Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion

Bulkeley (Dreaming the World’s Religions) brings his expertise in dream research to this serious inquiry about the content and process of dreaming. Bulkeley ambitiously seeks to relate findings in brain and mind research to the cognitive science of religion. He draws on evolutionary biology and neuroscience to understand the purpose of four kinds of “big dreams”: aggressive, sexual, gravitational, and mystical. Before explaining his schema, he unpacks the nature of sleep and dreaming (including why things can be both odd and familiar in dreams). These sections lend scientific credibility to his project and are helpful, but take up a lot of explanatory space before he launches into his original analysis of the relationship between dreaming and religion. He argues well and offers persuasive empirical support for oneiric study. Yet his understanding of religion is a little thin and anthropological in comparison to his more detailed appreciation of the neuroscience of dreaming. Bulkeley’s book begins an intriguing interdisciplinary conversation about two modalities that humans commonly experience and are paradoxically neglected by science. (Apr.)