Table of Contents

Introduction

Section I. Sleep
1. The evolution of sleep
2. The brain's paradoxical activities in sleep
3. The role of sleep in human health and development
4. Cultural practices of sleep through history

Section II. Ordinary Dreaming
5. Dream recall
6. Patterns in form and content
7. Continuities between dreaming and waking life
8. Discontinuities and metaphors

Section III. Big Dreams
9. Aggressive
10. Sexual
11. Gravitational
12. Mystical

Section IV. Religious Experiences
13. Demonic attack
14. Prophetic vision
15. Ritual healing
16. Contemplative practice

Conclusion
Appendix: Word search methods in the study of dreams
Index

About the Author

Kelly Bulkeley is Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He is former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Senior Editor of the APA journal Dreaming, and author of Dreaming in the World's Religions (2008).

Reviews

"Big Dreams will appeal to a wide cross-section of religious scholars as Bulkeley draws from scientific, historical, mythological, and literary sources to show how dreams influence religions..."--Reading Religion
"William James said that 'white crows' and 'mystics'--the anomalous and the extreme--helped us to understand the common and the ordinary in religious life. Recent claims have reversed this insight, dwelling on the ordinary and the everyday and writing off the extraordinary as statistical blips or 'anecdotes.' Kelly Bulkeley draws on a lifetime of erudition and his massive digital database to return us to the extreme cases, the 'black swans' of 'big dreams,' but
only after throwing much light on everything from the evolution of the brain and the neurochemistry of sleeping to the adaptiveness, meaningfulness, and playfulness of dreaming. Dreams, it turns out,
are not expressions of random neuronic stupidity. To the extent that they encourage us to imagine the possible, they are some of the deepest wellsprings of religious experience and the 'metacognitive potentials of human consciousness' itself."--Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms
"Bulkeley's erudite volume illuminates perspectives about dreams from the Upanishads through Thomas Aquinas, Charles Darwin, and Mircea Eliade to modern neuroscience and Dilbert. These lead to Bulkeley's own major ideas of dreams as play, and the distinction between the continuity of ordinary dreams vs. the discontinuity of big dreams. Novel and thought-provoking--I highly recommend it!"--Deirdre Barrett, author of The Committee of Sleep
"Bulkeley's highly original contribution approaches dreaming from its most intense and transformative varieties, avoiding the more normative but less consequential dreaming as illustrated daydream. This allows us to better understand both the prominent place of dream studies in the history of psychology and how it is that such dreams have played a major role in the cultural origins of human spirituality."--Harry T. Hunt, author of On the Nature of
Consciousness and Lives in Spirit
"Big Dreams is well written and provocative...[and] immediately earns classic status."-- CHOICE Reviews