KB: I first became interested in dreams because of a series of nightmares I had in high school and college. I had always been an outward-oriented person, focused intensely on sports and school, but then I started having recurrent nightmares of being chased by horrible monsters, creatures, and aliens. My most memorable dream antagonist was Darth Vadar, the black-masked villain of the "Star Wars" movies. These dreams were haunting in a very literal sense--they puzzled me deeply, and I couldn't get them out of my mind. So I began reading everything I could about dreams, going to lectures and workshops, and doing whatever I could to understand my nightmares better. The thing that really hooked me on dreams was how my nightmares began to change in response to the conscious attention I was giving them. One night I had another dream of Darth Vadar, but this time it wasn't a nightmare. I was on his spaceship, and I saw him with his mask off. Instead of having an ugly, scarred face I saw that his skin was smooth and handsome, and he had long, flowing golden hair. He spoke to me, saying "You have some of the best guerilla fighters in the known universe--but you don't have me." That dream really inspired me to continue exploring dreams, and to see where Darth might lead me.

AS: That's an amazing image, in both its frightening and transformed aspects.

KB: When I first read some of Carl Jung's works, and learned about his notion of the shadow and trying to integrate the darker sides of ourselves, it clicked immediately, and I realized that I could learn a lot from people like Jung who had experienced dreams like mine and who had been studying them for a long time.

AS: In connection with our work on parenting and children's dreams, I'm curious about what your parents said or thought about dreams.

KB: I remember having bad dreams as a very young kid and crawling into bed with my parents, and they were definitely comforting and reassuring. But they never really talked much about dreams in general, and I suppose I'm appreciative of them for what they didn't do, like say, "Oh, it's just a bad dream, don't pay any attention to it, you just too many pieces of pizza last night."

AS: At what point did your personal interest in your own dreams lead into your academic study of dreams?

KB: It happened very early in college. At first I thought I'd study psychology because that seemed like the natural place to learn about dreams. But then I realized that to answer the particular questions I had about dreams I also needed to study philosophy, religion, anthropology, literature, and many other disciplines. So I began looking at every class I took, in whatever department, as a new way of exploring the multi-faceted world of dreaming.

AS: When did you find a class or program that helped you focus in a more formal way on the study of dreams?

KB: That was the tough thing, because I always felt resistance from teachers about the legitimacy of dreams as a topic of serious study. It wasn't until I got to the University of Chicago for my doctoral studies that I finally found people who were willing not just to tolerate but actively encourage my study of dreams. The main person in that was Wendy Doniger, an incredibly gifted scholar of world religion and mythology who had written her book Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities just before I arrived at Chicago. She really helped me develop the kind of wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach to dreams that I'd been seeking. So it took a while, but I consider myself very fortunate to have finally found a school where I could receive the scholarly support and training I needed.

AS: What were some of the other mentoring experiences you had?

KB: Along with my very traditional, hard-core academic doctoral program at Chicago, I was also getting to know other people in the dream studies field. I didn't plan it this way, but I ended up having a series of early experiences that almost recapitulated the origins of the ASD. Two of the most influential books I read were Patty Garfield's Creative Dreaming and Strephon Kaplan Williams's The Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual, I went to several dream interpretation seminars with Gayle Delaney and Loma Flowers, and I did some workshops with Jeremy Taylor. So again I feel fortunate to have been taught so much by the people who were the early pioneers of the ASD.

AS: Let me use that to dovetail to your involvement with the ASD. As we're cataloging all the old issues of the ASD Newsletter, now called Dream Time, I noticed that you have the most cover stories over the years, dating back all the way to 1987, and I'm curious how you first got involved with the ASD.

KB: My first ASD conference was 1988 in Santa Cruz, and it was such a revelation to find 300 or so people who were just as fanatical about dreams as I was! It was so wonderful, and I remember vividly that first day having great conversations with the late Al Moffitt, and Carol Rupprecht, and Erik Craig, and Rita Dwyer, and countless other people who right from the start were very warm and inviting and welcoming. I just felt, wow, this is a community that I really feel I can contribute something to and be a part of.

AS: You've served in a lot of roles, from being secretary to board chair, chair of the education committee, co-chair of the historical committee, and so on. What have been some of the most memorable experiences you've had with the group?

KB: Without a doubt it was hosting the 1990 conference in Chicago. The 1988 conference had been my first ASD gathering, and as I corresponded with people after that I said the board might consider having a conference in Chicago. Well, that was my first experience of how in the ASD if you make a suggestion, you'd better get ready to be put in charge of doing it! Hosting the 1990 conference was my ASD "initiatory ordeal," my trial by fire, but it was also a total confirmation of how much I really loved the group. Jane White Lewis, now the chair of the ASD board, was the program chair that year, and I had lots of fun working and getting to be friends with her. So ever since that conference, everything I've done for the ASD has seemed easy!

AS: Your academic interests and writings on dreams are pretty wide-ranging, from the spiritual aspects of dreaming across culture to the social activist side of dreaming. I thought we could take a kind of guided tour through your writings, starting with The Wilderness of Dreams.

KB: The basic goal of that book was to show how the best of modern Western dream research doesn't contradict, but actually correlates very closely with what the world's religions have taught about dreams. I was trying to create a bridge, using the notion of "root metaphors," between what ancient religions and modern psychologies say about dreams. In the process I brought in some ideas from the philosophy of language, from the sociology of modern secular culture, and from literary criticism to help in that bridge-building process.

AS: I'm interested to hear more about your concept of root metaphor dreams.

KB: As philosophers like George Lakoff have shown, metaphors are one of our primary tools for making sense of the world. A metaphor takes something we know, something relatively tangible and concrete, and uses it to help us understand something we don't know, something that may be more intangible or abstract. So for example, we understand the emotion of anger by using metaphors of heat--"I was really steamed up," "Smoke was coming out of my ears," and so forth. Among the many things that our dreams are doing, they are creating metaphors aimed at helping us understand the great existential questions of life, questions like why are we born and why do we die, how do we overcome suffering, what makes for a good and fulfilling life, etc. What I call root metaphor dreams are those dreams which metaphorically express answers to those questions, reaching down into the depths of our unconscious (and perhaps into realms beyond our individual psyches), and providing us with spiritual nourishment and balance. I'm wary of creating a new term, but that's my best effort at trying to understand what's going on in those rare but very intense and transformative types of dreams.

AS: In our book on children's dreams there are a couple of examples of children having these kinds of powerful dreams, and I've heard many people describe special dreams from childhood that almost sound like Native American vision quest dreams in the way they reverberate throughout the person's life.

KB: That's just the sort of dream experience I've been trying to understand better. In The Wilderness of Dreams I argued that while such dreams are a truly universal phenomenon, different cultures do different things to prepare people for particularly extraordinary dreams. Native American cultures, for example, taught people what these dreams were like and supported and validated the experiences when they occurred. In modern Western culture, however, dreams like this often make people feel they're going crazy, and because they're taught that dreams are just random nonsense from the brain they have no idea what to make of those dreams that strike them with a special power and intensity. That's a terrible thing, I feel, and in all my writings I've tried to give people some resources to understand what's happening in such dreams. Many people who get involved with the ASD have been motivated by special dream experiences, what Jung called "big dreams," and I think it's important to continue exploring this realm of the dream world.

AS: I can see how this approach to dreams really ties in to religious and mystical traditions, because so many of them describe profound dream experiences that underlie their teachings.

KB: That's what I tried to do in my book Spiritual Dreaming, which is a cross-cultural study of the many important roles that dreams have played in the history of world religions. Religious conversions, initiation rites, and healing practices have all been directly connected to people's dreams. In almost every religion the world has known, dreams have been regarded as one vital means by which humans can connect with the divine.

AS: I know you've written specifically about conversion experiences through dreams. Can you say a bit about that?

KB: Maybe the best way to understand conversion dreams is to think of them as crisis-resolving dreams par excellence. These dreams often come to people in a time of severe crisis, like a health problem or a sudden social upheaval, and the dreams give the people a revelation of a new and better way of looking at the world, something that often leads to joining a new religious group or movement. As a result of the dreams the people feel better; the crisis seems more manageable, they have new hope for the future, they feel more vital and energetic. I've been so interested in conversion dreams because they are very similar to the kinds of dreams you've looked at in your study of the Oakland firestorm survivors, and to Rosalind Cartwright's research in Crisis Dreaming, and to the material in Deirdre Barrett's book Trauma and Dreams. In all these cases, it seems that dreams have the effect of resolving a given crisis by deeply transforming the person's way of looking at the world--in religious language, by converting them to a new spiritual outlook on life. Conversion dreams are one particular type of dream experience where I think you can see very clearly the connections between religious and psychological approaches.

AS: I know that in the field of dreams we get accused of being too ungrounded and too inner-directed and not connected enought to the social world and its problems of poverty, the environment, racial issues, etc. You've done some work in keeping our feet to the fire, by finding the relevance of dream studies to those social problems. In your research on dreams and Presidential politics and in your anthology Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society you've helped bring the topic more to the forefront.

KB: That's another important thing I've learned from the ASD, from people like Johanna King, Montague Ullman, Robbie Bosnak, and Jeremy Taylor, people who have been urging us to look at dreams not just for personal healing and growth, which is of course very important, but also for broader social healing and growth. In my studies of dreams in the world's religions I've always been struck by how often powerful dreams have led people to do new things in their community--building new monuments, creating new rituals, becoming healers and prophets, in various ways drawing on the energy of dreams to revitalize their societies. I've come to believe this community-building impulse lies at the very heart of dreams, and I feel strongly that we in modern Western society have not done enough to understand and appreciate this dimension of dreaming. Among All These Dreamers is very much an ASD book; I basically asked a lot of good friends who were doing wonderfully creative things in the realm of socially-active dreamwork to describe their efforts, so others could see that this way of approaching dreams is legitimate, important, and effective. My hope is that the book's readers will be inspired to find their own ways of bringing the power of dreams to bear on the various problems and conflicts our society is facing.

AS: Let me ask you a bit about your ongoing research on dreams and Presidential politics, and the data you've gathered during the 1992 and 1996 elections. What have you found out so far?

KB: Well, at the most basic level I've found that people do dream about the political world, which is something that some psychologists have questioned because of the assumption that all dreams are "really" about ourselves, about our inner worlds only. The most intriguing examples I've found are what I'm calling "dreams of political reconciliation," in which a person dreams of a politician whom in waking life they hate (two cases I've heard involve dreams of Richard Nixon); in the dream the person has an encounter with that politician that deeply transforms his or her waking life perspective. Because of the dream the person suddenly sees the politician in a different light, and gains a more balanced appreciation of both the virtues and vices of the politician. These examples really intrigue me, because they suggest that dreams may, in addition to all the other things they do, have a role in our development as mature citizens of a healthy democracy.

AS: Psychologically I'd be tempted to interpret those dreams, if I knew the people better, as updating old beliefs or images of ourselves and others. However, in your talk at Asheville you really emphasized not limiting one's view of dreams of political figures as only personal projections, but also as possibly direct references to the political world.

KB: I'm trying to keep open possibilities in both directions. Freud said that politics are nothing but our private psychological worlds projected outward, and Marx said that our alleged internal world is simply the political world introjected into us. My response is yes, and yes: they're both right, and you can see that in these dreams. The dreams definitely use political figures to express our private feelings and conflicts, and they also show how our inner psychological world provides the raw material out of which our waking life political views are created. I'm very curious about this two-way interaction between the personal and the political, with dreams being an ideal means of studying it.

AS: So perhaps we can look forward to dreams of Al Gore in 2000, right?

KB: And Jack Kemp, and Newt Gingrich, and Diane Feinstein, and whoever else stirs our dreaming imagination.

AS: You and I are just about to finish our project on children's dreams, Dreamcatching: Every Parent's Guide to Children's Dreams and Nightmares. What stands out for you about the research we've done in helping children, and their teachers and parents, learn more about their dreams?

KB: This book has really brought together all my interests, and I'm very eager to see what readers think of it. Yet another lesson I've learned from cross-cultural dream research is that many, many cultures have made deliberate efforts to teach their children about dreams. Dreaming is one of the things that all humans do, and it's only natural that parents and communities would try to help children understand what's going on in these strange yet often strangely transformative experiences. Dreamcatching is a good effort at trying to do that for our society. Too often parents dismiss their children's dreams as nonsense, and if nothing else I hope our book will help parents understand that their children's dreams are true gifts that deserve attention and appreciation. I've always been very interested in dream education, and I'm really happy that we've put something together that will further that cause.

AS: One of the things we emphasize in the book is that parents shouldn't pressure their children, that a playful approach to dreams is much better. I know that with my own daughter if I push too much she clams up a bit and maybe won't tell her dreams for a while. What have been your experiences in sharing dreams with your own children?

KB: I've always tried to let them set the pace. They know what daddy does, and they know that any time they have a dream I'm ready to listen, so I've just let their dreams guide the sharing. The most surprising thing has been how much help they've been in understanding my own dreams; I sometimes tell them dreams I've had, and they always have interesting and insightful things to say. The lesson I've learned from that is that family dream- sharing works best when it's a truly mutual process, when it's an open, back-and-forth dialogue. It's amazing to see how much children enjoy the opportunity to be the ones helping their parents with something, rather than always being on the receiving end of the care.

AS: Any future projects you're working on?

KB: Oh, there are always future projects! I have a book coming out this fall, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, which is a very simple, straightforward survey of twentieth- century dream psychology. It's intended as a basic textbook on dreams for college and graduate school classes. Late next year the book The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience should appear. It offers an almost kaleidoscopic portrait of the interplay between dreams, religion, and psychology. In the longer term, I mentioned in Asheville wanting to tell the rich history of how dreams have been understood through the course of Western civilization, from Homer and the Old Testament patriarchs through Aquinas, Shakespeare, and Descartes, up to Nietzsche and the beginning of the twentieth century, when what we call "modern" dream research first started. As we approach a new millennium I'm wanting to look back and see where we've come from, to help in figuring out where the field of dream studies might grow in coming years. It's a kind of "back to the future" project, in that I'm studying the forgotten wisdom of the past to help us move into a future that will almost certainly take us beyond the bounds of Western culture, into a very dynamic, multi- cultural global community.

AS: What ideas and visions do you have for the future of the ASD?

KB: I'm especially interested in promoting and expanding our dream education programs. I'd like to develop another batch of educational pamphlets, to put together a teacher's resource book on bringing dreams into the classroom, to expand our support services to graduate students, to make regional meetings easier to organize, to inaugurate an essay contest for both high school and college students, to finalize the details of our arrangement with the Union Institute for a doctoral program in dream studies (which Mena Potts has done so much to develop), and to expand our offerings of books, tapes, and other dream-related products. Along with those efforts, there are all sorts of nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts issues I'd like to work on to help improve the group's functioning. A lot of ASD members may not be aware of how huge a leap the organization has taken in the past year or so, with the very successful upgrading and professionalization of the central office and the hiring of Kellee Elkins, our first full-time staff person. All of this is very exciting, but there's also a lot of hard work that needs to be done to solidify the gains we've made and to make sure we continue to grow and prosper at this new level. The general public's interest in dreams is really growing, and it's the core of the ASD's mission to continue trying to meet those needs as best we can.

AS: Thanks for taking the time to talk, and I look forward to working with you during your presidential year.