dreams and religion

Dreams of religious signifi cance. Dreams have been thought to have spiritual importance in many traditions. The 19th-century anthropologist Edward Tylor, in fact, thought that the origin of religion lay in the experience of dreams. It seemed natural to think that fi gures appearing in those mysterious nighttime adventures might be gods or spirits of ancestors, and that their words or stories might bear divine messages. The ability to interpret dreams rightly was also a divine gift. In the biblical book of Genesis, JOSEPH was able to win his freedom from prison by rightly predicting the fate of two fellow-prisoners from their dreams, and then foretelling the seven good years and seven lean years on the basis of pharaoh's dream. In the NEW TESTAMENT another Joseph, the spouse of MARY the mother of JESUS, was told by an ANGEL in a dream that her child was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and later was warned in the same way to take the infant to Egypt and avoid the wrath of Herod. The Greeks and Romans also considered dreams to be messages from the gods, though they recognized they were not always reliable. Penelope, in a famous passage in The Odyssey, said that there are two gates through which dreams pass: the gate of ivory, whose dreams are deceitful, and the gate of horn, whose dreams are true. The ancients, like the Chinese more recently, would also practice incubation or sleeping in a temple in order to receive advice from a god through a dream. CHRISTIANITY has sometimes seen dreams as a means of divine revelation, but has also recognized that demons can tempt the unwary through dreams. The hazy and fl eeting nature of dreams has also had religious meaning. Buddhist literature such as the DIAMOND SUTRA has spoken of this world with its empty attractions as like a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a dew-drop, and a fl ash of lightning. Here dreams mean not revelations of truth, but illusion and unreality. Yet Eastern accounts have also presented positive experiences of dreams, and there are advanced yoga techniques for controlling and using them. Twentieth-century analytic psychology in the tradition of Carl Gustav JUNG has given dreams a renewed spiritual importance as mirrors or indicators of what is going on in one's psychic and spiritual life. Jung pointed to the marked similarity of the symbolic language of dreams to the language of the world's mythologies and religions, showing that, rightly understood, one's dreams could be like a personal story telling what is needed to fulfi ll one's life. Other modern psychologists, however, have said there is very little of real importance in dreams, thus closing the door on a venerable religious tradition. In any case, dreams have always been important in the myths and religions of the world, whether as the voice of the divine or as warnings not to get lost in fantasy and that which is passing away.