Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History, by Kelly Bulkeley

Abstract

A committed interdisciplinarian, Kelly Bulkeley has customarily engaged with the phenomenon of human dreaming through a variety of academic lenses, from the neuroscientific to the psychological to the religious, often within one text.Dreaming in the Worlds Religions: A Comparative History does not represent a departure.It is in some respects, as the title would suggest, a relatively straightforward overview of the ways in which dreams have been understood and utilized in the context of religion, both diachronically and cross-culturally.Bulkeley's stated premise is unambiguous: "I do not argue that dreaming is the origin of religion as such," he writes; father, my thesis is more focused: dreaming is a primal wellspring of religious experience" (6; emphasis in original).In actuality, Bulkeley is operating with several theses simultaneously.Evidence of his various research interests arises repeatedly throughout the account, and the spectre of the religion/science binary underlies the entire project without ever being directly challenged.Instead, the author attempts a modest detente.As if to preempt a rationalist dismissal of the spiritual dimension in his work, he takes pains to establish the historical coexistence of skeptical and reverent approaches to dream analysis.By the book's conclusion, Bulkeley's attention to the sociobiological functions of dreaming threatens to overshadow the religiously experiential aspects.Yet despite its divided focus, Dreaming is a worthwhile starting point for anyone interested in comparative religion, dream theory, and/or the interaction between conscious and unconscious intelligence.Bulkeley organizes his survey into ten chapters, each a general account of how a given culture has explained the meanings and usefulness of dreaming over time.Several of the chapters are devoted to specific religio-phiiosophical traditions ("Hinduism," "Buddhism," "Christianity," "Islam"), whereas the rest feature distinct traditions within a geographical region (e.g., "Religions of the Fertile Crescent").This structure is addressed in the introduction, where Bulkeley defends his decision as an imperfect but necessary compromise between chronological, environmental, and evolutionary factors.The first chapter, "Hinduism," enables him to draw upon a remarkably long written history that began with the Vedas, anthologies of hymnody