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Cyber-Dreaming — A Quick History
Just uploaded a short history of dreamwork on the Internet. Dream researchers and enthusiasts have been sharing dreams through the Internet since its inception. In fact, dreamers — who really are the true communicators of this age in my humble opinion — were some of the first groups that participated in pre-Internet file-sharing too.
I am indebted to Richard Wilkerson for this piece, who not only is a first generation cyberdreamer, but also pointed me in the right direction when I picked his brain a few weeks ago in San Francisco.
The article is called A Short History of Online Dream Sharing.
Topics: news | No Comments »
Dream Studies Redesign Poll
This post is for my subscribers:
Sometime in the next month I’ll be redesigning the site and adding new features. I’d really like to know what you think about some new directions the portal could go in. What is most important to you - hearing about new dream research, being exposed to cool dream-inspired art, or my how-to articles? Or, fill in your own answer; I’m uniquely blind to what brings ya’ll back post after post.
So check out the poll on the left sidebar and let me know!
And of course if you’ve just stumbled across me for the first time - I’d love to hear your opinions too.
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
New Lucid Dreaming Expert Site
Veteran lucid dreamer Robert Waggoner has launched a new lucid dreaming portal called Lucid Advice. Besides announcing his new book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert invites people to post their questions about lucid dreaming, Dear Abby style.
Why ask Robert Waggoner about lucid dreaming? Well, he is a co-editor of the Lucid Dream Exchange, an online and print magazine that has been sharing lucid dreaming expertise for almost a decade.
The magazine started out as a group of friends who shared their lucid dreams, but now has a much wider offering, including expert lucid dreamer interviews, featured articles, and ways to participate in the lucid dream research community.
Oh yeah, Wagonner himself claims to have documented more than a thousand of his own lucid dreams, so he’s speaking from experience. I’m currently reading his new book, and will have a review out soon.
Topics: lucid dreaming | No Comments »
Dreamscape - A Lucid Dreamer’s Review
I finally watched the 1984 classic Dreamscape last night with some friends. (I don’t mean to imply that I usually watch this movie alone… I mean we finally rented it). Directed by Joseph Ruben, and starring a young Dennis Quaid and even-old-back-then Christopher Plummer, this dream studies thriller holds up to the years. Highly recommended for dreamphiles and oneironauts.
Intriguingly, Dreamscape came out 2 months before A Nightmare on Elm Street, and both movies feature a murderous character with hand razors who tries to kill people in their sleep.
Watch Wes Craven’s movie for the horror, and this one for the accurate depiction of dream imagery and nightmares.
Without spoiling the plot, I can say that Dreamscape reveals the dark side of consciousness studies with chilling accuracy. Young Quaid plays a philandering psychic in need of a quest, and dream scientists scoop him up and give him an offer he can’t refuse: to use his psychic powers in combination with their amplifying technology to penetrate the nightmares of others.
At first, the researchers want to ease the pain of nightmare sufferers by using Quaid as a witness and dream guide to their personal terrors. But of course the study is funded by a secret wing of the US intelligence community, and their motives are not so noble.
Speaking with my phenomenologist hat on, I’d say the nightmare experiences are well done, although one of my friends noted that the dream scenes are too stable. Other elements are true-to-life, tho: such as lighting only where the characters are looking, and, in general, themes of descent and shamanic underworlds dominating the imagery. Some of the monsters are amusingly cheesy, but there are also some great claymation moments of animal-to-human transformation.
Computer simulation of a recurring lattice tunnel hallucination, by Paul C. Bressloff
I was also impressed with Dreamscape’s visual depictions of dreaming. They especially nailed the experience of a wake-initiated lucid dream, starting with a spinning vortex, then clusters of sporatic lights and strange noises with little narrative continuity.
Dreamscape shows the dark side of consciousness studies in another way: the chilling way that psychological knowledge is often funded by, and applied in the service of, the military interests of the state. So I am in this way relieved that dreaming has proven to be unsuitable for military applications…. so far.
On the other hand, lucid dreaming techniques for nightmare sufferers may help the veterans of armed conflicts; this research is the leading edge of lucid dreaming therapy and complementary treatments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Oh yeah, this is a movie review. Dreamscape - it’s not scary, or particularly thrilling, but it’s one of the best depictions of lucid dreaming and nightmares attempted by Hollywood, even considering the low budget 1980s puppetry arts.
Topics: dreams in the media | 1 Comment »
Sleep Paralysis and Spirits
Are spirits real, or are they just irrational stories meant to explain things that science now explains better? This is the way the question of spirits is framed by many. According to many recent polls, belief in ghosts in the West hovers around 60%, and one British poll found that more people believe in ghosts than God. These statistics are then typically melded to reinforce the idea that “we hold irrational belief despite all the math we’ve done,” such as this statement from Live Science:
Indeed, humans are prone to believing in things they can neither see nor find logical evidence for.
What this pedantic little reduction does, of course, is ignore all those who turned towards a belief in spirits based on their own extraordinary experiences. In other words, evidence informed not by a belief in spirits (or a belief in logic) but by the senses. In the old days, this was called empiricism.
Extraordinary experiences are the key to another view: This was the topic discussed last week by American anthropologists in San Francisco. It was an inspiring collection of papers titled, “Encounters of Spirits - Towards a New Paradigm.” The anthropologists told their extraordinary stories of contact with the “more-than-human” realm, and how these encounters changed their lives.
Features of Sleep Paralysis
A 16th century wooden bracket from Cambridge depicting a Succubus, a sexual entity long associated with sleep paralysis
David Hufford’s paper on sleep paralysis is a case-in-point. (Unfortunately, Hufford himself cancelled at the last minute, so his paper was read, thus invoking an invisible, disembodied presence of expertise.) Hufford suggests that sleep paralysis is marked by features that are similar in all cultures, including:
- awakening
- hearing or seeing someone/something come into the room and approach the bed
- being pressed on the chest or strangled
- being unable to move or cry out
The uniformity of the experience from Polynesian villagers to middle class Americans suggests a biological origin of sleep paralysis, which Hufford has explored as a medical anthropologist for 30 years.
The result of this terrifying experience is that it is usually interpreted as a spiritual experience, whether or not there is a cultural narrative in place to be reinforced.
The Reality of Visionary Experiences
Hufford goes on to argue that sleep paralysis is an example of visionary spiritual experiences that cannot be explained away by irrational beliefs. Besides SP (also known as night terrors, the Old Hag, the incubus effect and scores of more culturally-specific terms), other visionary experiences that have a stable, cross-cultural phenomenology are bereavement visits, and near death experiences. I would add archetypal dreams to this list, as well as out-of-body experiences.
Hufford’s quest is to make sure that Western medical practitioners do not misdiagnose these events as psychotic hallucinations (or culturally-derived stories), but rather view them as encounters that are common to many, and compellingly real. In other words, his concern is not if the entities are ontologically real, but that they are recognized as psychologically real in that they inform personal belief systems, effect behavior, sculpt cultural narratives, and generally make the world go ’round.
Back to the recent headlines (that are timed to promote the new X-Files DVD, by the way), maybe 60% of Westerners believe in ghosts and aliens because of their personal experiences, not their fool-hearty archaic beliefs.
We have to start from this understanding: we personally experience many things that we cannot rationally account for, and ignoring them (or explaining them away by focusing on their biological mechanisms) does not make them go away. We have to work with the cognitive framework we inherited - and we are rewarded when we do so.
For more on transforming sleep paralysis into its full expression as shamanic lucid dreams, check out my post on dealing with night terrors.
Topics: visitation dreams | 4 Comments »
Guide to Dream Sharing on the Internet
Two announcements today:
First, I just uploaded my guide to Online Dream Sharing to the original articles section. These are my top picks for places on the web to safely share and exchange dreams with other dreamers. All are peer-to-peer dream sharing sites, but many are run by dream researchers and professionals. The guide does not cover dream interpretation or dream dictionary sites (run away!).
Also included are two dream sharing sites where you can use their databases to do your own dream research - this is a great resource for students or for anyone interested in societal patterns of dream content.
Relatedly, check out this great blog about a psychotherapist’s view of dreaming. Psychotherapist Laura Lefelar-Barch has been writing some great introductory material on the importance of paying attention to dreams, the healing potential of dreams, as well as advice for remembering and interpreting your dreams.
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Big Dreams & Archetypal Visions
Big Dreams are usually discussed in the popular media as dreams we remember for the rest of our lives. These could include emotionally intense dreams, powerful dream journeys, and visitation dreams.
However, the “dreams we remember for the rest of our life” are not the Big Dreams that contemporary dream researchers have demarked, but rather a watered down “catch-all” category that is based on the dreaming public’s perceived importance of particular dreams, rather than a set of features and characteristics unique to the experiences themselves.
Some researchers claim that Big Dreams come from different kinds of cognition than the typical REM dream. These typical dreams are the bread and butter of our dream life: chaotic stories, funny pairings of people from the past with situations of the present, anxiety dreams, etc. These “little” dreams are largely drawn from our personal past and tend to be loosely put together. We use narrative and story to help structure these experiences so we can talk about them.
Features of Archetypal Dreams
Big Dreams, also known as archetypal dreams, seem to be cut from a different cloth. Most importantly, they feel more real than real life, and a strong “felt meaning” is experienced in the moment. I think some visitation dreams definitely fit this description. But the other categories really set Big Dreams apart from ordinary dreams.
The most common elements are:
- abstract geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic mandalas,
- the experience of flying, floating or falling,
- encounters with mythological creatures and strange, intelligent animals
- feeling awe, fascination, fear and terror, and a sense of “Other”
Unlike ordinary dreams, these dreams are not easily picked at with standard dream interpretation procedures like psychoanalysis because very little personal history is encoded in these larger-than-life experiences. Archetypal dreams also have a consistency unmatched by ordinary dreams; in other words, their structure is cleanly focused, and the delivery to consciousness resembles waking visions of shamans and saints more than other nocturnal dreams.
Carl Jung and Big Dreams
The term “Big Dreams” came from Carl Jung, who seemed to dream in an archetypal way much of the time. But he made the distinction after visiting an East African tribe in Kenya, the Elgoni, in 1925. According to Jung, the Elgoni have a strong dreaming culture (80 years ago anyways - they have been successful at staying out of the eye of Sauron for many years since). They explained to Jung that there are little dreams and big dreams. For the Elgoni, big dreams were seen as collective dreams. The dreamer was dreaming for the community, for the landscape, and perhaps for all of the world.
This shamanic style of dreaming matched well with Jung’s own experience, and it gave him further insight into his theories of the collective unconscious (as a side note, later in life, Jung revised his earlier essays about the collective unconscious and moved away from theories dealing with “racial memory”, instead framing these shared experiences in a way that is more parsimonious with today’s evolutionary psychology: as bodily expressions transformed metaphorically into cognitive symbols that all humans share due to our common biological heritage.)
Archetypal Dreams and Mysticism
Consciousness researcher Harry Hunt has studied archetypal dream for 20 years, and has done more than anyone in helping re-frame these experiences in light of cognitive psychology as well as the world’s mystical traditions. He notes in the Multiplicity of Dreams:
“The archetypal dreams of long-term meditators and other highly intuitive subjects, with their geometric (mandala) designs and forms of luminosity, convey an ineffable portent that when articulated sounds metaphysical and spiritual. These are more abstract levels of imagistic self-reference, based on structurally complex visual-kinesthetic synesthesias, with visual structures predominating. It is exceedingly difficult to see how such dreams could be based on the Freud/Foulkes model of translation from verbal-propositional thinking (p. 132).”
That’s a mouthful, and quoting Hunt is always dangerous because it makes me responsible for translating! So, in other words, Hunt is suggesting that archetypal dreams may have a different process than little dreams; his main point being that these expressions and experiences are not linguistically based and may not be formed from personal memory sources either.
The Origin of Big Dreams
So where do big dreams come from? And could archetypal dreams ultimately originate from the same cognitive soup as little dreams? John Antrobus, a retired professor of psychology and sleep research from City College of New York, thinks this is the case. His research into big dreams focuses on the emotional intensity of REM dreams that occur in the last part of the night, or early morning. From a recent New York Times article:
“Core body temperature rises gradually from its nadir in the middle of the night during slow-wave sleep, the least active brain state. As morning nears, subcortical brain activity tied to the circadian cycle increases. When these cycles coincide in the last and longest REM phase, the study found, the mind produces its most dramatic dreams.
“The brain is waking up,” Dr. Antrobus said in an interview. “It starts waking up long before you are fully awake.”
Dreams during this active period are more likely to be highly memorable, vivid, and experiential, what Dr. Antrobus calls “superdreams.””
Keep in mind that, for Antrobus, big dreams mean “memorable dreams,” and are not necessarily full of the archetypal elements that Jung and Hunt have described. Here, the emotional intensity of Antrobus’s “super-dreams” is the connecting thread. Perhaps the uncanny emotional level is one component that merges with the other, more complex, visual metaphors that comprise the unique characteristics of archetypal dreams.
This intense emotional element is also studied in the sociology of religion, in particular Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum, which he described as the basic of mystical thought.
Archetypal Dreams & Ecopsychology
Returning to the shamanic Big Dreams of the Elgoni, perhaps these intense experiences with “Other” reveal communication with the larger-than-human community through our personal mythic and metaphoric artifacts of dreaming. Those half-human/half-animal dream figures seem to have their own agendas - as such they could be seen as expressions of our connectivity to our present ecological community.
It’s no wonder Westerners describe horrific dream visions as well as benign, given our disconnect from the natural world and our techno-industrial assault on the living fabric of life itself. Even without assigning “inter-species communication” or “Gaia consciousness” it seems plain that we are resistant to ecological information (and other collective levels of suffering) that comes through our dreams.
That’s definitely one of my strong biases - that ecopsychology (the study of our minds in relation to our environment) has the most inclusive way of looking at our behaviors, our emotions, and our visionary states. From here, we can frame Big Dreams as evidence for a “collective unconscious” that is not rooted in the distant past (or phlyogenic memory) but instead that bubbles up from the present moment, from our present relationship to the Others in our lives.
Ultimately, I wonder: does the world dream through us? And even if this is only a metaphor for our personal and communal journeys through life, how can we learn to listen?
Topics: ecodreaming | 3 Comments »
Consciousness, Mediumship, and Psychic Detectives
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently listening to the podcast interviews from Skeptiko. Run by Alex Tsakiris, this site is a breath of fresh air for anomalous psychology and psi research.
Neither a believer nor a materialist skeptic himself, Tsakiris walks a fine line as he interviews his guests about their research. More than anything, Tsakiris seems concerned that the research in question follows good scientific methods, even if (and especially when) the findings challenge the accepted paradigm of Western knowledge.
Lately, Trakiris has been on a tear about the so-called “psychic detectives.” Highly recommended listening, especially since shows like Ghost Hunters have made the paranormal momentarily stylish (but not exactly credible) again.
And while I’m at it, check out Public Parapsychology if you are interested in following, and possibly participating in, peer-reviewed parapsychology research.
Topics: consciousness research | No Comments »
Can Science Learn from Religion about Dreams?
Dream scholar Kelly Bulkeley was recently interviewed by the Boston Globe on the subject of dream studies and its implications for science and religion studies.
Bulkeley is an unique scholar who is trained in religion studies but often integrates modern neuroscientific findings and anthropological evidence to anchor his findings. Bulkeley’s interviewer is Jonah Lehrer, the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
Here’s a taste:
LEHRER: You argue that modern science can learn about dreaming from religion. Do you have a favorite example that you use when talking to scientists?
BULKELEY: Well, consider this particular kind of nightmare dream that recurs again and again in religious texts. In the Christian tradition they talk about the incubus, or the demons of the night. In Newfoundland, it’s the old hag and so on. But what all these various religions agree on is that there’s a type of nightmare that’s very intense and involves the constriction of breathing or paralysis. Now we know, thanks to modern science, that this is a real class of dream called night terrors and they’re very different from ordinary nightmares. So all these texts that talk about night terrors, they’re actually describing a real element of human experience.
I’m fascinated by this, and all the other ancient documents we have laying around that are filled with real, first-hand experiences of verifiable altered states of consciousness. Often these experiences are considered to be hyperbole, or simply made up stories. But as cognitive anthropologist David Lewis-Williams is fond of saying, humans can’t refrain from dreaming.
Dreams and vision states are simply part of our collective story.
Here’s the link for the whole interview.
Topics: dreams in the media | No Comments »
A Shift in Consciousness & the Transfer of King Energy
Fiscal conservatives in the US aren’t happy, but around the world there is a sense of hope, promise, and a fresh start for American leadership. As Oprah was quoted as saying to CNN News in Chicago, IL last night:
“We’ve just experienced a profound shift in our consciousness.”
Oprah’s sentiment, perhaps emboldened by her recent study with Eckhart Tolle, reflects an ancient philosophical issue: can we change the status quo by the power of consciousness alone? How does our perspective create (or limit) our possibilities? And does radical change come from a new ideal that is untouched by the material world, or is it hammered from the raw matter of our physical, mental, and cultural limitations?
That’s what I started thinking about anyways as I saw Obama take the stage in Grant Park last night.
I share Oprah’s hope, and the world’s enthusiasm, for this new change in world leadership, but I am reminded of eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen’s statement that:
“Psychologically and socially, it [a shift in consciousness] is really important, but it doesn’t matter: you can still have a huge transformation of the heart, but if you still require the importation of resources, what are you going to do about it?”
The big picture, after all, is that modern civilization is unsustainable, and is enforceable only through violence. My anthropologist training cannot make me forget that never has there been a state level society that hasn’t operated through violence, oppression, and the destruction of landscape for unsustainable human practices.
I know, what a downer. In my mind, a shift of consciousness is not sufficient, but it sure is a nice change of pace.
Here’s Jensen discussing the big picture of our modern predicament, new world leader or not.
The transfer of “king energy” to Obama is still a tremendous event from a socio-historical perspective. And from a depth psychology level, I hope he continues to use the archetype to encourage Kingliness (compassion, service, fairness, and especially: order) in each of our lives, because that is the mark of a good leader.
Here is a selection that brings the idea of “King energy” back to earth, from Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette’s book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover:
“
The ordering function of the King energy…shows up not only in ancient maps, in sand paintings of the desert Indians, in the icons of Buddhist art, and in the rose windows of Christian churches, but also just as persistently in the dreams and paintings of modern people undergoing modern psychoanalysis. Jung, noticing this, borrowed the name for such representations from Tibetan Buddhism and called these pictures of the organizing Center “mandalas.” He noticed that when mandalas appeared in his analysands’ dreams and visions, they were always healing and life-giving.
What this function of the King energy does, through a mortal king, is embody for the people of the realm this ordering principle of the Divine World. The human king does this by codifying laws. He makes laws, or more accurately, he receives them from the King energy itself and passes them on to his nation.”
So, my hope is that Obama’s ability to channel the King energy, which is embodied in the chant, “Yes we can,” will spill over to the meta-issues which hound us as species today: environmental destruction, loss of habitat, loss of cultural diversity, peak oil, peak water, over-population, and the constant (and decidedly unpopular to discuss) threat of plague and its main catalysts, biological warfare and our over-reliance in antibiotics.
Don’t get me wrong, until the day that we can live sustainably on this earth, I’ll take the tax breaks.
Topics: news | 5 Comments »