The Seba library treats Continuity Hypothesis in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Bulkeley, Kelly, Thompson, Evan, Roesler, Christian).
If the continuity hypothesis is correct, we would expect that a quick scan of Merri’s dreams would reveal her basic feelings about religion.
Bulkeley operationalizes the continuity hypothesis as a testable prediction: religious waking attitudes should be directly legible in dream content, and blind textual analysis of dream reports should confirm this correspondence.
, The Religious Content of Dreams: A New Scientific Foundation, 2009thesis
The findings essentially confirm the continuity hypothesis. The way Sanders interacts with these people in her dreams accurately reflects both the importance of her waking relationships with them and the emotional tenor of those relationships.
Analysis of the Barb Sanders archive is presented as direct empirical confirmation that dream content accurately maps the emotional structure and relational priorities of waking life.
, The Religious Content of Dreams: A New Scientific Foundation, 2009thesis
The continuity hypothesis has an enormous amount of research literature supporting its basic tenets… Its usefulness has been well established for many years. The discontinuity hypothesis, by contrast, is more recent, harder to study and analyze, and more theoretically than empirically grounded.
Bulkeley contrasts the empirically well-supported continuity hypothesis against the more speculative discontinuity hypothesis, affirming the former’s dominant standing in scientific dream research while acknowledging the latter’s symbolic-interpretive utility.
, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 2017thesis
the strong continuity thesis of life and mind… life and mind share a set of basic organizational properties, and the organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. Mind is life-like and life is mind-like.
Thompson articulates a philosophical version of the continuity hypothesis — the ‘deep continuity of life and mind’ — in which mind is understood as an organizational extension of life’s self-organizing properties, not a categorically distinct phenomenon.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Dream content is meaningfully related to waking life religiosity, so much so that reading a person’s dream reports ‘blindly,’ without any other personal information or associations from the dreamer, can reveal with surprising accuracy his or her basic waking attitude toward religion and spirituality.
The abstract of Bulkeley’s empirical study frames the continuity hypothesis as the theoretical foundation enabling blind dream analysis to function as a window onto waking religious identity.
, The Religious Content of Dreams: A New Scientific Foundation, 2009supporting
Continuity hypothesis, 85, 135, 141… Discontinuity hypothesis, 135, 140–141
The index entry situates the continuity hypothesis as a distinct and repeatedly referenced concept in Bulkeley’s systematic introduction to dream psychology, paired consistently with its discontinuity counterpart.
, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 2017supporting
typical changes in the dream series’ patterns could be identified which corresponded with therapeutic change. These findings support Jung’s theory of dreams.
Roesler’s Structural Dream Analysis, while not invoking the continuity hypothesis by name, provides supporting evidence for the principle that dream patterns track and mirror waking psychological processes, including therapeutic change.
, Jungian Theory of Dreaming and Contemporary Dream Research: Findings from the Research Project Structural Dream Analysis, 2020supporting
although it also acquires the positive qualities of consciousness, such as continuity, it loses the irrational contact with the flow of life and tends to become mechanical.
Von Franz’s observation that conscious continuity can become mechanical at the cost of vital contact with the unconscious gestures toward the limits of any strict continuity model of psychic life.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970aside