Religion and Dreams
17-09-2008
In most ancient cultures, consideration and even veneration of
dreams played a great part. Some groups felt that dream life was more
real and important than waking life. Not only were dreams looked to
for information about hunting, as in Eskimo and African groups; but
also for ways of healing physical and psychological ills, such as the
Greek Dream Temples of Asclepius; insights into the medicinal
properties of herbs, barks and clays with African tribal
witch-doctors. Common to most of these groups, and evident in the Old
Testament, was also the sense that through dreams one had awareness of
the transcendental or supersensible. St. Peter's dream of the
sheet and unclean animals was a turning point in the history of
Western society - as was Constantine's dream of his victory if he
used the symbol of Christianity.
At its most fundamental, the human religious sense emerges out of
several factors. One is the awareness of existing amidst external and
internal forces of nature which cause us to feel vulnerable and
perhaps powerless. Such natural processes as illness, death, growth
and decay, earthquakes, the seasons, confront us with things which are
often beyond our ability to control. Considering the information and
resources of the times, one of religion's main functions in the
past, was the attempted control of the ‘uncertain' factors
in human life, and help toward psychological adjustment to
vulnerability. Religions were the first social programs aiding the
human need for help and support toward emotional, mental, physical and
social health and maturity. Even if primitive, such programs helped
groups of people gain a common identity and live in reasonable harmony
together. Like a computer program which is specific to a particular
business, such programs were specific to a particular group, and so
may be outdated in today's need for greater integration with
other races.
Kinship with all life
Dreams also portray and define the aspect of human experience in
which we have a sense of kinship with all life forms. This is an
experience through which we find a connection with the roots of our
being. While awake we might see the birth of a colt and feel the
wonder of emergence and newness; the struggle to stand up and survive;
the miracle of physical and sexual power which can be accepted or
feared. In looking in the faces of fellow men and women we see
something of what they have done in this strange and painful wonder we
call life. We see whether they have been crushed by the forces
confronting them; whether they have become rigid; or whether, through
some common miracle, they have been able to carry into their mature
years, the laughter, the crying, the joy, the ability to feel pain
that are the very signs of life within the human soul. These things
are sensed by us all, but seldom organised into a comprehensive view
of life and an extraction of meaning. Often it is only in our dreams,
through the ability the unconscious has to draw out the significance
of such widely divergent experiences, that we glimpse the unity behind
phenomena. This sense of unity is an essential of spiritual life -
i.e. we all have a liver, we breath, we have come from a mother, so
share a universal experience.
This experience of touching the essence of life is wonderfully
portrayed in the following example. It is quoted from J. B.
Priestley's book Rain Upon Godshill:
Just before I went to America, during the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had such a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read. The setting of the dream was quite simple, and owed something to the fact that not long before my wife had visited the lighthouse here at St. Catherine's to do some bird ringing. I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort?
As I stared down, seeming to see every creature's ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been born, if the struggle ceased for ever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled though them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds."
The totem as symbol
Some North American Indians developed the totem out of similar
processes. In one generation a person might learn to plant a seed and
eat the results. Later someone might see that through fertilisation
more food was produced. Still later someone found that by irrigating,
still more improvement was made. No one individual was responsible for
such vital cultural information, and the collective information is
bigger than any one person, yet individuals can partake of it and add
to it. The totem represented such subtle realities, as it might in a
modern dream, as Christ might in today's unconscious. That older
cultures venerated their collective information, and modern human's
seem largely apathetic to it, shows how our ‘religion' has
degenerated. Yet utilising the power of the unconscious to portray the
subtle influences which impinge upon us, and building the information
gained into our response to life, is deeply important.
With the growth of authoritarian structures in Western religion, and
the dominance of the rational mind over feeling values, dreams have
been pushed into the background. With this change has developed the
sense that visionary dreams were something which ‘superstitious'
cultural groups had in the past. Yet thoroughly modern men and women
still meet Christ powerfully in dreams and visions. Christ still
appears to them as a living being. The transcendental, the collective
or universal enters their life just as frequently as ever before.
Sometimes it enters with insistence and power, because a too rational
mind has led to an imbalance in the psyche - a balance in which the
waking and rational individuality is one pole, and the feeling,
connective awareness of the unconscious is the other.
Although it is tempting to think of the transcendent as ethereal or
unreal, the religious in dreams is nearly always a symbol for the
major processes of maturing in human life. We are the hero/ine who
meets the dangers of life outside the womb, who faces growth, ageing
and death. The awe and deep emotions we unconsciously feel about such
heroic deeds are depicted by religious emotion.
The spiritual as a practical fact
Also, though this is seldom thought to be the case, religious
feeling is at base a very practical thing. It is built upon a
fundamental human experience - that of personal existence. What is
meant by this is that in being aware of existing, you also become
aware that your existence depends upon factors other than your own
awareness of yourself. You need to breathe, you need to eat, you need
other human beings to help you gather food, produce clothing,
entertain you, share love, perhaps reproduce. In turn, food and air,
people, depend upon plants, animals, bacterial action, and sunlight,
for their own existence. A tree that produces an apple we eat needs
the minerals in the soil as well as the bacteria at its roots. It
needs sunlight for energy, as well as the rain and the bees or insects
to help it pollinate. Life is a process of coexistence and
interdependence. The interactions and dependencies upon which your
existence, or that of the apple on the tree depend, are not limited.
If we trace them we find they link not just with our earth, but with
the whole cosmos.
Taking the word spiritual to mean the sum total of all these linked
interactions and dependencies within our body and the universe that
enable our personal existence, then our spiritual life is a very basic
and practical thing. It arises out of our recognition of our intimate
connection and life in the web of existence. It comes from some
measure of experience or sense of this connection and integration.
Do you wash your hands of yourself?
When looked at from this viewpoint, none of us can escape the
spiritual life. We can, however, relate to it in many different ways.
These ways are depicted in the New Testament as the manner in which
people related to Christ. Taking Christ as a symbol of the cosmic web
of sentient life, people can love it, wash their hands of it, crucify
it, ignore it, be healed by it, lie about it, offer themselves to it,
worship it - and so on and on. The stance we take in our relationship
with this larger life we are an integral part of, is the basic stuff
of how we live, and the quality of our life.
In the end though, the experience of that bigger life in which we
are a part, is a transcendent one. It moves our awareness beyond the
limitations of thinking. It eliminates the boundaries of personal
awareness. It enables us to experience, not just think about, our life
as an eternal part of a great mystery. As Priestly says in describing
his wonderful dream of the birds, '... nothing mattered, nothing
could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering
and hurrying lambency of being.'
Rss Feeds - Dream dictionary
