This listing includes books and movies that have especially delighted or helped me. You can order any of these right here through Amazon. com -- just click on a title-- and the referral fees help to support this web site. The same is true of many other products you order from here through Amazon -- just use the search box below!

Our Dreaming Mind, by Robert Van de Castle, is the Big Book on dreams, the kind of book you buy because it covers Everything. The author, a former President of ASD, is one of the pioneers in telepathic dream research, and his comments about this are particularly interesting. But he's also done a prodigious job of covering many facets of dream history, tradition, practice and theory. This is a valuable reference work.

Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel is a one-of-a-kind collection of interviews with writers discussing how dreaming influences their work. Epel was hosting a radio show on dreaming when she took a second job squiring writers to their tour venues in the San Francisco Bay area. Eventually she interviewed 26 writers, and guess what? Dreams and creativity are just as mysterious and significant for Maya Angelou, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Elmore Leonard and Sue Grafton as they are for the rest of us, but these folks talk about them really well!

Conscious Dreaming is a treat for the dream adventurer. Author Robert Moss understands the ways of native peoples and provides their perspectives to explore the mysterious continent of dreaming. He nimbly covers the usual ground on getting started with dream work, but then is glad to go where others may fear to tread--to a shamanistic and magical world view, to dream encounters with the dead, and other strange and wonderful phenomena. Like Linda Magallón and Susan Watkins, Robert Moss demonstrates the importance of  independent inquiry and commentary in the study of dreaming.

Mutual Dreaming by Linda Lane Magallón is a trail-blazing work. Linda spent years identifying and researching
"meshing" dreams (in which two or more dreamers experience the same dream) and "meeting" dreams (where dreamers
actually encounter each other in a shared dream space). This provocative  book includes many great anecdotes that will inspire a new appreciation for the social aspects of dreaming.

Dreaming Myself, Dreaming a Town by Susan M. Watkins chronicles how a small town newspaper editor invited readers to share their dreams, and thus discovered instances of shared or mutual dreaming (sometimes among people who did not even know one other); community precognition; synchronicities: prophecies; and other provocative phenomena. It's a unique work by a unique woman, and helped inspire my experiments in programming precognitive dreams with newspaper headlines. As Watkins writes, "We are all of us scientific naturalists in the virgin land of dreams." Amen.

The Dream Messenger: How Dreams of the Departed Bring Healing Gifts by Patricia Garfield, also a former President of ASD, turned out to be a valuable resource when I was writing about caring for the dying. Survivors often report strong dreams of a loved one who has died. Sometimes these are positive, occasionally negative, and almost always compelling. Patricia Garfield does a wonderful job of covering the subject, describing the types of these dreams and citing many examples. This is a comforting book for those who are adjusting to a loss, and a thoughtful book for the rest of us.

The Mystical, Magical, Marvelous World of Dreams by Wilda B. Tanner is the one dream dictionary I recommend without qualification. Many experts advise against using dream dictionaries at all, but when you're really stumped by a dream, a reference book can help to stimulate connections that you just couldn't make otherwise. This one includes a number of suggestions for any one symbol, so you needn't force your personal dream symbolism into someone else's mold. This is a good book to give to someone who's just beginning to be -- or you want to get -- interested in dreams.

Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-cultural and Historical Journey by Kelly Bulkeley is an exciting study of the ways that dreams link us to the sacred. Kelly, another former President of ASD, has done a wonderful job of showing the universality of dreaming as an innate spiritual resource for human beings across cultures and through time. This function transcends the psychological approaches that have become the staple of contemporary dream theory, and that makes this book a mind-expanding experience. In addition, although Kelly is a scholar, he writes without sounding academic; even the Appendixes are good!

When Waking Life (VHS, also on DVD) came out in 2001, I was amazed at how the makers created the experience of dreaming even as various characters reflected on the nature of dreams and personal reality. It can take a while to return to "normal" after watching this movie, but it's well worth the trip.

That great old Hitchcock film, Spellbound (VHS, or on DVD), let's you revisit the good old days (1945) when both Salvador Dali and Freudian psychoanalysis were at the vanguard of Modernism. A lot has changed since then -- dreams aren't just for analysis any more -- but seldom have they been so cinematically showcased!

A sentimental favorite -- Peter Pan (VHS) is one of many children's stories that turns out the be "all a dream," but it's the first one I remember personally. This 1953 Disney version is also on  DVD.

Jane Roberts' "Seth" books have especially influenced my appreciation of dream life, but there are a lot of them. So in this section, I'm highlighting the ones that had the most impact on my understanding. The first ones I ever read were Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul (during which I had to get over the fact that Seth wasn't a physical guy) and The Nature of Personal Reality. Either of these are good introductions to the philosophical ideas presented in the many books to follow. Much of what was first published in these books would become New Age gospel, endlessly repeated and elaborated upon. It's always a good idea to read the originals.

The subsequent Seth books contain so much that is rich and stimulating that it is hard to summarize them. The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression covers the ways in which dreaming aids, abets and manifests the process of our inner lives; and The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events discusses dreaming and mass consciousness. The Unknown Reality, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are generally considered the densest of the Seth books, but are well worth the time it takes to read them. These are where the idea of probabilities being worked out in dreams is discussed, and where the concept of the "Dream Art Scientist" originates. The last books Jane worked on before she died, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1 and Vol 2, serve to recap what has come before, and to offer even more fascinating and provocative notions, such as: "There is an entire global dream network that goes quite unrecognized-- one of spectacular organization in which exchanges of information occur that give you the basis for the formation of recognized physical events." These last volumes are are heavily annotated, but can be read perfectly well without the notes. Some people have said they found the Seth books too ponderous; I have found them wonderful.

Jane's influence had everything to do with my writing The Practical Psychic with John Friedlander, who was one of her students. It was written as a primer for all sorts of psychic work, and you can read more about it on the next page. For me, it all began with dreams.

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