Dream researcher, author of "The Spirituality of Dreaming," director of the Sleep and Dream Database. Everything about dreaming interests me. Everything.
Estacada, Oregon
Joined May 2013
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"Dreaming does have a function that can be related to, but is not the same as, the function of REM sleep... Dreaming has a quasi-therapeutic function. Dreaming, like therapy, is the making of connections in a safe place" - Ernest Hartmann, "Dreams and Nightmares" (1998), p. 13
"The transfer of the cult [of Asclepius] to a new locality was almost always effected by transporting one of the sacred serpents to it, i.e., the god in his theriomorphic form, from the hieron ("sanctuary") at Epidaurus" - C.A. Meier, "Healing Dream and Ritual" (2009), p. 10
"We may forget our thoughts of the past, our opinions, the garments that we wore, or even the friends whom we loved, but memory holds our most significant dreams from our very childhood" - Katherine Taylor Craig, "The Fabric of Dreams" (1918), p. 9
"Dreaming with the Machines": a new post for the Stanford U. Press blog that Maja Gutman-Music and I co-wrote, discussing the dynamics between dreaming intelligence and artificial intelligence
blog.sup.org/digital-project…
Kant says the following about poetry, "the first rank of all the arts," in his Critique of Judgement (1790) - can't we say the same of dreaming?
"It expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination... It invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty--free, spontaneous, and independent of determination by nature--of regarding and judging nature as phenomenon in the light of aspects which nature of itself does not afford us in experience, either for the senses or the understanding, and of employing it accordingly on behalf of, and as a sort of schema for, the supersensible. It plays with semblance, which it produces at will, but not as an instrument of deception; for its avowed pursuit is merely one of play, which, however, understanding may turn to good account and employ for its own purpose" - (section 53)
Here is the new Weird Studies podcast (#220) on Dostoevsky's short story "A Dream of a Ridiculous Man" from the recent Dreams Symposium at the Brooklyn Public Library organized by Alisa Minyukova and me from the Dream Mapping Project
open.spotify.com/episode/4kh…
"Anything said about the possible meanings in someone else's dream is always a projection, a reflection of the interior life and symbol dramas of the person making the comment, more than it is a reflection of the possible 'objective' significance of the dream itself" - J. Taylor
The Dream Symposium 2026, Sept. 25-27 at the Brooklyn Public Library, will include a talk with David Pena-Guzman, author of When Animals Dream, plus a live performance by Yuki Kawahisa based on the Japanese classic "Ten Nights of Dreams" - it's all free!
bklynlibrary.org/calendar/dr…
"The human instinct is to attach to dreams the significance of reality. It is man's first reading of the phenomenon--and sometimes his last... Dreams are thus in large part the fashioners of early religions" -
A.J.J. Ratcliff, "A History of Dreams" (1923), 27-28
On the latest episode of the "Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse" podcast, I speak with host Sean O'Grady about the psychology of apocalypse, and try to answer his question of whether AI systems can dream...
from min 6 to min 12 of the episode
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
The balusters and handrails have been installed on the second floor of the Dream Library - a very good sign, it means the finish process is nearing completion...
