The First 100 Dreams by Kelly Bulkeley

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union and teaches in the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University, both in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and is the author, most recently, of American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else. His complete biography follows this article.


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People’s dreams of Hillary Clinton frequently show her as friendly and likeable, with an admirable willingness to help others. But compared to dreams of Barack Obama, the Hillary dreams are darker and more negative. They include more aggression than the Barack dreams and more emotions of fear, confusion, and sadness. The Barack dreams have some negative elements, too, but they have an almost equally high number of friendly interactions and many more happy emotions and lucky/magical events—the very qualities I’ve found in previous research to define “mystical” dreams.

Before explaining these findings in more detail, I’d like to thank Sheila Heti for creating this excellent dream collection. Her website offers a unique public forum for discussing dreams, and the dream reports themselves provide wonderful raw material for thinking about the political psychology of the 2008 U.S. Presidential race. The fact that Sheila is Canadian adds an ironic twist to these quirky commentaries on the American political process.

The total number of Hillary and Barack dreams has just passed 100 for each candidate, and I believe that’s a minimal threshold number for identifying significant patterns in dream content. In looking at anecdotal reports like these, it’s risky to focus too much attention on single dreams because we don’t have enough information from the individuals to confirm our interpretive hunches. But if we look at a large number of dreams, broad patterns start to emerge that can be compared to other sources of dream research, giving us an empirical foundation for making inferences about what may or may not be going on in terms of meaning and significance. (For more on research methods, see the note below.)

This analysis is still a work in progress. So far I’ve noticed several themes and patterns that certainly appear to connect the first 100 dreams with prominent features of each candidate’s campaign activities and public persona. That’s ultimately what makes these dreams so interesting: they reflect the passionate personal engagement many people feel towards Hillary and Barack, and they tell us what aspects of the campaign are making a particularly strong impact on the public imagination.

These are some of the content patterns I find most intriguing:


FRIENDLINESS

Both sets of dreams have an unusually high frequency of friendly social interactions. Seventy six of the Barack dreams include at least one friendly act, as do eighty of the Hillary dreams (compared to 40% of the 1000 dreams gathered by Hall and Van de Castle, 1966; HVDC after this). The most common theme in all these dreams is the dreamer and the candidate engaged in some kind of friendly behavior—hanging out together, talking, playing games, helping each other with problems. This seems like an accurate indication of the psychological depth of support enjoyed by both candidates.


AGGRESSION

Aggressive interactions, both physical and verbal, appear in 53 of the Hillary dreams and 39 of the Barack dreams (compared to 46% of the HVDC dreams). Sixteen of the Hillary dreams and nine of the Barack dreams include some kind of physical aggression; Barack is the mostly the victim of physical aggression, while Hillary is equally its victim and instigator. These frequencies suggest the perception of vulnerability and/or lack of aggressiveness in Barack and a confirmation of Hillary’s campaign claims to be a fighter, though not always in ways the dreamer appreciates.


EMOTIONS

This is an especially difficult aspect of dream content to measure. I use the HVDC system of five emotions (fear, anger, sadness, confusion, happiness) which, while not perfect, at least allows researchers a quick way of surveying the emotional terrain of a large set of dreams. Analyzed in these terms, the most frequent emotions in the Hillary dreams are fear (34) and confusion (34), followed by happiness (23), sadness (16), and anger (15). For Barack, the most frequent emotion is happiness (35), then confusion (28), fear (20), anger (16), and sadness (9). When compared to the HVDC dreams, what stands out is the high happiness and low fear in the Barack dreams and the high confusion in the Hillary dreams. No one would deny, I think, that Hillary’s campaign has been surprised by Obama’s rise and unsure of how to regain her once formidable lead. Nor could anyone who’s attended an Obama rally dispute the idea that he’s trying to banish people’s fears and stimulate their hopes. Perhaps one could say the Barack dreamers are too happy and not scared enough—that’s a charge made by his “realist” critics.


GOOD FORTUNES

A “good fortune,” in terms of content analysis, is anything magical or unusually beneficial that happens to a character. Seven of the Hillary dreams have some kind of good fortune, a slightly lower proportion than the 12% in the HVDC dreams. Nineteen of the Barack dreams include a good fortune, a relatively high number that seems plausibly related to his aura of extraordinary potential and transformative power. It could also, following Bill Clinton, reflect an association between Barack and the “fairy tale” qualities of his candidacy.


SEXUAL DREAMS

There are 11 dreams with at least one sexual interaction in the Hillary set and 9 in the dreams of Barack, which seems about average to me. All but one of the Barack sexual dreams involve him and the dreamer, and I suspect these dreams symbolize the intimate sense of personal connection his supporters feel with him. Nearly half the sexual activities in the Hillary dreams do not involve her directly, but rather her husband Bill. No surprise there—public perception of Hillary is still dogged by memories of Bill’s sexual misbehavior.


SHADOWS

The dreams also reveal the flaws and weaknesses people perceive in the two candidates. In several of the Hillary dreams the dreamer feels compelled to lie to Hillary, to hide from her the dreamer’s true feelings, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of pity. This can’t be a good sign of the trust and honesty people feel in relation to her campaign. With Barack, people’s fears revolve around his failure to live up to their expectations; in some dreams he disappoints them, leaving the dreamer feeling deflated and alone. The soaring idealization of Barack’s candidacy carries the risk of precipitous disillusionment as he attempts to make real the mystical aspirations of his supporters.


A NOTE ON RESEARCH

A note on research methods: I explain this general approach to dreams in more detail in the forthcoming book American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else (Beacon Press). The best resource on content analysis is the website Dream Research, administered by G. William Domhoff and Adam Schneider. I mentioned findings from two of my earlier articles: on mystical dreams, “Sacred Sleep: Scientific Contributions to the Study of Religiously Significant Dreaming,” in The New Science of Dreaming, edited by Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara (Praeger, 2007); on good fortunes, “Revision of the Good Fortunes Scale: A New Tool for the Study of “Big” Dreams,” Dreaming (2006) 16.1:11-21. I’ve written two earlier commentaries on the Hillary and Barack dreams on the Beacon Press author’s blog, where I say more about the limits of this kind of data and my own personal biases in studying these dreams.


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Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union and teaches in the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University, both in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned his doctorate in Religion and Psychological Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and is a former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. He has written and edited several books on dreaming, the newest of which are American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else (Beacon Press) and Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (NYU Press), both due in early summer 2008.

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