wider and more mature personality emerges. IASD has received over a hundred inspiring stories of these transformative or life changing dreams, which our subject matter experts are compiling into a book: Dreams That Change Our Lives. Here are a few examples.

Editor’s note: Originally published by IASD in 2016, this article appeared while the Dreams That Change Our Lives book project was still in development. The book has since been published.

Dreams and healing

Dreams appear to be part of a natural healing process which brings about inner transformation whether we understand them, or even recall them.

This young woman had just been fired from her job, for a second time. This drove her into a deep depression and an attitude that, “I have no future; it is all over for good.” At that point she had the following life-altering dream:

It was not until months later that she reflected on and reported the dream – but it was apparent that a change had occurred within the dream itself. Subsequent to the dream she set out to start her own company. Today she runs three.

The journey within

Jung observed that transformation is often symbolized by a going within and re-emergence (a symbolic death and rebirth) or a “great tree” whose powerful involuntary growth fulfils its own unique pattern. The journey of one dreamer began with her “going within,” a descent down a torch lit stone stairway where Carl Jung, sitting on a throne carved with serpent heads, sent her on an 18 month journey that guided her through a process of six changes. At the core of her transformation was embracing, rather than rejecting, herself for who she had become and building on that understanding to become a happier and stronger person. At the end of this phase of her journey she “emerged” with the following dream:

The power within

Dreams reveal an inner wisdom and strength that can help us overcome extreme adversity and depression:

Life-saving dreams

Sometimes dreams can even save our lives:

Dreams provide answers

At times dreams emerge from a deeper spiritual dimension. This dreamer was torn over leaving her home and parents, going off by herself into the unknown, to another continent to take a position with the Peace Corps. She prayed for a dream to help her with her “heart-wrenching” decision.

She had her answer.

Continue reading: The book that grew from this project is available as Dreams That Change Our Lives: A Publication of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, edited by Robert J. Hoss and Robert P. Gongloff.

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Today, in this time of enormous transitions, we need dreamers who can function as canaries in the mine. From research following September 11th, we know that in the weeks preceding, many people had dreams of planes crashing and buildings falling; they were not understandable until the event took place.1

Community dreams

Have you ever had a dream about people or events in the wider world? These dreams may be more common than we realize, but there aren’t guidelines for recognizing them. In ancient Athens, Sophocles dreamed of a gold vessel that had been stolen from the temple of Hermes. Three times it repeated, giving the identity of the thief and the location where the vessel was buried. After the third dream, Sophocles decided to report it to the Aeropagus. A search was made, and both the sacred object and the culprit were found.

Harriet Tubman frequently had dreams and visions of routes to take along the Underground Railroad. She once was leading four men down a country road and fell into a brief sleep, during which she was shown a river to cross and a cabin in which to hide. They soon came to a river, and on the other side was a cabin where a black family took in the runaways.

The discovery of the white buffalo came about in a similar way. The animal was born to a farmer in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1993. Thinking that something was wrong with it, he kept it hidden. One day, two trucks pulled up. Indians got out and asked if the white buffalo was on this farm. They had driven from North Dakota, following only the guidance from nightly dreams as to what roads to take each day. They assured the farmer they didn’t want the animal, but simply came to honor it with prayers, as the white buffalo is sacred for many Plains tribes. Thousands have since made the journey to see the white buffalo and its white offspring.

These native Indians as well as Tubman came from cultures in which dreams were highly respected. Although Sophocles himself did not believe in dreams, he too belonged to a culture that valued them and could receive their guidance.

Dreams that presaged war

Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung had a series of powerful visions and dreams that preceded World War I, but, lacking the cultural template for recognizing them, he mistook them for personal dreams. In autumn 1913, he had a vision of a monstrous flood covering all of northern Europe:

I saw mighty waves, the floating rubble of civilization, drowned bodies … then the whole sea turned to blood. A voice said, “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.”

In the spring of 1914, Jung had a thrice-repeating dream in which a cold wave descended and froze the land to ice. (See Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 175 ff.) Only when the war broke out in August did he realize these were not about himself but was an objective dream about his “village” of western Europe.

How to recognize outward-facing dreams

During the 1980s, I joined a professional organization and soon had a puzzling dream about being on a ship that was passing through a period of “bad air.” Neither my analyst nor I understood what the dream might refer to. Within the year, a series of sexual misconduct reports came forward within the organization.

How are we to recognize objective dreams about our “villages”? The dream itself may contain important clues. Jung’s dream showed a sudden and disastrous shift in “weather” all over northern Europe; the vehicle on which I was on was a huge ship, not a small boat. The dreams Tubman, the Indians, and Sophocles had were not subjective, but had specific, objective information that enabled them to follow the maps provided.

My title is adapted from the African saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.”

A dream is like a child in that more than one or two persons are needed to assure it grows into its fullness.

Our conscious mind is limited, but the dreaming mind, evolved over millions of years, has a much wider bandwidth, capable of perceiving changes in the wider circles around us. Whether for professional organizations, ethnic subcultures, or whole nations, we need dream councils or forums like the Aeropagus where we can share outward-facing dreams so that their implications for our “villages” can be understood and their messages integrated.

A longer version of Meredith Sabini’s article first appeared in DreamTime magazine, IASD, Winter 2009, 26:1, “It Can Take a Village to Understand a Dream.”

Footnote

Welcome to IASD’s Substack, a gathering place for all who are drawn to the mystery, meaning, science, and creative power of dreams.

For more than 40 years, the International Association for the Study of Dreams has brought together researchers, artists, clinicians, educators, practitioners, writers, and dreamers from around the world to explore one of humanity’s most universal experiences: dreaming.

This publication is an extension of that living conversation.

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Here, we’ll share ideas, updates, resources, reflections, conference news, dream art, research insights, and posts from our member experts exploring the many worlds that dreams open.

Our hope is that this space becomes a bridge between the professional and the personal, the scientific and the poetic, the individual dream and the collective imagination.

As we begin publishing here, we invite you to subscribe, follow along, and be part of what comes next.

Let us dream-weave together.

To learn more about joining the IASD community, explore membership HERE.