Dream research is entering a new era of accelerating insights and discoveries, thanks to the rise of powerful digital analysis tools that are enabling important advances in the empirical study of dreams. This paper illustrates the use of these tools, drawing on the resources of the Sleep and Dream Database, a free online archive of information about sleep and dreaming. These tools include...
Abstract This chapter examines the dream journals of the seven main figures, looking for unusual and anomalous features of dream content. Whereas the previous chapter looked at the common patterns of dreaming, this one focuses on the patterns that stand out as uncommon and distinctive to the individual dreamer. Included is a discussion of the continuity hypothesis and the idea that patterns in...
Abstract This chapter examines the dream journals of the seven main figures using a word-search method based on the resources of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb). The SDDb provides a template of forty categories of content, grouped into eight classes: Perception, Emotion, Characters, Movement, Social Interactions, Cognition, Culture, and Elements. The dreams of the seven dream journalists...
Abstract This is the first of three chapters that look at the religious and spiritual qualities of the seven dream journalists. Here the quality of religious individualism is considered as a defining characteristic of the dream journalists. In contrast to religious communalism, which emphasizes group togetherness and shared beliefs, each of the dream journalists displayed a strong reluctance to...
Abstract This chapter introduces the second of the dream journalists, Myōe Shonin. Born in 1173 ce in Japan, he became an ascetic monk who advocated for religious reforms in the Kegon and Shingon schools of Buddhism. Myōe kept a journal of his dreams, visions, and meditation experiences for more than forty years. The intensity of his desire to emulate as closely as possible the life and being...
Abstract This chapter introduces the use of digital methods for the study of dreams. The volume of material in a long series of dreams can be so great that ordinary methods of dream interpretation need to be supplemented by new tools of data analysis. In this project, a simple word-search method is applied to the dream reports, using the resources of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), an...
Abstract This is the third of three chapters that look at the religious and spiritual qualities of the seven dream journalists. Here the quality of religious pluralism is considered as a defining characteristic of the seven dream journalists. In contrast to monistic religiosity, which emphasizes the supreme unity and authority of one God and one way of relating to the divine, each of the dream...
This article demonstrates that an automated system of linguistic analysis can be developed - the Oneirograph - to analyze large collections of dreams and computationally map their contents in terms of typical situations involving an interplay of characters, activities, and settings. Focusing the analysis first on the twin situations of fighting and fleeing, the results provide densely detailed...
This study considers the relationship between dreaming and race in light of the public protests following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Findings are presented from an online survey about dreams and the Black Lives Movement (BLM) gathered from 4,947 demographically diverse American adults sampled between June 15 and June 19, 2020. The results show that the people most likely to...
This study analyzes the responses of 3,031 U S adults who, in early May of 2020, completed an online survey regarding their dreams and the COVID-19 outbreak The results indicate that those people most strongly affected by the pandemic also reported the strongest effects on their dream life (heightened dream recall, more negatively toned dreams, and pandemic-related dreams) Pronounced negative...
Lucid dreaming (LD) began to be scientifically studied in the last century, but various religions have highlighted the importance of LD in their doctrines for a much longer period. Hindus' manuscripts dating back over 2,000 years ago, for example, divide consciousness in waking, dreaming (including LD), and deep sleep. In the Buddhist tradition, Tibetan monks have been practicing the "Dream...
This article reports the findings of a new exercise in the “blind analysis” of a long dream series. The study focused on 940 dreams of a woman (“Beverly”) who kept a regular dream journal for 30 years. Four subsets of her dreams (from 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016) were analyzed using a digital word search template, and then predictions were made about Beverly’s waking life based on the word usage...
This article describes the future prospects of scientific dream research. Three frontiers of investigation hold special promise: neuroscientific studies of the brain-mind system's activities during sleep (such as during lucid dreaming); systematic analyses of large collections of dream reports from diverse populations of people; and psychotherapeutic explorations of the multiple dimensions of...
Where do our dreams originate from, and what do they tell us? Is there a universal set of symbols that are common to all dreams, regardless of a person's ethnicity or culture? What does dreaming reveal about the unconscious? Why do some dreams remain etched in our memories, whereas others are almost instantly forgotten? Some scientists have adopted the position that dreams are little more than...
This chapter examines the cross-cultural religious phenomenon of prophetic visions in dreams. The widespread occurrence of these kinds of visually intense, future-oriented dreams has prompted both positive and negative attention from religious authorities throughout history. This chapter looks at prophetic vision in the context of scientific research on big dreams. The discussion includes a...
Abstract This chapter examines the cross-cultural religious phenomenon of ritual healing in and through dreaming. The widespread practice of healing-oriented rituals involving dreams has always involved a religious framework in which the process unfolds. This chapter looks at ritual healing in the context of scientific research on big dreams. The discussion includes a detailed case study...
We present a theory of the creativity of dreams as well as psychopathology of religious delusions with respect to production of fundamental forms of religious cognition-specifically supernatural agent (SA) cognitions. We suggest that dream cognitions are particularly efficient at producing highly memorable and impactful experiences with SAs because dreams involve three processes that are...
This article demonstrates the use of a digital word search method designed to provide greater accuracy, objectivity, and speed in the study of dreams. A revised template of 40 word search categories, built into the website of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), is applied to four "classic" sets of dreams: The male and female "Norm" dreams of Hall and Van de Castle (1966), the "Engine Man"...
This paper systematizes the word search potential of DreamBank.net (Domhoff & Schneider, 2008a, 2008b) by formulating and testing a set of word strings that can be used as default analytic categories in future investigations. The word strings are applied to the 981 dream reports of college students gathered by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) and the 136 dream reports of an 80-year old male...
This study focuses on a set of dreams related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermath, using content analysis and cognitive psychology to explore the interweaving of external public catastrophe and internal psychological processes. The study tests several recent claims in contemporary dream research, including the central image theory of Hartmann [Hartmann, E., & Basile,...
This pilot study focuses on the relationship of dream content and political ideology in a contemporary U.S. context. The study involved 56 people, 28 (14 male and 14 female) who identified themselves as members of the political right and 28 (14 male and 14 female) who identified themselves as members of the political left. “Most recent dream” reports from these subjects were analyzed using Hall...