Dreams Come Through Our Bodies

This is the fifth article in my series about working with dreams without buying a dream dictionary.  Even though we all say we want to interpret our dreams, I think often we are not looking for an explanation so much as a chance to deepen the experience of the dream, to bring the dream into our lives and work its magic in this realm too.

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Dream Sharing: the Foundation of Dream Work

This is my second article in the series 10 ways to work with your dreams.  Over the next week or so, I’ll be rolling out my favorite ways to deepen the experience of the dream.   The real foundation of working with dreams is getting them out of your memory and into the world.   Keeping a dream journal is important, and could easily be the first post in this series, but I want to start with the historical, low-tech, and most widespread way of honoring your dreams: sharing them.

Dream sharing is ubiquitous across the world’s cultures and you can bet that dream sharing has been a standard human activity for as long as we have had the ability to: Read more

Dream Interpretation without a Dream Dictionary

Over the next week or so, I am going to cover my ten favorite ways of working with dreams without buying a dream dictionary.

It’s not that I think dream dictionaries are useless.  Actually I have one and consult it at least once a week.  However, the dream dictionary can only provide one way of working with dreams, which is the cultural significance of a symbol or some pan-human experience such as shame, mortality, or stress.  To put it mildly, our dreams are much more than the dumping grounds of our culture’s symbols and our fear of realizing we are butt-naked in public.

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FAQ about Dreaming

I was interviewed by a middle school student last year, and recently found the manuscript. I”m going to publish it here because she asked so many great questions about the current state of dream studies. The interview was a real education for me about how young people have the keen ability to seek out the blind spots in our theories and knowledge about dreams.

When are you interested in dream for the first time and why?
I wrote my first dream down at age 11, and have had a consistent interest in dreams since age 15. My early dreams were both exciting and scary, and I was not satisfied with most people’s answer “it’s just a dream, it doesn’t matter.”

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New Survey for Finding the Meaning of Dreams

Here’s another opportunity to participate in dream research.

Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard are conducting a short survey on dreams and memory. I took it in less than 10 minutes. The results will be reported in the New York Times, thanks to dream-enthusiast and journalist John Tierney.

Click here to take the survey.

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Solo Dream Interpretation Reinforces Your Personal Mythology

ScienceDaily has really been covering some great dream research studies recently. Earlier this week, SD reported on a group of studies that look into how ordinary people find meaning in their dreams.

The studies cited investigated under which conditions do people find meaning in their dreams. Their results, surveyed from various groups of US commuters and students, indicate that, in the US, people are more likely to find meaning in their dream if the dream reinforces something they already believe.

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Does the Full Moon Effect your Dreams?

Tomorrow is the full moon, depending on your ancestral tradition it is known as the Buck Moon, Thunder Moon or the Hay Moon. In all traditions, it’s gonna be big and round. But more pertinently, will this rising stone of Artemis effect your dreams?

Studies on this subject are hard to find, but almost everyone has an opinion. So I am asking my readers to chime in with their opinions, perspective and stories on this ancient question.

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Why do Nightmares Happen?

I missed this excellent podcast about contemporary nightmare research when it was released last fall. NPR interviews New York Times science journalist Natalie Angier and dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley about the whole mess: theories about the cause of nightmares, common nightmares, as well as how to deal.

Here’s the link for NPR”s Anatomy of your Nightmare.

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The Dream Institute Now Online

I”m happy to announce that the Dream Institute of Northern California is now online, making it easier than ever to see what innovative dream events are planned in the center of the American dream scene: Berkeley, CA.

If you live in the Bay Area, make contact and drop by for one of the Culture Dreaming sessions (a group creation, never the same twice) or one of the lecture and discussion series in the evenings. Getting ten or more dreamers together in a room can be powerful, and the Dream Institute is making that easier in CA.

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Are Boring Dreams our Western Heritage?

Since I”m in the business of pointing out good dream research, today I thought I would point out the opposite. Unfortunately, this fluff piece on dreams from The Daily Advertiser in Arizona is pretty typical of mainstream journalism. It’s an entertaining read, but devoid of actual journalistic research.

The title of this article “Stuff that dreams are made of is pretty mundane” sounds like a good dream research lead-in, but it’s actually a confessional by the author that he knows nothing about dreams and is bored by other people’s experiences. He writes, “Note: I would research the topic, but I never could figure out that complicated Dewey Decimal System. “

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