The Wilderness of Dreams

Download or read book The Wilderness of Dreams written by Kelly Bulkeley and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1994-02-08 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study of the religious dimensions of dreams shows how modern dream research supports and enriches our understanding of religiously meaningful dreams. The Wilderness of Dreams does four things that no other work on dreams has done. First, it surveys the whole range of modern dream research—not just the work of depth psychologists and neuroscientists, but also the findings of anthropologists, content analysts, cognitive psychologists, creative artists, and lucid dreaming researchers. Second, it draws upon new advances in hermeneutic philosophy in order to clarify basic questions about how to interpret dreams. Third, it develops a careful, well-grounded notion of religious meaning—the "root metaphor" concept—to show that seeking religious meanings in dreams is not mere superstition. And fourth, the book reflects on the question of why modern Westerners are so interested in affirming, or debunking, the idea that dreams have religious meanings.