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The Scribes of Sleep analyzes the dream journals of seven remarkable people -- Aelius Aristides, Myoe Shonin, Lucrecia de León, Emanuel Swedenborg, Benjamin Banneker, Anna Bonus Kingsford, and Wolfgang Pauli -- and employs an interdisciplinary approach to shed light on their meanings, drawing on data science, depth psychology, and religious studies.
List of contents
- I. Seven Dreamers and their Journals
- 1. Aelius Aristides: Devotee of the Healing God
- 2. Myoe Shonin: Extreme Visionary
- 3. Lucrecia de Leon: Prophet of an Empire's Doom
- 4. Emanuel Swedenborg: Mystical Scientist
- 5. Benjamin Banneker: Mapping the Heavens
- 6. Anna Kingsford: Spiritual Dynamo
- 7. Wolfgang Pauli: Quantum Physicist/Depth Psychologist
- II. Discovering Patterns of Content
- 8. Digital Methods of Analyzing Dreams
- 9. Baseline Patterns in Dream Content
- 10. Anomalous Patterns in Dream Content
- III. Interpreting Psychological Meaning
- 11. Psychoanalysis
- 12. Archetypal Psychology
- 13. Cultural Psychology
- IV. Exploring Dimensions of Religiosity
- 14. Individualism
- 15. Mysticism
- 16. Pluralism
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Kelly Bulkeley is director of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), a Senior Editor of the APA journal Dreaming, and a former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. He is the author of numerous books, including Dreaming in the World's Religions, Big Dreams, and Lucrecia the Dreamer.
Summary
Dream journals are a surprisingly powerful resource for psychological and spiritual discovery.
Contemporary dream science has shown that, as much as we can learn from single dreams, far more information can be derived from analyzing a series of dreams over time. Many have intuitively understood this point, and carefully recorded their dreams for years, even decades, drawing profound guidance from the patterns they discovered. The Scribes of Sleep is the first book to gather historical and cross-cultural evidence showing the value of dream journals as potent sources of healing, religious experience, and metaphysical insight. Dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley profiles seven remarkable people who kept dream journals: Aelius Aristides, Myoe Shonin, Lucrecia de León, Emanuel Swedenborg, Benjamin Banneker, Anna Bonus Kingsford, and Wolfgang Pauli. Because dreams are so complex and multi-faceted, especially when viewed in a series, Bulkeley employs an interdisciplinary approach to shed light on their meanings, drawing on data science, depth psychology, and religious studies. As the findings of these different methods are woven together and they begin to illuminate each other, it becomes clear that the practice of keeping a dream journal stimulates several specific qualities of religiosity, prompting the dreamers to move in more individualist, mystical, and pluralistic directions-towards becoming a free spirit.
Additional text
The Scribes of Sleep offers readers an introduction to the study of dream accounts using three methodologies as follows: digital analysis of content, psychology, and the study of religion.
