You’ve been promised some time off from work over the holiday season, so here’s a suggestion: get some sleep!

We mean it—for Christmas, gift yourself an extra hour or two of sleep a night because sleep deprivation has dreadful long-term effects on your health—and happiness: The Atlantic reports: “Australian scholars studying young women found that a year of frequent sleep difficulties predicted the onset of depression and anxiety in later years.”

Furthermore, glucose tolerance falls and stress hormones rise if you’re not getting enough rest, which can lead to weight gain and increased anxiety. And recent research published in ScienceDaily shows “for the first time that important immune cells called microglia—which play an important role in reorganizing the connections between nerve cells, fighting infections, and repairing damage—are … primarily active while we sleep.”

That aforementioned Atlantic article also offered these five practices for better sleep: 1) Darken your environment before bed, and sleep in complete darkness. 2) Cut out screen use, and especially social media, in the hours before sleeping. 3) Just go to bed! So that you get more hours in the sack. 4) Eat less junk food, particularly late in the day. 5) Get more exercise (though not right before bedtime, when it can set you buzzing).

Alrighty, then.

Today, Kelly Bulkeley is here to talk with Kristine Morris about another aspect of sleep that plays a huge role in your overall well-being: dreams. The author of The Spirituality of Dreaming, Kelly says that he considers dreaming a spiritual practice because “it’s hard to beat the natural wisdom of dreaming. Whether it’s your central [spiritual] practice or a helpful complement to your other spiritual pursuits, dreaming is specifically tailored to your life, your concerns, your challenges. It’s like having a free, full-time personal guru who knows you intimately, cares deeply about your well-being, and is willing to tell you hard but honest truths about what you need to do to grow into your full potential.”

Happy holidays! Enjoy the interview.

Your insightful book reveals that sleep, which takes up about a third of our lives, is not passive but rather an active state and the source of creativity, wisdom, and connection with the divine. It shows why dreamers and dream interpreters have been honored throughout history, and why dreaming, of all spiritual practices, is the most democratic—it’s free and accessible to all, holds insight and guidance for us and our communities, and is just as powerful and relevant today as it ever was.

Please tell us something about your early life and studies. What drew you to devote yourself to researching dreams and their relationship to spirituality?

As a child I had no particular interest in dreams, but in adolescence a series of hyper-vivid nightmares literally grabbed my attention and persuaded/forced me to become more aware of the unconscious dimensions of my mind. When I reflected on these disturbing nightmares and thought about their meanings, the subsequent dreams began changing in ways that made me feel engaged in an open-ended dialogue with another part of myself. That experience was revelatory and helped set me on the path I still follow today, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s observation that, “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

What do you consider to have been your most meaningful dream, and how has it guided you?

One of the nightmares I mentioned above involved an “evil alien” not just killing me but dissecting my body, literally disintegrating me. It was quite a vivid symbol of psycho-spiritual transformation, and later in graduate school when I read Mircea Eliade’s book Shamanism, it struck me that dreams like the one I experienced include many elements of a ritual of shamanic initiation—with the exception that, in my case at least, there was no cultural reintegration of the newly initiated person after their transformation during the ritual ordeal. Alas, modern Westerners don’t have spaces for that kind of thing, outside a therapist’s office. And I wasn’t mentally ill, and was certainly not a shaman! I was just a big dreamer trying to understand what that meant. In this sense, my career has been devoted to creating and supporting cultural traditions for dreamers living within the modern West, i.e., providing what I did not have when I was struggling to understand my own experiences.

How has the study of dreams changed during the course of your career?

Some questions no longer vex people the way they once did. Is Freud right or wrong? (Both.) Is Jung a mystic? (Yes, but so what.) Is REM sleep identical with dreaming? (No, but they’re closely related.) In recent years more attention has gone toward lucid dreaming and various technologies for influencing dreams. Although I’m intrigued by these new developments (which are not really new but have long cross-cultural histories), my concern is the effect they have of diminishing the autonomy of dreaming, its essential wildness, and replacing it with conscious intentions and efforts at ego control. The big insight from my adolescent nightmares centered on the spontaneous visionary qualities of dreaming, the opposite of what seems to motivate a lot of research today.

How can we be sure that our dreams are more than nonsensical stories crafted by a mind left to run wild, without the imposition of logic and reason?

Who says they aren’t? Take out the “nonsensical,” and you have done a fine job of characterizing my view that dreaming is a kind of play, the play of the imagination in sleep.

You wrote that dreams convey their messages via metaphor, so it seems that a familiarity with the language of metaphor is required in order to decode their messages. To what degree does metaphor transfer cross-culturally?

Even dreams with an obvious literal meaning can also have subtle metaphorical meanings. One of the fun things about dreams is how they bring us into contact with universal metaphors that relate to human life at its most basic level. This is why dream research has always been closely connected to anthropology, evolutionary biology, and the history of religions (e.g., Eliade), because in dreams we can see in real time these collective images and meanings taking shape within individual lives.

How deep might one go with only intuition as a guide to understanding their dreams?

Very deep! One of the themes of the book is that all of us have a natural aptitude for interpreting dreams, which we can discover if we just give it a try. Your intuition is a reliable guide with dreams; intuition and dreaming might even be two sides of the same process. And like any other skill, you get better the more you practice it.

Along with your book, what resources might you suggest to help those who want to make dreaming and dream interpretation a part of their spiritual practice?

A dream journal is the most powerful tool for discovering the potential insights of your dreams. Whether it is with a hand-written diary, an artist’s sketchbook, or a journaling app like “Elsewhere.to” (which I have been helping develop), the best resource for spiritual reflection is a large collection of dreams that you can explore for recurrent themes and unusual anomalies.

What would you say to someone whose dreams are frightening or contain a disturbing event that the person experiences, or sees happen to another, the next day?

That can be scary, for sure. It’s usually best with disturbing dreams to share them with someone else, or at least write them down, draw them, anything to put the dream outside yourself so you don’t feel trapped or paralyzed by it. Once in an external form of some kind, the dreams can be studied and reflected on for possible meanings without overwhelming you. The mind during sleep can pick up on possible future developments in the world, but coincidences do happen, so the best thing with a potentially precognitive dream is simply to keep a close watch for any follow-up dreams that seem related. What’s unclear in one dream will often become easier to understand in light of subsequent dreams.

You wrote that, throughout history, those in power have controlled the right of workers, slaves, women (especially, women of color) to adequate rest. Today, workers still struggle over rest-related issues like sick leave; vacations; parental leave; the amount of time worked in a day, week, or month; compensation for overtime; and a realistic living wage that eliminates the need to work more than one job. And Western society has a tendency to view those who actually take their vacations and try to include daily down-time as lazy slackers. Why are we still seeing such attitudes and issues today, and what is being done by and for workers to secure their rights to adequate rest?

It’s a race today between sleep science, which is showing ever more clearly the importance of sleep for personal and collective health, and the globally wired information economy, which is always ON and perpetually stimulating, perpetually demanding our attention and energy. I’m afraid science is losing the race! The ethos of modern tech culture, from top CEOs down to the coders and engineers, is profoundly antagonistic toward sleep. A sleep-deprived world is being created in their image, which we must resist not only in our personal lives but also collectively in calling out social and economic systems that disrupt the sleep of large populations.

We have examples of biblical figures like Joseph and Daniel, “big dreamers” whose dreams and interpretations of dreams are said to have played a major role in the world events of their day. Who are today’s “big dreamers” and what impact are they having on current events?

At the moment, I find the most “big dreaming” energy among artists. As a group, artists tend to be unusually open to input from their unconscious, and of course they are highly skilled at conveying their inner visions to collective audiences. When Jane Campion, for example, talks about dreams in relation to the making of her film “The Power of the Dog,” it helps create the culture of dreaming I spoke about earlier. The same is true with other artists (e.g., David Lynch, Maya Angelou, Miley Cyrus) who publicly share their dreams and create dream-related works.

But that might seem like weak tea in the face of all the world’s problems right now. In this sense, the goal of the book is to inspire big dreamers at the grassroots to recognize themselves as active participants in this vital project of legitimizing dreams as a source of collective insight and problem-solving. No one is going to ride to our rescue, it’s ultimately up to us. Who are today’s big dreamers? Look in the mirror.

Like any spiritual practice, that of cultivating and interpreting dreams requires discipline, and your book suggests ways to become a “big dreamer.” Please share what you’ve found most helpful, and why the practice demands humility.

Here’s the analogy I like: if you go into a forest hoping to see interesting wildlife, you need to be quiet, patient, and willing to receive whatever the forest gives you. If you’re too noisy and make too many big moves, it’s unlikely any creatures will appear and interact with you. (My first book was titled The Wilderness of Dreams.) To enhance your powers as a dreamer, you need to get out of your own way. You need to suspend ego expectations and critical judgment, and simply open yourself to whatever your dreaming imagination brings you. The great paradox of spiritual dreaming is that you receive the greatest gifts when you let go of your conscious intentions and adopt an attitude of humility and openness to whatever comes.

How do you incorporate dreaming into your personal spiritual practice, and how it has made a difference in your life?

I keep a regular dream journal and I share my dreams regularly with friends and colleagues. For me and many others, these activities amount to a contemplative practice. Whatever I may learn from a particular dream, it’s the practice of consistently engaging with my dreaming imagination that feels spiritually nourishing. In this sense, reflecting on dreams is like mental yoga: it helps keep you flexible, toned, and ready for the challenges of waking life. I’m hardly a perfect person, but thanks to close reflection on my dreams, I do feel well-grounded and confident in who I am and what I’m called to do in this life.

If one does not have a community of others also committed to dreaming as a spiritual practice, where might one go to share, ask questions, learn, and grow?

First of all, you are always the best expert on your own dreams; seeking the advice of others is less important than developing trust in your own intuition. The temptation is to seek guidance online, but I would avoid that, at least not until you have tried to find other dreamers who live near you. Few people besides nerds like me are open about their interest in dreams, so you need to poke around and ask some questions to find your kindred spirits. But they’re out there! And when you let others know that you are curious about the realm of dreaming, the dreamers in your community will find you. Build it and they will come.

Your book suggests that it’s especially in times of crisis and threat that our capacity for dreaming becomes most relevant as an “emergency response system” that can guide us through frightening situations. Please give an example of how this has played out in your experience or that of those you know.

Sure, another book project about to come out is called 2020 Dreams, a work of digital scholarship published by Stanford University Press. For the project, we recruited a small group of people to keep dream journals during the year 2020, to track the correlations between their dreams and public events of the coming year. When the project began, we knew an election was coming; we did not know that 2020 would also bring the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and relentless wildfires. Several of the participants were active in an alternative spiritual practice—yoga, meditation, wicca, astrology, etc. Unlike many people who were deeply disturbed and emotionally overwhelmed by the events of 2020, most of the people in our group did not have that reaction. They remained calm and balanced, even as they suffered serious pandemic-related problems. As several of them told us, their dreams and spiritual practices had already prepared them for a world that was less stable and reliable than conventional wisdom would have us believe. Rather than feeling shock and confusion, they were comfortable with dramatic changes and shifts in reality, and they could look beyond the frightening disruptions of the present to envision better possibilities in the future. This supported my hunch that close attention to dreams and one’s inner life generally can provide psychological resilience and adaptive insights during times of collective crisis.

You wrote that the truth about dreams as experienced by many Indigenous and ancient cultures is being illuminated in current research showing “that we do not dream for ourselves alone; we dream for each other, for our community, for our times, and for the future.” Please share an example or two from ancient and/or current cultures.

This is a tough concept for modern Westerners to accept because it suggests that our minds are not entirely our minds. As historical examples, sacred texts from Islam include instances of Muhammad and his followers sharing dreams to help discern the future path toward survival for their community; and as I mention in the book, the 19th century Native American healer Smohalla had a series of dreams that stimulated a spiritual revival among his people during a time of existential crisis. In the present day, several of the reports in the 2020 Dreams project involve themes and images that the dreamers themselves indicated were not purely personal but were directly speaking to the collective threats afflicting the world.

What words of encouragement do you have for someone who is considering dreaming and dream interpretation as a spiritual practice?

It’s hard to beat the natural wisdom of dreaming. Whether it’s your central practice or a helpful complement to your other spiritual pursuits, dreaming is specifically tailored to your life, your concerns, your challenges. It’s like having a free, full-time personal guru who knows you intimately, cares deeply about your well-being, and is willing to tell you hard but honest truths about what you need to do to grow into your full potential.

What new project or book do you currently have in the works?

So many! I’m upgrading and improving my online research archive, “The Sleep and Dream Database;” working with tech colleagues on the “Elsewhere.to” dream journaling app; collaborating with international artists on the “Dream Mapping Project;” writing The Moons of Mars, volume 2 of a sci-fi series; preparing a second edition of my 2008 book Dreaming in the World’s Religions; and beginning work on two new books, The Dreamers of Shakespeare and Philosophers of Dreaming: Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche.

Kristine Morris
December 22, 2023

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