This dissertation emphasizes the need for spirituality studies and practical theology to enter into robust scholarly engagement with dream studies. The study of lived experience and an interdisciplinary approach are key characteristics in all three areas of inquiry. Interconnecting these areas of inquiry opens new lenses for understanding how people experience, remember, interpret, and find meaning within daily experience. Chapter One outlines current trajectories of research in dream studies and highlights gaps in current scholarship regarding the relationship between dreams and Christian spirituality. A proposed framework for dialogue among these three areas of inquiry addresses these scholarly gaps throughout the dissertation. Chapter Two presents key aspects of the physiology of sleep and dreams while also describing prevalent American cultural attitudes towards sleep, rest, and work and their impact on attitudes towards dreaming. Holy Rest is proposed as a contemporary Christian practice with potential to recalibrate unbalanced preferences for productivity and waking experience over sleep and dreaming experience. Chapter Three asserts dreams are meaningful experiences which are potentially spiritually formative and thus require theological consideration. As such, dreamwork can be understood as a spiritual practice. Chapter Four positions dream reports in dialogue with theoretical literature on spiritual life writing as narrative, hermeneutical practices that create habits of recalling memories primarily via writing and using root metaphor. Chapter Five discusses pedagogical implications of research on dreamwork and summarizes common trajectories for research in practical theology, Christian spirituality, and dream studies. Specifically, this dissertation asserts that time imbalances between sleep, rest, and work pose spiritual as well as physiological concerns that impact theological meaning-making in daily life. It locates dreaming experiences as spiritually and theologically relevant and queries the lack of attention to Christian spirituality in contemporary dream studies discourse. It also proposes a means to examine how individuals’ memories may create communal practices of theological reflection based on shared narrative practices of dreamwork and spiritual life writing. This exploration of the hermeneutical, spiritual, and pedagogical significance of dreams and dreamwork suggests the merit of further scholarly examination of other undervalued and unnoticed experiences of daily life.

Three States of the Mind's Eye is a multimedia work composed of music, poetry, and video. The purpose of the work is to examine attributes of three different abstract states of mind: the dream, paranoia, and courage. The musical score both tells its own story as well as enhances the visuals and poetry as they are presented. This document will discuss the ideas behind the work, how the composer went about creating each section and combining them, and will provide musical excerpts, the poetry itself and other visual examples. All sounds for the project are synthetic or sampled and the use of technology will also be discussed. The thesis is divided into four parts: introduction, analysis, technology and workspace, and conclusion. / Mary Pappert School of Music; / Composition / MM; / Thesis;

Thesis (M.A.)--Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary, 2003. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-121).

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 16, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Andrew Hoberek. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary, 2003. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-121).

Thesis (M.A.)--Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary, 2003. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-121).

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that is dynamic, manageable, cost-effective and adaptable, making it ideal for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications. Using SDN, networks can enable a variety of concurrent, dynamically instantiated measurement tasks, that provide fine-grain visibility into network traffic by configuring Ternary Content Address Memory (TCAM) counters in hardware switches. However, TCAM memory is limited, thus the accuracy of measurement tasks depends on the number of resources devoted to them on each switch. In this thesis, we propose a solution that improves Dynamic Resource Allocation for Software-defined Measurements (DREAM), a framework with an adaptive step size search that achieves a desired level of accuracy for measurement tasks. We have enabled prediction capabilities in the framework to generate better counters configurations using previous network traffic information. We implement four estimation techniques (EWMA-based Prediction, Polynomial Curve Fitting, KMeans++ Cluster and Pseudo Linear Extrapolation) that have been tested with simulations running three types of measurement tasks (heavy hitters, hierarchical heavy hitters and traffic change detection) that show the proposed techniques improve task accuracy and tasks concurrency in DREAM. Existing traffic measurements tools usually rely on some predetermined concept of flows to collect traffic statistics. Thus, they usually have issues in adapting to changes in traffic condition and present scalability issues with respect to the number of flows and the heterogeneity of the monitoring applications. We propose an integration of the Programmable MEasurements (ProgME) paradigm, which defines a novel approach to defined measurement tasks in a programmable way using the concept of flowsets, on top of the DREAM framework. This enables better scalability for measurement tasks that deal with large amounts of traffic flows on DREAM while reducing the required number of counters allocations for the tasks.

This study was designed to examine the effects of Experiential Focusing-oriented dream interpretation. The process was twofold. The first part of this study involved a preliminary step of developing an instrument, the Dream Interpretation Effects Questionnaire (DIEQ). The DIEQ assessed specific effects of Experiential Focusing-oriented dream interpretation, e.g., a sense of easing, fresh air, or movement, increased positive energy or self-understanding, development of a new step, enhanced valuation of dreams, or enhanced understanding of the meaning of the dream. Fifty-two adult volunteers participated in the first part of this study. All participants completed Part One of the DIEQ after reporting a dream and freely associating its meaning to another participant. The results were computed to establish the reliability of the DIEQ. The researcher then used the DIEQ along with a structured interview in a pretest-posttest control group design to examine the effects of Experiential Focusing-oriented dream interpretation. Twenty adult volunteers experienced in Experiential Focusing participated in the second part of this study. They were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a waiting-list control group. The experimental participants completed the DIEQ before (pretest) and after (posttest) a 45-minute Experiential Focusing-oriented dream interpretation intervention. By contrast, the control participants completed the DIEQ before (pretest) and after (first posttest) a 45-minute no-intervention waiting period. Then, the control group participants received the same intervention as the experimental group and completed the DIEQ (second posttest). All participants participated in a structured interview to conclude the study.

The Medieval English dream vision evidence influences from a variety of earlier vision literature, notably the apocalyptic vision and narrative dream. Philosophical visions by Plato, Cicero and Boethius, and Christian revelations of John and Paul contain traits that found their way into the dream poems by Langland, the Pearl poet and Chaucer. The Norwegian ballad Draumkvedet exhibits features that mirror these English visions. Notable characteristics pertaining to the character of the dreamer, the interplay between dreamer and dream, imagery of the vision, and structure, point to a common set of generic influences. Comparing Draumkvedet with its English counterparts demonstrates that they stem from the same tradition. Draumkvedet bares special resemblance to the Dream of the Rood, Piers Plowman and Pearl in its exploration of Christian doctrine and its appeal to the audience.

This paper presents a meta-analysis of dream theory within psychology and neuroscience. The questions it attempts to answer are: what is the neuroscientific basis of dreaming? Why do dreams exist (do they have an adaptive function)? Could dreams possibly have no function? And, what is the best way to interpret a dream? The current analysis presents various theories relevant to each of these questions and compares their viability. It also briefly examines the origins of psychological thought on dreams and, towards the end, outlines the steps and empirical support for a well-regarded method of dream interpretation known as the cognitive experiential model. In the end, the analysis finds that a major likely cause of dreaming is the occurrence of different memory processes during REM sleep, whose activity likely also contributes to dream content. As for adaptive functions, the existing neuroscientific evidence suggests that we are almost certainly capable of learning during dreams and that learning may therefore be one of dreams’ primary adaptive functions. However, due to the scarcity of research on dreams, few of these conclusions can be drawn with overwhelming confidence. Lastly, in regards to dream interpretation, the cognitive experiential model seems to provides a framework for dream interpretation which clients and therapists alike find satisfying and useful.