The Spirituality of Dreaming: Unlocking the Wisdom of Our Sleeping Selves (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781506483146)

Finalist for the Chanticleer International Book Awards 2023 in Mind & Spirit

Enhance your dreaming with groundbreaking research and wisdom from vivid dreamers throughout history, sacred texts, and the present day.

We're asleep almost a third of our lives. What if those sleeping hours hold wisdom, creativity, and even connection with the divine? What if our dreams offer spiritual insight and guidance--not just for ourselves, but for our communities?

In The Spirituality of Dreaming, leading dream scholar and expert Dr. Kelly Bulkeley brings us a set of time-honored methods to stimulate innate dreaming capacities and amplify their impact in our waking lives. Dreams have been a perennial source of spiritual insight and guidance across all cultures and religions throughout history, he asserts, but the sacred energy of our dreams has often remained untapped. Relying on years of research, data analysis, and interviews, Bulkeley offers wisdom and strategies from "big dreamers"--people who have vivid, intense dreams and remember them. He also distills the latest findings on dreams: the impact of digital technologies on our dreams, the phenomena of lucid dreaming and dreaming incubation, practices of dream-sharing, the creative role of dreams in cultural innovation, and the growing evidence that animals dream too.

In conversation with people who care about dreams and spirituality, Bulkeley makes a case for taking ourselves seriously as dreaming visionaries. By drawing on classic and contemporary works of theology, anthropology, and psychology, along with the latest dream research, Bulkeley maps the spiritual power of dreaming and argues that our dreams matter in ways we do not yet fully realize, both individually and collectively. Together we can learn how to unlock the sacred truths revealed within our sleeping selves.