Dreams and Spirituality

Kate Adams

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848257313
• eBook ISBN: 9781848257344
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

A comprehensive overview of the nature of dreams as understood from a range of diverse perspectives, and their relevance for pastoral care. Its approach is both systematic and practical, enabling ministers, spiritual directors and counsellors to understand the nature of dreams and the role they play in the lives of those in their pastoral care.

PART 1
Multi-Disciplinary Points of Departure

1

Dreams as Revelations

Food for Theological and Philosophical Thought

BART J. KOET

In a fascinating philosophical study the Frenchman Pierre Carrique (2002) tries to assess the value and significance of dreaming. His thesis is that at the primary level of each experience the difference between waking on the one hand and sleeping and dreaming on the other is at stake. But the phenomenon of the ‘dream’ is, in that context, the most alarming.

Even a person who is not very contemplative will occasionally be amazed by one of their dreams. The most astonishing fact is that during the dream, the dreamer is not surprised by the dream, for while dreaming the dream world seems realistic.

The ambiguity of dreaming is one of the reasons why it is very difficult to define it. Carrique explores the act of thinking about dreaming within different philosophical systems. First he discusses some of Descartes’ works and those of his ‘disciple’ Sartre. Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel and Husserl follow. Then, in the second part of the book, Carrique turns to ancient Greek wisdom, to Plato and Aristotle, but also to older texts, like those of Heraclitus and Pindar, often with Heidegger as his guide.

In Greek wisdom it seems that the poet wins over the philosopher. It is the poet Pindar who, with the help of dreaming, defines human beings. First he asks:

‘Creatures of a day! What is somebody?

What is he not?’

And then he seems to answer: ‘Man is a dream of a shadow.’1

According to Pindar, the dream helps to define and to determine a human being. According to Carrique, the dream as a border-crossing helps to make clear what becomes evident when consciousness diminishes. The twilight and the morning sun are necessary to understand the day.

Nowadays, one can find these puzzling cross-overs between reality and dreams and fantasies present in movies. It is precisely the difficulty to determine differences between dreams and facts that makes these movies so appealing.

The Matrix (1999) depicts a world in which reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality, created by sentient machines. In the movie there are constant cross-overs between the dreamlike world as made by the Matrix, the computer simulation of the world, and the ‘real world’. It is no accident that the name of one of the protagonists is Morpheus (the Greek word for sleep and thus Morpheus is Mr Sleep) and that Simulcra and Simulation, a book by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, is visible onscreen. That work was supposed to be read by the actors prior to filming and this also indicates that The Matrix deals with philosoph­ical questions about the relationship between reality and signs. The theme of Inception (2010) is bringing real life to life in dreams (and in dreams within dreams) and thus it plays with the border-crossing between waking life and dreaming world.

However, dreams are not only an important philosophical, literary or cinematic topic. It is also important for theologians and pastors to think about dreams. It is the aim of this chapter to offer some theological, and above all, biblical points of departure. I will first sketch some theological aspects and, after drawing the broader lines of biblical views on dreams, I will discuss one biblical dream narrative more extensively.

An example of a theologian who as both a theologian and a philosopher thought about dreams is Augustine of Hippo (Koet 2012 and the literature mentioned on p. 110). In a very succinct but clear book about Augustine as a philosopher, Gareth B. Matthews discusses three philosophical dream problems according to Augustine (2005, pp. 65–75). Matthews distinguishes three different dream problems:

1. The first problem is the Epistemological Dream Problem: How do I know whether I am now dreaming or not?
2. Matthews calls the second the Metaphysical Dream Problem: How do I know whether all life is my dream?
3. He typifies the third as the Moral Dream Problem: Can I be immoral by doing something immoral in my dream?

Matthews refers to several of Plato’s dialogues to show that Socrates had already dealt with these questions.

However, there are other theological issues. One of the most important is the fact that dreams can be seen as revealing the divine will, as argued by A. L. Oppenheim (1956, p. 184) in the introduction to his important book:

For the ancient Near East it can be stated – with the oversimplification which is reserved only to preliminary remarks – that dream experiences were recorded on three clearly differentiated planes: first, dreams as revelations of the deity, which may or may not require interpretation; second, dreams which reflect, symptomatically, the state of mind, the spiritual and bodily ‘health’ of the dreamer, which are only mentioned but never recorded; and third, mantic dreams in which forthcoming events are prognosticated.

Oppenheim worked with Assyrian and Sumeric texts. In Greek and Jewish realms there was also a possible relationship between divine revelation and dreams. As argued by A. H. M. Kessels (1978, p. 154), in the Homeric poems all dreams are described as being sent by a God. And although quite a few other Greek authors referred to the divine origin of dreams, the philosopher Aristotle did not accept that dreams were from a divine source. Hence there was no single common idea about dreaming in ancient Greece.

When we look in the next section to the ideas on dreams in the Old Testament, we will also hear some different opinions. In the long history of the biblical books as an emerging canonical tradition, there were a variety of visions of dreams that were written down in the different stages of the development of the Old Testament (for dreams in the Old Testament, see Husser 1999; Lanckau 2006).

Views on dreams in the Bible

During the Requiem Mass for the assassinated president of the USA, Monsignor Philip M. Hannan, auxiliary Bishop of Washington, said that John F. Kennedy had quoted Joel 2.28: ‘And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions’ (ESV) during his last dinner on 21 November 1963. He combined that reference with Proverbs 29.18: ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’ (KJV). The Joel quotation and the way in which Kennedy combined two biblical texts, show two important aspects of biblical views on dreams: dreams and visions seem to be, to a certain extent, interchangeable and civilization needs them.

However, there is a lot of discussion about what a dream actually is. In English the word ‘dream’ can mean a fantasy or a daydream as well as something that happens during sleeping. It is quite difficult to give a concise definition of a dream. A well-known dream researcher told me at a congress of the International Association for the Study of Dreams that, as far as he was concerned, in dream research we have come no further than Aristotle (see his De Somno and De Insomniis).

There is no biblical definition of dreams and it is not possible to verify the authenticity of the dream stories that we read in the Scriptures. Did they really happen or are they a literary device? What is clear is that when dreams are mentioned in the Scriptures, often these narratives are indicative of a divine communication. As we have seen above, in classical times dreams were seen as a means of contact with the divine. This was the case in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Greece, as well as ancient Rome and Israel. Instances of this are found in the narratives about the dreams and visions in Genesis, in which God manifests himself in different ways to Abimelech (Gen. 20.3), Jacob (Gen. 28.10–16; 31.11–13) and Joseph (for example, Gen. 37.40–41).

One of the most important texts about divine communication is Numbers 12.1–8. Aaron and Miriam, the brother and sister of Moses, had been lamenting: ‘Has the Lord only spoken through Moses? Hasn’t he also spoken through us?’ Moses does not defend himself, but God does. According to Numbers, the Lord called Moses, Miriam and Aaron to the Tent of his presence. They obeyed, and the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud and called out:

‘Hear my words:

If there is a prophet among you,

I, the Lord make myself known to him in a vision

I speak with him in a dream.

Not so with my servant Moses;

he is entrusted with all my house.

With him I speak mouth to mouth,

clearly and not in dark speech;

and he beholds the form of the Lord.’

(Num. 12.6–8, ESV)

This passage teaches us that God speaks in dreams and visions to the prophets, but to Moses he speaks mouth to mouth, face to face. Our concern here is the fact that God speaks to the prophets in dreams and visions.

In the Bible we often come across passages where God speaks through visions and dreams. From Numbers 12.6 we learn that dreams and visions may have the same function even though there can be some differences. Both serve as the vehicle of divine communication. That dreams and visions are interchangeable in a certain way is – as we saw above – also suggested in the parallel between visions and dreams in Joel 2.28–32, a text quoted in Acts 2.17–21 (for the parallelism and the divine origin of dreams, see also Job 7.14).

In the comparatively older books of the Old Testament dreams are freely interpreted as communication with the divine, and in the later books of the Scriptures other origins of the dreams are also proposed. The Ecclesiast says that dreams come from working too hard (see Eccles. 5.2 (or 5.3); compare also 5.6). And the learned Jew Ben Sira, who summarized the Hebrew Torah in proverbs for the Jews living in the diaspora – which ended up in the canon of the Septuagint thanks to the translation by his grandson – states that dreams are a delusion (Sir. 34.5). However, he adds one condition. Only when the dream has been sent by the Almighty can men attach value to it (34.6). Ben Sira was a representative of the Judaism that increasingly valued the Scriptures in the making and its interpreters, a group of men who in later times became known as the ‘scribes’. In the Judaism of those times there were also more apocalyptic movements and they attached more importance to dreams and visions.

Consequently a dilemma arose: which dreams come from God and which ones do not? In the later books of the Old Testament, in the writings of the New Testament and in the Early Church only the dreams that are accompanied by reference to that other holy revelation, the Scriptures, are considered a credible divine revelation. This can be seen, for example, in the dreams in Matthew 1–2, where there are also references to the Scriptures (see Koet 2006; 2009).

Dreams in the New Testament

In the popular Theological Dictionary of the New Testament Albrecht Oepke writes under the term ‘dream’ that dreams in the New Testament are no longer so important, since Jesus, God, no longer speaks in a mysterious manner, but speaks openly (Oepke 1954, pp. 228–31). Dreams have not – according to him – been necessary since Jesus. This is one of the many examples in the dictionary of ‘debunking’ the Old Testament. Gerhard Kittel, the editor of this reference work, which is often used uncritic­ally, was an active anti-Semite. Further, as Professor of Evangelical Theology and New Testament, and as one of the founding fathers of the Reichsinstituts für Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands (in 1935, the Nazi Institute for the History of the New [sic] Germany), he published ‘scientific’ studies depicting Judaism as the historical enemy of Germany, Christianity and even European culture in general. It is thus not totally unexpected that in quite a few lemmas of that dictionary, authors suggest too wide an opposition between the ‘dark’ sides of the Old Testament or of Judaism on the one hand and the enlightened views of Jesus and the New Testament on the other. This seems to account also for the part that deals with dreams. After all, it may be so that in the Gospel little is said about dreams, but it does not mean that in the history of Christianity the part of dreams should be wiped out.

Only in Matthew 1–2 and in the story of Pilate’s wife (Matt. 27.19) do we hear about dreams as a communication with the divine. In Matthew 1–2 we find five different dreams (see Gnuse 1990; Frenschkowksi 1998). The first dream is in 1.20–25, where Joseph is asked to take Mary for his wife. The second dream is a warning to the magi to leave the country (2.12). Then in a dream Joseph is told to go to Egypt (2.13–15). He is also informed about the death of Herod and that he can go back to Israel (2.19–20). A last dream warns Joseph not to go to Galilee (2.22).

Let me discuss one example. In 1.20–25 it is told how Joseph was in a very difficult situation. According to the Law (e.g. Deut. 24.1) he must leave his wife. In the dream there is a reference to a prophetic text. The law about sending an unfaithful wife away was overruled by two divine revelations. This dream is trustworthy, because the message that Mary will have a child conceived by the Holy Spirit is confirmed by a prophecy in the Scriptures. A dream and the Scriptures show Joseph a new way (see Koet 2006, pp. 44–5). Apparently, Jesus, like Moses, needs no dream to communicate with God. In Luke too we find a reference to dreams as a possible channel of communication with the Divine. Luke does not mention it in his Gospel, but in the Acts of the Apostles. Also, in the literature of the early church accounts of many dreams are told (for more details, see Koet 2006, pp. 11–24).

For a better understanding, let us focus on one of the dreams from Acts: the dream of Paul in Troy (Acts 16.9–10; see Koet 2006, pp. 147–71 and Koet 2008). This dream comes at a special moment. Paul is on the verge of making the crossing to Europe. At that moment he gets an ‘epiphany-dream’, a dream in which a person manifests himself, in this case a Macedonian man. This kind of dream is commonly known from Greek works, as found in Homer, for example. To readers in ancient times Troy (and the surrounding area) was a symbolic place. According to Homer it was here that the first confrontation between Hellas and the East had taken place. Time and again great leaders had come to this place...

Table of contents

• Dreams and Spirituality
• PART 1 Multi-Disciplinary Points of Departure
• PART 2 Dreams and Religion: Empirical Data, Theory and Reflections
• PART 3 Dreams and the Practice of Pastoral Care