When ancestors appear in our dreams, they bring messages, handed down through the generations, to inform and guide us.

Deciphering the meanings helps us receive their gifts. My mother was a dreamer who comforted me through many childhood nightmares, which began the journey of my lifelong passion for dreaming.

Now, as a psychotherapist, I offer individual and group dreamwork to help people heal personal and ancestral trauma.

Jojo first came to my group to share a dream she had about her mother as she was dying. She also shared a dream her daughter had about her great-grandfather who had died many years before, her grandmother who would die soon and her child who had not yet been born. I invited Jojo and her daughter to work with these dreams together, to discover their interconnected messages. We talked for hours as they told me about the traumas and losses of their family members, as well as their love and resilience, and they have graciously allowed me to share their moving story.

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The 5 generations of the Kanetaka family lineage

From oldest to youngest:

Kisaboro and Kiku, Jojo’s grandparents – lived in Amatsu, Chiba, Japan

Harue, Jojo’s mom – born in Japan, immigrated to the US at age 25

Jojo – born in Japan, came to the US with her parents at 13 months old

Melissa – Jojo’s daughter

Sydney Jo – Melissa’s daughter, 6 years old.

Here is Jojo’s dream, called No Longer of This World, which she had as she slept in the recliner next to her mom’s bed in her hospice room

I see a beautiful young wildcat kitten who jumps up next to me onto a brown rock. Its fur is white, with mottled lime green and purple tinges on the tips. Its eyes are very green and triangular in shape. I’m a little scared but it seems friendly and makes intense eye contact. I hear classical music and hear my mom say,

Jojo reflected,

“I startled awake from this dream. My mom was no longer speaking at this time. It was hard for her to die, and took a long time. The dream showed her bravery and ferocity during the very personal and internal struggle of her transition process. I believe she was telling me that she was accepting her death. She passed away three days later.”

Jojo’s associations to the dream

“I had recently bought yarn in these colors for a shawl pattern called Lost in Time. My mom had dementia in her last 5 years of life, and often felt like she was lost in time, back and forth between places and periods in her life, sometimes speaking in Japanese, which we didn’t understand. The solitary rock felt like a solid place to land, which reminded me of my dad and also of god. The wildcat is the mascot of the town we lived in, and was also the alebrije on the t-shirt we got at the All Souls Procession we attended after my mom died.”

Years earlier, Jojo and her mom had gone to Japan and visited the 300-year-old family house. It was sparse and open with a central pillar, stone floor and wood burning fire replace. I imagine Kisaboro as the central pillar of the family, a benevolent patriarch guiding generations of the family in their dreams. Once during dementia hallucination, Harue told Jojo that she heard his voice saying,

She heeded his advice and soon moved into a home near her daughter.

Melissa never met Kisaboro but he appeared to her during a difficult time in her life. She was 35 years old, not in a relationship and feeling hopeless that she would have a child before it was too late.

Here is her dream, called The Exchange

I’m walking up to a Japanese temple or traditional home. It’s simple, one-story with a lush garden in front. I open the door and walk in. The space is empty except for my great-grandfather, Kisaboro, sitting on a mat on the floor. He’s happy to see me in his calm way. I ask him, “Are you my greatgrandfather?” He nods. A baby crawls across the floor, a year-and-a-half old, wearing only a diaper. I touch and hold the baby, immediately feeling deep love and connection. I ask him, “Is this my baby?” Again, he nods and says,

I panic, saying, “Please don’t take my grandma!” He looks at me calmly, as if to say it’s okay, it’s just the way things are.

Melissa said,

“I woke up feeling upset, knowing it was true. I was happy about the promise of a baby but I didn’t want to lose my grandma. She was 89 years old and doing okay. It helped me to know that when she died, she would be going to someone who really wanted to see her.”

Melissa described the building in the dream as “serene and sparse, with double doors that open wide.” In my vision of her dream, the ancestors were welcoming her with open arms, and the double aspect implied both coming in and going out. Melissa said,

Melissa met her husband the following year. She got pregnant in June and married in September. Then Harue died unexpectedly in October, five months before her daughter was born.

She said, “My grandma told me that coming to my wedding would be her last happiness, as if she knew she would not meet my daughter. My last happiness was her peaceful and content manner, which really helped me surrender spiritually to what is.”

There was another “exchange” for a baby in the family, two generations before

When Harue was 14 years old, her older sister got pregnant and was sent away for bringing shame to the family. Shortly after the baby was born, Harue’s mother died suddenly and she had to quit school to raise her niece. Harue had been caring for her mother, who was paralyzed from the waist down, just as Jojo and Melissa had been caring for Harue during her years with dementia, in a theme of shifting the caretaking energy from the oldest generation to the youngest.

Melissa reflected,

“My grandma and I were really close. Both of us were marginalized. She felt not worthy, not good enough. People would stare at us when we went out. I was attacked by dogs as a kid and my face was disfigured by extreme scarring. She had a strong accent and looked ‘different.’ We both felt apologetic for ourselves, and filled the sadness in each other with love.”

When I asked what meaning they make from their dreams, Melissa said, “I feel the heartbreak of so many generations. I pray to my grandma and ask her for guidance when I’m struggling. I hope my mom and I will be in my daughter’s dreams after we’re gone. I also want to share our feelings more now, while we’re here.”

Jojo said,

“Since having these conversations with you, we’re talking about family things and sharing our dreams more. It’s made our relationship even deeper emotionally.”

She teared up and I remarked what a wonderful ancestor she will be, one day, to her daughter and granddaughter. I felt the power from this dreamy exchange, and the intimacy between Jojo and Melissa. I imagined my mom, Helen, who died at age 92, one year after Harue, beaming down on us. She would have loved being a part of this conversation between mothers and daughters.

Dreams give us a chance to explore the questions we didn’t ask our elder family members when they were alive. Many of us long to connect with our ancestors as we get older, for support as we come full circle in our own life cycle of birth and death.

Jojo noted that each generation in her lineage is a stronger dreamer. Her daughter Melissa dreams more than she does, and her granddaughter, Sydney Jo, shares her dreams with them every morning. At age 3 she dreamed that Harue and her paternal grandfather, who died before she was born, were together, crying with happiness that she was here in the world. Jojo stated,

“I want Sydney Jo to feel good about all the family members who want her to be successful, and know that the power of her ancestors is with her in life.”

Marta Aarli, MA, LPC, is a psychotherapist and dream guide in Colorado. She draws from multiple styles of dreamwork in her eclectic approach to exploring the personal, collective and ancestral aspects of dreaming. She is currently writing a book on fi nding the healing messages in dreams. www.marta-aarli.com

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A growing volume of research is beginning to suggest that dream sleep might promote learning of several types. Is this influence of dreaming simply our ability to gain insight by applying our waking imagination to a dream we remember, or does a natural, purposeful process of learning take place within dream sleep itself – whether we recall the dream or not?

This article presents evolving theories. As is usually the case with recent research, further studies and replication are required to solidify any one theory, but enough evidence from seasoned researchers is accumulating to lead in exciting new directions.

Here we’ll look at how both factual knowledge and skills might benefit from dream sleep. In part 2 of this article, we’ll see how dream sleep seems to help with self-restoration, adaptation to life, and personality development.

Through Mazes, Awake and Asleep

Animal studies over the past 40 years, mostly in rats and mice, suggest that sleep states stages are important for placing recently learned material into stable, long-term memory.

These studies tested for learning pre- and post-sleep, but recent technological advances have enabled researchers to study the brain more directly.

In a 2001 study, Matthew Wilson at MIT used microprobes to monitor individual neurons in the brains of rats. Among these were “place cells” in the hippocampus, which fire, or pulse electrically, as a rat navigates its environment. Wilson observed the unique firing patterns of individual neural place cells as the rats traversed each part of a maze to find a food reward. When the rats slept, these same patterns appeared again, as if the brain was replaying the maze pattern and relearning it. Likewise, the firing patterns in the visual cortex of the rats were replayed, suggestive of visual dream activity during the process. The results suggest that the rats were rehearsing and consolidating some degree of learning about the maze in their sleep.

The same has been found in humans. In 2008 Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv and her colleagues at the Weizmann Institute worked with a patient who had had similar probes inserted as part of a brain surgery procedure. As the patient viewed a sequence of images presented in story form, Gelbard-Sagiv noted the sequence in which neurons fired. As the patient slept later on, the same neurons fired in the same sequence.

In 2004, Philippe Peigneux and his team at the University of Liège used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brain activity of humans as they worked through a virtual maze. The fMRI showed that the hippocampal areas activated during the maze experience were likewise activated later, during slow-wave (stage 3) sleep.

The Learning Process

Researcher Carlyle Smith at Trent University (2010) indicates that some of the sporadic, spiky brainwaves in stage 2, known as sleep spindles, are due to innate learning ability, and declarative learning appears to involve stage 3 non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep – whereas learning procedural tasks, whether motor or cognitive, involves either REM sleep or stage 2 NREM.

Tasks that are completely new or novel and require a new cognitive strategy appear to involve REM sleep – where remembered dream content is often related to the material being learned. Often, no dream is remembered in this process, although that does not mean there was no accompanying mental activity (also called mentation).

Matt Wilson observed in his rat experiments that the learning process in various stages of sleep may be progressive, whereby the maze is replayed in NREM sleep and then, in REM sleep, the image fragments are combined with prior maze configurations from past tests. This suggests that in REM sleep, a more general procedure for solving mazes was developed from recent and past waking experiences.

In some ways this isn’t surprising; “sleeping on it” is relatively common.

But is the dream simply a reflection of a sleep mentation process, or might the dream itself play a role in the learning process?

In 1977 Harry Fiss discovered that when students dreamed of a short story, they remembered it better the following morning. In 2000, M. J. Fosse found that dreams interleave fragments of recent waking episodes with past experiences and other content.

In 2010 Erin Wamsley and her colleagues at Furman University asked study volunteers to do a virtual-reality maze task and then sleep, after which the team tested these individuals again.

Wamsley observed content from the maze in all stages of sleep – onset, NREM, and REM – with no statistical differences between REM and NREM.

Psychological Growth

Aside from the task learning and performance improvement discussed yesterday in part 1 of this article, a number of contemporary psychologists and researchers have concluded that dreams promote a particular type of psychological learning – adaptive learning – where we simulate our waking-life situation, test various solution scenarios, and dream about the past to prepare for the future.

The 2017 IASD book Dreams That Change Our Lives contains more than 100 reports from persons who were experiencing an emotionally conflicted waking-life situation, then woke from a dream that dealt with it in a manner that was truly “life changing.” The nature of these stories suggests that life-changing dreams are not simply a random occurrence, but indeed are the brain’s response to a complex, less than ideal life situation.

To list just a few of these researchers: Donald Stewart and David Koulack in 1993 and Richard Coutts in 2008 proposed that dreams help us adapt to stress by testing mental plans and modifying our concepts and social skills. According to Antti Revonsuo (2000) at the University of Turku, dreams simulate threatening events and rehearse avoidance responses in the safe virtual environment of the dream – all to better prepare us for dealing with waking life. More recently (2016), Revonsuo, Jarno Tuominen, and Katja Valli have suggested dreams also simulate social situations.

Carl Jung was one of the earliest psychological theorists to propose that dreams bring about change, by virtue of what he called a transcendent function – a natural self-regulation that enables transition from one condition of the psyche to another, manifesting as a new attitude toward oneself and life.

The unconscious introduces a compensating scenario, which generally opposes, balances, or corrects for misconceptions of the conscious ego that have left the person stuck in an emotionally conflicted situation. Patrick McNamara (2002) at the Boston University School of Medicine termed this compensating scenario a “counterfactual” (a mental simulation of what might happen if a different decision were made) and observed the introduction of counterfactuals in 97 percent of dreams studied in a 34-subject study.

In dream sleep this process may begin with reactivating a memory – such as an unresolved emotional problem or conflict – perhaps triggered by a waking-life experience that day. Researcher Ernest Hartmann (2011) observed that dreams “illuminate,” generally via a visual metaphor, the patterns in the dreamer’s memory related to the emotional concern.

The Fleeting Opportunity for Change

Erin Wamsley (2016) states that sleep doesn’t just cement memory in its original form (termed memory consolidation); it extracts “meaning” from memories. For example, researcher Jessica Payne (2012) at the University of Arizona found that when subjects learned a word list pre-sleep, the subsequent dream reports resulted in more of the “gist” of the word list and not so much the words themselves.

The process may be similar to that found in waking-state memory reconsolidation studies whenever permanent change is observed. A study by Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe, and Joseph LeDoux in 2000 concluded that even strongly consolidated memories (old learning) can be made unstable and readily open to change when we recall them. The synapses involved deconsolidate; that is, the small spaces across which neurons communicate with each other chemically unlock.

If a critical new learning experience takes place during that “reconsolidation window,” the old learning can be permanently altered or replaced by the new learning.

In a review of animal and human studies from 2004 to 2009, Bruce Ecker observed three common elements in the process that brought about permanent change. He called this the “transformation sequence”: (1) reactivate (recall and deconsolidate) the original learning; (2) create a “mismatch schema,” an experience contradictory to that original learning (similar to Jung’s “compensating scenario”); (3) juxtapose the old and the new during the reconsolidation window, such that the memory reconsolidates with the new learning.

This process seems to have occurred in the following dream. The dreamer was offered a teaching position in an area of expertise he had abandoned many years before. He felt he could never resurrect his talents, so he decided to turn the position down the next day. But that night, he dreamt:

I am wandering through a desert and see an old rusty car. I look inside and find a man who is not moving. I am going to give him up for dead [recall/illuminate/deconsolidate]. My unknown companion from behind states he may be just asleep and urges me to wake the man [contradictory schema/compensation/counterfactual]. I argue that it is useless, but after much discussion I reluctantly give in and shake the man [juxtaposing the old learning with the mismatch schema and testing the schema in a learning experience, resulting in a reversal].

When I do, both the man and the car come to life and the car transforms into a newer car [emotional reinforcement influencing reconsolidation].

What is interesting is that the change or new learning seemed to be achieved within the dream. The next day the dreamer accepted the assignment, having reversed his decision. It was only upon later reflection that he fully recognized the role the dream may have played in changing his decision.

Dreams appear to recall and reactivate memory fragments. And they reorganize, interleave, and reintegrate those fragments of the recent event with past experiences, and other content, to prepare for the future.

© 2018 Robert Hoss, MS, is a director and past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and director of the DreamScience Foundation (dreamscience.org). A former scientist, he has training in Gestalt therapy and a background in humanistic psychology and Jungian studies. He is the author of Dream Language, coauthor of Dream to Freedom, and coeditor of Dreams That Change Our Lives. His work has been featured in ten others books, four journals, a PBS special, Reader’s Digest, Prevention, and USA Today.

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In your dream, you climb a mountain to the shining peak.

Take a deep breath, exhale, spread your arms like wings.

You take off, let the wind carry you, but your body gets heavier, the ground gets closer and then...

...the child sits in the open doorway with back to the garden.

The rising sun makes the dew sparkle like diamonds. The child leafs through the Book of the Night, where dreams are recorded.

There is the wardrobe’s wood grain in which you see faces, some light through basement windows.

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The postcard you rather sent for your birthday is taped to the wall at the head of your bed,

A night-blue village with a sky like you’ve never seen before, moon and stars so huge, Starry Night, what glowing words!

You listen to your mother doing dishes, nibble on your gold baptismal chain, light seeps through cracks in the bedroom door, shadows darken and turn into murmuring creatures that will follow you into your dreams.

Look at the postcard, climb into the billowing blue before it turns black,

The next time your father comes you’ll tell him you can fly in your dreams. But then you have a lot of time to look at this picture, in bed for weeks, with measles, then rubella, then wet blisters, itchy, feverish, with aching bones, wearing gloves so you don’t scratch. Your mother warns about permanent scars, but you wipe between your eyebrows where it itches like hell: a crust the size of a shilling.

Then you dream, no, remember that your black cat Minka hid her babies in the cellar and you wanted to see them, ran so fast you fell downstairs head first, but you’re good at falling, you can fly, you land well, cats have nine lives, but Minka cries for days because her babies are gone. When you move to a house in the country without your father, Minka runs away and the little blue picture of the starry night is lost.

The next time you see the lost sky painting is in art class. The teacher keeps disappearing into the next room to smoke, leaving you in the dark. You have to trace the artwork projected on the wall. There’s Starry Night, bigger than ever.

Your drawings too pathetic for a passing grade, you have to give a presentation on Vincent Van Gogh. Your mysterious dream painting turns into a matter-of-fact lecture on the cut-off ear and the metaphor of the dark night of the soul.

A “C”: you didn’t say enough original things about the symbolism of Starry Night, or explain in detail the brushstrokes, coloring.... Maybe it’s also because you love this painting.

Is it bad taste to love a painting that’s on notebooks, badges, umbrellas, curtains, scarves?

At fourteen, you have your own room with a view of a mountain pasture called Kingdom of Heaven. You type long letters to your father about the books you read. You lie in the dark, marveling at a starry sky you never saw as a city kid. With new glasses, you’re amazed to see that the stars are not the big shining spots that Van Gogh painted, but small dots. But you prefer your stars blurred with a halo, so put the glasses on your bedside table, and dream....

... hiking with friends to a shining glass castle.

Behind huge mountains, the sun rises majestically. The others want to go on, but you just want to look at the sun shining so promisingly in all colors of the rainbow. It’s sunrise and sunset at the same time, then a solar storm begins. Aloud speaker orders you into the castle. You want to run, but can only go slowly, as if walking through water. Suddenly the earth cracks open and a UFO rises. The aliens find you: Three horrible monsters with glowing eyes paralyze you with blue rays. They want to do surgery.

The game begins: Lie on the table for an anesthetic injection. Count backwards from ten to one, the gate to the other world opens, you have to get through before zero, before the injection goes all the way through – then slip into the intermediate world.

Swing on the trapeze and let yourself fall backwards at the right moment, into the gap between worlds, between wakefulness and coma, dream and reality. When you meet the infinite snake, show no fear.

Caress it, look into its eyes: you are firmly in control of the journey through the land of bones.

You wake up, aliens with surgical masks are looking at you and you can’t move, only in your mind, so go back three spaces, into the Sea of Serenity, put on your astronaut mask, let yourself fall, fall, fall into the Sea of Dreams.

You win when you no longer wake on the dark side of the moon, but in your own bed. But when you turn on the bedside lamp your room is bathed in twilight, and through the window you don’t see familiar dark mountains, but a troubled blue sky with pale glimmering stars. You want to wake up......but back in the sea of stars, blue swirling up, your grandmother’s statue of Mary floats, Mother of God, full of grace, let yourself be enveloped by her blue starry mantle, listen:

voices from other dimensions, from the realms of fairies and demons, past and future, the islands of clarity, voices of the unborn, of the spirits and the dead, and of your blood. Your heartbeat booms, a chorale in a mighty cathedral, all these voices rising high.

The images come from the same nothingness, one dissolving into the next.

Alone, ruler of your world, you are the one who makes the dreams, puts them on canvas with thick paint, breathes them onto paper with a watercolor brush, letst hem spill from the pen.

You tell your father you want to study psychology to understand how consciousness works, both in dreams and waking, but your interest threatens to devour you. You want to be conscious when awake and dreaming, but become like a sleepwalker by day, nights cut into a hundred pieces, brain flickering like a lightbulb about to burn out, images flowing, swirling, roaring, rippling. Slowdown!

Everything moving like clouds in the sky, windows to other dimensions everywhere. You want to catapult yourself out of this body, home to the stars. Maybe you could go back in time, all the way to zero, infinitely small. Lie between the cracks of time, waiting for the snake’s kiss to revive you. You just want to forget, but your gaze falls into the innermost world, into the cold eye of the sky snake. You’re torn out of your little humanity, whirled into space.

You know your way around: If there is dream, there must be awakening.

In talking about snake dreams, your father tells you about the primordial turn of the celestial serpent who sets the universe in motion. After his first chemotherapy, when he suddenly looks transparent, you want him to tell you whether darkness embraces light or light reveals darkness. He falls asleep, smiling, and doesn’t answer.

You wake in a new dream, the snake swallows you, skin, hair, soul. Go ahead, scream, no one can hear you under this pale sky where only shadows flicker by and wind howls and blows the sand away like memories. Everything’s under control?

The snake only has to open its mouth wide enough to swallow the whole world.

When you can no longer distinguish between waking and dreaming, you stick fluorescent stars on the ceiling above your bed. So easy to enter a painting, but how to get out? If you can’t find a door, open the window. Taking off with a flock of crows, you see the village on the hill, where you have been longing to be, bell tower glistening in the morning light.

Let this journey end: Rest in the shade of the cypress tree that rises so comfortingly into the sky.

You want to tell your father what you learned about flying. But when you wake, you realize his urn waits in the mortuary. Take pen in hand. Write the dream. Paint over the night with a bold stroke, stop wondering where the snakes sleep. Make your own picture, make the starry night your own.

With scissors and glue you tackle the pictures, reassemble them, blue, snake, church, cypress, moon, stars, reassemble yourself. The child has become a woman with gray hair. She sits in the open doorway, looking out into the garden. In her lap, the book in which she has written all her dreams.

The full moon conjures silver in the shades of blue to gray, church bells call for the funeral mass. The night after your father’s funeral, you dream of cleaning out his apartment. On his desk you find the letters you wrote as a child. On the bookshelf, behind books on alternative healing and spiritual views of cancer, you discover an old book on Van Gogh, Starry Night on the cover. In the kitchen, your father is cooking for you, young, healthy, smiling, saying:

“This is a dream!”

Johanna Vedral is a psychologist, author, collage artist and writing teacher from Vienna, Austria; a member of the IASD tribe since 2000, and Regional Representative for Austria. She teaches dreaming with magazines, scissors, and glue, in her book Collage Dream Writing and in workshops.

IG: johanna_vedral

Photo credits:Katja Palaszewski

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One of the most common approaches to understanding dreams regards their content as verbal or visual metaphors.

“The dreamer is faced with the task of sparking across the metaphoric gap between dream image and waking reality.”
— Montague Ullman

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Both Ullman and the Rev. Jeremy Taylor, among the strongest influencers of modern dreamwork since Carl Jung, considered metaphor central to understanding dreams. Ullman, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, pioneered enabling groups of nonspecialists in the community to support each other in understanding their dreams. Taylor, a Unitarian Universalist minister and founding member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), was the greatest popularizer of nonspecialist dream groups.

In both the Ullman and Taylor methods, the group members think about the dream that a member relates as though it had been their own. They comment on the feelings it evokes and what the content suggests to them metaphorically, thus offering the dreamer both empathy and a pool of ideas the dreamer might not have thought of. (Although the Ullman and Taylor methods are often conflated, Ullman’s limits this sort of “projection” of ideas to a brief stage at the work’s start, whereas Taylor’s is projective throughout.)

Psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann wrote in 1996 that dreams are explanatory metaphors in mostly visual form:

“The dream pictures metaphorically the overall state—especially the emotional state—of the dreamer…. ‘I am drowning in a tidal wave’ is a metaphorical description for the emotional state of the dreamer involving terror and vulnerability.”

In a 1969 paper, Dreaming as Metaphor in Motion, Ullman proposed that the dream as a whole, in its “rapidly changing presentational sequences,” creates a unified, major metaphor, and that each element of the dream—the minor metaphors—sheds light on the implications. By giving form to abstract insights that are new to us, metaphor enables us to “take a conceptual leap forward.”

Often a key to understanding a dream metaphor is day residue—the bits of the waking day that are woven into the dream—because, Ullman wrote,

“The individual’s equilibrium is upset in one of two ways by such an event. An area of ignorance may be uncovered…or an area of psychological vulnerability may be exposed…. The day residue, reappearing in the dream, confronts the individual either with new and personally significant data, or forces a confrontation with heretofore unrecognized, unintended consequences of one’s own behavior.”

By providing the opportunity to correct such situations, Ullman taught, dreams help us “repair the social fabric.”

Mapping

It’s this centrality of metaphor to dreamwork that led me (a nontherapist, nonscientist) to attend a November 2017 event at Columbia University—Metaphors and Models: The Neuroscience of Comparison, sponsored by Columbia’s Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program.

At the event, Dedre Gentner, a cognitive scientist at Northwestern University, described how conceptual metaphors map, or match up, characteristics between two systems.

Whatever is in common between two systems stands out, allowing us to use one system to understand the other.

The two systems “don’t have to have surface features in common, but they do have to have a relational pattern in common…. So something like ‘This book is a gold mine,’ which is a relational comparison, means roughly the book and the gold mine both are sources of something valuable.”

With this alignment, Gentner said,

“Whatever is in common between [the two systems being compared] will stand out, and we can use this to teach people things they don’t already know. Secondly, you can use one system to make inferences about the other.”

Framing and Reframing

Stephen Flusberg, a cognitive scientist at Purchase College, State University of New York, studies social and political metaphors.

Flusberg’s lab has found that the wording of a paragraph about police officers either as “guardians” or as “warriors” can change test participants’ opinion of law enforcement. To a small but statistically significant extent, the choice of metaphor “reframed” how test participants viewed the topic.

Mitt Romney’s 2012 U.S. presidential campaign issued a pamphlet comparing the federal budget to a household budget. When Flusberg’s team tested that comparison—emphasizing similarities with one group and differences with another—it found that emphasizing similarities left people more likely to say they’d vote in the way the brochure implied they should.

But if a person doesn’t know much about the “domain” against which the metaphor is making its comparison, the metaphor falls flat.

Brain Scans

When Alexander Rapp, a researcher in cognitive neuropsychiatry at the University of Tuebingen, entered his field in 2000, “it was almost common consensus that metaphor processing involves the right cerebral hemisphere,” while the left hemisphere was considered dominant for language.

Rapp’s first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study told a different story: when the study participants, who were not schizophrenic, read the test’s metaphors, only the left hemisphere showed activation.

“There is no such thing as a single metaphor module in the brain.”

In 2012, Rapp and colleagues published a meta-analysis of 28 fMRI studies of nonliteral language, including 17 of metaphor.

The regions where metaphor activity appeared were involved in selecting meanings, suppressing irrelevant meanings, and integrating knowledge from multiple sources.

Historical Baggage

Historian of science Stephen Casper highlighted how metaphors about the brain have become so entrenched they may subtly shape neuroscience itself.

A prime example is the language of “transmitters” and “receptors.”

Casper explained that these words originated as metaphors inspired by the invention of the telephone.

Originally they were metaphors.

Applying to Dreams

Although none of the speakers mentioned dreams, each talk was pertinent to dreaming and dreamwork.

The dreaming mind chooses its own metaphors, but with the same teaching and inference effects that Gentner described, and with the potential for reframing an issue, as Flusberg described.

What a dream metaphor refers to is frequently not obvious; as dream group members say what the dream’s images remind them of, a suggested metaphor might “click” with the dreamer that would not have otherwise occurred—thus reframing the issue, in effect teaching the dreamer something new about herself or her situation.

Casper identified a particularly stubborn neuroscience metaphor—the brain as computer.

Via email, psychologist Kelly Bulkeley confirmed that

“The computer metaphor for the brain has given rise to the unfortunate idea that dreaming is merely a kind of ‘offline processing,’ and that’s not the kind of thing that major scientific resources are devoted to studying.”

Conversely, students of waking metaphor might find a useful data source in dreaming, such as the Sleep and Dreams Database that Bulkeley maintains.

Bulkeley’s own wishes for future dream metaphor studies?

I’d like to see more systematic efforts to map the metaphors of dreaming onto people’s waking lives, perhaps by focusing on a recurrent dream motif (e.g., finding new rooms in a house) among many people, or by studying the dreams of a group of people in a very specific realm of activity (e.g., athletes, artists) and trying to identify the metaphors that relate to their waking-life specialties.”

© 2018 Gloria Sturzenacker

Gloria Sturzenacker is an editor, writer, and information designer with a background in journalism and trained by Montague Ullman in the Ullman method of dream group leadership. She initiated and managed IASD’s first year of involvement in Brain Awareness Week.

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We are the dreams of our ancestors.

We carry their lives within our DNA and within our energy bodies. We carry both the shredded remnants of past wounds and the shining grain of sand that created the gift of the pearl. If we can inherit trauma, we can inherit strength and wisdom.

Sometimes the pain of the past is more than can be transmuted in one lifetime. Sometimes the pearl and the pain are woven of different origins. Our ancestors are passing on their gifts, their blessings, and their wisdom through the medium of our own dreams, and sometimes their pain and suffering and trauma gets transmitted through our nightmares. They come calling on us in many ways, frequently through our dreams, needing our responses. The calls may be shouts or whispers; we need to listen carefully to discern what they need or are telling or asking us, and what we need from this connection.

Good boundaries are our friends in this work. Sometimes we can simply embrace and honor our departed, other times we need to tread with care.

The Key is in Connection

Deep in your history, your ancestors – your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents, farther back than you can imagine – had a dream, an image, a vision of what they hoped for the lives of their descendants. We are that dream, the time-traveled embodiment of their hopes and visions. Therefore, ultimately, this work is about healing and hope. We and our ancestors have been through wounding trauma as well as freedom and redemption. As Diana Fosha, psychologist and creator of a body of work on healing, transformation and attachment known as Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy tells us, we are hard-wired for healing and connecting.

They help us to go forward and backwards in time to heal from our personal, ancestral and global wounds, and then, along with dream-guided action steps, pass on the healing rather than the wounds or the trauma to the next generations.

Beets, Borscht, and Bloodlines

As you tune into your dreams, notice how your ancestors been trying to contact you, either through shouts or whispers. Recently I have been having dreams about my ancestors. One vivid dream had to do with making borscht, a hearty Ukrainian beet soup. In the dream,

I am learning the borscht recipe from a chef. It seems that we need a piece of equipment called a shredder tomake the soup. The chef helps me locate one. After that, I’m placed in charge of teaching my students how todo it. They aren’t getting it right, so we have to start over from scratch.

Since the dream, I have had a new craving for beets. My grandfather was born in Kiev. He and his family left Ukraine when he was three years old to escape the pogroms in about 1905. This is my personal bit of ancestral trauma. We all have some equivalent story: Our ancestors left their homeland to find proverbial gold, or for religious freedom, or to escape persecution, poverty or pogroms, or for opportunity or a patch of land to call their own. Or they were kidnapped, enslaved, or indentured and came against their will. And how were they treated? As honored or valuable members of society, or vilified, or marched away from their ancestral lands, or put into internment camps?

Somewhere in our history, in the near or far past, most of us had ancestors who whispered to their children,

“Survive. Take this amulet, this sacred text, these beads, these words, these candlesticks, this recipe, this clod of earth, and carry our story onward.”

There is an old Hebrew midrash (story or parable) that each blade of grass that springs forth from the earth has its own personal angel whispering to it, “Grow.”

Our history is passed on to us not only through our biological ancestors, but also through our teachers, our mentors, our caregivers – anyone who cared for or influenced us, including the land we lived on.

The Six Types of Calls

The six calls our ancestors may be using to try to get through to us are:

1. We are still here.

2. Take these gifts, blessings or apologies.

3. Let me help or heal you.

4. Help us and heal us.

5. Watch out: this old grudge has not yet been resolved.

6. Carry on my name and gifts to your children and their children’s children; remember.

Sometimes our ancestors show up as themselves in our dreams; sometimes they are symbolized, hidden or disguised in metaphor. They may come to tell us they are still with us; that they have never left. They come to give us advice, protection, instruction, or warning, or to pass us a gift, a blessing, or an apology. They may come to ask or plead with us for help or healing for themselves if they died in pain or with unfinished business.

They may have an unhealthy attachment to embodiment or to us and want us to continue with their cravings or vengeances. Or they may simply ask that they be remembered. When someone dies, we say to their loved ones, “May their memory be for a blessing.”

Each type of call may need a different kind of response from us. Some request simply that we listen and respond, others ask us to do something, still others make demands.

The Blue Light Container of Safety

Before attending to the needs of our departed, we need to be sure that we ourselves have safety and protection in case these visitors are needy or hurtful. To do so, we can create a protective container in which to explore these shouts and whispers. Kabbalist and dreamworker Catherine Shainberg teaches us to create the Sapphire egg of light around ourselves. Learned from the pioneer Kabbalist Collette, this light is the color of spirit and is used especially for dreams and visionary work.

We know that the color blue is used across cultures, and a blue egg of light is also taught in the world of lucid dreaming; is the color of the faces of the Hindu gods; and appears frequently in fairy tales, myth and biblical motifs.

Understanding the Ancestral Calls

“Hello, we are still here, you are not alone.”

This is one of the most comforting dreams in the face of loss of a loved one. In Requiem for a Nun William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” There is a numinous quality to these dream visits that let us know through their clarity and physicality that this is a visit.

“Take these gifts or blessings or apologies.” These can come through in words, objects, a gesture, or an embrace. Sometimes we have an opportunity to heal or reconcile old hurts or misunderstandings from either side of the veil.

“Let me help or heal you.” Sometimes our departed beloveds come to us with off ers of assistance. They have access to healing options that we may not have here in the corporal plane. Sometimes the advice is very concrete, and sometimes you will need to translate it into meaning for your life and needs.

“Please help me, I am still suffering.” When our ancestors died in pain, they may not be able to passover to the light and need our help. In dreamtime where time is fluid and circular, we can offer healing to these departed, healing backwards and forwards in time so that we do not pass on the suffering to subsequent generations.

“I still have a grudge or vendetta.” Be sure to use the protective egg of light before engaging with this category. These are the hungry ghosts who have died without resolving their anger, who can haunt af amily through generations if not addressed and sent all the way to the Source to heal and end their enmity. Get some help with these beings. The desire for revenge freezes grief and can keep us stuck in an endless loop of suffering.

“Remember me, tell my story.” In Jewish tradition one of the key messages is “m’dor l’dor,” from generation to generation. This is one of the ways we all survive, passing on the gifts from our ancestors and healing the legacy of those ancestors who need healing. My congregational rabbi Josh Briendel says that remembering is a devotional act. Build an altar, make a donation in their name, tell your children and grandchildren about their lives.

For more, pre-orderAncestral Dreaming: Healing Ancestral Wounds through Dreamwork through Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing at this link: https://www.llewellyn.com/product.php?ean=9780738778914

Linda Yael Schiller, MSW, LICSW, an international speaker and author on dreamwork, trauma, and integrated embodied spiritually; an integrative mind/body/spiritual psychotherapist and consultant; and a long-term IASD member, is also trained in the body/mind methodologies of EMDR, EFT, TAT, HBLU, Kabbalah healing, Enneagram, hypnotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, Focusing, andReiki. www.lindayaelschiller.com

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Modern research indicates that the brain is very active during sleep.

One of the functions of sleep is memory consolidation: information taken in during the day is reprocessed during sleep to optimize the memory system. These processes are taking place on a neural level or systems level, in the brain’s networks.

So if the brain is so busy, what is the mind doing during sleep?

Studies in which the sleeper is awakened during the sleep onset process (sleep stage N, or non REM, 1), normal sleep (sleep stage N2), deep sleep (sleep stage N3), and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep indicate that the awakened person can quite often remember mental activity that took place before the awakening.

In REM sleep, almost every awakening yielded an elaborate dream report (at least in young students). But in more than half the awakenings out of the other sleep stages, the person can also remember something.

The brain’s basic thinking ability seems never to stop, and its ability to produce the experience of a coherent world continues through much of sleep.

These findings led to the assumption that the brain’s basic thinking ability seems never to stop, and its ability to produce the experience of a coherent world continues through much of sleep, even without the input of light, acoustic, and other stimuli which are present during wakefulness.

The first findings that NREM dreaming is more like wakeful thinking have not been replicated; two studies our research group did on NREM dreaming clearly indicate that N2 and N3 dreaming can be quite similar to REM dreaming, even though the dream reports are on average shorter than REM dreams (Lutz Wittmann, Christina Palmy, and Michael Schredl, 2004, and Michael Schredl, Jaana Brennecke, and Iris Reinhard, 2013).

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What are lucid dreams, and why are they so interesting for research?

In a lucid dream, the sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming. With this awareness, it is possible to wake up deliberately, or to control the dream action, or to observe passively the course of the dream.

In a representative sample of adults, about 50% of the participants reported having at least one lucid dream; in student samples, the percentage goes up to 80%. Dreamers with more than one lucid dream per week are rare: about 5%. In Japan the frequency is lower than in Germany or the United States, possibly reflecting culture-dependent attitudes toward lucid dreaming.

Typically, lucid dreaming is fun. The dreamer can choose to do things that are impossible in waking life (such as flying, doing “real” magic, going through walls, or breathing under water), can pursue pleasant activities (sex, for example), can improve skills (sports ability, assertiveness, professional tasks), and can delve into spiritual experiences.

The proficient lucid dreamer can remember and carry out tasks that were prearranged with the experimenter.

In the late 1970s, Stephen LaBerge and Keith Hearne independently found that the dreamed eye movements of the lucid dreamer can be measured by a recording machine.

After awakening, the lucid dream report was compared to the recordings; the dreamed eye movements (e.g., left-right-left-right) were clearly seen in the recording, and they were clearly distinguishable from the normal eye movements of REM sleep.

This fascinating discovery has become a tool in further laboratory studies of lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming and the brain

In the sleep laboratory, a lucid dreamer can be instructed to perform an eye signal before starting a specific activity in the dream and at the end of the activity.

For example, in the 1980s LaBerge asked lucid dreamers to surround singing in a lucid dream with one type of signal, and counting with another type of signal. This allowed the researchers to establish that singing in the dream was accompanied by higher activation of the brain’s right hemisphere compared to counting in the dream.

This allowed the researchers to establish that singing in the dream was accompanied by higher activation of the brain’s right hemisphere compared to counting in the dream.

n a 2013 study by Daniel Erlacher and colleagues (I was one of them), the lucid dreamers were instructed ahead of time to, in their dreams, count to 10, to 20, and to 30, and also to walk 10 steps, 20 steps, and 30 steps.

Interestingly, the ratios of the time used for the different lengths of activity were very stable: 10 steps took half the time that 20 steps took.

And counting and walking took, on average, a little more time than in waking (about 30% more for counting, 50% more for walking), clearly contradicting the idea that time speeds up in dreaming.

The most extensive study was done by Martin Dresler in 2011; lucid dreamers slept in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, with electrodes attached to their heads for measuring sleep stages.

When lucid in the dream, they performed clenches with the left hand and the right hand. For two lucid dreams of one dreamer, Dresler’s team was able to show increased activity in the left motor cortex if the right hand was clenched and vice versa.

The activation was comparable to imagined hand movements in the waking state, but, as expected, of a much lower magnitude compared to real hand movements.

Despite many nights in the MRI lab, the research group managed to measure only the one lucid dreamer; the main problems were the noise of the machine and the need in MRI to keep the head from moving by using specific cushions and a holding device.

Almost science fiction are the most advanced experiments with lucid dreaming: the possibility of communicating with the lucid dreamer while she or he is sleeping.

Two researchers, Johannes Strelen and Kristoffer Appel, showed that a lucid dreamer can perform different eye signals if she or he is hearing different tones during lucid dreaming; a meaningful message (a simple math problem) was transmitted into the dream via Morse code and answered by the dreamer by using Morse-coded eye movements.

Lucid dreaming is a learnable skill

One of the simplest methods to increase the number of lucid dreams is called “reality checks.”

The reality checks are carried out 5 to 10 times during the day by asking oneself whether one is dreaming at that moment, and examining the environment for possible incongruities; some authors suggest looking at one’s hand, for example, counting the fingers.

This technique is effective; however, it might take some time to experience the first lucid dream.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a tradition of dream yoga, in which the trainee tries to stay conscious while falling asleep.

Publications describing it, however, indicate that achieving this goal is very difficult and might take years.

Using external stimuli as a means of inducing lucid dreams is based on the findings that external stimuli can be incorporated into the dream.

Typically the device is constructed like a sleep mask; sensors detect the eye movements that are typical for REM sleep, and the mask delivers a stimulus (light or sound) if those eye movements are detected.

The task for the dreamer is to recognize the external stimulus and realize that this is the cue to gain lucidity.

A more complex approach is based on findings that the prefrontal cortex is more activated in lucid dreaming than in REM sleep with non lucid dreaming.

The idea is to stimulate the prefrontal cortex from outside and increase the probability of a lucid dream.

Using transcranial direct current stimulation, a small amount of current (1 mA) applied via electrodes in the area of the prefrontal cortex showed a small positive effect on dream lucidity compared to a sham condition (no electric current applied), but only in experienced lucid dreamers.

The most potent technique studied so far is the wake up back to bed technique, typically carried out in the sleep laboratory setting.

The participant is allowed to sleep for about 6 hours, then awakened from REM sleep to obtain a “fresh” dream.

During the next hour, the participant rehearses this dream and reminds oneself, if I dream this or that [usually this “fresh” dream, but it is possible to work with an older one], then I will become lucid.

Then the dreamer can continue sleeping for two or three more hours.

However, so far it is not clear whether this technique is equally effective outside the sleep lab.

Consciousness studies

Lucid dreaming has exciting potential for studying consciousness in its purest form, without any distractions from the real world. On their own, lucid dreamers can experiment with what the imagination is capable of – finding out what it feels like to go through a wall, or asking dream characters questions like “Why are you in my dream?”

Researchers are interested in linking lucid dreamers’ subjective experience to objective physiological parameters and brain activation patterns, indirectly observing consciousness when it is not affected by the outside world.

© 2018 Michael Schredl. Co-chair of the International Association for the Study of Dreams’ Research Committee, heads the sleep laboratory of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. He is co-founder and co-editor of the International Journal of Dream Research, and he has published four books, in German, about dreaming.

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We live in an era of intense political and ideological divisions. Discourse has turned into tribal conflict, while social media amplifies outrage, hindering collaborative efforts on shared challenges like climate change and pandemics. Traditional methods of resolving differences—such as debate and compromise—fall short when we hold on to fixed positions, restraining empathy.

Dreaming while awake involves having waking dreams.

According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, waking dreams are dreamlike mental episodes that occur when one is not asleep, encompassing visions and hallucinations.

Waking dream phenomena, including those of Joan of Arc, Nikola Tesla, Salvador Dali, and Harriet Tubman, are well documented throughout history.

Although waking dreams often lead to genius breakthroughs, Western medicine and psychiatry tend to treat them as maladaptive or even pathological, resulting in fear and stigma.

In contrast, indigenous cultures around the world value waking dreams and have developed various methods, such as meditation, hypnosis, Yoga Nidra, vision quest, and shamanic ceremonies, to name a few, to incubate waking dreams for healing, problem-solving, and spiritual transcendence. Carl Jung’s method of active imagination is a contemporary example of interacting with the unconscious while in a state of wakefulness that can lead to self-discovery and personal growth.

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Waking dreams feature an altered state of reality, where sensory details feel intensely real and critical judgment is back-seated. They blur the lines between internal thoughts and external sensations, resulting in fluid, non-linear cognition.

Emotions play a dominant role, guided by symbolic meanings rather than rationality. Although some waking dreams can be initiated voluntarily, their content often feels spontaneous, with individuals sometimes experiencing a reduced sense of control and an altered self-perception, feeling merged with their surroundings or embodying different entities.

An Unlikely Beginning: Pain, Pandemic, and an Octopus Guide

I started my waking dream practice during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I struggled with chronic shoulder pain triggered by the stress of being a homeschooling mom entrepreneur. Seeking relief through hypnotherapy, I experienced vivid, waking dreams of a gentle octopus underwater.

My ongoing practice and research demonstrate that this method not only helps individuals overcome personal challenges but can also foster collaborative problem-solving within groups.

Observing the Process: Water as a Cognitive Catalyst

In my early personal waking dreams, I discovered that the sensory qualities of the underwater environment served as cognitive disruptors. This feeling is something all humans can relate to, as we experienced it during our time as embryos in the womb.

The pressure provided a sense of containment, muffled sounds quieted my mind, and weightlessness alleviated mental rigidity.

The octopus, with its unique shapeshifting ability, became a teacher for creative adaptation. As my shoulder pain eased, I began using breathwork and visualization to initiate the waking dream trance with the octopus as my guide.

From Personal Practice to Shared Methodology

When I introduced this practice to individuals experiencing burnout or other difficulties, their responses were striking.

These fascinating accounts led me to develop Guided Dreaming into a structured method based on three key pillars:

1. defining a specific problem,

2. imagining a helper for added support, and

3. visualizing an underwater dreamscape with the octopus to harness personalized, transformative insights.

Validation Guided Dreaming Through Academic Research

While developing Guided Dreaming, I returned to graduate school to pursue a master’s degree in health psychology. For my thesis, I conducted a mixed-methods phenomenological study with eleven diverse, self-selected adult volunteer participants, which I presented at the 2024 joint conference of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and the Catholic University of Freiburg in Germany.

Each participant chose a unique challenge, such as a career transition, a relationship breakdown, or an illness. Their survey responses indicated that the octopus’s fluid presence helped participants bypass rigid thinking while the sensory immersion of water reduced analytical interference.

All participants reported experiencing vivid waking dreams that reflected their unique waking circumstances. Notably, 91% achieved actionable insights relevant to their challenges, and their average self-assessed mental outlook improved by 36%.

These findings demonstrated that waking dreams reflect each person’s current circumstances, concerns, emotions, and experiences, consistent with the Continuity Theory on sleeping dreams. Furthermore, they also contain problem-solving insights, similar to sleeping dreams.

Additionally, this research establishes Guided Dreaming as an evidence-based waking dream method effective in stress reduction and problem-solving.

A Pivotal Case: Translating Insight into Action

One participant’s experience exemplifies the depth of the Guided Dreaming method. A burnt-out LGBTQ2S activist, who manages a non-profit health center for unhoused people, experienced water moving through their body rather than against it, allowing them to channel the water freely.

This sensation of flowing water stood in stark contrast to their waking life, where they felt stuck and drained. As a result, they decided to make career choices that would replicate the feeling of freedom.

This case illustrates Guided Dreaming’s distinctive capacity to address complex psychosocial dilemmas at their core, transcending cognitive understanding to catalyze meaningful change in the real world.

Scaling to Collective Crises

As I prepared to facilitate a dream group each morning during the four-day 2025 IASD virtual conference, I wondered: Could Guided Dreaming also tackle shared systemic challenges?

Adapting Guided Dreaming for collaborative problem-solving required shifting from individual struggles to unifying group intentions, unveiling new possibilities for addressing complex global issues. I planned to give it a try on the third and final day to familiarize the group with the method at the beginning, but the participants changed from day to day.

Global Conflict Resolution: Symbols for Peace

Leading a small, diverse group of mostly strangers, I asked, “How can we overcome escalating global conflicts and wars?” I chose this topic because it affects everyone, regardless of their background. From the Guided Dreaming experiential, participants shared what they “saw”:

• a purple tornado revealing explosive chaos

• an underwater volcano releasing suppressed anger while birthing new land

• calm starfishes capable of self-healing and regeneration

• an electric eel illustrating self-generating power

After the session, I created an AI image incorporating these symbols, deepening our understanding of the chaos and violence we face while igniting hope for new beginnings. One participant noted that the underwater volcano symbolizes that destructive power can also be creative, sometimes necessary for larger solutions.

Confronting Climate Crisis: Embodied Environmental Protection

With my last morning dream group, we explored another seemingly impossible challenge: “How can we overcome the climate crisis?” Symbols surfaced with visceral coherence:

• a pod of orcas reflected intergenerational coalition

• an ancient whale embodied enduring ecological wisdom

• Nemo navigating seaweeds captured bravery and hope amidst loss

• A watery eye evoked shared planetary grief dynamically transforming into an expanding aura of global solidarity

• the northern lights and expansive ocean evoked a sense of wonder and vastness

Reminding us of the beauty and mystery of nature. Participants themselves articulated this profound narrative arc—from honoring collective grief toward generating shared agency—as an actionable framework for environmental action.

Amplifying Insights Through Technology

Recognizing the fleeting nature of waking dream symbols, I used AI art to create impactful reminders. One participant shared that collective dreaming helped her confront the overwhelming global issues we often avoid– a crucial first step in resolving any problems. This technological integration effectively extended Guided Dreaming’s influence, allowing these symbols to guide ongoing strategic visions and actions.

Conclusion: The Continuum of Awake-Dreaming

My Guided Dreaming journey—from personal refuge to collective meaning-making—highlights an important truth: modern challenges require integrated approaches that engage our full intelligence. My IASD experiments showed that diverse groups can co-create actionable frameworks in just sixty minutes, achieving depth often missed in traditional settings. This experience demonstrated that dreaming together while awake unlocks our capacity to navigate complex crises, transforming personal insights into collective strategies for resilient futures.

Navigating Wider Waters

The octopus that once guided me through private struggles now navigates expanding seas. As I continue my Guided Dreaming practice, I remain a committed learner. Each session reaffirms the core lesson: transformative solutions emerge when we dream and trust the wisdom that emerges from the unconscious.

In that liminal space between waking consciousness and fluidity of dream, we discover our capacity to envision and create futures grounded in insight, empathy, and courageous action.

Interested in learning more about dreams and dream research? Join the global community dedicated to the exploration of dreams and dreaming.

Learn more about membership [HERE]

Originally published in the Winter 2026 Edition of DreamTime Magazine.

Bei Linda Tang is the developer of Guided Dreaming, a waking dream protocol designed for stress reduction and problem-solving. Her work integrates dream science, psychology, and ethical dreamwork to explore the mind’s capacity for self-regulation. She holds an MA in Health Psychology and is the Western Canadian IASD Representative.

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Most IASD members probably share their dreams.

Perhaps you share and discuss dreams with your family, regularly meet with other dreamers to pursue the meaning of dreams, or share dreams with your therapist or spiritual advisor. Dream sharing, also known as dreamwork, dream telling, and dream reporting, ranges from casual mention to a friend, to a formal presentation to a dream group or other audience.

Sharing the dream maybe as important as having the dream: both are necessary for understanding the dream.

As Mark Blechner states in The Dream Frontier(2001, p.7),

Dreams are both intensely personal and yet best understood after being made public.

Sharing a dream consists of a person communicating the content, emotions, and thoughts of their dreams to one or more persons. Sharing is usually for the purpose of obtaining comments and insights regarding the meaning of the dream through symbolic interpretation. Dream sharing may result in personal, psychological, social, or spiritual changes in the dreamer and the listener. Both the presenter and the listener generally benefit from the process.

Human thought is conditioned by one’s culture and dreaming occurs within a cultural context. A recent study (Liand Wang, 2025) indicates that the more positive a culture is towards dreaming the greater the sharing of dreams

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Early Survival Benefits

Between 100,000 to 300,000 years ago human beings would have been anatomically modern with the linguistic capability to share dreams.

Dream sharing in the distant past would have been beneficial for daily life and survival in general. Sharing would contribute to bonding, communication, and cooperation among the community members by addressing common issues.

Benefits to Small Communities

In modern Western cultures dreams are generally viewed as being for the individual, but in other cultures the focus of dream sharing is often for the community to address common concerns. Small social groups, as are found among Indigenous peoples, use dream sharing to jointly decide issues allowing presentation of innovative actions, which come not from themselves but from the dreamworld, as the community’s psychological, social, economic, and natural environmental concerns are addressed.

Sharing dreams could involve discussing resources, farming, ceremonies, hunting, relationships, gathering, seasonal movements, healing, and trading.

Learning About Dreams

For IASD members the sharing of dreams is probably not a matter of survival, but rather of psychological, emotional, social and spiritual interest and well-being by understanding the meaning of the dream.

When sharing, one often remembers forgotten dream details. Discussion of the dream helps to clarify and add to the story. Asking the dreamer to clarify the dream to better understand it can also bring better understanding of the dream to the dreamer. By hearing other people’s dreams, we get a sense of the kind and diversity of people’s dream experiences; we consider aspects of dreaming not thought of before; we see what is common and what is unique, both for others and oneself.

Sharing dreams facilitates understanding the dream as multiple intelligences and intuitions of several people are brought to bear on a dream or series of dreams, it is much more likely that the dreamer will be exposed to a fuller range of the dream’spossible meaning... and resonate to a wider spectrum of the dream’s multiple levels and layers of significance (Taylor, 1983, p,76).

Personal Benefits

There are a variety of socio-psychological benefits from the social interaction of sharing. Telling a dream can help the dreamer more fully experience the feelings and emotions of the dream.

With dream sharing we become aware of the feelings of others, which can affect our own thoughts and actions. Dream sharing can allow one to express emotions, anxieties, and cope with stress, and can have therapeutic value as we discuss our concerns. Sharing can be a way of communicating something that could not be told otherwise and topics that are socially taboo can be presented without being held responsible for the content.

Dream sharing, when done in the right way, empowers individuals with sympathy, understanding, self-esteem, and a sense of community” (Morgan, 2014).

There is pleasure and fun in sharing the richness of dreams and doing dreamwork with others. Sharing commonly brings forth positive experiences of laughter, amusement, sympathy, joy and enjoyment. “[I]n general listening to the dreams of other people is a positive experience emotionally...” (Blagrove and Lockheart, 2023, p.149).

Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal (2013, p.28), mentions aspects of storytelling applicable to dream sharing: low-cost sources of information, vicarious experience, instruction, learning about human culture and psychology, and “social glue that brings people together around common values.”

Sharing dreams is part of the inherent need to tell and hear stories.

Group Dreamwork

Much of the value of working with dreams comes from doing group dreamwork. Savary, Berne, and Williams,inDreams and Spiritual Growth (1984), identify several personal growth factors in doing group dreamwork: learning to listen more actively, formulate questions, and work together; getting practice in analytic and creative thinking; learning how to tell stories and get meaning from symbols; and learning to accept people.

Societal Benefits

There can be benefits to our greater society.

As Kelly Bulkeley (1996, p.64) points out...

Dream-sharing groups are also a strong means of renewing a vivid, dynamic sense of community in our society. Today’s world is in political, environmental, and social turmoil, and sharing our dreams may be invaluable.

Jeremy Taylor, in Dream Work(1983, p.19), states: Our collective perils are real and pressing... we must... find ways of disarming ourselves, reforming our institutions, reconciling ourselves with our planetary neighbors, and with the ecological interconnectedness of all beings.

Dreamwork can enhance and energize these efforts by breaking down our prematurely closed prejudices, opinions, ideologies, and world views.

Group dreamwork can also create a community of support and understanding which can sustain us in the efforts to remake global society in a wiser, more human and just form, as well as offering specific creative insights and ideas to accomplish this vitally important task.

Interested in learning more about dreams and dream research? Join the global community dedicated to the exploration of dreams and dreaming.

Learn more about membership [HERE]

Originally published in the Spring 2026 Edition of DreamTime Magazine.

Christian Gerike (MA Cultural Resources Management; MA Psychology), IASD member since 2011, is a dream researcher and writer; teaches on dreamwork at the College of Marin; and regularly presents dream information on several Facebook sites.

Christian is an administrator for IASD’s Facebook page, and IASD’s Regional Representative for Northern California.

ReferencesBlagrove, M. and Lockheart, J. (2023).The science and art of dreaming.Routledge

Blechner, M. J. (2001).The dream frontier.Routledge.

Bulkeley, K. (1996). Dream-sharing groups, spirituality, and community.Journal of Religion and Health, 35(1), 59-66.

Gottschall, J. (2013).The storytelling animal: How stories make us human.Mariner Books.

Li, Q. and Wang, X. (2025). Cultural infl uences on dream: A comparative study of Tibetan and Han Chinese populations.Dreaming, 35(4), 337-350.

Morgan, A. (2014, October 4). Why sharing your dreams is so important.Huffi ngton Post, DreamsCloud, The Blog.https://www.huff post.com/entry/why-sharing-your-dreams-i_b_5851854

Savoy, L. M., Berne, P. H., & Williams, S. K. (1984)Dreams and spiritual growth: A Judeo-Christian way of dreamwork.Paulist Press.

Taylor, J. (1983).Dream work: Techniques for discovering the creative power in dreams.Paulis

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“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

✧

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.