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Session : Dreams as Living Images: Meaning-Making and Mental Health Dr. Bonnie Buckner, Dr. Jerri Lynn Hogg, Ruby Hwang, and Dr. Dorote Lucci Dreams have occupied a central place within contemplative, spiritual, and psychological traditions for millennia. Across cultures, they have served as encounters with deeper dimensions of the psyche, offering insight, guidance, healing, and transformation. Contemporary neuroscience increasingly suggests that dreaming contributes to emotional regulation, memory consolidation, creativity, adaptive functioning, and the integration of lived experience. This interdisciplinary panel explores dreams as a contemplative practice capable of cultivating awareness, meaning-making, creativity, relationality, and human flourishing. Rather than treating dreams solely as symbolic objects to be interpreted, the panel considers how embodied engagement with dream imagery can become a transforma- tive dialogue—deepening self-awareness, strengthening psychological flexibility, and bringing unconscious material into waking life. Drawing from an ongoing mixed-methods contemplative dream study, the symposium bridges contemplative science, neurophenomenology, dream research, transpersonal and Buddhist psychology, Kabbalistic and Talmudic perspectives, embodied cognition, narrative inquiry, and relational dreamwork. The research combines first-person phenomenological reporting, contemplative observation, embodied reflection, image-based elicitation, and qualitative thematic analysis, incorporating the Four Levels Dream Framework and an embodied image-dialogue methodology. Preliminary findings suggest that embodied dream inquiry may support greater meaning-making, creative problem-solving, psychological flexibility, and connection between dream experiences and everyday life. Participants frequently described the process as transformative and eye-opening, while also reporting a shift from purely mystical interpretations toward more personally meaningful, embodied, and actionable understandings. At the same time, some participants experienced temporary increases in worry, fatigue, or reduced sense of purpose, suggesting that bringing unconscious material into awareness may precede deeper psychological integration. Aligned with the conference theme, this panel asks a timely question: How might dreams—our most intimate contemplative experiences—help restore imagination, relational wisdom, and human meaning in an increasingly algorithmic world? By bringing together science, contemplative traditions, psychology, and lived experi- ence, the panel invites participants to reconsider dreams not as isolated nighttime phenomena, but as living experiences that can illuminate pathways toward resilience, creativity, self-understanding, and human flourishing.
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Session : Female Socialization Scale Dr. Dawn Celeste McGregor
This session explores how recognizing civilized oppression can become a pathway toward greater agency, authenticity, and belonging. It examines the subtle ways people may suppress their voices and adapt to dominant expectations in order to belong, and how bringing these patterns into awareness can support reclaiming personal agency and authenticity. From a transpersonal perspective, the session considers how this awareness can help create more inclusive, authentic, and holistic communities where people can belong without diminishing themselves.
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