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Dreams and recovery from trauma.

Article Excerpt
Bulkeley, Kelly (2003).

Dreams of Healing: Transforming Nightmares Into Visions of Hope. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, Paperback. xvi + 207 pp. $16.95. ISBN 0-0891-4153-1.

Kelly Bulkeley is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and Director of the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University. His scholarship focuses on dream research, education, and consulting. He was president of the Association for the Study of Dreams 1997-1998, was a senior editor for Dreaming (now discontinued), and serves as secretary-treasurer and newsletter editor for the Person, Culture, and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion.

Kelly Bulkeley earned his Ph.D. in Religion and Psychological Studies in 1992 at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he was strongly influenced by Chicago's prominent integrator, Don Browning (1987), and specifically by Browning's notion of metaphors of ultimacy. Bulkeley has focused his career as an independent scholar on the interplay of psychology, spirituality, and culture in dreaming, and few contemporary religious scholars have contributed so extensively to the recent dream literature. Although Dreams of Healing stands by itself and targets a lay audience, the professional reader may appreciate it best in the context of Bulkeley's previous works, which includes An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming (1997), the edited volume Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society (1996), the parenting book, Dreamcatching: Every Parent's Guide to Exploring and Understanding Children's Dreams and Nightmares (Bulkeley & Siegel, 1998), and numerous articles in religious and psychological journals.

Much of Bulkeley's work focuses on dreams and religion. In The Wilderness of Dreams (1994) Bulkeley provides an ambitious overview of the literature on dreams and dreaming that promises to be a classic in the tradition of Richard M. Jones (1970),...