American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else

by Kelly Bulkeley

A unique vantage point into our unconscious hopes and fears about the Iraq war, the environment, religion, and family values There have been books on dreams and books on political psychology, but... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807077348
• ISBN13: 9780807077344
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
• Length: 217 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Dreaming left and right

We are all, in ways known and unconscious, our civilization's discontents. We are not always happy. We want better lives. And we want our elected government to help us in that endeavor. Just what policies and persuasions we'd like our government to adopt to get us there says much about our own politics and our principles. To those we invest with power, we want them to be like-minded. Like a myriad of separate species, we gravitate to those who we think share our concerns. In America, that gravity pulls us in two seemingly opposite political directions: right and left, Conservative and Liberal. Kelly Bulkeley explores, in his thought provoking book "American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else," that personal differences in political views are more than ideological banners. They are instead deeply held values that manifest in the depths of our psyche, from the reservoir of the unconscious from where our dreams come to haunt us at night. "Dreams," writes Bulkeley, "don't simply mirror people's political beliefs; they provide the raw psychological material for those beliefs." Conservatives and liberals seem to view the world differently. And the subject of Buckeley's book focuses on the research that tells us that conservatives and liberals even dream differently. Though Bulkeley warns that the differences are not absolute, and that political beliefs are complex with shades of either political ideology woven into the individual, there are trends within the separate philosophical stances. Bulkeley concludes, or at least posits as a working hypothesis derived from his and other's research, that conservatives are good sleepers and minimal dreamers, while liberals are troubled sleepers and expansive dreamers. A Liberal's dream more often contains bazaar or unusual elements than those of a conservative. Conservative's dreams are usually much more mundane. Conservatives report fewer sexual dreams than do liberals, with liberals reporting such dreams with more variety and in more detail. Earlier research demonstrated that conservatives had more nightmares. More recent research demonstrates an increased incidence of nightmares occurs in liberals. The reason for the disparity may be because of the chance of error due to the paucity of the sample size. But the confounding variable may be that the initial research occurred during the Democratic reign of Bill Clinton (who could terrorize the sleeping of any conservative), and the latter research was completed during the reign of George Bush (enough to keep any liberal tossing and turning with night-sweats). Despite differences in ideologies and dreams, Bulkeley states that "we share more in common than we know: our differences are a matter of degree, not kind." Dreams, on either side of the spectrum, speak to the continuing power of American spiritual beliefs, faith and search for personal meaning. All of us, conservative and liberal ali