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Summary
Summary
Finalist for the Chanticleer International Book Awards 2023 in Mind & Spirit
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.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bulkeley (The Scribes of Sleep), director of the Sleep and Dream Database, aims in this impassioned handbook to help readers "unlock new dimensions of your own nocturnal imagination." According to the author, everyone has "the potential to become a ," and can fuel their "dreaming imagination" by optimizing sleep patterns, exploring "the metaphorical meanings of dreams," and sharing dreams with others, whether individually or in"dream-sharing groups." He overviews three "realms" where "spiritual energies can be especially strong"--dreams with animals and nature; gods and demons; and death and dying--and elucidates prominent themes and types for each ("visitation dreams" featuring a deceased loved one are particularly common, for example). His links between the spiritual and the unconscious illuminate ("the psychospiritual intensity of dreaming can transform an abstract idea into a deeply relevant and personally meaningful conviction"), even if the thesis sometimes stretches into hyperbole, as when Bulkeley tells readers that their "visionary gifts can make a real contribution to the collective health of those around you in these fraught and perilous times." Still, it's a welcome resource for those eager to dive into the mysteries of the unconscious. (Dec.)
Booklist Review
Author and dream researcher Bulkeley's (Big Dreams, 2016) sixth book on the topic of dreaming is erudite yet eminently readable, fantastical yet utterly believable. As Bulkeley spins fascinating tales and shares personal anecdotes about sleeping human minds, he references Jung and Freud, Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, to demonstrate the strong connections between creativity and dreams. The book begins with a quick examination of sleeping practices, both now and in the past, emphasizing the biological necessity of sleep as well as the explanation of exactly when dreams occur. Interpreting those dreams is at the heart of Bulkeley's narrative, and he also characterizes the sharing of dreams, using two examples, Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman, and some principles for doing so. The author then unpacks the realms, or categories, of dreams, from animals and nature to gods and demons to death and dying. Bulkeley offers many suggestions for remembering dreams, but this book's most important takeaway is the special insight to be gained from what he calls the human's spiritual world.