Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them

by Stanley Krippner, Fariba Bogzaran (Contributor), Andre Percia De Carvalho (Contributor)

Discusses extraordinary dreams and offers suggestions for interpreting and appreciating your own extraordinary dreams.

From visions of a past life to glimpses of the future, history is full of accounts of unusual dreams. This fascinating book explores historical, scientific, and cross-cultural research on these sorts of extraordinary dreams, and offers practical suggestions on how to work with them-either individually or as a member of a dream group-to enhance one's intellectual, emotional, and spiritual health. Each chapter is devoted to a particular type of dream, and presents a summary of research data on their nature. Specific categories of dreams discussed include creative, lucid, out-of-body, pregnancy, healing, collective, telepathic, clairvoyant, precognitive, past-life, initiation, and spiritual visitation dreams, as well as dreams within dreams. Entertaining and instructive, this book points the way to an expanded conception of human potential for the twenty first century.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

211 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2001

About the author

Dr. Stanley C. Krippner Ph.D. is an executive faculty member and Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in Oakland, California. He was previously director of the Kent State University Child Study Center, and director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York. He has written extensively on altered states of consciousness, dream telepathy, and parapsychological subjects.

Reviews

[Tait · Rating 3 out of 5]

Krippner’s work falls into a particular category of approaches to dreamwork that lean heavily into scientific studies to back up their claims, which is at least better than all the metaphysical books that rely on scant anecdotal dream reports from their friends. But it also falls into a pattern that this type of more “sciencey” dream book has, which is it barely offers any actual way to work with dreams other than long lists of question asking you to reflect on your life.

[Scott Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dreams may be one of the most natural meeting places between psychology and psychic experience, and this book understands why. Krippner, Bogzaran, and de Carvalho move through lucid dreams, out-of-body dreams, healing dreams, telepathic and clairvoyant dreams, precognitive dreams, past-life dreams, initiation dreams, spiritual visitations, and several other categories without forcing all of them into a single explanation. I loved that approach. Dreaming already places consciousness in a condition where ordinary sensory input, selfhood, memory, imagery, emotion, and our experience of time behave differently. Once anomalous information enters that environment, determining where the psyche ends and psi begins becomes genuinely fascinating.

The telepathic and precognitive material was especially interesting given Krippner's history with experimental dream research. Dreams present obvious problems for parapsychology because they are extraordinarily easy to reinterpret after something happens, which makes prospective recording and experimental controls crucial. Yet there is also a substantial history of researchers attempting exactly that kind of controlled dream-psi work. I appreciated having those questions placed beside lucid dreaming, out-of-body experience, creativity, healing, and spiritual visitation because it creates a much richer picture of dreaming as a state of consciousness. The chapters on past-life, initiation, and visitation dreams also invite multiple levels of interpretation. A dream can be psychologically transformative whether its characters arise from the unconscious, something archetypal, memories outside ordinary biography, or an encounter with an intelligence independent of the dreamer. Establishing psychological meaning does not necessarily answer the ontological question.

What makes the book work for me is the combination of research, cross-cultural material, actual dream accounts, and methods for engaging with your own dreams. Some of the suggested dreamwork is fairly reflective and I could have used more experimental exercises, particularly for the psi-related categories, but the book continually encourages curiosity without demanding premature certainty. That is exactly the attitude I want from a book about extraordinary experience. Dreams are already laboratories in which consciousness produces realities convincing enough that we temporarily inhabit them, and occasionally they seem to contain information that raises much stranger questions. Extraordinary Dreams gave me both a better vocabulary for those experiences and more reasons to pay close attention to what consciousness is doing while the waking mind is asleep.

[Arnny Digital · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice book with detail guide