E216 - Dr. Kathy Belicki - A Love of Dreams

Description Dr. Kathy Belicki is a Professor Emerita of Psychology at Brock University. She trained originally as a clinical psychologist, but soon found out that teaching and conducting research brought her the most joy. For much of her career she studied dreams looking at such questions as differences in dream recall, the causes and treatment of nightmares, the relation of personality to dreaming, and, at the end of her research career, the nature of dreams of the deceased. At various times she also studied forgiveness, and the impact of childhood trauma and abuse on one’s emotional well-being and physical health as an adult. At present she has just completed writing a memoir about her experiences in the Memory Wars of the 1990s—a period of intense conflict over what to make of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. You can find more about Kathy at https://brocku.ca/social-sciences/psychology/people/kathryn-belicki/

In this episode we talk about her early research on nightmares, how dreams lack volume control, researching dreams of the deceased, bereavement experiences while awake, and dreams of her deceased cats and grandmother.