About The Interviewees
Deirdre Barrett
Deirdre Barrett, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and prominent author who teaches at the Harvard Medical School. Her interests in dreaming include its relationship to creativity, dream incubation, and PTSD. Dr. Barrett is an evolutionary psychologist, and sees much value in dreams as an opportunity to view our life issues from a different perspective. She has lectured on the topic of dreams in Russia, Kuwait, Israel, England, Holland, Esalen, and the Smithsonian Institute. She has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, Fox, and the Discovery Channel. [+] Top
Fariba Bogzaran
Fariba Bogzaran, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, California. She has been teaching for the Department of Consciousness Studies and Arts and Consciousness at JFKU since 1989. Dr. Bogzaran has been pioneering research and writing on transpersonal experiences in lucid dreaming. In mid 80's, she worked in a research team for the Lucidity Project at Stanford Sleep Laboratory and was a program chair and a Board member for Lucidity Association and Association for the Study of Dreams (ASD). She started the ASD arts in 1988 and curated numerous shows on dream inspired art. In1998 with the surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford she co-founded a non-profit art organization, Lucid Art Foundation. [+] Top
Kelly Bulkeley
Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union and a faculty member in the Dream Studies program at John F. Kennedy University . He earned a doctorate in Religion and Psychological Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School, a masters degree from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. from Stanford University . A former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he has written and edited several books on dream research. His newest books, published in 2008, are Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (NYU Press) and American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else (Beacon Press). [+] Top
Beverly D'Urso
Beverly D'Urso, PhD. As combination mystic and scientist, I, Beverly (Kedzierski Heart) D'Urso, have been called the world’s most prolific “lucid dreamer.” I developed the ability to “know I am dreaming while I dream” when I faced up to terrifying witches in my childhood dream. In my twenties, the renown pioneer of Lucid Dreaming, Dr. Stephen Laberge, chose me as his primary subject for decades of research at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory. Numerous major magazines, such as LIFE, Smithsonian, OMNI, and Parade, television specials, books, and radio talk shows have featured my life and my dreams. Using my practical philosophy called lucid living, with a related web site, I have taught my own workshops since 1991, and have presented at conferences for decades, where authors constantly tell me “You HAVE to write a book,” and I say, “Are you dreaming now?” Working with Stanford University Professors, I completed my Masters degree in 1980, involving Cognitive Psychology, and my Ph.D. in 1983, focussing on Artificial Intelligence. Prior to being a researcher, consultant, and a college professor, I created several startup companies, and over sixty publications, on my computer work and on my dream work. To allow for the greatest flexibility, I currently combine my writing and presenting with being a wife and mother, and I contribute the wonderful balance of work and family in my life to lucid living! [+] Top
Dr. Jayne Gackenbach
Dr. Jayne Gackenbach received her Ph.D. in 1978 in Experimental Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is currently a professor at Grant MacEwan College. She is also an adjunct faculty with Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco and teaches online for Athabasca University. She has taught at the post-secondary level both in the US and in Canada for over 25 years including these courses taught most often: Educational Psychology for Teachers, Social Psychology, Introductory Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Personality. Dr. Gackenbach has supervised numerous undergraduate research projects as well as several masters and doctoral level dissertations.
As well as being a past-president of the Association for the Study of Dreams, she has 70+ professional publications and 17 book chapters primarily on dreams and higher states of consciousness. Dr. Gackenbach is editor of “Sleep and Dreams: A Sourcebook” (1986) for Garland Publishers. She co-edited “Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain: Perspectives on Lucid Dreaming” (1988) for Plenum Publishers; “Dream Imagery: A Call to Mental Arms” (1991) for Baywood Publishers. Her first authored book is “Control Your Dreams” (1989) for Harper-Collins. This book was featured on the cover of “Psychology Today”, excerpted in “OMNI”, and was selected for the Behavioral Science Book Club. She has appeared on the Donahue Show and in Canada the Dede Petti Show, the Shirley Show, and ManAlive. She was invited in 1992 to present her work on lucid dreaming to the Dalai Lama at a conference on sleeping, dreaming, and dying. [+] Top
George Gillespie
George Gillespie, Moorestown, NJ; B.A., Rutgers University; B.D. Berkeley Baptist Divinity School (now American Baptist Seminary of the West); M.A. (Journalism), Syracuse University; doctoral studies in Sanskrit, University of Pennsylvania. Rev. Gillespie is an American Baptist minister and has taught the history of religions at seminaries in India. He now writes on the phenomenology of visual experience, including dreaming, hypnopompic imagery, mysticism, and perception.
He has had articles published in Indian Journal of Theology, Lucidity Letter, Dreaming, DreamTime, Perceptual and Motor Skills, The Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa, LuciDream Journal, Electric Dreams, and The Journal of Christian Healing. He has also contributed chapters to books on dreaming. [+] Top
Clare Johnson
In 2007 I completed a PhD with the University of Leeds, England, in which I examined the role of lucid dreaming in the process of creative writing. As an integral part of my PhD I wrote a novel, Breathing in Colour, which features lucid dreaming and I drew on lucid dreams at each stage of the creative process to inform my writing. This novel was published by Little, Brown in March 2009. I enjoy writing with strong, dreamlike imagery, and my short stories and poetry have won awards and appeared in anthologies. My second novel, Dreamrunner, is about a man who has violent, moving nightmares, and will be published in 2010.
For the past decade I have also been making collage art which reflects my visual experience of lucid dreams and a selection of these collages was displayed at the 2005 IASD Dream Art Exhibition in Berkeley, California. I give ‘Dreaming into Creative Writing’ workshops which combine my knowledge of yoga breathing techniques with what I have termed Lucid Writing (Johnson 2006): I guide participants into the writer’s trance as they focus on a vivid dream image, and they write without stopping in a stream of consciousness flow. At the 2004 IASD conference in Copenhagen, I came first place in the Dream Telepathy Contest with a lucid dream of a tree. In 2005 I came second with a hypnogogic image of a tiger. My combined project of two research papers and a couple of my lucid dream collages won the IASD 2005 Student Award for original research or creative work on dreams.
My favourite lucid dream image of the moment is that of an elephant emerging from the trunk of a giant, venerated tree in the centre of a roundabout in India. My favourite non-lucid dream image is of a monkey-woman giving birth to a smiling baby. To learn more about Clare, visit Clarejay.com [+] Top
Stanley Krippner
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco, is a Fellow in four APA divisions, and past-president of two divisions (30 and 32). Formerly, he was director of the Kent State University Child Study Center, Kent OH, and the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory, Brooklyn NY. He is co-author of Extraordinary Dreams (SUNY, 2002), The Mythic Path, 3rd ed. (Energy Psychology Press, 2006), and Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans (Greenwood, 2007), and co-editor of Healing Tales (Puente, 2007), Healing Stories (Puente, 2007), The Psychological Impact of War on Civilians: An International Perspective (Greenwood, 2003), Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (APA, 2000), and many other books.
Krippner has conducted workshops and seminars on dreams and/or hypnosis in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Cyprus, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, and at the last four congresses of the Interamerican Psychological Association. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published several cross-cultural studies on spiritual content in dreams. [+] Top
Scott Sparrow
Gregory Scott Sparrow, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he teaches in the graduate counseling program, and a charter faculty member at Atlantic University in Virginia Beach where he teaches in the Spiritual Mentoring certificate program. He is also a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Virginia, a writer, and a fly fishing guide. Scott wrote a masters thesis on lucid dreaming in 1974, in which he hypothesized that lucid dreaming represented the recapitulation in the dream state of the development of consciousness in the primitive world, and thus offered the same opportunities and pitfalls in one's pursuit of mastery. He expanded his thesis into a small book, titled Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light (ARE, 1976), which was one of the first books published on the topic. Later in 1983, he conducted a dissertation study in which he tested the effectiveness of “dream reliving” as a lucid dream induction strategy. He has since pioneered a dream analysis methodology called the Five Star Method based on the lucid dream paradigm, and is currently involved in applying meditation and dream reliving to the goal of enhancing the quality of one’s dream life, as well to the treatment of distressing dreams associated with PTSD. Scott articles and books can be accessed at his website, www.spiritualmentoring.com. [+] Top
Robert Waggoner
Robert Waggoner. An active lucid dreamer since 1975 and a member of IASD since 1995, Robert Waggoner is co-editor of the quarterly publication, "The Lucid Dream Exchange," and the author of the recently released book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self. In the book, Robert suggests that some experienced lucid dreamers are engaging the inner self or inner ego theorized by Carl Jung. Through a counter-intuitive technique of lucidly ignoring the dream figures and relating to the apparent awareness behind the dream materializations, lucid dreamers have apparently encountered this thoughtful inner awareness. [+] Top