The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience

The title of this book refers, of course, to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which was based on the Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the Fall of 1901 and Winter of 1902. In these lectures James developed a distinctive new method of studying religion. He used new research in the relatively young discipline of psychology to analyze and explain certain key phenomena found in virtually all the world’s religious traditions–phenomena like mysticism, asceticism, prayer, saintliness, conversion, and sacrifice. James, who was himself one of the preeminent psychologists of his day, approached religion just as he would any other expression of human mental life. He made careful, detailed observations of people’s religious experiences in all their colorful diversity, and he gave very sensitive attention to the personal meanings different kinds of experiences had for different kinds of people. James rejected the stubborn skepticism toward religion held by many of his scientific colleagues, and he argued that the ultimate standard to use in making a psychological evaluation of a religious experience was to look at its practical effects on the individual’s life–”by their fruits ye shall know them” (James 1958, 34).

However, just as much as James was interested in seeing what psychology could teach us about religion, he also wanted to explore what religion could teach us about psychology. Toward the end of the Gifford Lectures James brought the concept of the subconscious into his analysis, and he concluded that in psychological terms religious experiences are expressions of subconscious feelings, thoughts, energies, and desires. “[I]n religion,” James said, “we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the transmarginal or subliminal region [of the mind]….In persons deep in the religious life–and this is my conclusion–the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history” (James 1958, 366). What this means, James suggested, is that the further development of psychological knowledge will require us to explore experiential realms that have traditionally been regarded as religious or spiritual in nature. If we truly want to expand our psychological understanding of the human mind we must continue to examine in a careful and respectful fashion what the world’s religious traditions have taught about those mysteriously non-volitional, non-conscious powers that have guided, inspired, and sometimes radically transformed people’s lives.

In the twenty lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh James mentioned the subject of dreams but once, noting only that they are one of the most common expressions of that subconscious realm of the mind where religion and psychology come together (James 1958, 366). I imagine, though, that James might have devoted more attention to dreams if he had given the Gifford Lectures a few years later, after having what he described as one of the most “intensely peculiar experiences of my whole life”:

San Francisco, Feb. 14th 1906. The night before last, in my bed at Stanford University, I woke at 7:30 a.m., from a quiet dream of some sort, and whilst “gathering my waking wits,” seemed suddenly to get mixed up with reminiscences of a dream of an entirely different sort, which seemed to telescope, as it were, into the first one, a dream very elaborate, of lions, and tragic. I concluded this to have been a previous dream of the same sleep; but the apparent mingling of two dreams was something very queer, which I had never before experienced.

On the following night (Feb. 12-13) I awoke suddenly from my first sleep, which appeared to have been very heavy, in the middle of a dream, in thinking of which I became suddenly confused by the contents of two other dreams that shuffled themselves abruptly in between the parts of the first dream, and of which I couldn’t grasp the origin. Whence come these dreams? I asked. They were close to me, and fresh, as if I had just dreamed them; and yet they were far away from the first dream. The contents of the three had absolutely no connection. One had a cockney atmosphere, it happened to someone in London. The other two were American. One involved the trying on of a coat (was this the dream I seemed to wake from?) the other was a sort of nightmare and had to do with soldiers. Each had a wholly distinct emotional atmosphere that made its individuality discontinuous with that of the others. And yet, in a moment, as these three dreams alternately telescoped into and out of each other, and I seemed to myself to have been their common dreamer, they seemed quite as distinctly not to have been dreamed in succession, in that one sleep. When, then? Not on a previous night, either. When, then, and which was the one out of which I had just awakened? I could no longer tell: one was as close to me as the others, and yet they entirely repelled each other, and I seemed thus to belong to three different dream-systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either with the others or with my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide-awake. Presently cold shivers of dread ran over me: Am I getting into other people’s dreams? Is this a “telepathic” experience? Or an invasion of double (or treble) personality? Or is it a thrombus in a cortical artery? and the beginning of a general mental “confusion” and disorientation which is going on to develop who knows how far?

Decidedly I was losing hold of my “self,” and making acquaintance with a quality of mental distress that I had never known before, its nearest analogue being the sinking, giddying anxiety that one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really “lost.” Most human troubles look towards a terminus. Most fears point in a direction and concentrate towards a climax. Most assaults of the evil one may be met by bracing oneself against something, one’s principles, one’s courage, one’s will, one’s pride. But in this experience all was diffusion from a centre, and footholds swept away, the brace itself disintegrating all the faster as one needed its support more direly. Meanwhile vivid perception (or remembrance) of the various dreams kept coming over me in alternation. Whose? whose? WHOSE? Unless I can attach them, I am swept out to sea with no horizon and no bond, getting lost.

The idea aroused the “creeps” again, and with it the fear of again falling asleep and renewing the process. It had begun the previous night, but then the confusion had only gone one step, and had seemed simply curious. This was the second step–where might I be after a third step had been taken? (James 1910, 88-89, italics in original)

What strikes James more than anything else here is the overall form of his experience, the way it profoundly shakes his understanding of the ordinary structures of consciousness and personality. James provides few details about the dreams themselves, and no particular associations to the images of the lions, the cockney atmosphere, the coat, or the soldiers. Rather, it is the dizzying plurality of the dreams that unsettles him so deeply. Each of the dreams engages him in a vivid and distinct reality of its own, and yet he does not see any means of relating the dream realities to each other or to his daily life. James’s “self,” the customary center of his highly cultured and brilliantly intelligent waking life identity, is incapable of making sense of these dreaming experiences–the dreams carry him some place far beyond the boundaries, the “braces,” that have always defined and protected his selfhood.

I find many things to admire and wonder at in James’s narrative. One is his ability simply to describe what has happened to him. Despite the frightening confusion he feels, he still manages to write an evocative portrait of an experience that is utterly alien to ordinary rational thought. I’m particularly taken with his comparison of the dream experiences to the feeling of being “really lost” in the woods, as I have often drawn on wilderness metaphors when trying to describe the more extraordinary aspects of dreaming. Another remarkable element here is James’s willingness consider a variety of possible explanations for the dreams. They could be telepathic interactions with other people’s dreams, they could be products of a physiological malfunction in the cerebral cortex, they could be the beginnings of a mental breakdown, they could, perhaps, be an opening toward a kind of mystical insight or revelation. James isn’t sure what exactly has happened to him. And although no single explanation seems to fit, James clearly feels a strong impulse to understand the experience, to “attach” the dreams to someone or something.

More than anything, I marvel at James’s ability to live with the exquisitely sharp emotional tension generated by his dreams. He rejects the seductive simplicity of quick, reductionistic answers, and he chooses instead to hold all the different possibilities open, hoping that with time a better understanding will emerge that will do full justice to the mysterious complexity of his experience.

The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience is not intended to be a “Jamesian” analysis of dreaming. For one thing, I am interested not only in developing the dialogue between religion and psychology but also in expanding that dialogue to include voices from the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, neurophysiology, history, literature, and film criticism. For another thing, I am motivated in my research by somewhat different questions than those which guided James in his investigations. My key questions can be briefly stated as follows:

1. What is the role of dreaming in human development, and particularly in the development of our capacities for imaginative play? Given that all humans are “hard-wired” with a psychophysiological need to dream, what can or should a society do to educate its members (particularly its children) about the nature and the potentials of dreaming experience?
2. Why do certain dreams respond so directly and so creatively to waking life experiences of crisis, trauma, suffering, and loss? How have different cultural traditions made practical use of these “healing powers” of dreaming?
3. What is the relationship of dreaming to politics, authority, and rebellion? In what ways do dreams both reflect and challenge the structures of power that govern a dreamer’s life (at intrapsychic, geopolitical, and cosmic/theological levels)?
4. Is it ever possible to know with certainty if our dreams are revealing valuable spiritual truths or are simply deceiving us with alluring but vain fantasies? Can we develop trustworthy hermeneutic principles to guide us through the epistemologically confounding process of dream interpretation?

These four broad questions are woven throughout the thirteen chapters of The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience. Although each particular chapter uses a different interdisciplinary framework to study a different set of issues, all of the chapters are efforts to develop new perspectives on these four questions. Readers who expect a book to have a precise linear argument, marching point by point toward a specific concluding destination, may be disappointed by kaleidoscopic array of views presented in this work. Again, I can only appeal to the infinitely diverse nature of dreaming itself, and suggest that the best way to increase our understanding of dreaming is to engage in the kind of free-ranging interdisciplinary dialogue that is offered in the following chapters.

The specific focus of the first three chapters is on different ways of interpreting the religious or spiritual dimensions of dreaming. Most contemporary scholarship on dreams, even if it is friendly to religious issues and concerns, relies on conceptual models of religion that are narrow at best and erroneous at worst. In these three chapters I draw on resources from contemporary theology, the history of religions, depth psychology, and hermeneutic philosophy to promote a more sophisticated understanding of the numinous power and rich spiritual diversity of human dream life. In chapters four to six I consider the ways in which dreams relate not only to the dreamer’s personal life but to his or her social world as well. These chapters show how dreams reflect significant features of the dreamer’s cultural environment and sometimes even motivate moral and political actions that aim at the resolution of particularly troublesome problems in the dreamer’s community.

In chapters seven and eight I respond to the dream theories of Sigmund Freud and J. Allan Hobson, both of whom share a deep but in my view misguided hostility towards religion. I argue that their theories, despite their triumphant scientific reductionism, in fact provide valuable resources in helping us better understand the profoundly creative nature of dreaming.

In chapters nine through twelve I turn to the interplay of dreaming and artistic expression, and study different cultural representations of dreaming in myths, plays, and films. All of the dreams analyzed in these chapters are fictional, i.e. they are all experienced by people who are characters in an artistically-rendered narrative. My argument is that careful reading and interpretation of these “fictional” dreams can reveal intriguing new aspects of the “real” dreams we experience in our own lives.

I conclude the book with a personal narrative of my experiences at a dream studies conference I attended in Moscow, a conference that by coincidence began the very day (August 19, 1991) that a group of Red Army generals tried to seize control of the country from then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A postscript offers some thoughts on where this book fits into the ongoing scholarly discussion about the field of religion and psychological studies, a field which is in the midst of (yet another) period of transition and reorientation.
An annotated bibliography on dream research is included at the end of the book to aid readers who want to pursue the study of particular issues and themes. I have been writing regular book reviews on dreams for ten years now (first with Dream Network Bulletin and now with Dream Time) and this bibliography is intended to provide readers with a broad critical overview of the current state of dream literature.