Beacon Broadside

by Kelly Bulkeley

At the conclusion of a recent New Yorker story about her new
website posting people’s dreams of Barack
Obama and Hillary
Clinton, Toronto novelist Sheila Heti said, "I sort of hope that the
campaign managers will change the way candidates give speeches as a result of
people’s dream lives. It must be telling
them something."

These dreams do have the potential to reveal meaningful facets of people’s political
beliefs. The frequency and intensity of
a politician’s appearance in people’s dreams can be taken as an accurate index
of his or her personal charisma. The
more people dream of a politician, the more likely that politician has made a
deep emotional impact on them (both positively and negatively–Heti’s website
has instances of both).

In 1992, when I first studied dreams of politicians during that year’s Presidential
election, I heard numerous dreams of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, and almost
none of George H.W. Bush–no doubt where the charisma lay in that contest! As of
March 18th, Heti’s website contains 73 dreams of Obama, 67 of Hillary, and four
of John McCain (to be fair, the space for McCain dreams was just created on March
10th). Now, as then, the dreams offer a mix of the bizarre and the trivial, the profound and the absurd, the personally idiosyncratic and the socially relevant. From a research perspective, the value of Heti’s website is that it provides further evidence that people dream not only about their private lives
but also about public affairs like political contests. Dreaming is not purely inward-looking; it
also has the capacity to look outwards and express our feelings about the major
concerns, conflicts, and challenges of our communities.

It should
be noted that these kinds of anecdotal reports are limited in many ways. The website offers almost no other
information about the dreamer beyond the dream itself. There are no additional associations from the
dreamer about what the dream might mean to him or her, and no waking life
context or background details. The
reports come from people in many different countries, and of course we can
never be sure they aren’t just making up their dreams entirely (perhaps to put
their favored candidate in a better light, or to cast aspersions on the
candidate they want to lose).

With those caveats
in mind, it can still be fun and potentially illuminating to ponder individual
dreams like these:

"I was at a sweet country inn, the type of bed
and breakfast that you would escape to for a romantic weekend. It could have
been in upstate New York,
or maybe New Hampshire. The inn was right next to a lake. A woman came down the stairs in a red bathing
suit. She was magnetic, and everyone was staring at her. She carried herself so
well in that bathing suit, even though her figure was not that of a supermodel.
I admired her as well, and realized that I was having a little girl crush on
Hillary, the lady in the bathing suit. However, I told my friends at the inn
that I wasn’t going to vote for the dazzling senator.

"My friends were aghast. You mean, they said, that you won’t vote for
your own Mother!"

(42-year
old mother in Santa Monica, March 11)

"I was in
a smoky, hazy hotel office/suite with Barack Obama. We had driven back together
from a big rally and speech. He walked ahead of me and was dismissive, or maybe
just distracted. I wasn’t sure whether he’d already won the presidency or was
still just a candidate. I was acting as one of his assistants.

"I’d been respectfully carrying his coat and now I lay it on the bed. When I
tried to engage him in some light banter about how he felt about the rally, he
seemed distracted and annoyed. I was struck that in private, behind closed
doors, he was a different man: cordial enough, certainly not mean-spirited, but
his tone in private was nothing like his public persona.

"He reached for a pack of cigarettes, though the room was already smoky enough."

(Tech
start-up geek from California, March 10)

The best way
to interpret these kinds of reports is to 1) keep it light (they’re dreams,
after all!), 2) be careful not to read too much into them, and 2) use some of
the basic methods of content analysis to highlight possible patterns of
meaning. I’m experimenting with different
methods of analysis to study these dreams, and I’ll share my findings on this
website over the next few weeks.

Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, author of American Dreamers:
What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals,
and Everyone Else, is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological
Union and a faculty member in the dream studies program at John F. Kennedy
University. A former president of the International Association for the Study
of Dreams, his other books include Dreaming Beyond
Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions, Dreams: A Reader on
the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming; Dreams
of Healing: Transforming Nightmares into Visions of Hope; and The
Wondering Brain: Thinking about Religion with and beyond Cognitive Neuroscience.