Kelly Bulkeley

Big dreams are rare but highly memorable dream experiences that make a strong and lasting impact on the dreamer's waking awareness. Moving far beyond "I forgot to study and the finals are today" and other common scenarios, such dreams can include vivid imagery, intense emotions, fantastic characters, and an uncanny sense of being connected to forces beyond one's ordinary dreaming mind. In Big Dreams, Kelly Bulkeley provides the first full-scale cognitive scientific analysis of such dreams, putting forth an original theory about their formation, function, and meaning. Big dreams have played significant roles in religious and cultural history, but because of their infrequent occurrence and fantastical features, they have rarely been studied in light of modern science. We know a great deal about the religious manifestations of big dreams throughout history and around the world, but until now that cross-cultural knowledge has never been integrated with scientific research on their psychological roots in the brain-mind system. In Big Dreams, Bulkeley puts a classic psychological thesis to the scientific test by clarifying and improving it with better data, sharper analysis, and a broader evolutionary framework. He brings evidence from multiple sources, shows patterns of similarity and difference, questions prior assumptions, and provides predictive models that can be applied to new sets of data. The notion of a connection between dreaming and religion has always been intuitively compelling; Big Dreams transforms it into a solid premise of religious studies and brain-mind science. Combining evidence from religious studies, psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, Big Dreams makes a compelling argument that big dreams are a primal wellspring of religious experience. They represent an innate, neurologically hard-wired capacity of our species that regularly provokes greater self-awareness, creativity, and insight into the existential challenges and spiritual potentials of human life.

The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion

Big Dreams

This book argues that the profounded questions raised by cognitive neuroscience may best be answered through a dialogue with religion.

Thinking about Religion with and Beyond Cognitive Neuroscience

The Wondering Brain

Enhance your dreaming with groundbreaking research and wisdom from vivid dreamers throughout history, sacred texts, and the present day. We're asleep almost a third of our lives. What if those sleeping hours hold wisdom, creativity, and even connection with the divine? What if our dreams offer spiritual insight and guidance—not just for ourselves, but for our communities? In The Spirituality of Dreaming, leading dream scholar and expert Dr. Kelly Bulkeley brings us a set of time-honored methods to stimulate innate dreaming capacities and amplify their impact in our waking lives. Dreams have been a perennial source of spiritual insight and guidance across all cultures and religions throughout history, he asserts, but the sacred energy of our dreams has often remained untapped. Relying on years of research, data analysis, and interviews, Bulkeley offers wisdom and strategies from "big dreamers"--people who have vivid, intense dreams and remember them. He also distills the latest findings on dreams: the impact of digital technologies on our dreams, the phenomena of lucid dreaming and dreaming incubation, practices of dream-sharing, the creative role of dreams in cultural innovation, and the growing evidence that animals dream too. In conversation with people who care about dreams and spirituality, Bulkeley makes a case for taking ourselves seriously as dreaming visionaries. By drawing on classic and contemporary works of theology, anthropology, and psychology, along with the latest dream research, Bulkeley maps the spiritual power of dreaming and argues that our dreams matter in ways we do not yet fully realize, both individually and collectively. Together we can learn how to unlock the sacred truths revealed within our sleeping selves.

Unlocking the Wisdom of Our Sleeping Selves

The Spirituality of Dreaming

Clodagh Weldon

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) has made a major, though still contested, impact on the field of religious studies. Alternately revered and reviled, the subject of adoring memoirs and scathing exposes, Jung and his ideas have had at least as much influence on religious studies as have the psychoanalytic theories of his mentor, Sigmund Freud. Teaching Jung offers a collection of original articles presenting several different approaches to Jung's psychology in relation to religion, theology, and contemporary culture. The contributors describe their teaching of Jung in different academic contexts, with special attention to the pedagogical and theoretical challenges that arise in the classroom. Many of Jung's key psychological terms (archetypes, collective unconscious, individuation, projection, synchronicity, extroversion and introversion) have become standard features of religious studies discourse, and his extensive commentaries on various religious traditions make it clear that Jung's psychology is, at one level, a significant contribution to the study of human religiosity. His characterization of depth psychology as a fundamentally religious response to the secularizing power of modernity has left a lasting imprint on the relationship between religious studies and the psychological sciences.

Teaching Jung

Philip King

Bernard Welt

The essential guide on how to teach about dreaming.

Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education

Dreaming in the Classroom

Passing for what you are not—whether it is mulattos passing as white, Jews passing as Christian, or drag queens passing as women—can be a method of protection or self-defense. But it can also be a uniquely pleasurable experience, one that trades on the erotics of secrecy and revelation. It is precisely passing's radical playfulness, the way it asks us to reconsider our assumptions and forces our most cherished fantasies of identity to self-destruct, that is centrally addressed in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion. Identity in Western culture is largely structured around visibility, whether in the service of science (Victorian physiognomy), psychoanalysis (Lacan's mirror stage), or philosophy (the Panopticon). As such, it is charged with anxieties regarding classification and social demarcation. Passing wreaks havoc with accepted systems of social recognition and cultural intelligibility, blurring the carefully-marked lines of race, gender, and class. Bringing together theories of passing across a host of disciplines—from critical race theory and lesbian and gay studies, to literary theory and religious studies—Passing complicates our current understanding of the visual and categories of identity. Contributors: Michael Bronski, Karen McCarthy Brown, Bradley Epps, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hitchcock, Daniel Itzkovitz, Patrick O'Malley, Miriam Peskowitz, María C. Sánchez Linda Schlossberg, and Sharon Ullman.

A Comparative History

Dreaming in the World's Religions

This wide-ranging exploration of the spiritual and scientific dimensions of dreaming offers new connections between the ancient wisdom of the world's religious traditions, which have always taught that dreams reveal divine truths, and the recent findings of modern psychological research. Drawing upon philosophy, anthropology, sociology, neurology, literature, and film criticism, the book offers a better understanding of the mysterious complexity and startling creative powers of human dreaming experience. For those interested in gaining new perspectives on dreaming, the powers of the imagination, and the newest frontiers in the dialogue between religion and science, Visions of the Night promises to be a welcome resource.

Dreams, Religion, and Psychology

Visions of the Night

This multidisciplinary volume examines the cultural and social relevance of dream studies, looking at various ways that the field can contribute to the resolution of the modern Wests most troubling social issues. The essays offer novel insights on education, sexual abuse, ecology, crime, race, gender, religion, politics, death, and cross-cultural conflict. The contributors argue that the study of dreams can provide valuable resources to regain a vibrant, trustworthy sense of moral and spiritual orientation in life.

Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society

Among All These Dreamers

An introduction to the twentieth century's major psychological theories about dreams and dreaming, this work offers a detailed historical overview of how these theories have developed from 1900 to the present. To help readers understand the many different approaches modern psychologists have taken, the book examines each approach in terms of three basic questions: How are dreams formed? What functions do dreams serve? How can dreams be interpreted?

An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming

Rev. Patricia Bulkley

Drawing from a rich understanding of dreaming in culture, history, psychology, and modern dream study, Kelly Bulkeley and Patricia Bulkley's Dreaming Beyond Death explicitly addresses three common aspects of pre-death dreams and offers interpretations that will aid both dying persons and their caregivers. Rev. Patricia Bulkley's experience with the transformative possibilities of pre-death dreams as a hospice counselor lend this book a deeply personal and human touch, while Kelly Bulkeley's insightful analysis and intellectual framework provide an understanding of the deeper meanings behind this type of dreaming. A final chapter provides resources and concrete methods for caregivers to respectfully guide a dying person through the dreaming process to a sense of peace.

A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions

Dreaming Beyond Death

Dreams of Healing has a tremendous healing potential of dreams in times of crisis.This book: - focuses on the religious and spiritual dimensions of healing.- offers practical suggestions for caregivers who are working in a post-9/11 world.- is clearly written and accessible to the general reader.- is ideal for pastoral care and counseling courses in seminaries, and for crisis counseling courses in schools of professional psychology.

Transforming Nightmares Into Visions of Hope

Dreams of Healing

Patricia M. Bulkley

Introduces the basics of the neuroscience of dreams, explaining how they aid in creativity, and explores the "important" dreams of childhood and adolescence.

Understanding the Most Memorable Dreams and Nightmares of Childhood

Children's Dreams

Children’s Dreams teaches readers how to understand and appreciate memorable “big dreams” of childhood. The book introduces readers to the basic psychology and neuroscience of dreaming, then discusses dreams from early childhood through adolescence, exploring why we dream and how dreams can help us enhance creativity and make sense of our lives.

This book offers a collection of original articles presenting several different approaches to Jung's psychology in relation to religion, theology, and contemporary culture. The contributors describe their teaching of Jung in different academic contexts, with special attention to the pedagogical and theoretical challenges that arise in the classroom.

Kate Adams

Patricia M. Davis

Throughout history to the present day, religion has ideologically fueled wars, conquests, and persecutions. Christianity and Islam, the world's largest and geopolitically powerful faiths, are often positioned as mortal enemies locked in an apocalyptic "clash of civilizations." Rarely are similarities addressed. Dreaming in Christianity and Islam, the first book to explore dreaming in these religions through original essays, fills this void. The editors reach a plateau by focusing on how studying dreams reveals new aspects of social and political reality. International scholars document the impact of dreams on sacred texts, mystical experiences, therapeutic practices, and doctrinal controversies.

Culture, Conflict, and Creativity

Dreaming in Christianity and Islam

Patricia M Davis

Ryan Hurd

In this fascinating new collection, an all-star team of researchers explores lucid dreaming not only as consciousness during sleep but also as a powerful ability cultivated by artists, scientists, and shamans alike to achieve a variety of purposes and outcomes in the dream. • Presents a variety of expert perspectives on lucid dreaming from many different cultures that represent a breadth of disciplinary perspectives • Provides theoretical models that integrate scientific reason, mysticism, and individuals' experiences, making way for a new level of sophistication in the study of lucid dreaming • Offers practical insights for therapists, teachers, and researchers as well as students and scholars of psychology, anthropology, and religious studies while containing accessible information and compelling personal narratives that will appeal to general readers

New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep

Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep [2 volumes]

Set in late sixteenth-century Spain, this book tells the gripping story of Lucrecia de León, a young woman of modest background who gained a dangerously popular reputation as a prophetic dreamer predicting apocalyptic ruin for her country. When Lucrecia was still a teenager, several Catholic priests took great interest in her prolific dreams and began to record them in detail. But the growing public attention to the dreams eventually became too much for the Spanish king. Stung that Lucrecia had accurately foreseen the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Philip II ordered the Inquisition to arrest her on charges of heresy and sedition. During Lucrecia's imprisonment, trial, and torture, the carefully collected records of her dreams were preserved and analyzed by the court. The authenticity of these dreams, and their potentially explosive significance, became the focal point of the Church's investigation. Returning to these records of a dreamer from another era, Lucrecia the Dreamer is the first book to examine Lucrecia's dreams as dreams, as accurate reports of psychological experiences with roots in the brain's natural cycles of activity during sleep. Using methods from the cognitive science of religion, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley finds meaningful patterns in Lucrecia's dreaming prophecies and sheds new light on the infinitely puzzling question at the center of her trial, a question that has vexed all religious traditions throughout history: How can we determine if a dream is, or is not, a true revelation?

Kelly Bulkeley

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