Kilton Riggs Stewart was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 29, 1902 to Esther Call and John Riggs Stewart. He attended Franklin Elementary, Provo Jr. High, and Provo High school in Provo, Utah. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Stewart served a mission to French Canada before attending the University of Utah. He traveled between Honolulu, France, Japan, the Philippines and Hong Kong between 1928-1929. In 1931, he graduated with a Masters in Psychology from the University of Utah. In the early 1930s, Stewart traveled to Japan, the Philippines, and Malaya to do field work in the study of dream psychology. In the late 1930s, Stewart spent time in India, Iran, England and France. During these travels, Stewart, who was white, studied various groups of Indigenous people, conducting testing on their mental abilities and observing aspects of their culture, including ceremony and their relationships to dreams.In 1934, Stewart stayed with the Senoi people of Malaysia; he used this experience to develop the Senoi Dream Theory in his later writings. Though Stewart presented the theory as an accurate representation of the Senoi use of dream and lucid dreaming, psychologists recognize that he fabricated and exaggerated much of the theory (Domhoff, 2003).

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and Stewart was recalled from France by the United States State Department. From 1940-1941, Stewart performed unlicensed psychotherapy in New York and was then drafted into the U.S. Army to help train interrogators for prisoner of war interrogators. He was honorably discharged in 1943. He worked as a psychotherapist in New York until he moved to England where he completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1948. After graduation, Stewart became a New York State licensed psychotherapist and maintained offices in Philadelphia and New York City. During the 1950s, he associated with the Psychological Foundation, later renamed the American Mental Health Foundation. Kilton Riggs Stewart married Therese “Terri” Abernathy in 1954; together, they had one daughter. 1960, Stewart was diagnosed with cancer, causing him to establish the Stewart Foundation of Creative Psychology. After hospitalization in 1965, Kilton Stewart died of cancer on May 18, 1965.

Domhoff, G. W. (2003). Senoi Dream Theory: Myth, Scientific Method, and the Dreamwork Movement. Unpublished paper. University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kilton Riggs Stewart papers, ACCN 2824, Box 1, Folder 1 “Chronology of Life.” Special Collections and Archives. University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library. Salt Lake City, Utah.