"He said, 'Listen to my words: When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams.'"
Numbers 12:6
It’s not at all obvious that there really is that great a difference between the conscious and unconscious minds, to that one is really rational and the other irrational.
Indeed, modernity is utterly out of synch with how the ancients viewed dreams. For them, there was/is the Dreamtime and the time of Maya.
Schelling even had ascending stages of dreaming, ending in the state of free communion with the spiritual, archetypal, angelic world at the very apex, though recalled only in fragments.
For them, the great “fall” was in departing from this realm in the wrong manner.
Think of the vision of the Hindu sage, creations very ground is Viṣnu blissfully asleep, dreaming all things into being… and also the divine awareness asleep in each of us, so that we’re nearest God in dreaming within his dream, as put in the book Roland in Moonlight by David Bentley Hart, from which much here is taken.
Perhaps we are all dreaming this world, for is not dreams, for the Freudian, the place where desires are acted out?
Is this entire world not the staging ground for man, away from Heaven and God’s Way, to indulge in whatever desire he might fancy?
Wasn’t this world, Maya, born when Adam and Eve acted on their desire? Isn’t the world, phenomenologically, reconstituted each time we desire and seek to satisfy some lust?
Perhaps the Buddha was on to something, the world is desire, at least grasping desire, desire to take instead of receive as gift, and the end of self-centered desire the end to the illusions of this world…
Of course Jung and Plato have been compared, and indeed Plato's forms seem to be hypothesized as supra-conscious onto-noetic paradigms of all particular instances of a predicated property (e.g. the largeness of large), while Jung's archetypes are these forms as they have been sub-consciously embedded in the subterranean recesses of our individual and collective consciousness. The Platonic forms can thus be conceives as the primary analogue, or universal paradigm, of the psychologically embedded Jungian archetypes.
In any case, David Bentley Hart muses:
“At one time, the fluid boundary between the waking and sleeping worlds was much better appreciated, and hadn’t petrified into a wall of granite.
People understood so much more keenly that the dreaming intellect is simply one open to deliverances from other dimensions of reality… other regions of universal mind.
Everyone felt it rational to view dreams—or consider the possibility of viewing them—as objective communications from somewhere beyond the close boundaries of waking consciousness.
Aristotle wrote three separate treatises on the topics of sleep and dreaming and of prophecies that come in one’s sleep, even though he was inordinately disposed toward a naturalizing explanation for most of the phenomena he considered.
So too Cicero, in his treatise on divination: he may ultimately have rejected most oneiromancy as fanciful speculation, but he nonetheless reverently recorded Poseidonios’s three classifications of dreams inspired by the gods…
As I recall, the classifications are as follows: dreams in which the mind really perceives certain truths by virtue of its innate kinship to the gods; dreams prompted by incidental contact with the deathless spirits that naturally throng the air, who are bearers of symbols of truths otherwise hidden from us; and then dreams in which the gods directly address the sleeping mind, particularly when the dreamer is nearing death, in which they communicate truths about the future....
We have dream guides from Egypt and Babylon and Assyria that are millennia old—some as many as four millennia, in fact. And think of how many ancient oneirocritical theorists applied themselves to delving into those shadowy depths… those divinely nocturnal mysteries.
Antiphon, Demetrios of Phaleron, Philochoros, Chrysippos, Poseidonios again… Artemidoros, of course.
And think of those wise souls who heeded the messages their sleeping minds received in the night:
Marcus Aurelius taking medical advice from the gods in dreams, Dio Cassius discovering his vocation as an historian by virtue of a divine communication in his sleep, Plutarch taking the advice of a dream-augury to abstain from eating eggs, Galen receiving instruction on surgery from the gods while sleeping…”
“At one time, the fluid boundary between the waking and sleeping worlds was much better appreciated, and hadn’t petrified into a wall of granite.
People understood so much more keenly that the dreaming intellect is simply one open to deliverances from other dimensions of reality… other regions of universal mind.
Everyone felt it rational to view dreams—or consider the possibility of viewing them—as objective communications from somewhere beyond the close boundaries of waking consciousness.
Aristotle wrote three separate treatises on the topics of sleep and dreaming and of prophecies that come in one’s sleep, even though he was inordinately disposed toward a naturalizing explanation for most of the phenomena he considered.
So too Cicero, in his treatise on divination: he may ultimately have rejected most oneiromancy as fanciful speculation, but he nonetheless reverently recorded Poseidonios’s three classifications of dreams inspired by the gods…
As I recall, the classifications are as follows: dreams in which the mind really perceives certain truths by virtue of its innate kinship to the gods; dreams prompted by incidental contact with the deathless spirits that naturally throng the air, who are bearers of symbols of truths otherwise hidden from us; and then dreams in which the gods directly address the sleeping mind, particularly when the dreamer is nearing death, in which they communicate truths about the future....
We have dream guides from Egypt and Babylon and Assyria that are millennia old—some as many as four millennia, in fact. And think of how many ancient oneirocritical theorists applied themselves to delving into those shadowy depths… those divinely nocturnal mysteries.
Antiphon, Demetrios of Phaleron, Philochoros, Chrysippos, Poseidonios again… Artemidoros, of course.
And think of those wise souls who heeded the messages their sleeping minds received in the night:
Marcus Aurelius taking medical advice from the gods in dreams, Dio Cassius discovering his vocation as an historian by virtue of a divine communication in his sleep, Plutarch taking the advice of a dream-augury to abstain from eating eggs, Galen receiving instruction on surgery from the gods while sleeping…”
Hart notes one the ancient oneiric taxonomies of Macrobius :
“…he enumerates five species of dream. The two most trivial or incidental forms are the phantasma, the enhypnion or insomnium
—‘nightmare’—neither of which should be accorded any prophetic meaning, and either of which one may safely dismiss as no more than a perturbation of the senses and imagination.
But then, in more or less ascending order, come the three orders of dream that convey truths that must be heeded. There’s the oneiros or somnium proper, a nocturnal ‘perplexity’ or ‘enigma’ wherein truths are couched in strange and baffling shapes, under palls of ambiguity; such a dream is always in need of interpretation by someone adept at the art.
Then there’s the horama or visio , the dream that’s really a prophetic vision, wherein one glimpses events that will—and do—come to pass in the future, whether consequential or inconsequential. Finally, there’s the chrematismos or oraculum , the ‘oracular’ kind of dream, sent directly by the gods, in which a god, or at least a divine messenger garbed in the form of a priest or a trusted relative or a man revered for his piety, directly and lucidly “communicates to the sleeper something that is both yet to happen and of the greatest moment.
It’s enough to know, as Porphyry says, that that veil grows thin before the attentive soul, and betrays glimpses of what lies beyond it.”
Hart also references Synesius of Cyrene, the bishop of Ptolemais, who affirms that dreams often foreshadow or disclose the shape of the future, and at other times impart vital information, like the correct cure for a certain malady.
At still other times, he says, they reveal things to us about ourselves that otherwise we wouldn’t know—the way a dream of the for example, might apprise the dreamer of his poetic vocation.
There is the entire Chinese science of shenyou - ‘spiritwandering.’
For the ancient Chinese, dreams were seen as ventures out of the flesh into other realms of reality, and all reality as we know it is simply a matter of how the spirit wanders, in the landscapes both of dreams and of the waking world.
And even today the spirits still can guide us. One of the wildest case studies in medical history I've seen is titled "Diagnosis by hallucinatory voices” HERE.
In 1984, a woman starts hearing voices in her head saying things like, "Please don’t be afraid, we would like to help you.” She goes to doctor, is given psychiatric medication, voices stop.
But the voices reappear, they tell her to get immediate treatment, giving her a specific address, which turns out to be the tomography department of a London hospital. The voices tell her to get a brain scan done because of a tumor and just to reassure her, her doctor requests a brain scan.
Well, the scan actually identifies a brain tumor !
They remove it, and after the operation the voices say "We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye."
The woman discontinues the antipsychotic medication, voices never return.
Some proposed explanations for this from the article:
- some form of telepathic communication
- the patient made it all up, she already knew she had a tumor and wanted to get free health coverage (author says it's unlikely, given her initial relief from the voices subsiding + she had already been living in UK for 15 years)
- * this was a case of "confabulation" by the brain, where the disturbance by the lesion was detected subconsciously and bubbled into awareness in the form of a hallucination, integrating knowledge she had previously learned about e.g. tumors and the location of hospitals.
Cormac McCarthy, the great writer, has a central thesis he calls The Kekulé Problem HERE :
"Something inside us understands and answers things beyond language far more efficiently than our intellect.
He points out that the unconscious solves math problems without numbers, and you don't actually use language to solve anything.
Yet obviously the unconscious must understand those things, even though its loathe to speak to us with them, often using images, metaphors, pictures instead. He writes,
"Did language meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it....
“Language crossed mountains and oceans as if they weren’t there. …We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go.
The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated.
I suggested once in conversation at the Santa Fe Institute that language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion and David Krakauer—our president—said that the same idea had occurred to him.
....The difference between the history of a virus and that of language is that the virus has arrived by way of Darwinian selection and language has not. The virus comes nicely machined...
"....What is at work here? And how does the unconscious know we’re not getting it? What doesn't it know?
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us. (Moral compulsion? Is he serious?)
"The unconscious is concerned with rules but these rules will require your cooperation. The unconscious wants to give guidance to your life in general but it doesn't care what toothpaste you use.
And while the path which it suggests for you may be broad it doesn't include going over a cliff. ....The unconscious intends that they be difficult to unravel because it wants us to think about them. "
He eventually discovers there is an external being, the "dreamer", who knows the people and sends them dreams so that they will recognize themselves.
Next, he analyzes the nature of the "dreamer" and comes to the conclusion that God exists and is the dreamer.
Philosopher Erik Haynes claims what we think of as dreams are
constructed mentally from emergent unstable minds and reality while awake is a hyperdream, which is more vivid and consistent while being constructed mentally from a fundamental stable mind. He writes:
“This philosophy argues for a unified consciousness at the core of reality. Humans are primarily conscious beings (or souls) with a tangible sense of reality provided by, and connected through, God's consciousness.
This can be compared to the way in which the dream world seems to incorporate everything that reality does yet one would not say that the dream world contains matter since dreams exist completely in the mind. Since the mind is capable of producing a tangible reality in the dream world, then how much more so would God's mind be capable of creating a tangible reality for His creation?”
Haynes references ‘Death is but a dream’- a book by Dr. Christopher Kerr who, as a doctor in a hospice in Buffalo, wrote down the dreams of the dying.
It was very striking that the patients could not distinguish the dreams from the waking state and that in the dreams beloved already deceased people appeared who wanted to accompany them across to the afterlife.
The people who wanted to pick them up were as real to them as the doctor and the hospice staff. They were in a state where the dream reality and the material reality coincided with each other.
Haynes writes,
“From here we can assume that we dream ourselves into the other world. Arrived on the other side the dream disconnects from the body and we dream through the beyond until the dream connects again to a body.
During pregnancy, the fetus continues to be in the dream state which coincides with the bodily sensations, and after birth, the body disconnects from the dream.
However, the dream is not completely gone but still penetrates into our perception at night during sleep.
At the end of life, we come again into a state where dream reality and physical reality become one and after the transition, the dream disconnects from the body and we dream ourselves again through the afterlife.
What happens now if we become lucid in this bodiless dream state in the afterlife? I imagine this could endow us with the power over our fate and we could incarnate into any life we dream of.
I’ll end with a serious of quotes on dream for various Church fathers, who affirm much of what others have said.
Clement of Alexandria:
In discussing the nature and meaning of sleep, Clement urged: “Let us not, then, who are sons of the true light, close the door against this light; but turning in on ourselves, illumining the eyes of the hidden man, and gazing on the truth itself, and receiving its streams, let us clearly and intelligibly reveal such dreams as are true…. Thus also such dreams as are true, in the view of him who reflects rightly, are the thoughts of a sober soul, undistracted for the time by the affections of the body, and counseling with itself in the best manner…. Wherefore always contemplating God, and by perpetual converse with Him inoculating the body with wakefulness, it raises man to equality with angelic grace, and from the practice of wakefulness it grasps the eternity of life” (Stromata, or Miscellanies).
Thascius Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in 250 A.D.:
Thascius Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in 250 A.D.:
In a letter to Florentius Pupianus he said, “Although I know that to some men dreams seem ridiculous and visions foolish, yet assuredly it is to such as would rather believe in opposition to the priest, than believe the priest.” In another letter he wrote that God guides the very councils of the Church by “many and manifest visions.” He commended the reader, Celerinus, because his conversion to the Church had come through a vision of the night.
Athanasius :
“….but in death-like sleep, the soul keeps awake by virtue of its own power, and transcends the natural power of the body, and as though traveling away from the body while remaining in it, imagines and beholds things above the earth, and often even holds converse with the saints and angels who are above earthly and bodily existence, and approaches them in the confidence of the purity of its intelligence; shall it not all the more, when separated from the body at the time appointed by God Who coupled them together, have its knowledge of immortality more clear?” (II.31.5 and 33.3)
Gregory of Nyssa:
Athanasius :
“….but in death-like sleep, the soul keeps awake by virtue of its own power, and transcends the natural power of the body, and as though traveling away from the body while remaining in it, imagines and beholds things above the earth, and often even holds converse with the saints and angels who are above earthly and bodily existence, and approaches them in the confidence of the purity of its intelligence; shall it not all the more, when separated from the body at the time appointed by God Who coupled them together, have its knowledge of immortality more clear?” (II.31.5 and 33.3)
Gregory of Nyssa:
In his major philosophical work, On the Making of Man, Gregory deals directly with the meaning and place of sleep and dreams in man’s life. He believed that when man is asleep the senses and the reason rest, and the less rational parts of the soul appear to take over. Reason is not, however, extinguished, but smolders like a fire “heaped with chaff” and then breaks forth with insights that modern dream research calls “secondary mentation.”
He went on to say that “while all men are guided by their own minds, there are some few who are deemed worthy of evident Divine communication; so, while the imagination of sleep naturally occurs in a like and equivalent manner for all, some, not all, share by means of their dreams in some more Divine manifestation….” His reasoning was that there is a natural foreknowledge that comes in an unknown way through the nonrational part of the soul — the “unconscious,” according to modern depth psychology — and it is through this part of the soul that God communicates Himself directly.
Gregory then enumerated the other meanings that dreams can have, offering quite a complete outline of the subject. He suggested that dreams can provide mere reminiscences of daily occupations and events. Or, they can reflect the condition of the body, its hunger or thirst, or the emotional condition of the personality. Dreams can also be understood in medical practice as giving clues to the sickness of the body. Indeed, far from stating a superstitious belief, Gregory laid out quite well the principle upon which today’s analytical study of dreams is based.
Gregory also told, in a sermon entitled “In Praise of the Forty Martyrs,” of a dream that occurred while he was attending a celebration in honor of the soldiers who had been martyred. In the dream, the martyrs challenged Gregory for his Christian lethargy, and it had a profound effect upon his life.
It is clear that philosophically, practically and personally, Gregory of Nyssa believed the dream could be a revelation of depths beyond the human ego.
Basil the Great:
He went on to say that “while all men are guided by their own minds, there are some few who are deemed worthy of evident Divine communication; so, while the imagination of sleep naturally occurs in a like and equivalent manner for all, some, not all, share by means of their dreams in some more Divine manifestation….” His reasoning was that there is a natural foreknowledge that comes in an unknown way through the nonrational part of the soul — the “unconscious,” according to modern depth psychology — and it is through this part of the soul that God communicates Himself directly.
Gregory then enumerated the other meanings that dreams can have, offering quite a complete outline of the subject. He suggested that dreams can provide mere reminiscences of daily occupations and events. Or, they can reflect the condition of the body, its hunger or thirst, or the emotional condition of the personality. Dreams can also be understood in medical practice as giving clues to the sickness of the body. Indeed, far from stating a superstitious belief, Gregory laid out quite well the principle upon which today’s analytical study of dreams is based.
Gregory also told, in a sermon entitled “In Praise of the Forty Martyrs,” of a dream that occurred while he was attending a celebration in honor of the soldiers who had been martyred. In the dream, the martyrs challenged Gregory for his Christian lethargy, and it had a profound effect upon his life.
It is clear that philosophically, practically and personally, Gregory of Nyssa believed the dream could be a revelation of depths beyond the human ego.
Basil the Great:
In his commentary on Isaiah, Basil states, “The enigmas in dreams have a close affinity to those things which are signified in an allegoric or hidden sense in the Scriptures. Thus both Joseph and Daniel, through the gift of prophecy, used to interpret dreams, since the force of reason by itself is not powerful enough for getting at truth” (S. Basilii Magni, Commentarium in Isaiam Prophetam, Prooemium 6f., J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Graecae, Paris, l880, Vol. 30, Col. 127-30).
That Basil believed in continuing to consider dreams is indicated by the letter he wrote to a woman in which he interpreted the dream she had sent him. He suggested to her that her dream meant she was to spend more time in “spiritual contemplation and cultivating that mental vision by which God is wont to be seen.”
Gregory of Nazianzen:
That Basil believed in continuing to consider dreams is indicated by the letter he wrote to a woman in which he interpreted the dream she had sent him. He suggested to her that her dream meant she was to spend more time in “spiritual contemplation and cultivating that mental vision by which God is wont to be seen.”
Gregory of Nazianzen:
In his second book of poems, Gregory writes: “And God summoned me from boyhood in my nocturnal dreams, and I arrived at the very goals of wisdom” (S. Gregorii Theologi, Carminum, Liber II, 994-95O). In another place he told that this nocturnal vision was the hidden spark that set his whole life aflame for God. In one of his poems, he spoke of the ability of demons to also speak through one’s dreams. “Devote not your trust too much to the mockery of dreams, nor let yourself be terrified by everything; do not become inflated by joyful visions, For frequently a demon prepares these snares for you” (Carminum, Liber I, 608-9, lines 209-12).
St. John Chrysostom:
St. John Chrysostom:
In his commentary on Acts, volume one, he states, “To some the grace was imparted through dreams, to others it was openly poured forth. For indeed by dreams the prophets saw, and received revelations.” According to Chrysostom, dreams are sent to those whose wills are compliant to God, for they do not need visions or the more startling divine manifestations, and he mentioned Joseph, the father of Jesus, and Peter and Paul as examples of this truth (Homilies on Matthew, IV. 10f., 18; v. 5)
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