Multiplicities
of Dreaming and Waking Consciousness: Scientific and Religious
Perspectives
Kelly Bulkeley, PhD, is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate
Theological Union and teaches in JFKU’s Dream Studies Program in
the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a Past President of IASD, and is
author of The Wilderness of Dreams and The Wondering
Brain, co-author of Dreaming Beyond Death, and editor
of Dreams: A Reader and Soul, Psyche, Brain.
J.F. Pagel, MS/MD,
Colorado, USA, is Board Certified in Sleep Disorders Medicine and
Behavioral Sleep Medicine, and a co-author of the American Academy
of Sleep Medicine training programs in Obstructive Sleep Apnea,
and other disorders. He has authored over 80 papers on sleep and
dreaming, including dream and nightmare recall, dream use in
filmmaking, and the body/mind interface.
David Kahn, PhD, is an
Instructor in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School in Boston,
Massachusetts. He has been working in the field of dream research
since 1990, and is IASD’s current Board Chair. He has published on
the neuropsychology and the neurobiology of dreaming, and on
several other dream-related subjects.
Bonnelle Lewis Strickling,
PhD, RCC, is a Jungian psychotherapist and spiritual director
in private practice in Canada. Her forthcoming book is Dreaming
of the Divine. She is a clinical associate of the Department
of Psychology at Simon Fraser University. She has given workshops
and seminars on dreams and the interface between psychology and
spirituality in Canada, the US, and England.
Abstract
The interface between brain and
mind is a border crossed by dreaming. Most attempts that have been
made to approach that border have been conceptually directed from
the perspectives of brain, mind, or soul. Such unidirectional
approaches have had limited ability to describe the complexity of
the contrary paradigms or to explain the role of dreaming in
accessing this border. For religious believers throughout history,
dreaming is a means of communion with the Divine. For
psychoanalysts, dreams are the royal path to the unconscious. For
virtually all neuroscientists today, dreams are understood to
occur in all stages of sleep but are generally most vivid during
the REM stage of sleep. For some neuroscientists dream content
helps individuals to better understand themselves, while to others
dream content makes up the screensaver left each morning on our
neural computer.
Unidirectional approaches are typically used to discount or
amalgamate the contrary perspectives. Yet each type of approach is
likely to prove meaningless in understanding dreaming and the
mind/brain interface without the other. Mind—thought, emotion, and
belief—is the evidence for the functioning of the body organ that
is the brain. From the perspective of either mind or brain, dreams
are our access to this border. And both brain and mind are
necessary concepts in trying to understand the full creative
potential of human life, a potential that the world’s religions
have tried to both stimulate and control, with dreaming being a
primary wellspring of spiritual belief, practice, and experience.
Scientific dream research is fundamentally incomplete if it fails
to take these historical and cross-cultural religious perspectives
into account.
This
panel session will consider recent trends in dream research as
possible avenues for crossing all those borders, exploring what
scientists call “structural alternative concepts of nervous system
organization" and what religious studies scholars call “the
emergence of the human spirit.” The panelists will share their
different contributions to understanding "The Multiplicities of
Dreaming and Waking Consciousness," and the main questions to be
discussed include these: What's the best way to correlate
conscious experience with neurophysiological functioning? What can
dream research tell us about alternative modes of neural
organization and their corresponding states of consciousness? What
are the factors involved in shifting from one mode to another? How
does dreaming relate to meditation and other non-pathological
mental processes? What are the implications of such a pluralistic
view of brain-mind activity for clinical practice? For
developmental psychology? For ethics, art, and spirituality?
