Dreaming: Religious and Scientific Approaches
Course Proposal
Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.
Santa Clara University
1. Statement of the Three Most Significant Features of This Course
Santa Clara University requires all undergraduates to take at least three religious studies courses (one each at the introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels) to satisfy the University’s Core Curriculum. “Dreaming: Religious and Scientific Approaches,” which I have taught at SCU since 1996, is an advanced level course in which students focus critical attention on dreaming, an eternally puzzling phenomenon that has attracted intense religious and scientific interest throughout history. The three most significant features of the course are:
Pedagogy: The effectiveness of the course depends on the direct connection students make between their own personal dream experiences and the academic research we study in class. All students are required to keep a detailed sleep and dream journal through the term, and I teach the students how to use their journals as a source of empirical data to test the various religious and scientific theories they are learning in class. This is a uniquely effective pedagogical technique because it gives students a truly “experience-near” understanding of the subject, and it encourages them to take an actively questioning rather than passively receptive attitude toward academic research.
Substantive Content: The main substantive theme in the course is the historical development of three different ways of conceptualizing the origins of dreaming: 1) as divine revelation from God, 2) as psychological expression of the unconscious, and 3) as neurological product of the brain. Each unit of the course challenges students to think creatively about these three fundamental theories, which can be found as far back as the Bible, Aristotle, and Artemidorus and as recently as Freud, Jung, and current sleep laboratory research. Students are encouraged to move beyond simplistic, either-or answers and develop their own integrated understandings of how God, the unconscious, and the brain are related to each other.
Curricular Impact: No other course offered by the SCU Religious Studies Department involves such a sustained and rigorous investigation of religion and science. Perhaps for this reason, “Dreaming: Religious and Scientific Approaches” is one of the most popular courses on campus, with routinely full registration, dozens of people signing the waiting list, and consistently excellent student evaluations. Having taught the class seven times since 1996, I have had the pleasure of initiating well over 200 students into the religion-science dialogue. I have good reason to expect the course will remain a regular offering at SCU for many years to come.
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Scope of Scientific Thought
The course is divided into four basic units: Historical/Theological, Psychological, Cross-Cultural, and Cognitive Neurological. In each unit students engage in focused discussions of the nature of science, scientific reasoning, and scientific methods of studying dreams and other related phenomena.
In the Historical/Theological unit, students learn about the earliest dream naturalists, the fourth century B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle and the second century A.D. Roman dream interpreter Artemidorus. Aristotle’s two treatises On Dreams and On Prophesizing By Dreams offer a careful, rational analysis of the nature of dreams, and Aristotle’s basic argument is that dreaming is a function of certain physiological activities in the sleeping person’s mind. Aristotle thus offers a scientific approach to dreams that is remarkably similar in form (though very different in content) to the present-day neurological dream research of Francis Crick, Graeme Mitchison, and J.Allan Hobson. In Artemidorus students find an acute observer of dream phenomenology. His book The Oneirocriticon (Interpretation of Dreams) is the most detailed and comprehensive taxonomy of dreams that remains from the ancient world, with an extensive and remarkably sophisticated system of dream classification. Artemidorus illustrates for students the fundamental importance of beginning any scientific inquiry with closely observed and carefully ordered empirical data.
In the Psychological unit students will concentrate on the scientific practices of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the pioneering depth psychologists whose theories have wielded enormous influence over many decades of dream research. Both Freud and Jung were proud advocates of the scientific method, and many of their greatest insights emerged out of their abilities to discern regular, empirically verifiable patterns and structures in human mental functioning. However, this unit also takes a critical approach to the scientific weaknesses of both Freud and Jung, and students will be encouraged to reflect on the unfortunate ways in which Freud and Jung used the rhetoric of science to mask serious conceptual and empirical problems with their theories.
In the Cross-Cultural unit students will learn that scientific dream research is not the exclusive province of the West. Readings of Lee Irwin’s The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains, Serinity Young’s Dreaming in the Lotus: Dreaming in the Buddhist Tradition, and Marcia Hermansen’s The Study of Dreams and Vision in Islam will provide students with highly detailed portraits of the dream traditions of three distinct cultures. By learning how these non-Western cultures have analyzed, examined, and understood the phenomenology of dreaming, students will gain a new understanding of the cultural embeddedness of any kind of scientific inquiry. Students will also reflect on the important methodological question of what criteria should be used to compare and evaluate the dream theories of these three cultures in relation to the research findings of contemporary Western dream investigators.
Finally, in the Cognitive Neurological unit, the focus will be on the truly revolutionary findings of Western dream science in the past fifty years. Students will learn about 1) the 1953 discovery by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep; 2) the reverse-learning theory of Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison; 3) the activation-synthesis hypothesis of Allan Hobson; 4) the ongoing debate between Hobson and Mark Solms, author of The Neuropsychology of Dreams, who has provided strong neurological evidence that Hobson is wrong to strictly identify REM sleep with dreaming; 5) the new research by Tracey Kahan and Stephen Laberge on the metacognitive dimension of dreaming and its relation to the latest findings of cognitive neuroscience; and 6) the quantitative content analysis system of G. William Domhoff, which has provided the most extensive and reliable body of data on the statistical frequency of the core elements of dreams. Both Tracey Kahan and G. William Domhoff will give guest lectures in the class.
Each of the researchers discussed in this unit gives students a different perspective on the scientific study of dreams, and this rich methodological diversity inspires students to develop their own theoretical syntheses.
Additionally, one class meeting will involve a field trip to the Stanford University Sleep Laboratory, administered by Dr. William Dement, where students will be able to see firsthand the practice of current sleep and dream research.
The last part of this unit, and the concluding text of the course, is James B. Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright’s The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet. This book is, in my judgment, the single best text currently available on the subject of religion and neuroscience, and the book provides students with invaluable conceptual guidance as they prepare their final essay project. Ashbrook and Albright give a clear, straightforward account of current scientific knowledge about the human brain and the profound religious implications of that knowledge. Students are encouraged to use Ashbrook and Albright’s account when they reach the end of the course to help them conceptually organize the religious and scientific material they have learned in the class.
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Scope of Religious Thought
Each unit of the course also devotes extensive attention to the nature of religion, the diversity of world religions, and the relationship between experience, belief, and practice in religion.
In the Historical/Theological unit, students start with a careful examination of the many Biblical passages dealing with dreams. In the Bible, some dreams are presented as direct revelations from God, while other dreams seem to be merely the vain creations of the dreamer’s own mind. After the Bible, students turn first to the ancient Greek context, where Aristotle addresses the common religious belief that dreams are prophetic visions sent by the gods, and then to the world of ancient Rome, where Artemidorus describes the dreams people have of the official state deities. Students then read a selection from Morton Kelsey’s God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, for a survey of the treatment of dreams by Christian theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther and Jewish theologians like Maimonides.
In the Psychological unit the central focus is on the religious background of Freud’s and Jung’s dream theories. Both Freud and Jung made extensive use of traditional religious concepts and methods, although Freud was much more reticent about it than Jung was. Students learn how deeply Freud was indebted to the Jewish dream interpretation, and how directly Jung’s archetypal psychology drew on both Gnostic Christianity and medieval alchemy.
In the Cross-Cultural unit students encounter three non-Western religious traditions, and the effect of this encounter is the broadening of the students’ appreciation for the great diversity of the world’s religions. The readings from Native American, Buddhist, and Islamic traditions give students the opportunity both to appreciate the unique integrity of each tradition and to discern meaningful parallels between the different traditions in their understanding of the religious significance of dreaming.
In the Cognitive Neurological unit a key concern is the ongoing debate about the significance of current sleep laboratory research for a religious understanding of dreams. Investigators like Crick, Mitchison, and Hobson argue that current neurological findings repudiate any claim for the religious basis of dreaming, while Solms, Kahan, and Laberge suggest that the most recent scientific findings actually open up new possibilities for appreciating the deeply creative potentials of dreaming. Ashbrook and Albright’s The Humanizing Brain helps students analyze this debate by giving them a set of conceptual tools to use in evaluating the “pro-” and “anti-” religious claims of contemporary scientific researchers.
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Science-Religion Dialogue
The first reading of the course is from Ian Barbour’s Religion in an Age of Science, with a focus on his models of the relationship between science and religion: conflict, separation, dialogue, and integration. A familiarity with these models will enable students to clarify the similarities and differences of the many different religious and scientific theories they will be encountering in the course. Students will find many examples of consonance between religious and scientific approaches to dreams (e.g., between the Bible and Jung, between Buddhism and modern sleep laboratory research) as well as many examples of dissonance (e.g., between Native American traditions and Hobson’s activation-synthesis hypothesis). The class will devote sustained discussion to the theological implications of current cognitive neuroscience, with particular attention to religious beliefs about the soul, God, and the afterlife. Attention will also be given to the complex relationship between religious and scientific epistemologies.
As the culminating book of the course, Ahbrook and Albright’s The Humanizing Brain provides students with a “state-of-the-art” rendering of the science-religion dialogue. The final essay project for the class challenges students to use Ashbrook and Albright’s model as a guide in making an original investigation into the dream series provided by an anonymous research subject to U.C. Santa Cruz social psychologist G. William Domhoff, author of Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach. The 3000+ dreams of this research subject are available to students on Domhoff’s web site, www.dreamresearch.net, and Domhoff will give a guest a lecture in the class to explain to students how they can design and conduct their own original research projects. The final essay will ask students to pick one key element from Ashbrook and Albright’s multifaceted model for integrating the physical and the imaginative (e.g., the neurobiology of faith, memory and meaning-making, the forebrain’s role in empathy and goal-formation) and examine the remarkable dream series on Domhoff’s web site for evidence of this element.
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Historical Perspectives
The course follows a chronological order from the earliest dream explorations of Western civilization to the most recent, cutting-edge findings of cognitive neuroscience. The historical trajectory of the course demonstrates to students the falsity of the popular misconception that in the past people held absurdly irrational and superstitious views of dreams. Students see in the Bible, Aristotle, and Artemidorus, as well as in the Cross-Cultural material from Native American, Buddhist, and Islamic cultures, that there are many striking parallels between past and present-day views of dreaming. At the same time, students are encouraged to reflect on the distinctive features of the world in the 21st century, and to identify the truly unique and original contributions of contemporary researchers to an understanding of the essential nature of dreaming.
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Intellectual Humility
It is impossible to teach a course on dreams without a deep sense of intellectual humility. By their very nature dreams defy easy analysis and simple explanation. Initially, most students struggle with the baffling complexity of human dream experience, and some of the students complain that there’s no way to find any certainty or objectivity with such a subject. But then, as the class goes on, they come to see that their demand for strict, unambiguous certainty is not appropriate in this realm of study; they gradually realize that a humbler, more nuanced and open-minded perspective is required to understand a phenomenon as richly varied and profoundly complex as dreaming. One of my great joys in teaching this course is to help students see that this humbler intellectual perspective is valuable not only in the study of dreams, but in any realm of life where ultimate questions of meaning, value, and purpose are central.
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Course Design
What follows is a meeting-by-meeting syllabus for the 15 two-hour sessions of the course, with required readings, topics for discussion, assignments, and a list of recommended texts.
First Meeting:
Introduction.
Reading: Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science, Chapter 1.
Topics for discussion:
The study of religion and science
Barbour’s 4 models of the relationship between science and religion
What are dreams?
Basic facts about mammalian sleep patterns
Overview of the course
Instructions on keeping sleep and dream journals
Second Meeting:
Historical/Theological Unit #1
Readings: The Bible: Genesis 28, 32, 37, 40-41; Numbers 12; Deuteronomy 13; I Kings 3; I Samuel 3; Job 7, 33; Jeremiah 23, 29; Daniel 2, 4; Matthew 1-2, 27.
Topics for discussion:
Ancient Near Eastern beliefs about dreams
Dreams as a source of divine revelation
Nightmares
Prophetic dreams
Symbols and interpretation
Third Meeting:
Historical/Theological Unit #2
Readings: Aristotle, “On Dreams,” “On Prophesizing by Dreams”; Artemidorus, Oneirocriticon, Chapter 1; Morton Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, Chapter 6.
Topics for discussion:
Greek philosophical views of dreams
Aristotle’s naturalistic explanation
Artemidorus’s dream taxonomy
Early scientific methods of dream study
Dreaming, thought, and symbolism
Dreams and sexual desire
“Folk” beliefs about dreams
Christian skepticism toward dreams
Written assignment: 3-4 page essay examining the historical/theological theories regarding one of the following questions: the meaning of nightmares; the nature of prophetic dreams; the practice of dream interpretation; the physical causes of dreaming.
Fourth Meeting:
Psychological Unit #1
Readings: “Sigmund Freud Discovers the Secret of Dreams” (Chapter 2, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, Kelly Bulkeley).
Topics for discussion:
Freud’s training as a scientist
Freud’s religious background
Consciousness and the unconscious
Wish-fulfillment
Symbols and interpretation
Psychoanalysis and the “fantasy” of religion
Psychoanalysis as a science
Fifth Meeting:
Psychological Unit #2
Reading: “Carl Jung Descends into the Collective Unconscious” (Chapter 3, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, Kelly Bulkeley).
Topics for discussion:
The Freud-Jung relationship
Jung’s training as a scientist
Jung’s religious background
Archetypes, the collective unconscious, and individuation
Psychology as a kind of “secular religion”
Jungian psychology as a science
Written assignment: 3-4 page essay testing Freudian and Jungian methods of interpretation by applying them to either a) a sample dream provided by the instructor, or b) one of the students’ own dreams.
Sixth Meeting:
Cross-Cultural Unit #1
Reading: Lee Irwin, The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains, Chapters 1-7.
Topics for discussion:
Dreaming and cultural context
Native American religious beliefs and practices
Physical and emotional healing
Dream rituals
Basic Native American observations of dream phenomenology
Comparisons with Western theories
Seventh Meeting:
Cross-Cultural Unit #2
Reading: Serinity Young, Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, Practice, Chapters 1, 5-10.
Topics for discussion:
Buddhist religious beliefs and practices
Theories of the soul
Medical uses of dream interpretation
Dream rituals
Basic Buddhist observations of dream phenomenology
Comparisons with Western and Native American theories
Eighth Meeting:
Cross-Cultural Unit #3
Reading: Marcia Hermansen, “The Study of Dreams and Vision in Islam” (Special issue of the journal Religion (1997; Vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 1-64)).
Topics for discussion:
Islamic religious beliefs and practices
The influence of the Bible, Aristotle, and Artemidorus
Classifications of dreaming
Mystical visions
Dream rituals
Basic Islamic observations of dream phenomenology
Written Assignment: 3-4 page essay taking two non-Western cultures and carefully analyzing and comparing their basic theories about the origin, function, and meaning of dreams.
Ninth Meeting:
Cognitive Neurological Unit #1
Reading: “Sleep Laboratories, REM Sleep, and Dreaming” and “Experimental Psychology and Dreaming” (Chapters 5 and 6 of An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, Kelly Bulkeley).
Topics for discussion:
Aserinsky and Kleitman’s discovery of REM sleep
REM and nonREM sleep
Evolutionary benefits of REM sleep
Hobson’s activation-synthesis model
Crick and Mitchison’s reverse-learning model
The Hobson-Solms debate: are dreaming and REM sleep isomorphic?
Bottom-up vs. top-down theories of dream formation
Tenth Meeting:
Cognitive Neurological Unit #2
Reading: Tracey Kahan and Stephen Laberge, “Lucid Dreaming as Metacognition: Implications for Cognitive Science.”
Prof. Kahan will give a guest lecture in this meeting.)
Topics for discussion:
Historical and cross-cultural reports of dreaming metacognition
Self-awareness in the dream state
Dreaming and consciousness
The metacognitive aspects of religious contemplative practices
Eleventh Meeting:
Cognitive Neurological Unit #3
Field trip: The class will travel a few minutes north to Stanford University’s Sleep Laboratory, administered by Dr. William Dement. Students will have the chance to see firsthand the methods and techniques used to conduct neuroscientific sleep and dream research.
Twelfth Meeting:
Cognitive Neurological Unit #4
Reading: James Ashbrook and Carol Albright, The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet, Introduction and Chapters 1-3.
Topics for discussion:
The current state of neuroscientific research
Neurobiology and faith
Instinctual drives to know, relate, and make meaning
The brain as physical and relational
Conceptual preparation for final essay project
Thirteenth Meeting:
Cognitive Neurological Unit #5
Reading: James Ashbrook and Carol Albright, The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet, Chapters 4-7.
Topics for discussion:
The reptilian brain, the mammalian brain, and REM sleep
Memory in dreaming
Right brain, left brain, and dream phenomenology
The forebrain, empathy, and creative imagination
Conceptual preparation for final essay project
Fourteenth Meeting:
Final Review #1
Reading: G. William Domhoff, Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach, Chapters 1 and 9.
Prof. Domhoff will give a guest lecture in this meeting.)
Topics for discussion:
The quantitative analysis of dream content
Differences in the dreams of males and females
Differences in the dreams of children and adults
Differences in the dreams of people from different cultures
The application of quantitative content analysis to the students’ final essay project
Fifteenth Meeting:
Final Review #2
No reading.
In this meeting students share the preliminary results of their research for their final essays and offer each other suggestions about new avenues to pursue and new conceptual models to apply. The basic assignment for the final essay is to make an original analysis of a subset of the 3000+ dreams provided by an anonymous research subject on G. William Domhoff’s web site, www.dreamresearch.net. Students are required to use one key theme from Ashbrook and Albright’s The Humanizing Brain (e.g., the neurobiology of faith, memory and meaning-making, the forebrain’s role in empathy and goal-formation) to orient their analysis of the religious and scientific dimensions of the subject’s dreams. Students are also required to make substantive use of material from the historical/theological, psychological, and cross-cultural units of the class. The essay will be graded according to the originality of the research, the quality of analysis, the clarity of writing, and the breadth of theoretical integration.
Recommended texts
In addition to the required texts, the following books will be on reserve at Santa Clara University’s Orradre Library to supplement the students’ investigations.
Austin, J. 1998. Zen and the Brain: Toward and Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness (MIT Press).
Barbour, I. 1974. Myths, Models and Paradigms (Harper & Row).
________. 1997. Religion and Science (HarperCollins).
Barrett, D. (editor). 1996. Trauma and Dreams (Harvard University Press).
Brown, W. and Murphy, N. (editors). 1998. Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Fortress).
Bulkeley, K. 2000. Transforming Dreams (John Wiley and Sons).
________. 1999. Visions of the Night (SUNY Press).
Freud, S. 1965. The Interpretation of Dreams (Avon Books).
Hartmann, E. 1998. Dreams and Nightmares (Plenum).
Hobson, J. Allan. 1988. The Dreaming Brain (Basic Books).
Hunt, H. 1989. The Multiplicity of Dreams (Yale University Press).
Jedrej, M.C. and Shaw, R. 1993. Dreams, Religion, and Society in Africa (E.J. Brill).
Jung, C.G. 1965. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Vintage).
Moffitt, A., Kramer, M., and Hoffmann, R. (editors). 1993. The Functions of Dreaming (SUNY Press).
O’Flaherty, W.D. 1984. Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (University of Chicago Press).
Russell, R.J. (editor). 1998. Neuroscience and the Person (University of Notre Dame Press).
Solms, M. 1997. The Neuropsychology of Dreams (Lawrence Erlbaum).
Shulman, D. and Stroumsa, G. 1999. Dream Cultures (Oxford University Press).
Tilbey, A. 1992. Soul: God, Self, and the New Cosmology (Doubleday).
Tedlock, B. (editor). 1987. Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Investigations (Cambridge University Press).
Academic Setting: Relevant Training and Experience of Course Director
Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., received his doctorate in Religion and Psychological Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1992, his M.T.S. in Christianity and Culture from Harvard Divinity School in 1986, and his B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Stanford University in 1984. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the Graduate Theological Union, John F. Kennedy University, and most recently at Santa Clara Univesity. “Dreaming: Religious and Scientific Approaches” is a course he has taught at SCU since 1996.
Dr. Bulkeley is the author of several books on the subject of dreams, most recently Transforming Dreams (John Wiley & Son, 2000), Visions of the Night (SUNY Press, 1999), and An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming (Praeger, 1997). He is a former President of the Association for the Study of Dreams, the world’s largest multidisciplinary organization devoted to the study of dreams, and he is also the Secretary-Treasurer of the Person, Culture and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion. He is a Contributing Editor of the journal Dreaming and a sub-editor in the Religion and Psychology area for Religious Studies Review.
Dr. Bulkeley attended the January 2000 Science and Religion Course Workshop in Berkeley, California, and he is currently working with Lisa Stenmark, Western Regional Director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, to organize a conference in Los Angeles in February 2001 on the theme, “Religious and Scientific Research on Dreaming: New Frontiers.” This conference promises to be milestone in the religious and scientific dialogue surrounding the subject of dreams, with speakers from several scientific disciplines and many different religious traditions gathering together to share ideas, discuss key topics, and speculate about future directions in dream research.
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