DREAMS

DREAMS . The category of dreams designates both sleeping and imaginal states
of consciousness together with waking descriptions and other representations of
these states. Sleeping consciousness includes healing dreams, prophetic dreams,
archetypal dreams, nightmares, and lucid dreams. Imaginal consciousness
includes guided fantasies known as waking dreams, omens, and visions.

Dreaming is both a sleeping and a waking experience that is activated whenever

energy flows inward toward the spiritual and intellectual senses rather than
outward toward the worldly and perceptual senses. When one falls into a trance or
falls asleep, the worldly senses vanish inside, the everyday mind stops functioning,
and one is sleeping. After a period of nothingness, the mind begins to function
again, and dreaming begins. As this happens one slowly moves from private
sensations, personal memories, images, and symbols to transpersonal imagining
as an interactive social process.

The Cross-Cultural Study Of Dreams

From the earliest times sleeping dreams and waking visions have been of
considerable interest to humankind. Dream narratives have also been examined to
learn how members of different cultures categorize and use their dreams. Some
researchers have shown both the tactical use of dreams in social interaction and
the cultural influences on dream content. Others have chosen not to focus their
attention on dream narratives or social context but rather to use dreams to
investigate psychological issues, such as personality and values.

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Before Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), scholars
described dreams as the ultimate source of religious beliefs concerning the
supernatural and the nature of the human soul. After Freud's book, many people
followed him in separating the nature of the dream experience, or the "manifest
dream," from the so-called real meaning of the experience, which he labeled the
"latent dream." The manifest dream content is investigated with the help of a
dreamer's associations to the key elements in the dream that are traced to the
dreamer's hidden or latent thoughts, consisting of a combination of wishes and
conflicts. The manifest dream content—though often distorted, disguised, or
presented in metaphorical form—and the latent dream content are in turn linked to
a distinction between two modes of thought: primary and secondary process.

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 Primary process consists of nonlogical symbolic imagery, whereas secondary
process is predominantly verbal and logical.

A number of researchers who were interested in the cross-cultural study of dreams

utilized Freudian concepts and methodologies. Some, however, remained skeptical
and tested the key hypotheses. Others ignored the approach altogether. Those
who followed Freud's psychoanalytic theories and methods argued that similar
latent contents—including incestuous family attachments, sibling rivalry, anxiety
about maternal separation, and fear of castration—are revealed in dream reports
gathered in vastly different cultures. The ethnographer Anthony Wallace (1958)
even described the Iroquois of North America as having independently invented
their own psychoanalytic techniques of dream interpretation.

Other researchers employed one or more of the following Freudian methodologies

in working with dreams:

1. eliciting associations to dream images as they are related,

2. focusing on an element containing a metaphorical key to the meaning of the dream,
3. asking for the previous day's events connected with the dream,
4. allowing the subject to freely associate to the dream.

The ethnographer Dorothy Eggan (1966), for example, did not press her Hopi
consultants for the previous day's residue or free associations but allowed them to
take the initiative in dream telling and free association. The psychoanalyst Géza
Róheim (1952), on the other hand, obtained associations from Australian
Aborigines for each dream episode and elicited personal anecdotes, myths, and
songs. Because he was focused on the infantile wish rather than on current
conflicts, he suggested that an analyst need only be familiar with the simple factual
knowledge required to follow the manifest narrative content of a dream.

The psychoanalytically trained ethnographer Waud Kracke (1979) disagreed with

Róheim, noting that in order to understand what a person's dreams reveal about
his or her personality it is necessary to learn the language of dreaming within that
individual's culture. Researchers who use a psychoanalytic approach to dreams
often combine it with an ethnographic approach to the culture in order to probe
both the psychological and the cultural significance of dreams. Visionary or
prophetic dreams, for example, often transform the psyche of the dreamer, and
they may be a source of inspiration for the founding of new religions and
charismatic movements as well as for triggering anticolonialist revolts. Would-be
prophets commonly experience revelatory dreams that underlie both their personal
access to charismatic power and their spiritual message. Examples include the
origins of the Dream and Ghost Dances of Native North America as well as
Melanesian cargo cults and Japanese new religions (Michelson, 1923; Burridge,
1960; Fabian, 1966; Worsley, 1968; Franck, 1975; Lanternari, 1975; Stephen,
1979).

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Freud's hypothesis concerning type dreams states that the same manifest content
—for example, flying, climbing, or the loss of a tooth—reveals identical latent
meanings across cultures. Charles Seligman (1923) tested this idea by publishing
a request for British colonial officials and missionaries to send him records of
native dreams. He believed that if type dreams of the Freudian sort were found
frequently in this data base, then the human unconscious was qualitatively so alike
worldwide that it constituted a common store on which fantasy might draw. His
store metaphor points to the objectifying notion of dream symbolism as a simple
trait that might be measured or weighed by colonial officials. It ignores the
importance of communicative context both within these cultures and in the
negotiation of reality between colonial administrators and indigenous peoples. This
lack of sensitivity to the context and manner in which one conducts research is also
true for the Navajo research of Jackson Steward Lincoln (1935). He ignored the
influence of social setting on his own collection of dreams: transactions that took
place at the Black Mountain Trading Post.

While Seligman and Lincoln found that similar sorts of dreams occurred worldwide,
the Freudian premise that universal type dreams should mean the same thing
everywhere they occurred was never tested empirically until Benjamin Kilborne
(1978) asked a group of Moroccan dream interpreters to explain the meaning of a
set of fifteen dreams he culled from Freud. Kilborne found that whereas Freud
treated dream reports as analyzable structures requiring secondary associations
before they could be adequately interpreted, Moroccans did not make an
analyzable entity of either the dream or the context of interpretation. Thus in a
woman's dream of a deep pit in a vineyard created when a tree was removed,
which Freud used as a classic example of a female castration dream, Moroccan
dream interpreters focused primarily on the pit, leaving out the tree, or else focused
on the tree, leaving out the pit. In the first instance the pit was described as
representing a trap for the dreamer, whereas in the second case the tree
represented a good person who died. Whereas the Freudian explanation of dream
symbols draws on the notion of universal latent content, the Moroccan explanation
centers on the dreamer's social position.

Although most dream researchers chose the Freudian path of analysis, a few,
including John Layard (1988), Vera Bührmann (1982), and Lawrence Petchkovsky
(1984), followed Carl Jung. The sharpest disagreement between the Freudians and
the Jungians centers on Freud's hypothesis that the manifest dream is simply a
disguise of the latent dream that embodies an infantile erotic wish. Jung (1974)
argued that images in dreams reflect the structure of psychological complexes in
the personal unconscious that rest upon archetypal cores in the psyche and are
subject to the individuating force of the self.

Dreaming encourages a variety of attitudes and responses: pragmatic, cognitive,

and spiritual. The pragmatics of dreaming centers on the tactical use of dreams
and visions in dream sharing, social interaction, and healing. A cognitive response
focuses on expectations concerning the theoretical nature of dreaming and dream

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interpretation systems together with the languages of dream telling. Spiritual
approaches to dreaming combine symbolic, mythic, and ritual elaborations of
consciousness. Although these responses overlap, the following sections introduce
them one after the other.

The Pragmatics Of Dreaming

Deciding which dreams to share, how, and with whom are important issues.
Informal dream telling upon awakening with members of one's immediate family is
found in all societies. More formal public dream sharing, although it is far less
common, also occurs in many places. However, the significance given to the act of
dream sharing, whether formal or informal, varies markedly from one society to
another. In some societies people place a high value on both the personal and the
public use of the many forms of dreaming, including waking dreams, lucid dreams,
visions, and nightmares. In other societies dreaming is regarded as insignificant
and is given limited importance or even ignored. Epistemological differences
between these attitudes toward dreaming are evident when people relate their life
stories.

Many Amerindian societies, for example, honor dreaming and construct personal
biographies around dreams and visions. The Lakota holy man Black Elk, when he
first met his biographer John Neihardt (1932), immediately shared his power
dreams with him. Likewise in Chile, when the Mapuche shaman Tomasa first met
Lydia Degarrod (1990), she shared her power dreams and visions. In northern
California and Oregon there were in the past, and in some cases there remain,
organized schools of shamans in which novices shared their dreams with their
teachers. After listening carefully to the novices' dreams, the teachers encouraged
them to receive specific types of dreams or visions that allowed them to heal
patients.

For Mayans in Mexico and Central America it is routine to awaken one's spouse or

other sleeping partner in the middle of the night to narrate a dream (Tedlock, 1992,
p. 120). Parents also ask their children each morning about their dreams. In most
of these societies, even though there may be no recognized dream interpreters,
dreams and dream interpretations of respected elders are taken seriously.
Children's dreams, while they are always given the benefit of interpretation, have
little effect on adult's actions. Other societies urge their children to experience and
report certain types of culturally approved dreams and visions that help them to
allay anxiety and bring them power and prestige. In yet other cultures parents
carefully monitor their children's dream reports lest they begin receiving
nightmares. If a youngster receives such dreams, the parents do what they can to
alter them by taking the child into the mountains, where they ask that person's
spirit to stay away.

The first issue in dream sharing is to categorize the dream as to its type: good or
bad, lucky or unlucky. Once this has been decided, a dreamer chooses whether or
not to tell the dream. This depends on a combination of personal preference and

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wider cultural patterns. At Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico, for example, the
dreams that are immediately told are only those that are considered to be "bad," in
that dead people appear and attempt to lure the dreamer to visit the Land of the
Dead (Tedlock, 1992, p. 118). The way Zunis prevent the completion of such
nightmares is to tell them while inhaling the fumes of a burning piñon branch, then
to plant feathered prayer sticks for the ancestors asking them not to appear. If the
dream is frightening, the dreamer may even ask for a ceremonial whipping at the
hands of a masked ancestral figure. Such whippings remove the bad thoughts and
turn them around, reversing their meaning. Good dreams, on the other hand, are
not reported until they have been "completed," in other words until they have come
true.

Among Quechua speakers in the Peruvian Andes, dreams are premonitory of the
day's events (Mannheim, 1992, p. 145). If you experience a bad dream, when you
get out of bed in the morning you should step on the left instead of on the right foot.
Then before telling anyone your dream, you must find a young sheep or llama and
recount the dream to the animal then spit in its mouth three times saying,
"Disappear, disappear, disappear."

In China from the earliest times the nature of dreams—whether lucky or unlucky—
was considered to be determined by the spirits (Fang and Zhang, 2000). During
the Zhou dynasty (c. 1150–256 bce) the emperors practiced rituals to solicit lucky
dreams and to avoid unlucky dreams. Texts containing charms to help one avoid
bad dreams or turn them into good dreams were eventually written down. The New
Collection Zhou Gong's Dream Interpretations (Tang dynasty, c. 618–907 ce), for
example, explains that those who have evil dreams should not tell anyone. When
they rise in the morning they should instead write on a piece of paper "Red
sunshine, the sun rises in the east." If they read this charm three times and place it
under their beds, the ghosts will immediately flee.

After a dream is categorized, it can be enacted or interpreted in various ways.

Jungians and certain other dream workers regard one's dream images as aspects
of the self. Thus all of the symbols within a dream are "translated" into words upon
waking and are shared later during an analytic session or dream-group meeting.
During this period the dreamer, with the help of the analyst or facilitator, moves into
the inner space of the dream and brings out or elaborates the dream events, often
amplifying them through mythic or visual similarities, rhymes, or wordplays.

K'iche' Mayans handle their dreams in a similar but slightly different manner. Unlike
Western dream enthusiasts, Mayans do not wait for the dream to end to integrate
it. Instead they begin during the process of dreaming whenever an important
mythic symbol appears. If they miss this opportunity, they wait for a later dream
when the symbol recurs in a somewhat different form. At that time the dreamer
awakens slightly, cognitively enters the dreamscape, and interrogates each and
every symbol as it appears, one after the other, so that each reveals its true nature.

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This practice, called "completing the dreaming," is similar to both Dream Yoga and
lucid dreaming.

Dreaming, Cognition, And Interpretation

The dichotomy between dreaming as an internal subjective reality and waking as
an external objective reality, together with a devaluation of dreaming, is an
inheritance from the ancient Greeks, most especially from Aristotle. He dismissed
dreams as nothing but mental pictures that, like reflections in water, are not the
real objects. This idea was elaborated at the end of the Middle Ages, when the
notion of the person as having a soul or spirit that could temporarily leave the body
during dreaming became heretical. Whereas dreaming was already devalued
within the West by the time of the emergence of naturalistic or scientific thought, it
was not until the development of Cartesian dualism in the seventeenth century that
dreams were firmly placed within the realm of fantasy or irrational experience.

It must be remembered, however, that the irreducible dualism of "spirit" and

"matter," which denies the common principle from which the terms of this duality
proceed by a process of polarization, was a historical development within Western
philosophy. A majority of the world's peoples have not focused their thinking
around oppositionalism and thus have not isolated dreaming within the "unreal"
realm of spirit. Rather, it is a rationalist proposition that dreaming is somehow a
more subjective, false, private, illusory, or transient reality than the more objective,
true, public, real, or permanent reality of waking life.

This difference in attitudes toward dreaming is demonstrated by a set of

interchanges between Rarámuri Indians living in northern Mexico and the
ethnographer William Merrill (1992). Merrill noted that he was frustrated when on
numerous occasions people described to him incredible personal experiences but
failed to mention that the events had taken place in dreams until he specifically
asked. Another researcher living in a Tzeltal Mayan community in Chiapas,
Mexico, noted that since dream events were deeply integrated into conscious
behavior, it was often difficult for her to decide whether a person was referring to
an actual occurrence or to a dream (Hermitte, 1964, p. 183). A third ethnographer
who was editing a Tzotzil Mayan's life story reported that she found herself asking
him over and over again whether a particular event he was describing occurred in
conscious waking life or in a dream while he was sleeping (Guiteras Holmes, 1961,
pp. 256–257).

During fieldwork at Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico, Barbara Tedlock

sometimes found it difficult to tell whether a person was narrating a nighttime
dream or a waking experience. When she asked a middle-aged man whether he
ever had dreams that foretold the future, he answered: "Yes, awhile back a sheep
herder found a dead rabbit, badly torn up, and he cooked and ate it. Later on the
man was thrown from a burro, his foot caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged

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around in some rocks. When his partner found him, he was all tore up, dead"
(Tedlock, 1973 field notes).

Instead of narrating one of his own dream experiences, this man related a waking
omen. Thus although there are separate terms in the Zuni language to distinguish
dreaming from the perception of omens, the fact that the rabbit was eaten in life
rather than in a dream seemed to be a matter of indifference to the narrator. Either
way, the incident of the rabbit portended the incident with the burro. This blending
of waking omens and sleeping dream signs into a single category of premonitions
is found more generally among Amerindians.

This remarkable creative potentiality of dreaming occurs because dreams are a

way of thinking and of organizing knowledge. At some level all people believe this,
as is revealed by the common saying "I'll have to sleep on that decision." At the
same time people often profess the belief that dreams are meaningless fantasies
or confused mental imaginings with little truth value. This ambivalence arises from
the educational system that teaches that only fully conscious rational thoughts can
provide true knowledge. Nevertheless people also believe that irrational, or better
yet nonrational, unconscious thoughts or intuitions are a sign of "genius."

The Language Of Dreaming

It has been suggested that dreaming is the original native tongue, a common
language shared by all human beings. However, when discussing dreams, people
often neglect the important fact that in any given society the language or languages
spoken deeply affect the perception and narration of dreams. Both the structure of
the language and its available vocabulary help to channel the imagination of
dreamers. Thus within a number of languages, including French, Italian, K'iche'
Mayan, and Xavante, the verb stem for dreaming is transitive, indicating that a
dreamer acts upon or "makes" something while dreaming. In other languages,
such as English, German, Spanish, Zuni, Kalapalo, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, the
verb stem used to describe the process of dreaming is intransitive, indicating that
dreaming is a passive state of being, that one simply "has" or "sees" a dream. This
difference underscores the variable attention paid to dreaming as a passive
observation by a dreamer and dreaming as an active experience of the dreamer's
soul, psyche, or self.

In dream telling a dreamer's source of knowledge or authority as a narrator is also

marked grammatically. Wherever dreaming is conceived as involving the actions of
the soul rather than of the dreamer's ego, third-person singular forms are used.
Epistemological concern with a dreamer's source of knowledge or authority is often
marked grammatically. On the Northwest Coast of Canada Kwakiutl speakers use
a suffix that indicates that the action of the verb occurred in a dream. There is also
another suffix meaning apparently, seemingly, and it seems like as well as in a
dream. Since these two suffixes include adverbial and conjunctional ideas
possessing a strong subjective element, they are categorized as word suffixes and
are placed in a single classification expressing the sources of subjective

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knowledge. As a grammatical category these suffixes indicating events known only
indirectly have been classified by linguists as evidentials. There are several kinds
of evidentials—tense particles, adverbs, and quotatives—that require the speaker
to adopt a particular stance toward the truth value of an utterance.

The use of evidentials demonstrates major epistemological differences among

various traditions. In a number of cultures report forms consisting of verbs as well
as particles indicate that the preceding or following utterance is an animation of the
speech of a deity, ancestor, or other supernatural. In these examples there is no
distinction, as there is in English, between direct discourse that is faithful to the
wording and indirect discourse that is faithful to the meaning. Instead, for many
peoples there appears to be an irreducible dialectic between linguistic structure,
practice, and ideology. It also reveals the existence of separate dream
interpretation codes for lay dreamers and professional dream interpreters within
the same society. Only people who have been trained as dream interpreters use
the quotative.

Psychologists of both psychoanalytic and cognitive bents have read anthropology

to compare the dreams of preliterate, tribal, traditional, or peasant peoples with
their own findings concerning the dreams of literate, urban, modern, or industrial
peoples. This dichotomy, however, denies people living in other cultures
contemporaneity with industrial peoples. Instead of using typological time to create
and set off an object of study, such as "tribal dreaming," cultural anthropologists
have become interested in intersubjective time in which all of the participants
involved are coeval or share the same time. This focus on communicative
processes among people living in the same time but in vastly different cultures
demands that coevalness not only be created and maintained in the field but also
that it is carried over during the write-up process. Robert Dentan (1986), while
discussing the principle of contraries in which dreams indicate the opposite of what
they seem, noted that practitioners of this type of dream interpretation include such
widely separated peoples as Ashanti, Malays, Maori, Semai, Zulu, Polish American
schoolgirls, and psychoanalysts. In other words Euro-Americans share this
principle of dream interpretation with people living in faraway, exotic places.

This underlying sameness in human cognition is also stressed within structuralism.

A structural approach to dreaming demonstrates that dreams, like myths, constitute
a set of systematic transformations of a single structure consisting of a set of
oppositions representing a dilemma or conflict facing a dreamer. Philippe Descola
(1989), in research among Jivaroan people in South America, found that the
individual unconscious and the collective unconscious are related less by contiguity
or universal archetypes than by use of encoding devices for the diversity of reality
within elementary systems of relationships. He noted that, like structualists,
indigenous dream interpreters emphasize the logical operations through which
symbols are connected and suggests that a comparative grammar of dreams is
needed that might elucidate how various cultures choose and combine a set of
rules or codes for dream interpretation.

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The turn away from treating non-Western dreams as totally other, fully knowable
objects to be gathered, analyzed, tabulated, and compared with Western dreams
toward paying attention to the problematics of dream communication and
interpretation worldwide has occurred within anthropology for several reasons.
First, ethnographers came to distrust survey research in which "data" is gathered
for the purpose of testing Western theories concerning universals in human
psychology. Cross-cultural content analysis, in which statistical assertions about
dream patterns within particular ethnic groups or genders were the goal, have been
critiqued by anthropologists. There are several reasons for this, including the fact
that sample surveys aggregate respondents who are deeply distrustful of the
researcher with those who are not, as if suspicion made no difference whatsoever
in the validity of their replies. Further, a comparativist focus on the extractable
contents, underlying structure, or cognitive grammar of a dream report not only
omits important phenomena, such as pacing, tones of voice, gestures, and
audience responses, that accompany dream narrative performances but is also an
expression of the culture of alphabetic literacy and thus is culture-bound.

Another reason for the abandonment of content analysis by most anthropologists is

their formal training in linguistics, which encourages them to reject the basic
assumption of aggregate statistical research, namely that meaning resides within
single words rather than within their contexts. Furthermore dream symbols taken in
isolation can be misleading if the researcher has not spent sufficient time observing
and interacting within the culture in order to make sense of local knowledge and
produce a "thick description" of that culture. Rather than interpreting the language
of dream narratives in semantico-referential, context-independent terms, it is more
appropriate to utilize context-dependent or pragmatic meaning.

Because of these considerations, researchers no longer set out to elicit dream

reports as ethnographic objects to be used primarily as raw data for comparative
hypotheses. Instead, since the attitudes toward and beliefs about dreams held by a
people reveal important aspects of their worldviews, constructing a detailed
ethnography of dreaming has become an important research goal. Ethnographers
tape-record and transcribe verbatim dream narratives along with dreamers'
interpretations. The method of ethnographic semantics, in which direct and formal
questioning is used, may also be applied to ascertain how members of a particular
linguistic group categorize their dreams. The goals of this methodology are to
produce a taxonomic system of types of dreams, good, bad, true, false, and to
reveal native dream theory and techniques of dream interpretation.

This combination of linguistic and ethnographic methodologies, applied within

different domains, particularly suits contemporary cultural anthropology, which
requires researchers to enter the field for extended periods of time with broad sets
of research interests. By living in the community they learn the local language as
well as how to interact appropriately, and they are present for various formal and
informal social dramas. Sooner or later they are present when a dream is narrated
within a family or to a practicing shaman or other dream interpreter. If this event
attracts their attention, they make notes about it in their field journals, and they may

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later record other such occurrences on audio- or videotape. Once they have
translated their texts, they may ask the narrator, who may or may not be the
dreamer, questions about the meaning, significance, and use of the dream
account.

This shift in research strategy from eliciting dozens of dreams as fixed objects to
studying naturally occurring situations, such as dream sharing, representation, and
interpretation, is part of a larger movement within the human sciences in which
there has been a growing interest in analyses focused on practice, interaction,
dialogue, experience, and performance together with the individual agents, actors,
persons, selves, and subjects of all this activity. A number of new books in the
human sciences display this shift from a focus on the dream as an object to the
social context surrounding both the personal experience and cultural uses of
dreaming (Dombeck, 1991; Parman, 1991; Jʾedrej and Shaw, 1992; Tedlock,
1992; Shulman and Stroumsa, 1999; Young, 1999; Lohmann, 2003).

Dream Sharing
Lydia Degarrod (1990) recorded the majority of her subjects' dreams within a
natural setting rather than by arranging formal interviews. During her research in
southern Chile with the Mapuche Indians, she gathered dreams and interpretations
from members of two families who were coping with serious stress caused by
witchcraft and illness. Through dream sharing and interpreting, the afflicted
members of the families were able to express their anxieties and externalize their
illness, and other family members were able to participate in the healing of their
loved ones. Degarrod hypothesized that these types of family interventions were
possible due to the general belief that dreams facilitate communication with
supernatural beings and due to the nature of the communal dream sharing and
interpreting system that allowed the combination of elements from different
individual's dreams to be related through intertextual and contextual analysis.

During her research among Australian Aboriginal peoples, Sylvie Poirier (2003)
found that dreaming was closely intertwined with religious beliefs. In Western
Australia, for example, dreams represent the privileged space-time of increased
receptivity among individuals, the environment, and the ancestral world. Through
studying local epistemology, she found that not only was the interpretation of
dreams open to multiple readings depending on context but that dream experience
was also a primary step in the social construction of the person. This sensitivity to
the crucial importance of the social and cultural context in understanding and
interpreting dreams has been elaborated by historians of religion to include the
integration of dream interpretation into the culture's ontological and semiotic maps
and the further integration of dream theory into culturally specific notions of
personality and economies of consciousness, so that dreaming can be seen in the
context of metapsychology (Shulman and Stroumsa, 1999, p. 7).

By studying dream sharing and the transmission of dream theories in their full
social contexts as communicative and integrative events, including the natural
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dialogical interactions that take place within these events, scholars have realized
that both the researcher and those who are researched are engaged in the
creation of a social reality that implicates both of them. Although ethnographers
have long subscribed to the method of participant observation, it still comes as a
shock when they discover how important their participation is in helping to create
what they are studying. Gilbert Herdt (1992) reported his surprise at discovering
the therapeutic dimension of his role in New Guinea as a sympathetic listener to
his key consultant, who shared with him erotic dreams that the consultant could not
communicate to anyone within his own society.

Likewise the importance of the psychodynamic process of transference, or the

bringing of past experiences into a current situation with the result that the present
is unconsciously experienced as though it were the past, has only recently been
fully realized and described for anthropology. Waud Kracke (1979), during his
fieldwork with the Kagwahiv Indians of Brazil, kept a diary containing his personal
reactions, dreams, and associations. In an essay discussing these field responses,
Kracke not only analyzed his personal transference of his own family relationships
to certain key Kagwahiv individuals but also his cultural transference of American
values to Kagwahiv behavior patterns.

The Spirituality Of Dreaming

Throughout history humans have perceived the visible world of daily living as
containing an invisible essence or world of the imagination that manifests in sacred
places. This may be located above, below, behind, or alongside of the everyday
waking world. Melanesians picture a magical underground mirror world, in Celtic
myths the Otherworld lies somewhere in the west, entered through lakes or caves,
and in Korean shamanism it lies just across a river from the everyday world. During
dreaming, human spirits leave the body and wander in these mythic realms,
meeting and engaging with other spirits.

Dreams are perceived as an experience of the shadow, spirit, or soul. As such they
are fertile ground for reflection, spiritual growth, and prophecy. Insights derived
from dreams have challenged people to deepen and refine their understandings of
the sacred. The process of dreaming lies at the heart of shamanism and those
religions such as Daoism and Buddhism that have long intermingled with
shamanism.

In shamanic cultures dreams allow increased receptivity among persons,

ancestors, animals, and indeed the entire natural world. The visible entities that
surround one—rocks, persons, animals, trees, leaves—are crystallizations of
conscious awareness. The invisible medium between such entities is a dreamlike
realm from which all conscious forms emerge. In a number of traditions the
rainbow is the outside edge of dreaming, a place where the invisible potentials
become manifest, and flashes of lightning are discharges from the depth of
dreaming. It is through the nightly experience of dreaming that shamans learn to
connect themselves to the cosmos in order to gain knowledge and power.
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This shamanic approach toward dreaming is highly developed in hunting-and-
gathering societies. When a hunter falls asleep, the spirit detaches itself from the
body, tracks and catches a prey animal. The following morning the awakened
dreamer goes into the forest to the dream place and gets his or her prey. In far
northern Canada hunters explain this ability to communicate with and influence
animals as the spiritual practice of "deep hope." They envision this form of
dreaming as learning how to untie or lay out a straight mental-spiritual path to the
goal of getting meat. In yet another form of dream hunting a person develops an
amorous dream alliance with a forest spirit who becomes his or her hunting guide.
The spirit falls in love with the dreamer, visiting often in dreams, and enjoys
intercourse with the dreamer. This intimate relationship eventually turns the
dreamer into a successful hunter. A third type of dreaming involves spirit animals
who visit hunters and "sing through them" while they are sleeping, granting them
special songs that ensure their later success in hunting. These types of power
dreams are sources of spiritual entities, such as divine partners or spouses,
attending spirits, companion animals, co-essences, or spirit doubles.

Worldwide there is a close connection between dreaming and shamanic initiation.

Essie Parrish, a famous Kashaya Pomo shaman from northern California, told
Tedlock one of her earliest power dreams. She was eleven years old at the time
she was selected to serve her people as a healing shaman.

As I lay asleep, a dream came to me. I heard a man singing way up in the sky. It
was as if the singing entered deep into my chest, as if the song itself were singing
in my voice box. Then it seemed as if I could see the man. After I awoke the song
was singing in my voice box. Then I myself tried, tried to sing, and amazingly the
song turned out to be beautiful. I have remembered it ever since. (Tedlock, 1972
speech to the New School)

In Myanmar (formerly Burma) a young woman dreamed repeatedly of a spirit suitor

in human form. After sharing her dreams with her friends, she was encouraged by
them to symbolically wed him. As an orchestra played, she performed a special
dance and then entered a screened-off area where a group of women shamans
waited. One of them moved a mirror back and forth in front of her face, hypnotizing
her, while pressing another mirror against her back. A second woman shaman
attached cotton strings to her ankles and wrists, placed a longer cord diagonally
across her shoulders, and pierced her hair knot with a needle to which a cotton
string was attached. As the young woman drifted into sleep, she became both the
wife of the spirit and an initiated shaman. From this point onward she was not only
in love with and loved by her spiritual spouse, but she also was able to transform
herself into his spirit double through appropriate dress and dance gestures (Spiro,
1967, p. 322).

Within Buddhist nations, such as Myanmar, Mongolia, and Tibet, there are both
clerical (written) and shamanic (oral) spiritual traditions. Whereas each accepts
dreams as spiritually meaningful, the clerical tradition, in which dreaming is
primarily used as an aid to achieving enlightenment, holds that dreams are

12
examples of the empty and illusory nature of this world. In the shamanic tradition
dreaming leads directly to the esoteric practice of Yoga or lucid dreaming, both of
which involve cultivating and controlling one's dreams. Tibetan dream practice
combines indigenous shamanic beliefs about the spiritual power of dreams with the
Buddhist goal of enlightenment (Young, 1999).

Lucid Dreaming
Within many spiritual traditions the key moment of lucidity is described as the result
of an interior dialogue or imaginal conversation between different parts of the self,
psyche, or soul. The dreamer is simultaneously cognizant of being asleep and
removed from the external world and of being awake and receptive to the inner
world. At this crossover point between sleeping and waking there are often
complex synesthesias—visual, auditory, and tactile—as the lucid dream emerges
from the dream landscape. This new element, which interrupts the imagery and
narrative flow of an ongoing dream, fuses dreamer to dreamscape in such a way
that it may be experienced as fearful or joyful.

Several methods for achieving lucidity while dreaming are described in the
autobiography of the well-known Cahuilla shaman Ruby Modesto (Modesto and
Mount, 1980). This remarkable woman spent her adult life as an herb doctor,
spiritual healer, and midwife within her home community outside Palm Springs.
She explained that directing the course of dreaming, or what is called in her
tradition "setting up dreaming," was the most important spiritual practice within her
culture. It had been actively sought, used, and taught for generations by shamanic
healers.

Dreams And Prophecy

In monotheistic religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, dreaming is closely
related to prophetic traditions. The prophet Muḥammad was chosen for his mission
late in his life, when the angel Gabriel appeared to him in a dream. The Old
Testament records the prophetic dreams of Joseph, the son of Jacob (Gn. 37:5–
11), and in the New Testament both the Magi and Mary's husband Joseph are
warned in dreams to beware of King Herod. The Magi are warned to return to their
country by another route, whereas Joseph is told "take the child and his mother
and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the
child to kill him" (Mt. 2:13).

A widespread type of prophetic dream is the conception dream that parents

experience shortly before the birth of extraordinary children. Stories about the birth
of Christian and Muslim saints contain many such dreams, which are believed to
be signs of divine involvement, sometimes even actual divine fathering. For
example, Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, received a dream in which an angel
appeared to him saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife,
for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit" (Mt. 1:20–21). This dream

13
proclaims Jesus' divine origin and encourages Joseph to accept Mary's child as the
son of God.

Women also have conception dreams. According to Korean Daoist beliefs,

whenever heavenly spirits and those of a woman's body join together and
crystallize to make a baby, a dream emerges. One night a Korean woman
dreamed that she was bathing in a stream all alone in the moonlight. "I saw a red
pepper floating around me. Without thinking, I picked it out of the water, and woke
up. Ten months later I had a gentle, though obstinate, boy" (Seligson, 1989, p. 15).
In the West during the Middle Ages a pregnant woman's dream was recorded in an
eleventh-century text, The Life of Saint Thierry. The future mother of Thierry was
disturbed by her dreams and consulted a woman renowned for her gift of
interpreting dreams.

She confided her vision, first begging [the woman] to pray for her, so that the vision
would not forecast for her an unnatural event, and then begging her to tell her the
meaning of the vision. After praying, invested with prophetic grace, [the dream
interpreter] said: "Have faith, woman, since what you have seen is a vision coming
from God." (Schmitt, 1999, p. 277)

Conception dreams can also be experienced by a fetus while still inside its
mother's womb. Desert-dwelling Yuman speakers in the American Southwest
remember their earliest dreams from the time they are within their mothers' wombs
(Kroeber, 1957). These unborn souls are said to journey to a sacred mountain,
where their deceased elders give them special spiritual powers. After the baby is
born, he or she totally forgets this prenatal journey, but dreams of the mountain
reappear during adolescence. In these traditions all songs, myths, good fortune,
and in fact all knowledge itself is derived from dreams. Thus the Mohave and other
Yumans are said to interpret their culture in terms of their dreams, rather than their
dreams in terms of their culture.

Robert Desjarlais (1991), during his fieldwork in Nepal with the Yolmo Sherpa,
noted a large degree of agreement among individuals concerning the meaning of
dream imagery and found an implicit dictionary of dream symbolism that individuals
relied upon most frequently in times of physical or spiritual distress. In this dream
interpretation system the experience of dreaming is believed to have a close, even
causal connection with the future life of the dreamer. This principle is also found in
many other cultures. However, such interpretations are often provisional. Not all
people in a given society place their faith in them, and in some societies only
certain individuals are believed to be able to experience prophetic or precognitive
dreams. Researchers who have undertaken substantial fieldwork within American
society have found that middle-class dreamers also admit to having experienced
dreams of the prophetic or precognitive sort in which they obtain information about
future events. The Western conception of dreams as predictors of misfortune or
success, together with the anecdotal literature on "psychic dreams," indicates that
this form of dream interpretation is far from rare in Western societies.

14
Labeling certain dream experiences prophetic or precognitive, however, does not
explain how these and other dream experiences are used within a society. In order
to learn about the use of dreaming, researchers cannot simply gather examples of
different types of dreams by administering a questionnaire but must interact
intensively with local populations for long periods of time. Thus whereas Desjarlais
discovered an implicit metaphorical dictionary of dream symbolism among the
Sherpa early in his fieldwork, it took him some time as an apprentice shaman to
learn the precise way these dream symbols served as symptoms and signifiers
both shaping and reflecting distress.

Among the Navajo of the American Southwest and the Maya of Guatemala, as
people age their dreams become more and more continuous with waking life,
predicting, causing, or expressing events in the world. As a result they no longer
clearly distinguish what they discover in dreams from what they learn through
direct sensory experience or from other people. Elders sometimes even manipulate
their dream narratives to blur the distinction between the present and the
mythological past.

Myths And Dreams

Whereas dreams have been described as private, highly fluid experiences and
myths as public, fixed linguistic forms, they are actually closely related. Both myths
and dreams have a story line that is expressive of an inner emotional-aesthetic
structure together with an imagistic, metaphor-rich tapestry of spiritual feeling.
Links between dream portents and the events they predict are often made by way
of myths. Examples include Daoist practices in ancient China as well as those of
contemporary peoples living in the Amazon Basin in Brazil.

For Daoists the appearance of a peach in a dream was an extremely favorable

omen, because the Queen Mother of the West loved peaches and invited her
favorites to partake of them in order to acquire immortality (Fang and Zhang,
2000). In the Amazon Basin to dream of an armadillo smoked out of his burrow
indicates that a kinsman will die, because in a myth a man lures his brother-in-law
into an armadillo's home and tries to kill him there (Reid, 1978). On the other hand,
to dream of either leaf-cutter ants or a white-lipped peccary entering the house
indicates that the person will be killed. This is based on a set of myths in which twin
heroes kill their grandmother by transforming leaf-cutter ants into poisonous
spiders then create and destroy white-lipped peccaries with thunder sticks (Reid,
1978).

As processes dreams and myths are inversions of one another. Whereas dreams
move from sensory imagery to verbal form, myths move from language to sensory
imagery. Thus among the Sharanahua of eastern Peru, when shamans elicit
dream reports from their patients, they typically consist of single images, such as
"peccary" or the "sun," that simultaneously echo myths and overlap with the
shamans' categories of songs and symptoms. These thoughts may be shared

15
through "representation" by talking about, drawing, painting, or describing a dream
or through "presentation" by reenacting the dream in poetry, song, and dance.

In representational symbolism intentional reference is paramount, the medium of

expression is relatively automatic, and inductive reality is paramount. In
presentational symbolism meaning emerges as a result of an experiential
immersion in the emotional patterns of the dream that is grasped intuitively. Dream
workers of various kinds—prophets, gurus, shamans, theologians, and
psychoanalysts—use a combination of these techniques to help dreamers engage
with the image-filled mythic world of dreaming. It has been noted by healers that in
many cultures dramatizations of dreams are a highly effective treatment for
disoriented and alienated persons. The psychiatrist Wolfgang Jilek (1982)
observed that Northwest Coast shamans who encouraged their clients to perform
their dreaming in public are 80 percent effective in healing, compared with the 30
percent effective rate for psychiatrists using the private representational techniques
favored by depth psychology.

Some Western dream workers have independently come to a similar conclusion

about the presentational power of dreaming. They have noted that because
dreams involve an imagistic healing process, it is best if the cogitating mind stays
out of the process. Consequently many of them no longer interpret dreams but
instead focus on reenacting and reexperiencing the feelings and images of the
dream as fully as possible. Others take the position that the healing power of
dreaming requires both experiencing, for energy, and interpretation, for meaning.

See Also
Asklepios; Consciousness, States of; Visions.

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Degarrod, Lydia N. "Coping with Stress: Dream Interpretation in the Mapuche
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Fabian, Johannes. "Dream and Charisma: 'Theories of Dreams' in the Jamaa-

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Franck, Frederick. An Encounter with Oomoto: "The Great Origin." West Nyack,

N.Y., 1975. The story of the founding of a new religion based on a woman
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The focus, however, is not the culture or religion-specific perception of dreams but
rather the observation that the modern age seems to have less need of dreams.

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55–85. Santa Fe, N.Mex., 1992.

17
Hermitte, M. Esther. Supernatural Power and Social Control in a Modern Mayan
Village. Chicago, 1964.

Hunt, Harry T. The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination, and

Consciousness. New Haven, Conn., 1989. Hunt challenges prior theories based on
the characteristics of a single type of dream and develops a cognitive
psychological understanding of the visual-spatial imagery that generates the
various dream types.

Jʾedrej, M. C., and Rosalind Shaw, eds. Dreaming, Religion, and Society in Africa.
Leiden, 1992.

Jilek, Wolfgang G. Indian Healing: Shamanic Ceremonialism in the Pacific

Northwest Today. Surrey, British Columbia, 1982.

Jung, Carl. Dreams. Extracted from vols. 4, 8, 12, and 16 of The Collected Works
of C. G. Jung. Princeton, N.J., 1974.

Kilborne, Benjamin. Interprétations du rêve au Maroc. Grenoble, France, 1978. An

extended comparison of Freudian with Moroccan dream interpretation practices.

Kracke, Waud. "Dreaming in Kagwahiv: Dream Beliefs and Their Psychic Uses in
an Amazonian Culture." Psychoanalytic Study of Society 8 (1979): 119–171.

Kroeber, Alfred. "Mohave Clairvoyance: Ethnographic Interpretations." University

of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 47 (1957): 230–
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Lanternari, Vittorio. "Dreams as Charismatic Significants: Their Bearing on the Rise

of New Religious Movements." In Psychological Anthropology, edited by Thomas
R. Williams, pp. 221–235. The Hague, 1975.

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Lincoln, Jackson Steward. The Dream in Primitive Cultures. London, 1935. A

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American societies.

Lohmann, Roger Ivar, ed. Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the
Western Pacific. New York, 2003.

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Fe, N.Mex., 1992.

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Merrill, William. "The Rarámuri Stereotype of Dreams." In Dreaming:
Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, edited by Barbara Tedlock, pp.
194–219. Santa Fe, N.Mex., 1992.

Michelson, Truman. "On the Origin of the So-Called Dream Dance of the Central
Algonkians." American Anthropologist 25 (1923): 277–278.

Miller, Patricia Cox. Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a

Culture. Princeton, 1994.

Modesto, Ruby, and Guy Mount. Not for Innocent Ears: Spiritual Traditions of a
Desert Cahuilla Medicine Woman. Angelus Oaks, Calif., 1980.

Parman, Susan. Dream and Culture: An Anthropological Study of the Western

Intellectual Tradition. New York, 1991.

Petchkovsky, Lawrence. "A Jungian Commentary on the 'Ordinar' Dreams of the

Yolngu." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 18 (1984): 245–249.

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Ivar Lohmann, pp. 196–229. New York, 2003.

Reid, Howard. "Dreams and Their Interpretation among the Hupdu Maku Indians of
Brazil." Cambridge Anthropology 4 (1978): 1–28.

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central Australian dream reports together with Freudian analysis.

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Comparative History of Dreaming. New York, 1999. An important source for
readers interested in the intersection of dreams, religion, and culture. The essays
center on dreams as witnessed, transmitted linguistically, and framed as texts.

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Spiro, Melford E. Burmese Supernaturalism. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967.

Stephen, Michele. "Dreams of Change: The Innovative Role of Altered States of

Consciousness in Traditional Melanesian Religion." Oceania 50 (1979): 3–22.

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context of dream sharing and interpretation.

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Barbara Tedlock (1987 and 2005)

Encyclopedia of Religion Tedlock, Barbara

Dream
Views 1,228,364Updated Jun 06 2020

DREAM.
It is midnight in the desert, and the full moon has just passed its apex. On the
sandy ground, staff in hand, guitar and jug by his side, a dark-skinned man is
nuzzled by a tawny-maned lion. Is the man dreaming? Are we? Or is this the
dream of the artist, Henri Rousseau (1844–1910)? If, as some traditions have it,
the Universe was dreamed into existence by its Creator, then it makes perfect
sense that all of art—the microcosm created by human beings in emulation of the
Creator's macrocosm—is a dream of sorts. And art is a dream, in a way—a
projection of the deepest subconscious and unconscious desires upon canvas and
stone, the etching plate and the loom. But when artists depict dreams and
dreaming, whether explicitly, with the dreamer in the picture, or implicitly, with the
picture illustrating the dream, ambiguities flourish, and polyvalency abounds.

20
There are many loci classici of the dream in art, in many times, places, and
cultures. Some are explicit, yet ambiguous, like Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy of
1897. Some are explicit and distinctly unambiguous, such as Francisco Goya's
(1746–1826) Capricho 43: El Sueno de la Razon Produce Monstruos (1797–1798,
"The Sleep/Dream of Reason Begets Monsters") or Henry Fuseli's (1741–
1825) The Nightmare (1781) where dreams are made manifest in oil on canvas.
Even those depictions in which the intention to depict a dream is overt are fraught
with a multiplicity of interpretive possibilities—Maurice Sendak's (b. 1928)
nightmare creatures in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) are both the products of
the dreams of Max, the young protagonist, and of Sendak's own family history,
wherein those things that go bump in the night are stand-ins for his loud, invasive,
cheek-pinching aunts and uncles.

Antiquity
Just as Max creates a world in his dream, Krishna acts out the role of Vishnu in his
sleep, and the universe is created out of the navel of the dreaming god. The
individual adept, like the artist, assumes the role of conscious creator. Dreams
have been represented in art for thousands of years. The Talmud describes sleep
as "one-sixtieth part of death," one part in sixty being the threshold of perception
for Jewish legal purposes—a taste, in other words, of what death is like. Likewise
did the ancient Egyptians consider sleep a sort of preliminary glimpse of death, and
in dreams, certain aspects of what one would call the soul encountered the upper
and lower realms. The lessons thus learned were transmitted by the forces of the
other world to the priests of the cult of the dead, who could then advise the dead
about the pitfalls and pratfalls of the journey before them. The Ba, the spiritual
entity that was believed to leave the body both in dreams and in death, is
represented as a jabiru bird in art, whether in reliefs or in papyri. It is depicted
hovering over the inert body as it is in the famous Scroll of Ani of the Theban Book
of the Dead (c. 1250 b.c.e.).

The Egyptians also evoked the topos of the dream in art in the representation of
Bes, god of crossroads and transitions, on the headrests they used as pillows. And
the great Sphinx of Giza is among the earliest artworks attributable to a dream, that
of Pharaoh Tutmosis IV, who either constructed or—some sources say—
uncovered or rediscovered the colossus around 2620 b.c.e. on the basis of a night
vision.

Some of the loveliest depictions of sleep and dreams come out of the Hellenistic-
Roman world. In Greek mythology, Nyx (Night) gives birth to Hypnos (Sleep) and
Thanatos (Death). The god of dreams is Morpheus, whose symbols are a smoking
horn and a staff, symbols respectively of false and true dreams. Morpheus is not
often represented in art, but Hypnos is, quite often and quite beautifully. He
receives a melancholically sensitive treatment in a Roman copy of a lost Bronze
statue of the fourth century b.c.e., which simply depicts a winged, sleeping, boyish

21
head. And on the famous and controversial Euphronius (flourished c. 520–470
b.c.e.) krater (Greece, 520–510 b.c.e.), a winged Hypnos is paired with his twin
brother Thanatos, gently bearing Sarpedon to his eternal sleep.

The Bible In The Middle Ages

In the biblical tradition, sleep is rarely personified, but dreams bear great
significance as prophetic moments, or as the means of connection between the
divine and the earthly realms. Thus, occasions arise in art not to depict images that
are "dream-like," or that one may imagine represent the artists' dreams, but that,
rather, explicitly represent dreams as described in the text of the bible. Most often,
these depictions include the dreamer, with the dream itself in a realm slightly above
and beyond. In both Jewish and Christian art from late antiquity through
the Renaissance, the biblical dreams of the Patriarchs Jacob and Joseph, the
Egyptian Pharoah, and of King Nebuchadnezzar are favorite subjects for depiction.
The New Testament and, particularly, its apochrypha introduce the subjects of the
dreams of Joseph the husband of Mary, those of Three Magi, and that of Pilate's
wife. The dreams are depicted sometimes simply, sometimes with elaboration, but
the fact that the viewer recognizes that these are crucial prophetic turning points in
the story make them ever powerful.

While many of the illustrations, illuminations, and carvings depicting these subjects
are anonymous, biblical and apocryphal dreams were treated by artists known to
history, such as Simone dei Crocifissi (1330–1399), whose "Dream of the Virgin"
heralded an interest in this topos in Italian painting of the fourteenth century, and
Piero Della Francesca's (1415–1492) quiet and lyrical depiction of Constantine's
Dream as part of the fresco cycle of the Legend of the True Cross in the Church of
San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy (c. 1457–1458). Night scenes are notoriously
difficult to depict, yet the artists, through the simple devices of positioning and
composition, manage to convey a supernal and pervasive sense of quietness,
calm, and sacred anticipation.

Saints And Holy People, East And West

Depictions of prophetic dreams or dreams that advance the narrative of a sacred
tale or myth are not limited to the biblical realm—saints and holy people of all
religious traditions are depicted in art. Vittore Carpaccio's (c. 1455–c. 1525)
lyrical Dream of St. Ursula (Italy, early sixteenth century) is devoted mostly to a
depiction of the saint asleep in bed, with a rather self-effacing angel as the only
evidence that we are witnessing a dream. Again, a modesty, a sense of calm
permeates the composition. In Asian art, one can view depictions of the dream of
Maya, the Buddah's future mother, in which, wakeful, she sees the white elephant
that symbolizes her son's birth. The Indian Bhagavata Purana of the nineteenth
century describes a spontaneous out-of-body experience, a dream flight by a

22
woman named Usha, from which she returned with verifiable information. Her flight
is depicted in illuminated manuscripts with a jewel-like clarity that parallels the
clarity of her vision. And in Muslim iconography, Muhammad's nighttime
conversations with the angel Gabriel show the prophet awake but in his bed,
engaged in a rather static conversation (Iran, fifteenth century). By way of contrast,
the beautiful iconography of the famous Night Journey tends to show Muhammad
in action—on his mount al-Buraq, speeding through the clouds and accompanied
by angels and celestial beings.

While we like to think of dreams as spontaneous, it has long been known that they
can be incubated or induced, and from antiquity through the modern period, sacred
sites were used as loci of incubation. In the East and in the West, temples and
churches dedicated to various deities and saints were places whose architecture
and geographical disposition were believed to be conducive to dream incubation,
and where believers retreated, prepared themselves, and received their visionary
experiences. The total environment of these places—as enhanced by art, among
other factors—was key in terms of the potential success of the visionary process.

And when dreams do come, they could advocate reconsideration of even those
aspects of the culture most taken for granted—the appearance of the gods. Like
the dream that gave birth to the sphinx, dreams can often be the cause of the
creation of new iconography or the alteration of existing iconographic conventions,
as they represent the direct intervention of the higher powers through the realm of
vision. Although part of a strictly aniconic culture when it came to the depiction of
the deity, the visions of the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, though both glimpses of
the God of Israel, presented radically different "images" of that imageless deity that
influenced the way those in the West envision God. Likewise, Kan Hiu, a Chinese
Buddhist monk who was also a painter and a poet in the late ninth and early tenth
century, was able to radically change conventional portrayals of the Buddhist saints
through the inspiration of dreams. The way in which he envisioned these people
was sometimes at odds with historical tradition as transmitted by the mainstream,
but his vision was so compelling that the tradition changed to accommodate it. And
in the same way, the visions of St. Bridget of Sweden (c. 1303–1373) completely
altered the view of the Nativity for Christianity. The snowy landscape, the broken
manger, the many details of the story as it is commonly depicted are responses to
her dream.

Finally, inspiration and even instruction in art is attributed to dreams. William

Blake (1757–1827) claimed he was instructed in painting by a spirit who appeared
in his dreams in the form of a man, and whom he depicted in a lost sketch (copied,
fortunately, by a friend around 1819).

Native And Tribal Societies

23
The dream as a time out of time, depicted from the perspective of a soul out of
body, is an important topos in native and tribal cultures. The native peoples of what
is now Australia imagined the Dreamtime—an era in which humans and nature
came to be as they are now. They created churinga, magical depictions, tracings,
or maps of Dreamtime events seen from the point of view of the spiritual essence
of the individual, that part of the self that exists outside of time. These are similar to
maps made by shamans in a number of cultures—both in the northern and
southern hemispheres and over the historical longue durée —depicting their dream
journeys.

In native and tribal society, the active dream—the one that the dreamer calls down
upon him or herself and in which he or she is a conscious participant—is an
important factor in religious and spiritual life, and art and adornment help create the
atmosphere in which such dreams may be invoked. An Arapaho dress, made
in Oklahoma around 1890, situates the dreamer at the conjunction of various
symbols that make it clear that she is on the threshold between light and darkness,
between the spirit and the material worlds.

Iroquois people danced in cornhusk masks in order to help recall forgotten dreams,
since these were believed to be windows on the soul. The masks, with their
hungry, haunted, and longing looks, were meant to symbolize the psychological
state of the dreamers seeking to remember their dream-desires and enact them in
order to fulfill the hunger of their souls.

Dreams As Symbolic And Spiritual

Sleep and dreams in art can also take on symbolic and what one would term
psychological valences, what would have been called at the times and places of
the creation of the art stages or stations in the spiritual journey. The story of
the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus was current in the sixth century and remained
popular in both East and West throughout the Middle Ages. Paintings of this theme
based in the Sufi tradition depict the seven sleepers as seven stages of human
personality and its awakening into full development. Likewise, in some Arab and
Muslim traditions, five sleeping, dreaming, and waking figures may represent the
five organs of spiritual perception into the care of which one is delivered after
regaining consciousness in sleep. The dream as a nexus for the quest for love and
knowledge is vividly illustrated in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), an erudite,
enigmatic, and beautifully illustrated example of the book arts of the Renaissance
that depicts the dream of the protagonist Poliphilo in his quest for his beloved Polia
(Greek for "many things"). And the waking of the self from the dream is drawn in
parallel with the alchemical process of the refinement of metals in the woodcuts of
Giovanni Battista Nazari's (1533–1599) Della Transmutatione Metallica, sogni
tre (Brescia, 1599).

24
Dreams And The Visionary: Fifteenth
To Eighteenth Centuries
The late medieval and early modern periods saw the triumph of the visionary in art.
While not illustrations of dreams or dreamers per se, the work of this period,
including the phantasms of Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450–1516), Pieter Bruegel the
Elder (c. 1525–1569), and others, first in large-scale commissions and later in more
popular prints, brought the realm of the dream-like and highly imaginative to a
growing audience, taking the visionary beyond the confines of the physical building
of the church, and into the street. Popular series, some anonymous, some
attributable to artists like Jean Duvet (1485–1561), include prints illustrating visions
of heaven and hell and of the apocalypse.

The rise of popular interest in the natural world—particularly in alchemy—gave rise

to a host of fantastic images in alchemical works of the seventeenth century
illustrated by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) and others. Baroque art transformed the
quotidian into the phantasmagoric, and as such, can also be viewed as dreamlike
in its elaboration and imaginative ornamentation. But however dreamlike the
imagery, less emphasis is ultimately placed in this period on dreams and the
dreamer—on imaginative phenomena occurring outside the range of perceivable
reality and nature—and more attention is devoted to the overriding interest in the
ingenious exposition of the natural in fanciful ways.

Psychoanalysis, The Dream, And Art In The Nineteenth And

Twentieth Centuries
The nineteenth century heralded a revolution in the understanding of the dream,
with Sigmund Freud (1836–1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961) engaging very
different interpretations of what both agreed was a phenomenon highly significant
for the understanding of the farthest reaches of the human subconscious. Freud
argued that dreams revealed the most occluded aspects of the individual
unconscious, particularly the realm of sublimated sexual desire, the universal
constant of the human condition. Jung saw the dream as tapping into the universal
consciousness of humankind, and containing symbols that permeate all human
cultures, ultimately uniting humans in what he argued was a more elevated
universal and common bond than Freud's lowest common denominator. Art since
the nineteenth century has blended these two currents, with most manifestations
depicting the dream experience from the perspective of the individual (one sees
the dream but not the dreamer), displaying a pervasive sexuality (whether implicit
or explicit), and drawing upon the rich symbolic treasury of the entire history of
world art. Consciousness of the importance of the dream experience for and in art
has resulted in the creation of dream realms that are awe-inspiring, fascinating,
and quite often frightening. Salvador Dali (1904–1989) and René Magritte (1898–

25
1967) both play with the idea of the elasticity of time and perspective in the dream,
while Giorgio De Chirico's (1888–1978) dream-scapes have to do with the bending
of space. Paul Delvaux's (1897–1994) dreamlike scenes are simultaneously sexual
and menacing, whereas Marc Chagall's (1887–1985) work is playful, blending the
quotidian and the bizarre in a lush, colorful, and romantic synthesis that is instantly
recognizable as "dreamlike." Max Ernst's (1891–1976) overlapping and repeated
images—recognizable, yet juxtaposed incongruously, Paul Klee's (1879–1940)
often extremely playful and "light" images that yet conceal a highly intellectual
subtext, Rousseau's lush forests and spare deserts of the imagination, and the
elemental power of Constantin Brancusi's (1876–1957) visions of flight (a common
element in dreams) are but a few manifestations of the dream in twentieth century
art.

The dream is a particularly widespread theme in film and photography. From Edwin
Porter's (1969–1941) early short films, notably An Artist's Dream (1900)
and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), to the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's
(1899–1980) Vertigo (1958), Akira Kurosawa's (1910–1998) Dreams (1990), and
the vivid dream landscapes of Ingmar Bergman's (b. 1918) Wild
Strawberries (1957) and Federico Fellini's (1920–1993) 8 1/2 (1963), the very
nature of film has proved fertile ground for the exposition of dreams through the
varying lenses of each director. The deceptive realism of film provides an excellent
foil for the recounting of dreams through the eyes of the dreamer.

Contemporary Art
Contemporary art is so much enamored of the idea of the dream that one would be
hard-pressed to name an artist in the postwar era who did not engage the subject
on some level. The work or stages in the work of some artists revolves around
dreams. African and African-American artists such as Olu Amoda (b. 1959), in
his Window of Dreams (1991), and Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), with his Dreams
#2 (1965), have engaged the dream as a metaphor in particularly poignant and
affecting ways.

Though photography is a static medium, it is like film in that it is self-conscious

about giving the appearance of replicating reality while never actually and
completely doing so. Jerry Uelsman's (b. 1934) untitled images with dream themes
owe their sensibility to the painted dreamscapes of the nineteenth century, while
works like Ralph Gibson's (b. 1939) Sonambulist Series (1968), with its creepy
hand reaching out of a doorway, draw on the fearful depths of human
consciousness, known to the ancients, filtered through Freud and Jung, and
always lurking under the surface.

Yet the dark and menacing vision, as eternal and pervasive as it is, is matched by
an equally pervasive transcendent mythic consciousness. Contemporary
26
photographers Suzanne Scherer (b. 1964) and Pavel Ouporov (b. 1966), in their
preoccupation with the dream, draw on such mythic archetypes as a dream maze
replete with minotaur, and an Icarus-like flying dreamer, a topos they share with
contemporary artists, notably Jonathan Borofsky (b. 1942) in his series titled I
dreamed I could fly.… These works articulate and draw upon common dream
themes in all times and places, from Muhammad's flight to Usha's, to the launching
of the very universe from Krishna's dream.

See also Consciousness ; Mind ; Psychoanalysis ; Surrealism .

Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Dreams. Translated with an introduction by Edwin E. Slosson.
London: Unwin, 1914.

Campbell, Joseph, ed. Myths, Dreams, and Religion. New York: Dutton, 1970.

Coxhead, David, and Susan Hiller. Dreams: Visions of the Night. London: Thames

and Hudson, 1976.

Devereux, George, ed. Psychoanalysis and the Occult. New York: International

Universities Press, 1973.

Freud, Sigmund. On Dreams. Vols. 4 and 5. Translated from the German under the
general editorship of James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. The standard
edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud.

Gamwell, Lynn, ed. Dreams 1900–2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious

Mind. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Dreams. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1974.

Marc Michael Epstein
New Dictionary of the History of Ideas Epstein, Marc

Dreams
Views 3,227,922Updated May 31 2020

Dreams
Whether in ancient or in contemporary times, dreams are a mystery of the mind
that everyone has experienced. Quite likely, most individuals have also pondered
the meaning of their dreams. Whether these sleep-time adventures are considered

27
voyages of the soul, messages from the gods, the doorway of the unconscious, or
accidental byproducts of insufficient oxygen in the brain, down through the ages
thoughtful men and women have sought to learn more about this intriguing activity
of the sleeping consciousness.

Among the ancients there were the dream incubation temples of Serapis,
Egyptian god of dreams; and later, of Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing.
Thousands of people made their pilgrimage to these holy places to seek advice
and healing from their dreams. After rigorous periods of fasting, prayer, and sacred
ritual, they would attempt to induce revelatory nocturnal visions by spending the
night in the temple. This practice was commonly employed by the cultic prophets
and the kings of the ancient cities of Lagash in Sumer and Ugarit in Syria.

Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 b.c.e.) saw dreams as a release for passionate inner
forces. In the second century, another Greek, Artemidorous of Ephesus, produced
the Oneirocritica, the encyclopedia that was the forerunner to thousands of dream
books throughout the ages.

In Hinduism, it is believed that the immortal soul within the physical body is able to
leave the "house of flesh" during sleep and to travel wherever it desires. It is also
thought that the passing to the next life after death may be compared to a sleeper
awakening from a dream. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad states that the soul, the
"self-luminous being," may assume many forms, high and low, in the world of
dreams. "Some say that dreaming is but another form of waking, for what a man
experiences while awake he experiences again in his dreams.…As a man passes
from dream to wakefulness, so does he pass at death from this life to the next"
(Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.3.11–14, 35).

The Mesopotamian and Egyptian courts employed skilled professionals who

sought to interpret dreams and visions. The Israelites, by contrast, believed that
interpretation of dreams could be accomplished only with the Lord's guidance.
"For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet a man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a
vision of the night, when sleep falleth upon men in slumberings upon the bed; then
He openeth the ears of men, and speaketh their instructions, that he may withdraw
man from his purpose and hide pride from man" (KJV: Job 33:14). The Talmud, the
Hebrew sacred book of practical wisdom, reveals that the Jews gave great
importance both to the dream and to the one whom the Lord gave the knowledge
to interpret the dream. Joseph and Daniel were two Israelites who attained high
regard for their skill as dream interpreters.

Dreams, or night visions, might be auditory and present a direct message (as in
Job 33:15–17, Genesis 20:3,6) or at other times be symbolic, requiring skilled
interpretation. Jacob had a dream of a ladder set up on Earth, the top of it reaching
to heaven. He beheld in this dream angels of God ascending and descending on
the ladder with the Lord standing above it, confirming the covenant of Abraham to

28
Jacob (Genesis 28:12). King Solomon received both wisdom and warning in
dreams (I Kings 3:5, 9:2).

The New Testament accounts surrounding the birth of Jesus (c. 6 b.c.e.–c. 30 c.e.)

record a number of revelatory dreams. Joseph was instructed to wed Mary and
was assured of her purity (Matthew 1:20), in spite of the apparent fact that she was
already pregnant. Later, Joseph was warned to flee to Egypt (Matthew 2:13), return
to Israel, (2:19) and to go to Galilee (2:22). The Magi (the three wise men) were
warned in a dream not to return to their native land along the same route as they
had come (2:12) because of Herod's evil intentions. Acts 2:17 contains the
prophetic verse: "And it shall come to pass in the last days saith God, I will pour out
of my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and daughters shall prophesy [preach]
and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams."

By the late nineteenth century, dreams were being examined from a physiological
perspective. The ancient notion that God spoke directly to men in dreams was
pretty much dismissed by a culture that was becoming more scientific and
materialistic. Then came the groundbreaking work of Sigmund Freud and Carl G.
Jung.

In 1899 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), a Viennese psychiatrist and the founder of

psychoanalysis, brought dreams into the realm of the scientific community with the
publication of his monumental work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he
maintained that the dream is "the guardian of sleep" and "the royal road" to
understanding the human unconscious. Freud's theory was basically that the
dream was a disguised wish-fulfillment of infantile sexual needs, which were
repressed by built-in censors of the waking mind. The apparent content of the
dream was only concealing a shockingly latent dream. Through the use of a
complex process of "dream work," which Freud developed, the dream could be
unraveled backward, penetrating the unconscious memory of the dreamer and
thereby setting the person free.

According to Dr. Stanley Krippner (1932– ), former director of the Dream

Laboratory at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, contemporary
experiments in sleep laboratories have confirmed many of Freud's speculations
and cast doubt upon others. Some psychiatrists, including Lester Gelb, argue that
the concept of the unconscious should be totally abandoned in explaining human
behavior. Gelb feels it would be more useful to recognize several states or types of
consciousness—working, sleeping, dreaming, daydreaming, trance, and so forth—
each of which can be productively studied by behavioral scientists. Krippner stated
that possible confirmation of Freud's emphasis on sexual symbolism does occur
occasionally in modern electroencephalographic dream research, but he further

29
observed that human thought processes are too varied to allow any single, unitary
explanation of dreaming to be adequate.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875– 1961), a student and later dissenter of

Freudian techniques, added new dimensions to the understanding of the self
through dreams. From Jung's perspective, Freud expressed a contempt for the
psyche as a kind of waste bin for inappropriate or immoral thoughts. In Jung's
opinion, the unconscious was far more than a depository for the past; it was also
full of future psychic situations and ideas. Jung saw the dream as a compensatory
mechanism whose function was to restore one's psychological balance. His
concept of a collective unconscious linked humans with their ancestors as part of
the evolutionary tendency of the human mind. Jung rejected arbitrary
interpretations of dreams and dismissed free Freudian association as wandering
too far from the dream content. Jung developed an intricate system of
"elaborations," in which the dreamer relates all that he or she knows about a
symbol—as if he or she were explaining it to a visitor from another planet.

Jung found startling similarities in the unconscious contents and the symbolic
processes of both modern and primitive humans, and he recognized what he called
"archetypes," mental forces and symbology whose presence cannot be explained
by anything in the individual's own life, but seemed to be "aboriginal, innate, and
inherited shapes of the human mind." Jung believed that it is crucial to pay
attention to the archetypes met in dream life. Of special importance is the
"shadow," a figure of the same sex as the dreamer, which contains all the
repressed characteristics one has not developed in his or her conscious life. The
"anima" is the personification of all the female tendencies, both positive and
negative, in the male psyche. Its counterpart in the female psyche is the "animus."

The most mysterious, but most significant, of the Jungian archetypes is the self,
which M. L. von Fram describes in Man and His Symbols (1964) as the regulating
center that brings about a constant expansion and maturing of the personality. The
self emerges only when the ego can surrender and merge into it. The ego is the "I"
within each individual. It is the thinking, feeling, and aware aspect of self that
enables the individual to distinguish himself or herself from others. In
psychoanalytic theory, the ego mediates between the more primitive drives of the
"id," the unconscious, instinctual self, and the demands of the social environment
in which the individual must function. (Jung saw the self as encompassing the total
psyche, of which the ego is only a small part.) Jung called this psychic integration
of the personality, this striving toward wholeness, the process of "individuation."

Many authorities consider Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman (1895–1999) to be the father of

modern scientific dream research, for he pursued the subject when his colleagues
dismissed the area as having no value. As a professor of philosophy at the

30
University of Chicago, Kleitman asked a graduate student, Eugene Aserinsky, to
study the relationship of eye movement and sleep; and in 1951, Aserinsky
identified rapid eye movement (REM) and demonstrated that the brain is active
during sleep, thus establishing the course for other dream researchers to follow.
Although discussions of REM are now commonplace in the conversations of
informed laypeople, it should be noted that prior to the work of Kleitman and
Aserinsky most scientists maintained that the brain "tuned down" during sleep.

Pursuing the REM research, Kleitman and another of his medical students, William
C. Dement, found what may be the pattern for a "good night's sleep." They
discovered a nightly pattern of sleep that begins with about 90 minutes of non-REM
rest during which brain-waves gradually lengthen and progress through four
distinct stages of sleep, with Stage Four the deepest stage. It is then that the first
REM episode of the night begins. Rapid eye movement is now observable, but the
body itself remains still. The central nervous system becomes extremely active
during REM. It becomes so intensely active that Dr. Frederick Snyder, of the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), termed the activity "a third state of
earthly existence," distinct from both non-REM sleep and wakefulness.

The breathing is even in non-REM sleep. During the REM episode breathing may
accelerate to a panting pace. The rhythm of the heart may speed up or slow down
unaccountably. Blood pressure can dramatically fall. Other physiological changes
also occur during REM. The flow of blood to the brain increases about 40 percent.
Then the individual stirs and returns to the non-REM sleep cycle. This pattern
repeats itself throughout the night.

Dreaming, in Dr. Stanley Krippner's estimation, is a primary means of brain

development and maturation. Newborn infants spend about half of their sleeping
time in the rapid eye movement or dream state. Although such dreams probably
are concerned with tactile impressions rather than memories, he believes that
these dreams probably prepare the infants' immature nervous systems for the
onslaught of experiences that come with the maturation of vision, hearing, and the
other senses. To further support this theory, Krippner cites studies done with older
subjects that indicate that young adults spend 25 percent of their time dreaming
while the proportion decreases to 20 percent among the elderly. It seems that the
brain, once it is functioning well, does not need as much dream time.

Recent experiments demonstrate that simple forms of mental functioning go on at

night even when the individual is not dreaming. The brain appears to require
constant stimulation even during sleep and may use dream periods to "keep in
tune" and to process information that has accumulated during the day.

In the mid-1950s, Drs. William Dement and Charles Fischer, working at Mount
Sinai Hospital in New York, asked a group of volunteers to spend several nights in
the laboratory. When the volunteers fell asleep, they were awakened throughout
the night each time the electroencephalographs indicated the start of a dream
period. These volunteers got all of their regular sleep except for their dream time.

31
After five nights of dreamlessness, they became nervous, jittery, irritable, and had
trouble concentrating. One volunteer quit the project in a panic.

Another group of volunteers in another part of the hospital was awakened the
same number of times each night as those in the first group, but they were
awakened when they were not dreaming. In other words, they were allowed
approximately their usual amount of dream time. These volunteers suffered none
of the troubles and upsets that afflicted the first group.

For the first time, the Dement and Fischer experiment presented evidence that
regular dream sleep is essential to physical well-being. Some of the volunteers
went as long as 15 nights without dream sleep, at which point they tried to dream
all of the time, and the researchers had to awaken them constantly. When their
dream time was no longer interrupted, the volunteers spent much more time than
normal in dream sleep and continued to do so until they had made up their dream
loss.

Dement summed up the results of their experiment by concluding that when people
are deprived of REM sleep, a rebound effect occurs. If individuals are not getting
their proper share of REM and non-REM rest and are feeling sleepy, they can
become a menace. People who have accumulated a large sleep debt are
dangerous drivers on the highway, for example.

Krippner believes that dreaming is as necessary to humans as eating and drinking.

Not only does dreaming process data to keep the brain "in tune," but there is also
evidence that a biochemical substance that accumulates during the day can only
be eliminated from the nervous system during dream periods. Individuals should be
just as concerned about receiving adequate dream time at night as they are about
receiving adequate food during the day. Any disturbance that interrupts sleep will
interfere with dream time, thus leaving the individual less well prepared—physically
and psychologically—to face the coming day. Alcohol, amphetamines, and
barbiturates depress the amount of dreaming an individual can experience during
the night, and users of these drugs should be aware of the fact. Coffee, however,
does not seem to depress dream time.

Today there are at least 170 sleep clinics operating in the United States, and their
analyses cite more than 50 sleep disorders. A general consensus of the
researchers at such clinics expresses the opinion that—second only to
the common cold—sleep disorders constitute the most common health complaint.
In March 2001, the National Sleep Foundation released the results of a poll that
revealed that 51 percent of adults complained of insomnia, the inability to fall into a
restful sleep, a few nights per week over the period of a year; 29 percent said that
they had experienced insomnia almost every night over a year's time.

Researchers also have noted a mysterious kinship between mental illness and
sleep— and even longevity and sleep. Daniel Kripke, a professor of psychiatry at

32
the University of California at San Diego, led a study that tracked the sleeping
habits of 1.1 million Americans for six years and concluded that, contrary to
popular belief, people who sleep six or seven hours per night live longer than those
who sleep eight or more. The controversial study, the largest of its kind, was
published in the February 15, 2002, issue of Archives of General Psychiatry and
provoked criticism from other sleep experts who stated that the main problem with
America's sleep habits is deprivation, not oversleeping.

Dr. Patricia Carrington, a Princeton University psychologist, has expressed her

hypothesis that humankind would be better served if it followed the natural
rhythms, the biological alternation of rest and relaxation that is seen in animals.
Only in human beings is there such a thing as 17 hours of constant wakefulness.

Many sleep and dream researchers have theorized that one of the reasons why
humans use drugs, alcohol, caffeine, and other means of altering states of
consciousness may be to somehow manipulate the body-mind structure into
obeying the schedule forced upon it— rather than permitting it to follow the natural
cycles and rhythms of life itself. Dr. Jurgen Zulley, psychologist at the Max
Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, has found evidence for a four-
hour sleep-wake cycle with nap periods at approximately 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and
5:00 p.m. Zulley feels that individuals shouldn't try to combat their natural
drowsiness at these times with coffee breaks or with exercise. In his opinion
individuals should seek to be biologically correct. It would be better for human
health, Zulley advises, if individuals took a short nap or just leaned back in a chair
for a bit of relaxation rather than reaching for a soft drink or a cup of coffee to keep
the mental motors running.

Dream researchers also have learned that environment appears to have a marked
effect on dreams. One may have unusual dreams when spending the night in a
friend's home or in a motel room. In their series of studies at the Maimonides
Dream Laboratory, the research team found that the subjects' dreams often
contained references to the electroencephalograph and to the electrodes on their
heads, especially during the first night in which they participated in the study.
Charles Tart, one of the nation's most eminent sleep and dream researchers,
suggests that dream content also will differ with the demands placed upon the
dreamer; dreams that are written down at home and given to a researcher will
differ from dreams given to a psychotherapist, because in the latter instance the
emphasis is on the person's inner life and his or her attempts to change his or her
behavior.

It has been noted that patients who go to Freudian psychotherapists eventually

begin to incorporate Freudian symbols into their dreams while patients who see
Jungian analysts do the same with Jungian symbols.

Opinions on the degree to which external events influence dreams vary widely.
Some dream researchers contend that all dreams are the result of presleep
experiences, while Freudian psychoanalysts emphasize the internal determinants

33
of dream content (i.e., one's unconscious drives and defenses). Others argue that
the presleep experiences of one's daily activities may be used by the unconscious,
but they are not of major significance in dream interpretation.

In 1967, Tart presented a list of the various items that influence dreams. Tart's list
included the dreamer's actual life history; the dreamer's memories of what has
happened to him or her, especially during the past week; the "day residue," which
includes immediate presleep experiences; and currently poorly understood factors
such as atmospheric concentration, barometric pressure, and paranormal stimuli
such as telepathic messages.

Dream researchers are not sure how the visual dimensions in dreams compare
with the visual dimensions in everyday life. Dream reports indicate that most often
the dream is on a "cinemascope screen" rather than on a small "television screen."
People usually are seen full-length and in about the same dimensions as they
appear during waking hours.

One reason REMs (rapid eye movements) are associated with dreams may be that
the eyes scan the visual scene just as they do during the waking state. On the
other hand, eye movements also occur when subjects report no movement in their
dreams, suggesting that the relationship between rapid eye movements and
dreams is highly complex.

There is not a one-to-one relationship between waking time and dream time.
However, extreme time distortion rarely occurs in dreams despite the fact that
many psychologists used to believe that dreams lasted only a second or two.

The subjects at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory recalled the visual elements in
their dreams most clearly, but auditory (sound) and tactile (touch) impressions also
were common. While subjects in the dream laboratories report auditory and tactile
impressions in addition to vivid visual dreams, some individuals stubbornly insist
that they "never dream." Since researchers have established that dreaming is as
necessary to mental and physical health as eating and drinking, it becomes
apparent that individuals who claim that they never dream simply are not
remembering their dreams, or are having dreams they wish to forget—the
nightmares.

Delving Deeper
Faraday, Ann. Dream Power. New York: Berkley Medallion Books Edition, 1973.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 1955.

Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1953,
1956.

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Jung, C. G., ed. Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books, 1964; New York:
Dell Publishing, 1968.

Kramer, Milton, ed. Dream Psychology and the New Biology of

Dreaming. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1969.

Krippner, Stanley. Dreamtime and Dreamwork: Decod ing the Language of the

Night. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1990.

Perls, Frederick S. Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Lafayette, Calif.: Real People Press,

1969.

Sechrist, Elsie. Dreams—Your Magic Mirror. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.

Stekel, Wilhelm. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Washington Square

Press, 1967.

Tart, Charles, ed. Altered States of Consciousness. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1969.

Vedantam, Shankar. "Study Links 8 Hours' Sleep to Shorter Life

Span." Washington Post, February 15, 2002. [Online]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12305-2002Feb14.html.

Creative And Lucid Dreaming

Data currently being researched indicates that dreams provide a fertile field for the
examination of creative processes. The act of dreaming, that most personal and
subjective experience, may well be a key to humankind's hidden powers. Many
artists, writers, inventors, musicians, and other creative people have received
inspiration in their dreams or have used their dreams as problem-solving catalysts.

All through Easter Day in 1920, Dr. Otto Loewi, research pharmacologist at the
New York University College of Medicine, pondered a strange dream that revisited
the details of an experiment that he had discarded 17 years before. Acetylcholine,
the chemical that he had used in the experiment, had first been isolated by Dr. H.
H. Dale, Loewi's close friend, in 1914, but the new test inspired by Loewi's dream
brought about an abrupt change in the theory of muscle stimulation. Loewi and
Dale shared the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1936.

Although the experiment itself had a striking effect on the academic world of
physiology, the manner in which the idea came to Loewi is perhaps even more
astounding. It is conceivable that ideas can be transferred from one mind to
another during sleep, but when such ideas are not in the mind of another person,
from where could they possibly arise? Before his death in 1961, Loewi stated that

35
he could not possibly answer this question. Perhaps no one can, but it is certain
that Loewi's dream provided the key to subsequent research that eventually gained
him the Nobel Prize.

Solving problems via the dream state is as old as humankind itself. Thomas Edison
(1847–1931), the "Genius of Menlo Park," it is said, had the habit of curling up in
his roll-top desk to catch brief naps that sometimes constituted his entire sleep
schedule. After such a nap he would emerge with the answers to problems that
had plagued him during his waking state.

Elias Howe (1819–1867) failed at the conscious level to perfect a workable sewing

machine. Then one night he dreamed that a savage king ordered him to invent
a sewing machine, and when he was unable to comply, the spear-armed natives
raised their weapons to kill him. At that exact moment, he noticed that each spear
had a hole in it just above the point. This vision gave him the much-needed clue to
the commercial perfection of the sewing machine.

Another famous scientist who used his dreams to solve problems was Niels Bohr
(1885–1962), who one night dreamed of a sun composed of burning gas with
planets spinning around it, attached by thin threads. He realized that this explained
the structure of the atom, which eventually led to the field of atomic physics and,
ultimately, atomic energy.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) credited dreams for the many poems he wrote.

"Kubla Khan" was the result of a dream by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).
The classic novel Jane Eyre (1847) was spun from the dreams of Charlotte
Brontë (1816–1855).

Some of the world's most successful business executives never make a decision
until they have a chance to allow it to pass through their minds during the hours of
sleep, permitting solutions to come during dreams. Once this practice of "sleeping
on a problem" becomes habit, these successful individuals find that there is really
nothing magical about the process of dreaming solutions. Creative dreaming
simply appears to be a matter of training the mind to do certain things. The
subconscious level of the mind does the work, rather than the intellectual level. The
subconscious understands symbols far better than words, and, in general, can be
likened to an electronic computer. Material must be fed into it or it cannot produce
effective answers. To the intellect, a particular plan may sound silly, but to the
subconscious it may make a lot of sense.

The concept of the dream as a creative tool may be somewhat alien to Western
thought, but numerous Eastern writings, including the ancient Hindu Upanishads,
speak of this aspect of the dream. One of the Upanishads says that "…Man in his
dreams becomes a creator. There are no real chariots in that state…no

36
 blessings…no joys, but he himself creates blessings, happiness and joys."
Psychologists Montague Ullman, Joseph Adelson, Howard Shevrin, and Frederick
Weiss have done much to advance the thesis that dreams basically are creative.

Psychoanalyst Ullman cites four creative aspects of dreaming:

1. the element of originality;

2. the joining together of elements into new patterns;
3. the concern with accuracy;
4. the felt reaction of participating in an involuntary experience.

Ullman concedes that the final product of a dream's creativity may be either dull or
ecstatic, but he insists that it is an act of creation to have the dream in the first
place.

Lucid dreaming is simply the technique of dreaming while knowing that one is still
dreaming. The word "lucid" is used to indicate a sense of mental clarity. A lucid
dream usually occurs while one is in the midst of a dream and suddenly realizes
that the experience that he or she is undergoing is not happening in physical
reality, but in the framework of a dream scenario. Often the dreamer notices some
impossible occurrence in the dream, such as having a conversation with a
deceased relative or having the ability to fly, which prompts this awareness. While
experiencing lucid dreaming is not quite the same thing as exercising control over
one's dreams, the dreamer who realizes that he or she is dreaming may greatly
influence the course of the events in the dream scenario. Some practitioners of
lucid dreaming promise extended creativity, the ability to overcome nightmares and
other sleep problems, the healing of mind and body—and even spiritual
transcendence.

Those who teach lucid dreaming state that the two essentials are motivation and
effort. Lucid dreaming techniques allow the individual dreamer to focus intention
and to prepare a critical mind. The exercises taught by those conducting lucid
dreaming workshops range from ancient Tibetan techniques to modern programs
developed by dream researchers.

Delving Deeper
Faraday, Ann. Dream Power. New York: Berkley Medallion Books Edition, 1973.

Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1953,
1956.

Krippner, Stanley. Dreamtime and Dreamwork: Decod ing the Language of the

Night. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1990.

37
Krippner, Stanley, with Montague Ullman and Alan Vaughan. Dream Telepathy:
Experiments in Nocturnal ESP. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishers, 1989.

LaBerge, Stephen. Lucid Dreaming. New York: Ballantine, 1986.

Lucidity Institute. [Online] http://www.lucidity.com/LucidDreamingFAQ2.html.

Sechrist, Elsie. Dreams—Your Magic Mirror. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.

Van de Castle, Robert L. Our Dreaming Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1994.

Nightmares
A nightmare differs considerably from a frightening dream. The terror of a
nightmare is more intense and does not present an image or a dream sequence.
Dreamers in the throes of a nightmare cry out while in deep sleep. They sweat,
have difficulty in breathing, and often appear as if paralyzed.

In 1968 Dr. R. J. Broughton compiled considerable evidence that indicates that

bed-wetting, sleepwalking, and nightmares occur during periods of deep sleep
rather than during periods of dreaming, as the layperson often assumes. Bed-
wetting is common among unstable individuals, and the sleepwalker, in about 25
percent of the cases, is also a bed-wetter. Dream researcher Dr. Stanley Krippner
agrees that nightmares, bed-wetting, and sleepwalking rarely coincide with dream
periods.

Psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University believes that the nightmares of

people who seem physically healthy but who regularly suffer from "bad dreams"
are reflecting their personalities rather than a traumatic past or a present struggle
with health problems. Hartmann found evidence of "thin boundaries" in people
prone to recurrent nightmares. In his assessment they were men and women who
tended to be more open and sensitive than the average. They were, he discovered,
people with a tendency to become quickly and deeply involved in relationships with
other individuals. At the same time, paradoxically, they also tended to be "loners,"
people who did not identify strongly with groups of any kind.

Hartmann developed a 138-item "Boundary Questionnaire" that he administered to

more than a thousand people, including a wide range of students, nightmare
sufferers, and naval officers. The findings supported earlier studies that suggested
that many of the men and women who endure nightmares are artistic or otherwise
creative people. Naval officers, not surprisingly, most often turned up on the
opposite end of the scale with rather "thick boundaries." Hartmann speculates that

38
"boundary thickness" may reflect a basic organizational pattern of the brain—one
that is genetically determined or established early in life. The general openness of
"thin-boundaried" people may predispose them to creativity, but it also binds them
to a childlike vulnerability that leaves them at the mercy of the night creatures that
go "bump" in the darkness.

Nightmares, then, just might be the price that some otherwise healthy and
untroubled people pay for their sensitivity and creativity. The nightmare may work
out the vulnerability, Hartmann states, especially if the sufferer learns to maneuver
the frightening dream from a place of vulnerability to a place of control.

On October 2, 2001, clinical psychologist Alan Siegel, editor of Dream

Time magazine, told Mike Conklin, reporter for the Chicago Tribune, that the
people of the United States had entered a "national epidemic of nightmares"
brought on by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11.
"Nightmares are a cardinal symptom of something traumatic in [One's] life," Siegel
said. "In this case, we've lost our sense of security, and this is something more
traumatic than most Americans have really experienced before."

Dr. Michael Friedman, a sleep specialist at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical

Center in Chicago, agreed that there was no question that they had begun treating
many patients with sleep problems and nightmares related to the incidents of that
terrible event. Deirdre Barrett, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical Center
who supervised counselors at Boston's Logan Airport following the hijackings of
the jets that crashed into the Twin Towers, cautioned that in some cases it might
be six months or a year before certain people would begin having traumatic
dreams of the series of events that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Siegel went on to explain that such nightmares should be considered the brain's
natural means of dealing with the trauma, dispelling it through the subconscious
while people are sleeping. Although people tend to think of nightmares as a kind of
mental poison, Siegel said that, in reality, "they are a form of vaccine."

Delving Deeper
Conklin, Mike. "Plague of Nightmares Descend on Elm Street." Tribune, October 2,
2001. [Online] http://chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-
0110020007oct02.story?coll=chi-leisureterr.

Faraday, Ann. Dream Power. New York: Berkley Medallion Books Edition, 1973.

Hall, Calvin, S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1953,
1956.

39
Kramer, Milton, ed. Dream Psychology and the New Biology of
Dreaming. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1969.

Krippner, Stanley. Dreamtime and Dreamwork: Decod ing the Language of the

Night. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1990.

Sechrist, Elsie. Dreams—Your Magic Mirror. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.

Tart, Charles, ed. Altered States of Consciousness. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1969.

Sleep Paralysis
Sleep paralysis is a condition that occurs in that state just before falling to sleep
(hypnagogic state) or just before fully awakening from sleep (hypnopompic state).
Although the condition may last for only a few seconds, during that time a person
undergoing sleep paralysis is unable to move or speak and often experiences a
sense of fear that there is some unknown presence in the room. Along with such
hallucinations as seeing ghosts, angels, devils, and extraterrestrial beings, many
individuals undergoing sleep paralysis also report the sensation of being touched,
pulled, or feeling a great pressure on the chest.

A general consensus among researchers links sleep paralysis with rapid eye
movement (REM), the dream state. While in the normal state of dreaming, the
muscles relax and the brain blocks signals that would permit the limbs to move,
thus preventing the body from acting out its dreams. In the case of sleep paralysis,
the usual barrier between sleeping and wakefulness temporarily drops and certain
sleep phenomena, of which immobility is one, enter into wakefulness. Some
individuals, momentarily paralyzed, suffer feelings of dread, helplessness, and
become convinced that they have been visited by some supernatural presence.

The 1990 International Classification of Sleep Disorders reports that sleep

paralysis may occur to 40 to 60 percent of the population once or twice in a
lifetime, but happens quite frequently to people who suffer from narcolepsy, a sleep
disorder. Research has also determined that instances of sleep paralysis usually
begin around the ages of 16 and 17, increases through the teen years, and
generally declines during the 20s. Although the condition is comparatively rare
during the 30s, roughly 3 to 6 percent of the general population may continue on
occasion to experience sleep paralysis throughout their lives, especially if they
undergo sleep deprivation or experience frequent sleep disruption.

40
Because the experience is extremely frightening for many who suffer from sleep
paralysis, they may be reluctant to discuss the problem because they have
become convinced that they have witnessed a supernatural visitation or because
they fear they are going insane. Researchers insist that while the condition of sleep
paralysis may be unpleasant and unsettling, it is not indicative of any serious long-
term psychological problem. Those enduring severe sleep paralysis have been
successfully treated with certain antidepressants that inhibit REM sleep. Even
more effective, many sleep researchers maintain, is to understand more about
what the condition is and learn not to fear it.

Delving Deeper
Hellmich, Nanci. "When Sleep Is But a Dream." USA Today, March 27, 2001.
[Online] http://www.usatoday.com/life/llead.htm.

Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered

Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Krippner, Stanley, with Joseph Dillard. Dreamwork: How to Use Your Dreams for

Creative Problem-Solving. Buffalo, N.Y.: Bearly, 1988.

Rowlands, Barbara. "In the Dead of Night." The Observer, November 18, 2001.

[Online] http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,596608,00.html.

Symbology Of Dreams
Fritz Perls (1893–1970), the founder of Gestalt therapy, believed that dreams were
"the royal road to integration." In his view the various parts of a dream should be
thoroughly examined and even role-played to gain self-awareness and to integrate
fragmented aspects of the personality into wholeness. According to Perls, the
different parts of a dream are fragments of the human personality. To become a
unified person without conflicts, one must put the different fragments of the dream
together.

The Gestalt approach to learning about oneself through dreams lies in a concerted
attempt to integrate one's dreams, rather than seeking to analyze them. This can
be accomplished by consciously reliving the dreams, by taking responsibility for
being the people and the objects in the dream, and by becoming aware of the
messages contained in the dream.

41
Perls found that in order to learn from dreams, it is not essential to work out the
entire dream structure. To work even with small bits of the dream is to learn more
about the dreamer. In order to "relive" a dream one must first refresh one's memory
of it by writing it down or by telling it to another person as a story that is happening
now, in the present tense.

Perls used the present tense in all of Gestalt dream work. In his view, dreams are
the most spontaneous expression of the existence of the human being. One might
perceive dreams being much like a stage production, but the action and the
direction are not under the same control as in waking life. Therefore, Perls advised,
it is helpful to visualize a dream as a script from one's own internal stage
production.

Each part of the dream is likely to be disguised or to bear a hidden message about
the dreamer. When the message comes through, the individual will feel that shock
of recognition that Gestalt called the "Ah-ha!"

Perls concluded that every dream has a message to reveal to the dreamer. Like
most dream researchers, he recommends that one keep a paper and pencil at
bedside in order to record the important points of one's dreams as they are
remembered.

Dr. Stanley Krippner (1932– ), formerly of the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in

New York City, said if one were to lie quietly in bed for a few moments each
morning the final dream of the night would often be remembered. In Krippner's
opinion, no dream symbols carry the same meaning for every person. Despite
certain mass-produced "dream interpretation guides," the research in the dream
laboratories indicates that only a skilled therapist, working closely with an individual
over a long period of time, can hope to interpret dream symbolism with any degree
of correctness. Even then the therapist's interpretations would hold true for only
that one subject.

Krippner points out, however, that certain dreams do occur with great frequency
among peoples all over the world. Dr. Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) spoke of
"archetypal images" in humankind's "collective unconscious." In this part of the
mind, Jung believed, were images common to all people everywhere. People living
in different times and different places have dreamed of "wise old men,"
"earth mothers," "mandalas" (circles within a square), and other "archetypes."

Jung's theories are rejected by many psychologists and psychiatrists as being too
mystical, but Krippner believes Jung's hypotheses really are not in conflict with
what the dream researchers call "scientific common sense." There must be
something structural in the brain comparable to the structural form of other body
parts. If so, this structure would develop along certain general lines even though an
individual were isolated from other human beings.

42
 According to a general consensus among dream researchers, the number one rule
in understanding one's dreams is to understand oneself. It is only by knowing
oneself as completely as possible that any individual will be able to identify and
fully comprehend the dream symbols that are uniquely his or her own. Here are a
number of symbols commonly seen in dreams and general meanings that have
been applied to them by certain researchers:

 Angel. Contact with Higher Self or superconsciousness. Guidance. Wisdom. Truth.

 Bathing. Spiritual cleansing. Need to "clean up" one's life.
 Cat. Universal symbol for woman. May refer to gossip; beware of gossip. The
mysterious. Independence.
 Church. The realm of Inner Awareness. Higher Self. Spiritual need.
 Desert. Spiritual thirst. Emotional barrenness. Sterility.
 Devil. Unpleasant person. Authoritarian figure of negative emotions. Parent figure
for unhappy childhood. Search for forbidden knowledge.
 Earthquake. Inner turmoil. Old ideas and problems coming forth. Literal or
prophetic. Changes.
 Falling. A natural fear and common to children. Falling from grace or higher
spiritual realms. Defeat.
 Hair. If soft and clean: spiritual beauty; if matted and dirty: spiritually unclean; if
thinning or bald: a man may feel consciousness of his age, or of aging. Gray or white
represents wisdom. A haircut may represent loss of vitality.
 Island. Seclusion. Desire to get away from it all. Security. A place of inhibitions.
 Judge. Authority figure. One who views objectively and fairly. Need for Self-
discipline. Hidden guilt.
 Key. The answer to a problem. Opening new doorways of opportunity. Gaining of
new knowledge or wisdom.
 Lake. Water symbol for spirit. Peace if placid or smooth.
 Mirror. Reveals one's true Self. good, bad, or indifferent. A reflection of the truth.
Can also represent illusion, that which is not real, only a reflection.
 Needle. Sewing indicates repairing errors of the past or may be someone giving
someone the "needle."
 Ocean. Spirit, God, Higher Self. Peace, unless a rough sea, then turmoil, strife, etc.
 Pig. Selfishness.
 Relatives. Relatives often represent parts of the dreamer's Self playing various roles
of his or her life.
 Suitcase. Prosperity. Desire to travel. Prestige. Subconscious desire for someone
else to go away.
 Sun. Spiritual light and awareness.
 Teeth. The loss of a tooth or teeth may foretell the loss of something of value.
 Water. Source of Life. Spirit, God, Universal.

Delving Deeper
Faraday, Ann. Dream Power. New York: Berkley Medallion Books Edition, 1973.

43
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 1955.

Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1953,
1956.

Jung, C. G., ed. Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books, 1964; New York:
Dell Publishing, 1968.

Krippner, Stanley. Dreamtime and Dreamwork: Decod ing the Language of the

Night. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1990.

Krippner, Stanley, with Mark Waldman. Dreamscap ing: New and Creative Ways to

Work with Your Dreams. Los Angeles: Lowell House, 1999.

Perls, Frederick S. Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Lafayette, Calif.: Real People Press,

1969.

Sechrist, Elsie. Dreams—Your Magic Mirror. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.

Stekel, Wilhelm. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Washington Square

Press, 1967.
Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained

Dreams
Views 2,229,436Updated Jun 10 2020

Dreams
The occult significance of dreams was a matter of speculation among the wise at
an early period in the history of civilization. The entries on Babylonia and Egypt to
some extent out-line the methods by which the wise men of those countries divined
the future from visions seen in sleep, and articles dealing with other countries
include data relating to dreams and dreamlore. This entry addresses some of the
more outstanding theories of antiquity regarding the nature and causes of dreams
and the manner in which the ancient diviners generally interpreted them.

Historical Views Of Dreaming

Dreams were regarded as of two kinds—false and true, in either case emanating
from a supernatural intelligence, evil or good. Sleep was regarded as a second life
by the ancients, a life in which the soul was freed from the body and was therefore
much more active than during the waking state. The acts it observed and the
scenes through which it passed were thought to have a bearing on the future life of
the dreamer, but it is also believed that the dream life was regarded as
supernatural and "inverted," and that the events that the bodiless spirit beheld were

44
the opposites of those that would later occur on the earth-ly plane. The idea thus
originated that "dreams go by contraries," as both popular belief and many
treatises upon the subject of nightly visions assure us is the case.

A belief in the divinatory character of dreams arose, and their causes and nature
occupied some of the greatest minds of antiquity. Aristotle, for example, believed
them to arise solely from natural causes. Posidonius the Stoic was of the opinion
that there were three kinds: the first was automatic and came from the clear sight
of the soul, the second from spirits, and the third from God. Cratippus, Democritus,
and Pythagoras held doctrines almost identical to this or differing only in detail.

Later, Macrobius divided dreams into five kinds: the dream, the vision, the ocular
dream, the insomnium, and the phantasm. The first was a figurative and
mysterious representation that required an interpretation; the second was an exact
representation of a future event in sleep; the third was a dream representing some
priest or divinity who declared to the sleeper things to come; the fourth was an
ordinary dream not deserving of attention; and the fifth was a disturbing half-awake
dream, a species of nightmare.

Other writers divided dreams into accidental dreams and those induced for the
purposes of divination. Herodotus wrote that in the temple of Bel in Babylon, a
priestess lay on a bed of ram skin ready to dream for divination. The
ancient Hebrews obtained such dreams by sleeping among tombs. Dreams are
believed to be as successful as hypnosis and other methods of reaching the
supernatural world and hearing its pronouncements.

Sleep was, of course, often induced by drugs, whether the soma of the Hindus,
the peyotl of the ancient Mexicans, the hashish of the Arabs, or the opium of the
Malays or Chinese. These narcotics, which have the property of inducing speedy
sleep and of heightening inward visions, were and are still prized by professional
dreamers all over the world, especially as they render dreaming almost
immediately possible.

Ancient Methods Of Dream Interpretation

As stated, interpretation of dreams was generally undertaken by a special class of
diviners, who in ancient Greece were known as oneiocritikoi, or "interpreters of
dreams." The first treatise on the subject was that of Artemidorus (ca. 100C.E.). He
differentiated between the dreams of kings and those of commoners, since he
believed that the visions of royalty referred to the commonwealth and not to the
individual. Dreams that represented something happening to the dreamer revealed
a personal significance, whereas a dream relating to another concerned him alone.
He detailed the numerous species of dreams throughout five books, giving
numerous examples. The rules of Artemidorus are far from clear, and according to
them, any dream might signify any event, and any interpretation might be
considered justifiable.

45
The method of testing dreams according to Moses Amyraldus in his Discours sur
les songes divins (1625) was to determine whether the instructions and advice they
contained made for good or ill—a test impossible to apply until after the result is
known. But Amyraldus addressed this difficulty by proposing to test dreams by the
evidence of divine knowledge they showed—by asking whether the dream gave
any evidence of things such as God alone could know.

It seems from an examination of dreams submitted to the ancient diviners that the
exhibited symbolism could only be interpreted through divine aid, as in the cases
of Moses and Daniel in the Bible. Many improbable interpretations were given to
most epochal dreams of antiquity. There are some students of the occult who
doubt the occult significance of dreams and do not classify dreams generally
with vision, second sight, or ecstasy.

Dreams And Psychical Phenomena

Dreams of a supernormal character fall within the purview of psychical research.
The dividing line between normal and supernormal dreams is not easy to draw. It is
believed that sub-conscious elaboration often presents supernormal effects.

Reportedly Goethe solved scientific problems and composed poetry in his

dreams. Jean de La Fontaine composed The Fable of Pleasures and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan" (1816) as a result of dreams. Bernhard
Palissy made a piece on dream inspiration. Matthew Maury confessed, "I have had
in dream ideas and inspiration that could never have entered my consciousness
when awake." Giuseppe Tartini heard his "Sonate del Diavolo" played by
Beelzebub in a dream, Holden composed La Phantasie in his sleep; and Charles
Nodier's Lydia was similarly born. Robert Louis Stevenson's most ingenious plots
were evolved in the dream state. Reportedly Kruger, Corda, and Maignan solved
mathematical problems in dreams and Condillac finished an interrupted lecture.
For many of the Romantic writers, such as Coleridge and Nodier, these creative
dreams were induced by the ingestion of opium.

A dream of Louis Agassiz is frequently quoted. He tried for two weeks to decipher
the obscure impression of a fish fossil on the stone slab in which it was preserved.
In a dream he saw the fish with all the missing features restored. The image
escaped him on awakening. He went to the Jardin des Plantes in the hope that an
association with the fossil would recapture it. It did not. The next night he again
dreamed of the fish, but in the morning the features of the fish were as elusive as
ever. On the third night he placed paper and pencil near his bed. Toward morning
the fish again appeared in a dream. Half dreaming, half awake, he traced the
outlines in the darkness. On awakening he was surprised to see details in his
nocturnal sketch that he thought impossible. He returned to the Jardin des Plantes
and began to chisel on the surface of the stone using the sketch as a guide.
Reportedly Agassiz found the hidden portions of the fish as indicated in the
drawing.

46
The dream of a Professor Hilprecht, a Babylonian scholar who tried to decipher
writing on two small pieces of agate, is more complicated and belongs to the
clairvoyant order. As reported in the Proceedings of the Societry for Psychical
Research (August 1900), he went to sleep and dreamt of a tall, thin priest of the old
pre-Christian Nippur who led him to the treasure chamber of the temple and went
with him into a small, lowceilinged room without windows in which there was a
large wooden chest; scraps of agate and lapis lazuli lay scattered on the floor.
Here the priest addressed Hilprecht as follows:

"The two fragments which you have published separately belong together, and
their history is as follows: King Kruigalzu [c. 1300 B.C.E.] once sent to the temple
of Bel, among other articles of agate and lapis-lazuli, an inscribed votive cylinder of
agate. Then we priests suddenly received the command to make for the statue of
the god Nidib a pair of ear rings of agate. We were in great dismay, since there
was no agate as raw material at hand. In order for us to execute the command
there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder into three parts, thus
making three rings, each of which contained a portion of the original inscription.
The first two served as ear rings for the statue of the god; the two fragments which
have given you so much trouble are portions of them. If you will put the two
together you will have a confirmation of my words." The continuation of the story is
given by Mrs. Hilprecht, who testified to having seen her husband jump out of bed,
rush into the study and cry out, "It is so, it is so."

The scientist Nikola Tesla had waking visions in which a complex electrical

engineering apparatus was perceived in total details of design and construction.

There are many cases of bits of information obtained in dreams. William

James was impressed by the Enfield case, in which the discovery of the body of a
drowned woman was effected through a dream of a Mrs. Titus of Lebanon, a
stranger to the scene. Charles Richet recounts the following instance of dream
cognition:

"I saw Stella on the 2nd of December during the day, and on leaving I said 'I am
going to give a lecture on snake poison.' She at once replied: 'I dreamt last night of
snakes, or rather of eels.' Then, without of course giving any reason, I asked her to
tell me her dream, and her exact words were: 'It was about eels more than snakes,
two eels, for I could see their white shining bellies and their sticky skin; and I said
to myself I do not like these creatures, but it pains me when they are hurt.' This
dream was strangely conformable to what I had done the day before, December 1.
On that day I had, for the first time in twenty years, experimented with eels.
Desiring to draw from them a little blood, I had put two eels on the table and their
white, shining, irridescent, viscous bellies had particularly struck me."

A case of dream clairvoyance, possibly under spirit influence, is that of a Miss

Loganson, 19, of Chicago. She saw in a dream the murder of her brother, Oscar,
who was a farmer of Marengo, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago. She accused
a farmer neighbor named Bedford for days, but no one paid attention to her. At

47
length she was permitted to send a telegram; the reply was, "Oscar has
disappeared." Starting for Oscar's farm, accompanied by another brother and by
the police, she went directly to Bedford's house. Traces of blood were found in the
kitchen. Proceeding to the hen house, the yard of which was paved, the girl said,
"My brother is buried here." Because of the girl's insistence and her agitation,
consent was given to dig. Under the pavement they first found the brother's over-
coat; five feet down they came upon the body. Bedford was arrested at
Ellos, Nebraska, and hanged in due course. Miss Loganson, in explanation, said
that the spirit of her brother haunted her for seven days in dreams.

Lost objects are frequently found in dreams. In most cases subconscious memory
sufficiently explains the mystery. There are, however, more complicated cases.
According to legend Hercules appeared in a dream to Sophocles and indicated
where a golden crown would be found. Sophocles got the reward promised to the
finder.

Supposedly the paranormal character of dreams is clearest in telepathic and

prophetic dreams. They often produce an impression lasting for days. Sweating
and trembling are occasionally experienced on waking from a dream of this
character. The dreams tend to be repeated. One case of prophetic dreams
announced the murder of a Chancellor Perceval. It is thus narrated by one
Abercrombie: "Many years ago there was mentioned in several of the newspapers
a dream which gave notice of the murder of Mr. Perceval. Through the kindness of
an eminent medical friend in England I have received the authentic particulars of
this remarkable case, from the gentleman to whom the dream occurred. He resides
in Cornwall, and eight days before the murder was committed, dreamt that he was
in the lobby of the House of Commons, and saw a small man enter, dressed in a
blue coat and white waistcoat. Immediately after, he saw a man dressed in a brown
coat with yellow basket metal buttons draw a pistol from under his coat, and
discharge it at the former, who instantly fell; the blood issued from the wound a
little below the left breast. He saw the murderer seized by some gentlemen who
were present, and observed his countenance; and on asking who the gentleman
was that had been shot, he was told that it was the Chancellor. He then awoke,
and mentioned the dream to his wife, who made light of it; but in the course of the
night the dream occurred three times without the least variation in any of the
circumstances. He was now so much impressed by it, that he felt much inclined to
give notice to Mr. Perceval, but was dissuaded by some friends whom he
consulted, who assured him that he would only get himself treated as a fanatic. On
the evening of the eighth day after, he received the account of the murder. Being in
London a short time after, he found in the print-shops a representation of the
scene, and recognised in it the countenance and dresses of the parties, the blood
on Mr. Perceval's waistcoat, and the yellow basket buttons on Bellingham's coat,
precisely as he had seen them in his dreams."

J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927) is a study of how future events are

foreshadowed in our dreams. By keeping a record of his dreams, putting them

48
down immediately on awakening, he found that a considerable part of his dreams
anticipated future experiences, and this was corroborated by fellow experimenters.

Many other dreams, difficult to classify, bear the stamp of paranormal. Camille

Flammarion in his Death and its Mystery (1922-23) quoted the curious dream of a
Mrs. Marechal, who between sleeping and waking, saw a specter taking her arm
and saying, "Either your husband or your daughter must die. Choose!" After great
mental sufferings she decided for her child. Five days later her husband, who was
in good health, suddenly died.

The experience of déjà vu to which advocates of reincarnation often refer, may

be explained by traveling clairvoyance in dreams. Another explanation, a theory of
ancestral dreams, is offered in the Bulletins et Mémoires de la
Societé d'Anthropologie de Paris by Letourneau, as follows:

"Certain events, external or psychic, which have made a deep impression on a

person, may be so deeply engraved upon his brain as to result in a molecular
orientation, so lasting that it may be transmitted to some of his descendants in the
same way as character, aptitudes, mental maladies, etc. It is then no longer a
question of infantile reminiscences, but of ancestral recollections, capable of being
revived. From that will proceed not only the fortuitous recognition of places which a
person has never seen, but, moreover a whole category of peculiar dreams,
admirably co-ordinated, in which we witness as at a panorama, adventures which
cannot be remembrances, because they have not the least connection with our
individual life" (Paul Joire, Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena, 1936).

Hereward Carrington called attention in The Story of Psychic Science (1930) to

the neglect shown for the dreams of mediums. It is believed that if the
communicators are subconscious personalities, some connection may be
established between them and the dreams of the medium. In the Lenora
Piper trances the communicators themselves alleged that they were in a dreamlike
state. In one instant a statement came through that was quite wrong, but upon
investigation, it turned out to be a remark that the communicator made in the
delirium of death.

Modern Views On Dreaming

Modern scientists have studied the relationship of eye movements to dreaming.
Professors N. Kleitman and E. Aserinsky of the Department of
Physiology, University of Chicago, monitored eye movements of sleepers using
electroencephalographic records. They distinguished four types of brain wave and
sleep periods, ranging from lightest sleep to deep coma. In stage 1 there were
rapid eye movements; in stages 2, 3, and 4, eye movements were slow. They
concluded that rapid eye movements (REMs) were related to dreaming, when the
eyes move like a spectator watching a theater play or reading a book.

49
This relationship between eye movement and mental states makes interesting
comparison with Eastern religious techniques of meditation. In both Indian and
Chinese yoga meditation exercises, eye rolling and focusing is linked to
techniques of concentration and visionary experience.

The dream state plays a prominent part in Hindu religious philosophy, which
recognizes four states of consciousness— waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and a
fourth condition of higher consciousness that embraces the first three. Hindu
mystics have stressed that since the essential self (the unconditioned sense of "I")
is constant in all states of consciousness, identification with the body, mind,
emotions, memories, age, sex, and so on in waking life is illusory—a false ego—
since such characteristics are transitory. The pure self is always present, and this
essential "I-ness" is the same in all individuals. Awareness of this true self in the
fourth condition of higher consciousness (turiya ) is known as self-realization, in
which there is unity with all creation. The significance of dreaming, deep sleep, and
waking states is discussed in the Hindu scripture Mandukya Upani-shad.

Many out-of-the-body travel experiences (astral projection ) appear to be

stimulated by vivid dreams, particularly when waking consciousness is aroused by
some irregularity in the logic of a dream. For example, a dreamer recognizes the
familiar environment of his own room, but notices that the wallpaper is the wrong
design and color, and immediately thinks "This must be a dream!" This gaining of
waking consciousness while still in a sleeping condition sometimes results in a
subtle or astral body moving independently of the physical body. (See dreaming
true; lucid dreams )

Some experimenters have claimed that release of the subtle body may be
stimulated by deliberately induced images of release (e.g., taking off in an airplane,
traveling upward in an elevator), just before passing into the sleep state. Such out-
of-the-body experiences were also recognized in Hindu religious philosophy and
are described in ancient scriptures. The subtle body was named the sukshma
sharira.

Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis have moved in a different direction in their

interpretation of the significance of dreams. Certain elements in dreams are said to
be wish fulfilling, or to contain clues to psychic problems of the individual. In
Jungian analysis, dream symbols are also understood as universal archetypes of
human experience. Carl G. Jung drew heavily upon Eastern religious philosophies
in his exposition of the concept of a collective unconscious.

Scientific research indicates other fascinating areas of dreaming. In 1927 J. W.

Dunne, a British airplane designer, published his remarkable book An Experiment
with Time, in which he analyzes a dream experiment suggestive of the occur-rence
of future elements in dreams, side by side with images from past experience.

In 1970 the Soviet psychiatrist Dr. Vasily Kasatkin reported on a 28 year study of
8,000 dreams and concluded that dreams could warn of the onset of a serious

50
illness several months in advance, through a special sensitivity of the brain to
preliminary physical symptoms.

At the Dream Laboratory, founded at Maimonides Medical Center, New York, in

1962, volunteers submitted to controlled experiments in dreaming, studying the
rapid eye movements noticeable in people as they dream. One of the most
interesting projects was a statistical study with pairs of subjects, which tended to
show that telepathic dreams could be produced experimentally.

It would seem that dreaming and the elements in dreams have many different
aspects of a physiological and psychological nature, with certain paranormal
characteristics. Many of these aspects differ widely in various individuals. There
have been well-authenticated prophetic dreams, as well as fragmentary elements
of future events of the kind described by J. W. Dunne. Many aspects of dream
imagery appear to be a visual presentation of individual psychic problems.
Increasing evidence from out-of-the-body travel experiences has convinced some
researchers of the reality of astral travel and of its stimulus through dream images.
It may well be, as noted in several religious traditions, that there are also meta-
physical dimensions to dream experience.

More than a century has passed since Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of

Dreams (1899) was first published. Its main premise, holding with Freud's
conception of the unconscious mind, was that dreams are the symbolic fulfillment
of repressed childhood desires. Although the book's sales were abysmally slow for
its first several years in print and, despite the holes in Freud's theory that are
obvious today, Interpretation of Dreams has greatly influenced Western thought
and culture and is now considered by some dream analysts to be the bible of
dream studies. Bookstores have long carried dream dictionaries that offer
interpretations of nearly any and every symbol or image seen in a dream. Modern
dream studies have demonstrated, if anything, that the evaluation of dreams is far
more complex than these popular dream interpretation manuals even begin to
suggest. To address a more educated society, recent dream manuals offer more
in-depth in their analysis of dream interpretation with many concentrating on
awareness of hidden messages and awakening the unconscious mind.

Sources:
Artemidorus. The Interpretation of Dreams: Oneirocritica. Translated by Robert
White. Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes Press, 1975.

Cartwright, Rosalind D. Night Life: Explorations in Dreaming. Englewood, N.J.:

Prentice-Hall, 1977.

Christmas, Henry. The Cradle of the Twin Giants, Science and History. 2 vols.
London, 1849.

51
Colquohoun, John C. An History of Magic, Witchcraft & Animal Magnetism. 2 vols.
N.p., 1851.

De Becker, R. The Meaning of Dreams. London, 1968.

Diamond, E. The Science of Dreams. London, 1962.Dunne, J. W. An Experiment

with Time. London, 1927.

Ellis, Havelock. The World of Dreams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922.

Reprint, Detroit: Gale Research, 1976.

Faraday, Ann. Dream Power. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972.

Reprint, New York: Berkeley, 1973.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London, 1942.

Garfield, Patricia L. Creative Dreaming. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.

Green, Celia E. Lucid Dreams. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968.

Hutchinson, H. Dreams and their Meanings. London, 1901.Jung, C. G. Archetypes

and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, vol. 9. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1959.

Kelsey, Morton T. God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of

Dreams. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1974.

LaBerge, Steven. Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Being Awake and Aware in Your
Dreams. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987.

Lang, Andrew. The Book of Dreams & Ghosts. London, 1897. Reprint, New York:
Causeway Books, 1974.

Lawrence, Lauren. Dream Keys: Unlocking the Power of Your Unconcious

Mind. New York: Dell Publishing, 1999.

Lincoln, J. S. The Dream in Primitive Cultures. London, 1935. Reprint, Academic

Press, 1970.

Luce, Gay Gaer. Body Time. Pantheon, 1961.

Luce, Gay Gaer, and J. Segal. Sleep. New York: Coward, McCann, 1966.

Lukeman, Alex. What Your Dreams Can Teach You. St. Paul: Llewellyn

Publications, 1997.

Muldoon, Sylvan J., and Hereward Carrington. The Projection of the Astral

Body. London, 1929. Reprint, New York: Samuel Weiser, 1967.

52
Nikhilananda, Swami, trans. Mandukya Upanishad. Chicago: Vedanta Press, 1972.

Pohle, Nancy C. Awakening the Real You: Awareness Through Dreams and
Intuition. Virginia Beach, Va.: A.R.E. Press, 1999.

Priestley, J. B. Man and Time. London, 1964. Reprint, New York: Dell, 1971.

Ratcliff, A. J. J. A History of Dreams. London, 1913.Sabin, Katharine C. ESP and

Dream Analysis. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1974.

Seafield, Frank. The Literature & Curiosities of Dreams. 2nd ed. London, 1877.

Staff, V. S. Remembered on Waking; Concerning Psychic & Spiritual Dreams &

Theories of Dreaming. Crowborough, UK: V. S. Staff, 1975.

Tart, Charles, ed. Altered States of Consciousness. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,

1969.

Tolson, Jay. "The Bible of Dreams Turns 100." US News & World Report. Vol. 127,
No. 18. pp. 79.

Ullman, Montague, Stanley Krippner, and Alan Vaughan. Dream Telepathy. New

York: Turnstone Books; London: Macmillan, 1973.
Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology

Dreams
Views 2,018,691Updated May 25 2020

Dreams
The process of dreaming

Dream interpretation

Experimental studies of dreams

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dreaming is a unique form of behavior. It ordinarily occurs only during sleep and
may be the only psychological activity that does occur during sleep. It is involuntary
and unintentional in the usual meaning of these words. Customarily, it is not
accompanied by, and does not eventuate in, appropriate, relevant, or purposeful
overt activity. Dreaming is expressed in the form of hallucinatory imagery that is
predominantly visual and is often very vivid and lifelike in nature. It is this
hallucinatory experience that constitutes the dream. No other human experience

53
seems to have excited so much interest or so much speculation regarding its
cause.

Until recently, the process of dreaming was not directly accessible to scientific
investigation; no one knew how to tell when a person was dreaming. Nevertheless,
one could study the product of dreaming—the dream—when it was reported or
described by the dreamer upon his awakening. Today, we can tell with almost
complete certainty when a person is dreaming. The dream itself, however, still
remains virtually inaccessible to direct investigation and will remain inaccessible
until the invention of some means of transcribing the dream as it is taking place.
Until that time, investigators must depend upon the dreamer to communicate his
dream verbally or through some other medium. Studies of dreams, therefore, are
actually studies of reported dreams. How much correspondence there is between
the dream as reported and the dream as dreamed cannot, as yet, be determined.
We know now that failure to recall a dream does not mean that the person has had
a dreamless sleep. In fact, except under certain abnormal conditions, everyone
dreams every night, having from four to six separate dreams.

The Process Of Dreaming

Objective study of eye movements
The process of dreaming, as distinguished from the product, was made available
for scientific study by the discovery of objective indicators of dreaming. The first of
these was reported in 1953 by E. Aserinsky and N. Kleitman, who noted while
observing sleeping subjects that bursts of rapid eye movements (REMs) occurred
periodically during sleep. Kleitman later described this fruitful discovery:

In our laboratory at the University of Chicago we literally stumbled on an objective

method of studying dreaming while exploring eye motility in adults, after we found
that in infants eye movements persisted for a time when all discernible body
motility ceased. Instead of direct inspection, as was done for infant eye
movements, those of adult sleepers were recorded indirectly, to insure undisturbed
sleep in the dark. By leads from two skin spots straddling the eye to an EEG
machine, located in an adjacent room, it was possible to register potential
differences whenever the eye moved in its socket. … By this method … slow eye
movements were found to be related to general body motility. In addition, jerky
rapid eye movements …, executed in only a fraction of a second and binocularly
symmetrical, tended to occur in clusters for 5 to 60 minutes several times during a
single night’s sleep. In order to correlate the REMs with other concomitants,
simultaneous recordings were made of changes in the sleepers’ EEG, pulse, and
respiration. It was soon apparent that the REMs were associated with a typical low-
voltage EEG pattern and statistically significant increases in the heart and
respiratory rates … though occasionally the pulse was slowed. These changes
suggested some sort of emotional disturbance, such as might be caused by
dreaming. To test this supposition, sleepers were aroused and interrogated during,
or shortly after the termination of, REMs and they almost invariably reported having

54
dreamed. If awakened in the absence of REMs, … they seldom recalled dreaming.
(Kleitman 1963, pp. 93–94)

Like most discoveries, the correlation of eye movements with dreaming was not
unanticipated. In 1892, G. T. Ladd tentatively concluded on the basis of
introspective studies that the eyes move during dreaming, and many years later, E.
Jacobson (1938) corroborated Ladd’s introspections by actually observing that the
eyes do move during dreaming. Despite these historical antecedents, it was the
findings of Aserinsky and Kleitman that launched the modern era of dream
research, just as half a century earlier it had been Freud’s book The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900) that established the dream as the main vehicle for studying the
operations and products of unconscious processes.

Why do the eyes move during dreaming? The best answer seems to be that the
eyes are scanning the dream scene, just as the eyes of a person who is awake
scan the visual field. There is some evidence to support this scanning hypothesis.
Dreams that involve much action are reported after a REM period in which there
are many large eye movements, whereas more passive dreams are correlated with
smaller eye movements (Berger & Oswald 1962). In some instances, the direction
of the eye movement has been shown to correspond with the direction of the
movements in the reported dream (Dement & Wolpert 1958). For example,
following a REM period in which only vertical eye movements were recorded, the
subject reported a dream of looking alternately down at the sidewalk and up toward
the top of a flight of stairs.

Dreaming and sleep cycles

Not only is dreaming a unique form of behavior, but it also occurs during a unique
stage of sleep. Unlike any of the other stages, the one during which dreaming
occurs is characterized not only by bursts of rapid, conjugate movements of both
eyes and by a low-voltage EEC pattern but also by other physiological and
behavioral concomitants. Breathing and heart rate tend to be irregular, and the
muscles of the throat adjacent to the larynx become flaccid, although, interestingly,
the penis becomes more erect. The electrical resistance of the skin, which is
ordinarily high during sleep, is reported to be even higher during so-called
dreaming sleep. All of this evidence suggests that the stage during which dreaming
occurs may be, as one authority has stated, “a separate organismic state, different
from both ‘nondreaming’ sleeping and from waking” (Snyder 1963).

Dreaming is cyclical throughout the sleep period, with from four to six such cycles
occurring during the night. The first cycle appears approximately an hour after a
person falls asleep, and succeeding ones occur about every 90 minutes. The
length of successive REM periods increases from 5 to 10 minutes for the first one
to 30 minutes or longer for the last one. This finding revokes the common belief
that a dream lasts for only a few seconds. In fact, some recent evidence suggests
that what transpires in a dream occupies approximately the same length of time as
it would were the same events to occur in waking life.
55
Although a hallucinatory dream experience is rarely reported if a person is
awakened when eye movements are lacking, some investigators have obtained
thoughtlike reports from persons who were awakened during non-REM periods. In
one such study the subjects compared their reports of non-REM periods with those
obtained from dreaming sleep. They found that their reports of non-REM periods
were more difficult to recall, were more plausible and less emotional, were more
concerned with contemporary events, and, generally speaking, resembled thinking
more than dreaming (Rechtschaffen et al. 1963.) It has been suggested that the
thinking the subject reports on being awakened from a non-REM period occurs
while the sleeper is being awakened and does not reflect mental activity during
sleep itself.

Universality
By employing the objective indicators of dreaming in studies involving numerous
subjects, investigators in the United States and abroad have established that
everyone dreams every night. Exceptions to this have been noted when the subject
is in an abnormal state, such as during a high fever or when certain drugs have
been administered. Even people who say they have never dreamed or who rarely
remember a dream will report dreams when they are awakened during a rapid-eye-
movement period (Goodenough et al. 1959).

A young adult spends about one-fifth of the sleep period dreaming, babies
considerably more, and older people less. Rapid eye movements have been
observed in blind people whose blindness is not of long standing. In those who
have been blind for several years, low-voltage EEG waves still occur and a
nonvisual type of dream is reported when the blind person is awakened (Berger et
al. 1962). Other animals besides man show cyclical periods of rapid eye
movements during sleep.

Biological necessity? One of the most interesting findings resulting from the use of
objective indicators of dreaming is that when a person’s dreaming is reduced by
awakening him every time his eyes begin to move, there is a significant increase in
REM time when he is finally permitted to sleep undisturbed (Dement 1960).
Moreover, if a person is deprived of dreaming for a number of nights, his waking
behavior appears to be adversely affected. He manifests various aberrant
“symptoms” that border on being pathological, and it has been conjectured that if
he were deprived of dreams long enough, he might become psychotic. These
results seem to indicate a “need to dream,” comparable in its psychobiological
insistence to any of the other basic needs of the individual.

One authority believes, however, it may be the kind of sleep and not the dreaming
itself that is the biological necessity (Snyder 1963). Support for this hypothesis is
found in the work of the French investigator Jouvet, who has observed periods of
eye movements and low-voltage waves in decorticate cats (Jouvet 1961) and in
decorticate humans (Jouvet et al. 1961). It is considered unlikely that either a
decorticate cat or a decorticate person is capable of having dreams, yet the
56
physiological concomitants of dreaming persist in the decorticate state. It is these
physiological processes and not the dreaming that Snyder considers to be the
biological necessity.

External events
The availability of indicators of dreaming will enable investigators to observe the
effects of certain stimuli upon dreaming. Studies made prior to the discovery of
objective indicators showed that experimentally introduced discrete stimuli had, for
the most part, very little influence upon the dream (Ramsey 1953). They may
appear either directly or in distorted form in the dream, but they do not instigate,
control, or shape the substance of the dream. Preliminary studies using the
objective indicators have produced similar results, namely, that such external
stimuli as sounds, pressures, and temperature changes have little influence on the
dream. It is believed, however, that more complex forms of stimulation, such as
movies shown to a person before he retires, will influence dreams. It is an
established fact that the experimental situation for monitoring sleep becomes
represented in dreams, especially during the subject’s initial nights in the
laboratory. It will now be possible also to determine whether the sleeping person is
more sensitive to telepathic or clairvoyant influences, as some authorities believe,
by noting the appearance of subliminal stimuli in his dreams.

One question that is being investigated is whether the dreams obtained from
persons whose sleep is monitored can be compared with dreams remembered by
them upon awakening from non-monitored sleep. Preliminary findings indicate that
the two samples are not comparable. A related question is whether the dreams of a
person throughout the night show any consistent pattern of thematic material.
Again preliminary findings suggest that there are minimal correspondences among
a person’s dreams of the same night.

Dream Interpretation
Interpretation before Freud
Although Freud was not the first person to assume that the dream has a “deeper”
meaning—such an assumption seems always to have existed—he was the first to
develop an empirical method for “interpreting” a dream. Dream interpreters before
Freud—men like Artemidorus, who is Credited with being the first compiler of a
dream book, and Joseph, whose exploits are recounted in the Bible—depended
upon intuition, wisdom, and a scholarly knowledge of dream lore for deriving
significance from the dream. Elements in a dream were assumed by these ancient
dream interpreters to have a fixed meaning. It is this assumption that underlies
dream books. Although dream books, with their prophecies of good and bad
fortune, have fallen into disrepute among educated people, they are still published
and purchased in large quantities and influence the decisions of many people
(Weiss 1944). Among societies lacking books, dream interpreters still flourish and

57
enjoy great prestige for their knowledge of a phenomenon deemed to be steeped
in personal and even social relevance. There are societies like the Senoi in which
people tell each other their dreams for the express purpose of reducing
interpersonal tensions (Steward 1951).

That the dream among all the cognitive activities of man should be singled out as
possessing special and mysterious properties, and requiring as a consequence
special and often supernatural explanations, is not surprising when one considers
how unique the dream is. For example, the ancient theory that the dream is a
record of the experiences of a soul that leaves the body during sleep is based upon
the fact that many dreams are so vivid and lifelike that they are mistaken for real
perceptions.

Also, in view of the fact that the dream appears as an alien visitation without
warning and without intention during the dead of sleep, a condition that is itself
charged with mystery, it is not difficult to comprehend why many people construe
the dream as a prophetic message from supernatural beings, from the sleeping
person’s ancestors, or, in the present age of science fiction, from people living on
other planets. Other prescientific theories that purport to explain dreaming are
based upon other equally singular features of the dream.

Freud’s theory
Freud’s empirical method for interpreting a dream involves free association. After a
person reports a dream to his analyst, he is instructed to say everything that comes
into his mind when each successive element of the dream is presented back to
him. By using the method of free association with his patients’ dreams, Freud
(1900) was able to formulate a comprehensive theory of the dream. The dream has
two kinds of content: the manifest (conscious) content, which is the dream as
experienced and remembered by the dreamer, and the latent (unconscious)
content, which is discovered through free association. Dream interpretation
involves replacing the manifest with the latent content. The nucleus of the latent
content is an unconscious infantile wish with which later experiences have become
implicated. The ultimate task of interpretation is to unearth the nuclear infantile
wish through free association. Much of the latent content consists, however, of
“day residue,” that is, memories of experiences and thoughts that the dreamer has
had on the day previous to the dream. Day residue alone is not sufficient to create
a dream; it must be charged by an infantile wish in order to transform it into the
conscious imagery of a dream.

When the dream thoughts (latent content) are transformed into the manifest
content of the recalled dream, they are altered in certain ways. They are subject to
condensation; an element in the manifest dream may be a compression of several
dream thoughts. They are subject to displacement; feeling associated with a
particular dream thought is transferred to an otherwise neutral element in the
manifest dream. Latent thoughts may also be represented in the experienced
dream by symbols. The interpretation of a dream requires, then, that all of the
58
condensed manifest elements be expanded into their constituent dream thoughts,
that all displaced affects be traced to their proper sources in the latent content, and
that referents be found for all symbols. This is a formidable undertaking, the result
of which is an interpreted version that is many times longer than the text of the
manifest dream. The practicability of this method of interpreting dreams appears to
be restricted to long-term psychotherapy.

Freud hypothesized that the dream work, which consists of the operations for
transforming latent into manifest content is governed by two aims: regard for
representability and disguise. Regard for representability refers to the
transformation of abstract dream thoughts into concrete dream imagery. The aim of
disguise is protection, based on the assumption that the undisguised latent
thoughts would evoke so much anxiety that the dreamer would awaken. Many
dreams do, in fact, awaken the sleeper because they are not sufficiently disguised.
The sleep-protection hypothesis is a biological one, for it explains not what we
dream but why we dream.

Dreams, then, according to Freud’s theory, are useful in establishing the contents
of the unconscious. Since the foundation of the unconscious is laid down early in
life, before the age of five or six, and contains repressed material from the psycho-
sexual stages, the analysis of dreams constitutes one of the few methods for
studying early psychological development. That the unconscious may also contain
material from the racial past was discussed by Freud, but he neither strongly
affirmed nor denied the notion, although he seems to have been sympathetic to it.

Jung’s theory
It remained for one of Freud’s early associates (later an apostate), Carl Jung, to
examine dreams for evidence of a racial uncon scious that all men share (Jung
1960). Jung was convinced that there was sufficient evidence in dreams and other
types of material, e.g., myths and religion, to validate the concept of a collective
unconscious. He called the contents of this unconscious “archetypes” and
identified a number of them: the anima, the shadow, the earth mother, the wise old
man, and, most important of all, the archetype of personal unity symbolically
represented in dreams and elsewhere by the form of the mandala. Whereas Freud
used dreams to explore the formative years of a person’s life, Jung used them to
explore the psychological development of the race.

Jung also thought, in contradistinction to Freud, that dreams are oriented to the
future as well as to the past. They mark out for the individual the proper path to a
more complete actualization of personality and help reveal poorly developed parts
of the personality.

Other theories

59
In addition to the theories of Freud and Jung, there are a number of other theories,
for example, those of Hall (1953), French (1954), Hadfield (1954), Boss (1953),
Ullman (1955; 1958; 1959), and Jones (1962). These have several features in
common. They deal more with the manifest than with the latent content, and they
are more concerned with the dream as an expression having adaptive significance
for the dreamer than as a disguise for infantile wishes. Hall, for example, regards
the dream as a concrete representation of the dreamer’s conception of himself, of
others, and of his world. The dream reveals more than it conceals. French stresses
the integrative role played by the dream. The dreamer is attempting to solve his
emotional problems. Hadfield also sees the dream as problem-solving activity, and
Ullman emphasizes the dream’s adaptive function. For Boss, an existential–
phenomenological therapist, the dream is a confrontation experience in which the
dreamer faces directly his own questions of existence as a unique experiencing
self. In the most recent of these theoretical formulations, Jones describes the
synthesizing function of the dream within the context of a developmental sequence
of critical phases through which a person passes in growing up.

It would seem from these theories that the dream was a complex,
multidimensional, multileveled phenomenon capable of supporting diverse
theoretical superstructures. The dream may, in fact, be just such a complex
phenomenon, although the ratio of research to speculation is still so small that it is
difficult to draw any firm conclusions regarding the validity of these speculations.
Although research is scanty, the usefulness of dream analysis in psycho-analytic
and other forms of psychotherapy seems to be generally acknowledged by
psychotherapists (Bonime 1962).

Experimental Studies Of Dreams

The dream as a projective device
It is not possible to say just how much research on dreams has been deterred by
Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent content and by the complex set of
operations that must be carried out under a very special type of relationship
between the observer and the subject before the operations can be successful.
There are indications that these methodological obstacles are being bypassed by
treating the manifest dream as significant material in its own right (Hall 1947;
Eggan 1952; Jones 1962). This approach regards the dream, or preferably a series
of dreams, as a projective device similar to those of the Rorschach and story-telling
techniques. It may be argued that the dream is almost a pure form of projection,
since external stimuli seem to have so little to do with its formation or its content.

The projective approach may be illustrated by a study made by Hall and Van de
Castle (1965). Following Freud’s theory of sex differences in psycho-sexual
development, they hypothesized that there would be a greater frequency of
castration anxiety in dreams reported by males and that there would be a greater
incidence of castration wish and penis envy in dreams reported by females. Scales
for identifying castration anxiety, castration wish, and penis envy in dream reports

60
were developed, and a large number of male and female dream series were
scored using these scales. The hypotheses were confirmed at a high level of
significance.

Another study employing the same methodology was conducted by Beck and
Hurvich (1959). They predicted that depressed patients would show a greater
incidence of manifest dreams with masochistic content than would nondepressed
patients. A collection of dreams secured from depressed and nondepressed
patients was scored, and the hypothesis was confirmed at an appropriate level of
significance.

This method of dream analysis has much to recommend it. Dream reports can
easily be collected in large numbers from groups of people living under different
cultural, economic, social, educational, and geographical conditions. They can be
subjected to quantification, and the same set of dreams can be analyzed in many
ways to serve different empirical and theoretical purposes. Norms for different
populations can be established so that an individual’s deviation from the norms for
the group may be accurately described. The influence of experimental
manipulation of variables can be assessed by comparing a treated group with a
control one.

Of particular significance for the social sciences is the comparison of dreams

obtained from people living in different cultures. Dorothy Eggan’s pioneering efforts
in studying the dreams of Hopi Indians show what can be done by correlating the
themes of reported dreams with culturally relevant material (1961).

The objective method of analyzing dreams

It is to be expected that the availability of objective indicators of dreaming will prove
a stimulant to research and increase our knowledge of dreams and dreaming in the
future. The physiological emphasis so far in research probably reflects the fact that
rapid eye movements and brain waves were discovered by physiologists and that
their measurement employs apparatus that is more familiar to physiologists than to
social and behavioral scientists.

Calvin Hall

[Other relevant material may be found inAnalytical psychology; Nervous

system, article onelectroencephalography; Projective
methods; Psychoanalysis; Sleep; and in the biography ofJung.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aserinsky, Eugene; and Kleitman, Nathaniel 1953 Regularly Occurring Periods of
Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena During Sleep. Science 118:273–274.

61
Beck, Aaron T.; and Hurvich, Marvin 1959 Psychological Correlates of Depression:
1. Frequency of “Masochistic” Dream Content in a Private Practice
Sample. Psychosomatic Medicine 21:50–55.

Berger, Ralph J.; Olley, P.; and Oswald, Ian 1962 The EEC, Eye-movements and
Dreams of the Blind. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 14: 183–186.

Berger, Ralph J.; and Oswald, Ian 1962 Eye Movements During Active and
Passive Dreams. Science 137:601 only.

Bonime, Walter 1962 The Clinical Use of Dreams. New York: Basic Books.

Boss, Medard (1953) 1958 The Analysis of Dreams. New York: Philosophical

Library. → First published as Der Traum und seine Auslegung.

Dement, William 1960 The Effect of Dream Deprivation. Science 131:1705–1707.

Dement, William; and Wolpert, Edward 1958 The Relation of Eye Movements,
Body Motility, and External Stimuli to Dream Content. Journal of Experimental
Psychology 55:543–553.

Diamond, Edwin 1962 The Science of Dreams. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. →

This book, written by the science editor of Newsweek, is a popularized account of
recent dream studies.

Eggan, Dorothy 1952 The Manifest Content of Dreams: A Challenge to Social

Science. American Anthropologist New Series 54:469–485.

Eggan, Dorothy 1961 Dream Analysis. Pages 550–577 in Bert Kaplan

(editor), Studying Personality Cross-culturally. Evanston, III.: Row, Peterson.

French, Thomas M. 1954 The Integration of Behavior. Volume 2: The Integrative

Process in Dreams. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1900) 1953 The Interpretation of Dreams. 2 vols. New York:

Macmillan; London: Hogarth. → Constitutes Volumes 4 and 5 of The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

Fromm, Erich 1951 The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding

of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths. New York: Holt.

Goodenough, Donald A. et al. 1959 A Comparison of “Dreamers” and

“Nondreamers”: Eye Movements, Electroencephalograms, and the Recall of
Dreams. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59:295–302.

Hadfield, James A. 1954 Dreams and Nightmares. Baltimore: Penguin.

Hall, Calvin S. 1947 Diagnosing Personality by the Analysis of Dreams. Journal of

Abnormal and Social Psychology 42:68–79.
62
Hall, Calvin S. 1953 The Meaning of Dreams. New York: Harper.

Hall, Calvin S.; and Van de Castle, R. L. 1965 An Empirical Investigation of the
Castration Complex in Dreams. Journal of Personality 33:22–29.

Jacobson, Edmund 1938 You Can Sleep Well: The ABC’s of Restful Sleep for the
Average Person. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Jones, Richard M. 1962 Ego Synthesis in Dreams. Cambridge, Mass.:

Schenkman.

Jouvet, M. 1961 Telencephalic and Rhombencephalic Sleep in the Cat. Pages

188–208 in Ciba Foundation, Symposium on the Nature of Sleep. Edited by G. E.
W. Wolstenholme and Maeve O’Connor. Boston: Little.

Jouvet, M.; Pellin, B.; and Mounier, D. 1961 Étude polygraphique des différentes
phases du sommeil au cours des troubles de conscience chronique (comas
prolongés). Revue neurologique 105:181–186.

Jung, Carl G. 1960 Collected Works. Volume 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the

Psyche. New York: Pantheon. → Contains works first published between 1916 and
1954.

Kleitman, Nathaniel 1963 Sleep and Wake fulness. Rev. & enl. ed. Univ. of
Chicago Press. → Extracted matter is reproduced by permission. © 1939, 1963 by
the University of Chicago.

Ladd, George T. 1892 Contribution to the Psychology of Visual Dreams. Mind New

Series 1:299–304.

Ramsey, Glenn V. 1953 Studies of Dreaming. psychological Bulletin 50:432–455.

Rechtschaffen, Allan; Verdone, Paul; and Wheaton, Joy 1963 Reports of Mental
Activity During Sleep. Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 8:409–414.

Snyder, Frederick 1963 The New Biology of Dreaming. Archives of General

Psychiatry 8:381–391.

Steward, Kilton 1951 Dream Theory in Malaya. Complex: The Magazine of

Psychoanalysis and Related Matters 6:21–33.

Ullman, Montague (1955) 1958 The Dream Process. American Journal of

Psychotherapy 12:671–690. → This paper was originally published in expanded
form in Psychotherapy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1955.

Ullman, Montague 1958 Dreams and Arousal. American Journal of

Psychotherapy 12:222–242.

63
Ullman, Montague 1959 The Adaptive Significance of the Dream. Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease 129:144–149.

Weiss, Harry B. 1944 Oneirocritica americana. New York Public

Library, Bulletin 48:519–541.
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

Dreams
Views 2,970,476Updated Jun 24 2020
Encyclopedia of Philosophy Manser, A.

Dream
Views 3,800,652Updated Jun 04 2020
New Catholic Encyclopedia CUK, A. M.

Dreams
Views 2,399,801Updated Jun 11 2020
Contemporary American Religion

Dreaming
Views 3,539,974Updated May 17 2020
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

Dream
Views 2,613,914Updated Jun 22 2020
International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis Perron, Roger

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64
 RELATED TOPICS
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MANIFEST
Manifest content is the narrative that the dreamer tells about his or her dream. In
contemporary usage, the criterion manifest is also applied to other types of verbal
production and to behaviors. Sigmund Freud contrasted manifest content to the
latent dream thoughts brought out by psychoanalytic interpretation.

The Freudian theory of dreams "is not based on a consideration of the manifest
content of dreams but refers to the thoughts which are shown by the work of
interpretation to lie behind dreams" wrote Freud in The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a, p. 135).

Manifest and latent are notions by the "dream work." During sleep, wishes linked to
childhood events, normally repressed, are actualized owing to the relaxation of
censorship. Dreaming requires, however, that "selfish," sexual, sadistic, or
incestuous wishes be transformed. The dream fulfills these wishes ("latent
thoughts," "latent contents," "dream thoughts"); only if they are modified, distorted,
and/or transformed in their expression, which is the manifest dream. But the
manifest dream is also a product of the effects of certain events of the previous day
65
(day's residues) or of bodily sensations on the unconscious. The manifest dream
results from a combination of the day's residues, bodily sensations, and latent
dream-thoughts. The regression to archaic forms of thought provoked by sleep
entails the repression and transformation of the latent thoughts. A secondary
revision, which gives the dream a certain coherence, then seconds to these
transformations. What is manifest may therefore function as a "façade" or "trompe-
l'oeil."

Interpretation of the manifest dream entails following the path of the dream work in
reverse and, by tracking associations and uncovering the latent thoughts, although
Freud stressed that there were limits to the interpretation of dreams (see his
discussion of the "dream's navel," 1900a, p. 525).

Over time, the opposition between manifest and latent posited by Freud in his
earliest works was reconsidered. However, he continued to refer to it even as late
as his "Outline of Psycho-Analysis" (1940a [1938]), as a means of understanding
and working out dreams.

The exigencies of the second topography (or structural model), with its complex
picture of the mental agencies (the ego being deeply rooted in the id) made the
opposition between manifest and latent more difficult in relation to dreams. The
dream became one form of material among others, caught up in the movements of
transference and resistance. The analyst's goal was no longer conceived as the
revelation of what was unconscious or rather as latent through the interpretation of
dreams, but rather as development of the psychoanalytic process. Manifest and
latent were seen as interpenetrating instead of radical opposites. The manifest
could therefore be treated, much like the latent, in the work of the session.

The initial importance assigned in the theory of dreams to the manifest, making it
as important, in fact, as the latent, was reduced: Analytical treatment came to focus
on the dynamics of the latent psychic functioning of the analyst and the analysand.
Dreams were also considered in their totality, as a space of projection/protection,
and as a mode of expression for the dreamer in their very nonsense (Jean-Claude
Lavie)—simply another mode for apprehension of the manifest.

In the treatment, behaviors (attitude, gestures, somatization) are manifest forms of

a latent mode of psychic functioning in the patient. But because they are outside
the patient's consciousness and verbalization, they elude the process of working
over. They can be related to early modes of psychic functioning, when the
dynamics of the one remained indistinctly linked to the primal other. The
mechanisms involved are thus splitting, repetition, and reversal into the opposite.

The nonverbal manifest and the latent it conceals can be discovered by the patient,
notably in situations where bonds of identification and transference are developed
by means other than those used in treatment, and where expressiveness through
the body, actions, and attitudes emerges in situations such as analytic role-playing
and/or small-group situations with analysts.

66
AndrÉ Missenard

See also: Apprenti-historien et le maítre-sorcier, L' [The apprentice historian and

the master sorcerer]; Censorship; Condensation; Conflict; Displacement; Dream;
Dream symbolism; Dream work; Interpretation of dreams (analytical psychology);
Interpretation; Interpretation of Dreams, The ; Language and disturbances of
language; Latent; Latent dream thoughts; Representability; Secondary revision;
Symbol.

Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4-5: 1-625.

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——. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE, 23: 139-207.

Lavie, Jean-Claude. (1972). Parlerà l'analyste. Nouvelle Revue de

psychanalyse, 5, 287-298.
International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis Missenard, Andr

Manifest
Views 3,430,434Updated May 16 2020

man·i·fest1 / ˈmanəˌfest/• adj. clear or obvious to the eye or mind: the

system's manifest failings.• v. [tr.] display or show (a quality or feeling) by one's
acts or appearance; demonstrate: Ray manifested signs of severe
depression.∎  (often  be manifested in) be evidence of; prove: bad
industrial relations are often manifested in disputes and strikes. ∎  [intr.] (of an
ailment) become apparent through the appearance of symptoms: a disorder that
usually manifests in middle age. ∎  [intr.] (of a ghost or spirit) appear: one deity
manifested in the form of a
bird.DERIVATIVES: man·i·fest·ly
 adv. man·i·fest2 • n. a
document giving comprehensive details of a ship and its cargo and other contents,
passengers, and crew for the use of customs officers.∎  a list of passengers or
cargo in an aircraft. ∎  a list of the cars forming a freight train.• v. [tr.] record in
such a manifest: every passenger is manifested at the point of departure.

67
 The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English

Manifest
Views 1,707,395Updated Jun 13 2020
manifest adj. XIV. — (O)F. manifeste or L. manifestus, earlier manufestus,
f. manus hand (see MANUAL) + *festus struck, f. base of dēfendere DEFEND.
So vb. XIV. manifestation XV. — late L. manifesto † proof; public declaration.
XVII. — It., whence also manifest sb. † manifestation XVI; † manifesto XVII; list of
ship's cargo XVIII.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology T. F. HOAD

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68
NEARBY TERMS

Manieren
Manicurist
Manicure
Manicouagan Reservoir
Manicom, Jacqueline (1938–1976)
Manico
Manicka, Rani
Manichord
Manichee
Manicheanism
Manichaeism: Manichaeism In The Roman Empire
Manichaeism: Manichaeism In Iran
Manichaeism: Manichaeism In Central Asia And China
Manichaeism: Manichaeism And Christianity
Manichaeism: An Overview
Manich
Manica
Manic Street Preachers
Manic Defenses
Manic
Maniacal
Maniac Warriors
Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy
Maniac Cop 3: Badge Of Silence
Maniac Cop 2
Manifest
Manifest Destiny And Expansionism
Manifest Function

ECSTASY
ECSTASY . The term ecstasy (Gr., ekstasis )
literally means "to be placed outside," as well
69
as, secondarily, "to be displaced." Both senses
are relevant to the study of religion, the first
more than the second perhaps, inasmuch as it
denotes a state of exaltation in which one
stands outside or transcends oneself.
Transcendence has often been associated or
even equated with religion. If such an
understanding of ecstasy carries the historian
of religion into the hinterland of mysticism, the
second sense, involving as it does spirit
possession and shamanism, carries one to the
borderland of anthropology and even
psychiatry. The vast range of phenomena
covered by the term supports the adoption of
an approach toward its understanding that
uses a variety of methods, one of which, the
philological, has already been
engaged. Ecstasy can thus mean both the
seizure of one's body by a spirit and the
seizure of a human by a divinity. Although
seemingly in opposition, the two senses are not
mutually exclusive, and between them lies the
vast and diverse range of phenomena covered
by the umbrella term ecstasy, with the
magician standing at one end of the spectrum
and the psychiatrist at the other. The historian

70
of religion tries to grasp the significance of the
intervening terrain with the help of historical,
anthropological, phenomenological,
sociological, psychological, and philosophical
approaches to the study of religion.

Historical Approach
Ecstatic techniques reach back to prehistoric
times; utilizing the principle of survivals, the
historian can reconstruct these techniques by
extrapolating from the role of shamans in
modern primal societies. In the realm of history
proper, the mystery religions that flourished in
the Greco-Roman world, such as those
celebrated at Eleusis and those centering on
Orpheus, Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris, Mithra,
and others, provide examples of the role of
ecstasy in religion. The emphasis on secrecy in
these cults makes it difficult to delineate the
exact role played by ecstasy in their rituals, but
those rituals are generally believed to have led
to ecstatic states that signified salvific union
with their deities. Elements of ecstasy are not
absent in Israelite religion, where groups or
individuals were seized by the spirit of Yahveh;

71
the case of Saul is often cited in this respect (1
Sm. 10:1–16).
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It is significant that even the phenomenological

approach to ecstasy, though it does not divorce
the ecstasy of the shaman from communion
with spirits, does point out that the "specific
element of shamanism is not the incorporation
of spirits in the shaman, but the ecstasy
provoked by the ascension to the sky or by the
descent to Hell" (Eliade, cited in Lewis, 1971,
p. 49); the descent of Jesus into hell and his
ascent to heaven, according to the Athanasian
Creed, provide a rudimentary parallel to
shamanistic ecstasy. Even when spirits are
associated with the work of the shaman, the
parallel persists. In Revelation, for instance, it
is ecstasy that rules from the first moment: "I
was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, and I heard
behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying,
'Write what you see in a book'" (1:10–11). John
turns to "see the voice," whereupon he sees
seven lampstands and, in the middle of them,
"one like a son of man": "When I saw him, I fell

72
at his feet as though dead" (1:17). Later we are
told how John saw an open door in heaven,
and he heard a voice saying, "Come up hither,
and I will show you what must take place after
this" (4:1). John responds, or something within
him responds: "At once I was in the Spirit"
(4:2). Again he looked, saw, and heard.
Another example may be provided from a later
chapter of Revelation : "And he carried me
away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a
woman sitting on a scarlet beast" (17:3). Finally
there is the vision of the New Jerusalem: "And
in the Spirit he carried me away to a great, high
mountain, and showed me the holy city
Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from
God" (21:10). Many religious traditions chart
the path to ecstasy with precision and
sophistication. Hinduism speaks of the various
steps of Yoga leading to samādhi ; Buddhism
speaks of jhāna s and nirvāṇa ; Christianity
speaks of the mystical way; and Islam speaks
of the hal and maqam, or states and stations
en route to divine knowledge (an imagery that
may be compared to the "mansions" of Teresa
of Ávila), as well as of wajd ("ecstasy").

73
Anthropological Approach
The anthropological approach emphasizes the
role of the shaman and the phenomenon of
possession in both prehistoric and
contemporary preliterate societies. Shaman is
a widely used term, the "lowest common
denominator of which is that of the inspired
priest" (Eliade, cited in Lewis, 1971, p. 49). In
the anthropological approach, it is the
shaman's role as a psychopomp that is
preeminent. Through an ability to achieve a
state of ecstatic exaltation, acquired after much
rigorous training and careful, often painful
initiation, the shaman is able to establish
contact with the spirit world. In the course of
this exaltation, the shaman may affect the
postmortem fate of the deceased, aid or hurt
the diseased in this life, as well as encounter
the occupants of the spirit world, communicate
with them, and then narrate the experiences of
ecstatic flight on his or her return from there.

Phenomenological Approach
It must be remembered, however, that while all
shamans are ecstatics, all ecstatics are not

74
shamans. Taking a broader phenomenological
approach, one discovers that a variety of
means, such as dancing, drugs, self-
mortification, and so on, have been used
across cultures and at various times to induce
ecstasy and that these have generated ecstatic
states ranging from the shamanistic to the
mystical. If the first step of the
phenomenological method is to classify, then
one may employ Plato's distinction between
"two types of mantic or 'prophecy', the first
the mantikē entheos, the 'inspired madness' of
the ecstatic, e.g. that of the Pythia; the second
the systematic interpretation of signs, such as
the augury of the flight of birds" (van der
Leeuw, vol. 1, 1938, p. 225). This last category
may be excluded from consideration here as a
form of soothsaying. A further distinction has to
be made between shamanistic and mystical
ecstasy, with the experience of someone like
Saul providing a bridge between the two. As
Gerardus van der Leeuw writes: "With
the Shamans, still further, we find ourselves on
the road to the prophets, but of course only in
the sense in which Saul too was 'among the
prophets', that is as regards the ecstatic frenzy
75
that renders possible a superhuman
development of power" (ibid., p. 218). We must
therefore consider three categories of
ecstasies (and accordingly, ecstatics); they
may not always be separable, but they are
distinct: the shamanistic ecstasy, the prophetic
ecstasy, and the mystical ecstasy. The
differences among the three emerge clearly
when we consider the nature of ecstatic
utterances.
The ecstatic utterances of the shaman relate to
the world of the spirits and to the shaman's
movements in that realm. Eliade clearly
distinguishes between non-shamanic, para-
shamanic, and shamanic ecstasy, the
characteristic feature of the last being the
shaman's ability to communicate with dead or
natural spirits. The ecstatic utterances of the
prophet relate to God: the prophet literally
speaks for God, though there are borderline
cases, such as the priestess at the oracle at
Delphi whose cryptic utterances had to be
interpreted. These may be contrasted with the
ecstatic utterances known as shaṭḥīyāt in
Islamic mysticism; a typical example is

76
provided by al-Ḥallāj's proclamation, "I am the
Creative Truth" ("Anā al-ḥaqq"). This highly
mystical utterance, which cost him his life, has
been explained in later Sufism as resulting
from a mistaken sense of identity with God due
to God's overwhelming presence in mystical
experience (as if a piece of red-hot coal in a
furnace would call itself fire or a candle in the
sunlight would mistake the light of the sun for
its own).

Sociological Approach
The sociology of ecstasy or ecstatic religion, as
explored by I. M. Lewis, provides another
useful dimension to the topic. This approach
relies heavily on the indirect application of the
work of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber.
Following Durkheim, Lewis draws attention to
the socially integrative function of the shaman
who, at ritual services, instills in the people a
sense of solidarity by emphasizing the
shunning of adultery, homicide, and other
socially disruptive practices, and who often
plays an active role in settling disputes. At the
same time, however, the study of ecstasy also
77
exposes the limitations of Durkheim's approach
in certain contexts: the cultivation of ecstasy,
especially in mysticism, may lead to a breach
within a religious tradition instead of playing an
integrating role in it. Thus, Sufism was viewed
with suspicion by Islamic orthodoxy until the
two were reconciled by al-Ghazālī. A more
Weberian approach views the shaman as
discovering through his ecstatic flights the
reasons for whatever may have befallen his
client, providing the client with "meaning,"
which according to Weber is one role of
religion. Moreover, a subtler application of the
Weberian approach makes further
generalizations possible. Thus, according to
the relative-deprivation theory, secret ecstatic
cults may flourish particularly among women or
dispossessed groups in patriarchal or
authoritarian societies. This may be as true of
women dancing ecstatically in Dionysian rituals
in Greece in the fifth century bce as it is in
the zār cult in Sudan in modern times.
Another issue raised by the sociological
approach to the study of religion is the role of
ecstasy in societies that are in the process of
78
secularization. Two views seem to prevail. One
is to look upon the cultivation of cultic ecstasy
as possessing cathartic value in a society
undergoing rapid social change. A broader
view suggests that the process of
secularization does not so much do away with
the need for transcendence as it provides
surrogates for it. A convergence exists
between the sociology of religion, which
maintains that there are religious phenomena
that belong to no determined religion, and the
Tillichian theological viewpoint, which
maintains that, though modern people think
they have overcome their need for ultimate
concern or transcendence, what has really
happened is that they continue to seek it in
secular contexts (as, for instance, in ecstatic
participation in football matches). It may be
further added that ecstasy is by definition an
extraordinary experience that transcends
routine, so that the increasing
bureaucratization of modern life may impel the
sort of person that Eliade called homo
religiosus to seek such ecstasy all the more. It
has been speculatively suggested, for instance,
that the evidence in Indus Valley culture of

79
yogic practices possibly possessing an ecstatic
dimension may reflect that culture's highly
organized, homogeneous, even monotonous
appearance.

Psychological Approach
Various approaches to ecstasy have been
discussed so far but, inasmuch as ecstasy is
essentially concerned with the mind (or what
lies beyond the mind), one might expect the
psychology of religion to prove the most
illuminating. The psychology of religion,
however, is a discipline with boundaries that
are difficult to define strictly; this is even more
true when it is applied to a subject like ecstasy,
which the psychology of religion itself
approaches with methods that can vary from
the transpersonal to the psychiatric. Thus, one
must distinguish clearly among certain
approaches within the psychology of religion:
the psychoanalytical approach, the
pharmacological approach, and the mystical
approach.
The psychoanalytical approach has been
applied to ecstasy at two levels, the

80
shamanistic and the mystical. Claude Lévi-
Strauss has argued that the cure administered
by the shaman—who, unlike the modern
analyst listening to the patient's words, speaks
out on behalf of the patient—involves "the
inversion of all the elements" of psychoanalysis
yet retains its analogy with it. J. M. Masson
sees in the ecstatic, oceanic feelings of the
mystic a reversion to the experience of the
fetus in the womb.
Modern developments in pharmacology have
brought what might be called chemical ecstasy
into the limelight. Drug-induced ecstasy was
not unknown in ancient times. The soma of the
Vedas, which R. Gordon Wasson identified
with the mushroom called the Amanita
muscaria, was supposed to be one such drug;
it has even been suggested that techniques of
yogic ecstatic trances were developed in post-
Vedic Hinduism as a substitute for the soma -
induced trances once the Aryans moved
deeper into India and lost contact with the
geographical source of the mushroom. Mexico
provides another example of the religious use
of drug-induced ecstasy in the peyote cult,
81
which Aldous Huxley popularized in a modern
version through his experiments with
mescaline. But it was the discovery of LSD
(lysergic acid diethylamide) that threw the door
wide open to this avenue to ecstasy, with its
open advocacy by modern experimenters such
as Timothy Leary and Alan Watts.
Modern psychology tends to dismiss these
experiences as chemically and artifically
induced and therefore not genuine. Such a
dismissive approach is difficult for a historian of
religion to countenance; drugs can be the
means to, rather than the cause of, these
ecstasies. But the fact that such chemical
experiences are not always ecstatic should not
be overlooked; neither should the widespread
assertion that drug-induced ecstasy may be
distinguished from mystical experience
primarily because the drug does not usually
transform the personality and the subsequent
life of the user, and that mystical experience
usually does. Psychedelic drugs can be used
not merely to induce ecstasy but also to gain
power, a fact mentioned by Patañjali in
his Yoga Sūtra and illustrated in the

82
contemporary writings of anthropologist Carlos
Castaneda.
For many, the classical focus of the discussion
of ecstasy is still provided by mysticism,
notwithstanding the elaboration of the role of
archaic and chemical techniques in this
context. Mysticism, for our purposes, may be
conveniently defined as the doctrine or belief
that a direct knowledge or immediate
perception of the ultimate reality, or God, is
possible in a way different from normal sense
experience and ratiocination. The two channels
in which the mystical tradition of mankind has
flowed are thus naturally identified by emotion
and intuition. The ecstatic experience resulting
from them has been distinguished accordingly
as "communion" in the first case, in which the
devotee, though psychologically merged in
God, remains a distinct entity, and as "union" in
the second case, in which the aspirant
achieves an ontological identity with God. The
distinction is crucial to an understanding of
mystical ecstasy: in the first case, access to the
ultimate reality is "gained"; that is, it is
something that originally did not exist; in the
second case, access to the reality is
83
"regained"; that is, it is something that always
existed but was not recognized until the
moment of ecstasy. Martin Buber's distinction
between I-Thou and I-It relationships is
relevant here. Some traditions recognize the
existence of both these types of mysticism. The
Hindu mystic Ramakrishna (1836–1886)
contrasts the two ecstasies as offering a choice
between "tasting sugar" and "becoming sugar,"
without insisting that the two be viewed as
mutually exclusive.
Ecstasy in the Hindu tradition is basically
experienced in three modes: nontheistic,
theistic, and trans-theistic. In the nontheistic
mode, it results from the suppression of all
mental modifications; because of its restriction
to the person of the practitioner and the
absence of any outside referent, R. C. Zaehner
refers to this mode as enstasy : "By 'enstasy' I
understand that introverted mystical experience
in which there is experience of nothing except
an unchanging, purely static oneness. It is the
exact reverse of ecstasy which means to get
outside oneself and which is often
characterized by a breaking down of the
barriers between the individual subject and the
84
universe around him" (The Bhagavad-Gītā,
London, 1973, p. 143). Although the Yoga
Sūtra, to which Zaehner's statement applies,
also recognizes the existence of God, the
theistic mode of ecstasy that flows from the
love of God is best described in the Bhakti
Sūtra : "It is as if a dumb man who has tasted a
delicious food could not speak about it." The
ecstasy experienced through the transtheistic
or absolutistic mode in Hinduism is similarly
considered ineffable because, in it, the
distinction between the one who experiences
and the experienced is annulled. Thus one is
left with the Upanisadic paradox of the
experience of the Absolute: "But where
everything has become just one's own self,
then whereby and whom would one see?"
(Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. 4.5.15). Does Meister
Eckhart provide an answer to the question
when he says "The eye with which I see God is
the same with which God sees me"?
The Islamic mystical tradition emphasizes the
passing away of individuality in God (fanāʾ ),
who alone represents divine unity (tawḥīd); this
85
loss of self into God provides the experience of
inward ecstasy. In Islamic mystical poetry wine
symbolizes the "ecstatic experience due to the
revelation of the True Beloved, destroying the
foundations of reason" (Arberry, 1950, p. 114).
Such ecstatic experience of God constitutes
the ecstatic's knowledge of God (maʾrifah ).
In Buddhism ecstasy plays an important role in
the trances; the typical text of the first trance
runs as follows: "Detached from sensual
objects, O monks, detached from
unwholesome states of mind, the monk enters
into the first absorption, which is accompanied
by Thought-Conception [vitakka ] and
Discursive Thinking [vicāra ], is born of
Detachment [Concentration: samādhi ] and
filled with Rapture [pīti ] and Joy " (Dīgha
Nikāya 1.182). It should be added, however,
that in the fifth stage, ecstasy gives way to
equanimity, and the final attainment
of nirvāṇa is characterized not by ecstasy but
by knowledge and bliss.

86
In Christian mysticism too, ecstasy plays a key
role. We see it in the statement of John
Cassian (360–435) that "by constant meditation
on things divine and spiritual
contemplation … the soul is caught up
into … an ecstasy." It is at the heart of the
fourteenth-century text The Cloud of
Unknowing :
God wishes to be served with both the body
and the spirit together, as is proper, and He will
give man his reward in bliss both in body and
in soul. In giving that reward, He sometimes
inflames the body of His devout servants with
wonderful pleasures here in this life, not only
once or twice, but very often in some cases as
He may wish. Of these pleasures not all come
into the body from outside through the
windows of our senses, but come from within,
rising and springing up out of an abundance of
spiritual gladness and out of true devotion of
spirit. (cited in Progoff, 1957, pp. 172–173)
It may be noted that, here as in other
instances, ecstasy is not divorced from
knowledge of God, and the text spells out
87
stages for its attainment. In Christian
mysticism, as in other forms of mysticism
(especially theistic), different stages are
delineated, perhaps the best known being the
passage of the soul to God, first through the
illuminative, second the purgative, and finally
the unitive ways.

The Cross-Cultural Approach

Following Gershom Scholem's study of Jewish
mysticism, we can ask why ecstatic
experiences take particular forms constrained
by each individual culture. Why, for instance,
did Teresa of Ávila not have ecstatic visions of
Kālī? The Hindu mystic Rama-krishna is said to
have had visions of figures outside Hinduism,
but he is known to have been somewhat
familiar with the traditions in question. Yet C.
G. Jung argued that some of his clients gave
evidence of certain archetypal ecstatic visions
that transcend the bounds of time and space.
The role of depth psychology in uncovering the
roots of ecstasy, it seems, has yet to be fully
explored; the same is true of the other extreme,
the physical symptoms accompanying the

88
states of ecstasy. In ecstasies of the
shamanistic and prophetic type the
hypothalamus has been shown to become
inactive so that people in trance become
impervious to physical maltreatment or
deprivation, though they still respond to speech
and social communication. In ecstasies of the
mystical type, signs of life have been known to
fade, sometimes to the point of apparent
disappearance.
Humanistic psychologists such as Abraham H.
Maslow have taken some interest in ecstasy in
its relation to the concept of peak experience.
This interest is even more evident in Ernst
Arbman's monumental work, Ecstasy or
Religious Trance (1963–1970). In this
psychological study of ecstasy, Arbman
emphasizes the close relation between ecstasy
and mystical experience and, within mysticism,
between ecstasy and visionary experience. He
classifies the latter as assuming three forms,
which represents a trichotomy of medieval
Christian mysticism traceable to Augustine:
corporeal, imaginative, and intellectual. These
three forms may be instantiated, respectively,
by the experiences of the prophet Muḥammad
89
in receiving the Qurʾān through an angel, some
of the experiences of Teresa of Ávila, and the
recorded experiences of Ignatius Loyola
and Jakob Boehme. The distinction between
these three forms of ecstatic visionary
experience—the corporeal, the imaginative,
and the intellectual—is said to lie in the fact
that, while the first experience is felt as
something actually or objectively perceived, in
the second case it is something experienced
only inwardly, in a psychic or spiritual sense.
The third type of vision, in which the sense of
the word intellectual seems to correspond more
to Platonic than to modern usage, apprehends
its object without any image or form.
How might we establish the genuineness of the
experiences represented by this classification,
even if the existence of a mystical realm is
granted, and even if it is further accepted that
the pathological state of mind might be the
most receptive for such experiences? Or, to
broaden the scale of skepticism, how do we
know that the shaman's journeys do in fact
occur? The phenomenologist of religion is
disinclined to ask such questions, as are the
90
followers of some other disciplines, but the
historian of religion cannot choose to ignore
them since almost every tradition concerned
with ecstatic experience has provided
evaluative criteria for distinguishing between
genuine and spurious experience. More
generally, what is the role of the philosophy of
religion in ecstatic experiences? This is a
thorny issue, complicated by a fundamental
epistemological problem: philosophers use
reason in order to know, but ecstatics reason
because they know. And yet a philosophical
approach to ecstasy still seems possible if two
factors are taken into account: an ecstasy,
however prolonged, is usually a temporary
state, and it can be experienced by religious
mystics and nonreligious mystics alike.

Duration and Efficacy

The duration of the ecstatic trance is
variable. William James regarded transience as
one of the four marks of the mystic state, but
allowed only for "half an hour, or at most an
hour or two." On the other hand, according to
the Hindu mystical tradition, an ecstatic trance
can be so profound that one does not recover
91
from it at all. One reads of mystics who
remained in a state of trance for six hours
(Teresa of Ávila), three days (Ramakrishna),
five days (Ellina von Crevelsheim), and even
six months (again, Ramakrishna). Moreover,
not merely mystics per se but also otherwise
intellectually or aesthetically gifted persons
have experienced ecstasy. Rabindranath
Tagore describes one such experience:
I suddenly felt as if some ancient mist had in a
moment lifted from my sight and the ultimate
significance of all things was laid bare.… I
found that facts that had been detached and
dim had a great unity of meaning, as if a man
groping through a fog suddenly discovers that
he stands before his own house.… An
unexpected train of thought ran across my
mind like a strange caravan carrying the wealth
of an unknown kingdom.… Immediately I found
the world bathed in a wonderful radiance with
waves of beauty and joy swelling on every
side, and no person or thing in the world
seemed to me trivial or unpleasing. (cited in
Walker, 1968, p. 475)

92
This passage raises a vital issue: if ordinary
mortals can experience ecstasy along with the
great mystics, and if ecstasies are terminable,
then what do the great religious traditions of
the world ultimately have to offer by way of
salvation? If the answer is ecstatic union and
ecstasy is a temporary phenomenon, then how
lasting are the results of the spiritual path?
Must one follow it to experience ecstasy?
The answer is not entirely clear, but both the
theistic and nontheistic mystical traditions have
approached an answer by asking whether
ecstasy and union (in a mystical context) are
identical. For Plotinus the two are one:
For then nothing stirred within him, neither
anger, nor desire, nor even reason, nor a
certain intellectual perception, nor, in short,
was he himself moved, if we may assert this;
but, being in an ecstasy, tranquil and alone
with God, he enjoyed an unbreakable calm.
(Plotinus, Enneads 6.9)
For Teresa of Ávila, ecstasy and union are not
identical:

93
I wish I could explain with the help of God
wherein union differs from rapture, or from
transport, or from flight of the spirit, as they call
it, or from trance, which are all one. I mean that
all these are only different names for that one
and the same thing, which is also called
ecstasy. It is more excellent than union, the
fruits of it are much greater, and its other
operations more manifold, for union is uniform
in the beginning, the middle and the end, and
is so also interiorly; but as raptures have ends
of a much higher kind, they produce effects
both within and without (i. e., both physical and
psychical).… A rapture is absolutely
irresistible; whilst union, inasmuch as we are
then on our own ground, may be hindered,
though that resistance be painful and violent.
(Teresa of  Ávila, Life 20.1–3)
Apart from the question of whether, in either
the theistic or nontheistic context, ecstasy
represents union, and if so, to what extent and
degree, there is a further question: does such
ecstatic union constitute the summation of
religious experience? There seems to be some

94
difference of opinion on this point. Thus,
according to W. R. Inge,
Ecstasy was for Plotinus the culminating point
of religious experience, whereby the union with
God and perfect knowledge of Divine truth,
which are the conclusion and achievement of
the dialectical process and the ultimate goal of
the moral will, are realized also in direct,
though ineffable, experience. Plotinus enjoyed
this supreme initiation four times during the
period when Porphyry was with him; Porphyry
himself only once, he tells us, when he was in
his 68th year. It was a vision of the Absolute,
'the One', which being above even intuitive
thought, can only be apprehended passively by
a sort of Divine illapse into the expectant soul.
It is not properly a vision, for the seer no longer
distinguishes himself from that which he sees;
indeed, it is impossible to speak of them as
two, for the spirit, during the ecstasy, has been
completely one with the One. This 'flight of the
alone to the Alone' is a rare and transient
privilege, even for the greatest saint. He who
enjoys it 'can only say that he has all his
desire, and that he would not exchange his

95
bliss for all the heaven of heavens'. (Inge,
1912, p. 158)
Yet when we turn to other religious traditions,
the culmination of the religious life seems to be
distinguished not so much by a transient, if
repeatable, ecstatic union as by a blissful state
of being. The final goal of a Christian
existence, for example, is the "eternal life" of
the beatific vision or the kingdom of God, and
not transient ecstasies; and the final goal of
Buddhism is the attainment of the lasting
happiness of nirvāṇa, which is attained for
good, unlike the temporary ecstasies of the
trances.
Even the word 'happiness' (sukha ) which is
used to describe Nirvāṇa has an entirely
different sense here. Sāriputta once said: 'O
friend, Nirvāṇa is happiness! Nirvāṇa is
happiness!' Then Udāyi asked: 'But, friend
Sāriputta, what happiness can it be if there is
no sensation?' Sāriputta's reply was highly
philosophical and beyond ordinary

96
comprehension: 'That there is no sensation
itself is happiness.' (Rahula, 1967, p. 43)
Given the scope and variety of the
phenomenon of ecstasy, our approach has
been to use a variety of methods. It might then
be proper to conclude by raising a
methodological point: can or should one's
approach to the study of ecstasy be translated
into the terms of some other human
phenomenon (a method often pejoratively
described as "reductionist")? Eliade argues this
point:
Since ecstasy (trance, losing one's soul, losing
consciousness) seems to form an integral part
of the human condition, just like anxiety,
dreams, imagination, etc., we do not deem it
necessary to look for its origin in a particular
culture or a particular historical moment. As an
experience ecstasy is a non-historical
phenomenon in the sense that it is coextensive
with human nature. Only the
religious interpretation given to ecstasy and
the techniques designed to prepare it or
facilitate it are historically conditioned. That is
to say, they are dependent on various cultural

97
contexts, and they change in the course of
history. (Eliade, cited in Wavell et al., 1966, p.
243).
Thus, fasting, drugs, meditation, prayer,
dancing, and sex have all been used to induce
ecstasy in the course of human history.
A dominant trend in the study of religion on this
point is reflected in what Charles Davis says of
reductionistic explanations in general, which
also applies to the explanations of ecstasy. His
discussion is entitled "Wherein There Is No
Ecstasy," a line from T. S. Eliot that refers not
to the absence of ecstasy per se but to its
absence in "the mystical dark night of the soul."
Davis has this to say:
There is no difficulty in accepting reductionistic
explanations of particular religious beliefs and
practices, if such explanations are sufficiently
grounded. Every expression of the
transcendent is a particular experience. The
particularity of the experience is due to non-
transcendent factors. Hence, in that
particularity, it is open to non-religious
explanations. As for a reductionistic
explanation of religious faith as such, in my
98
judgment a reductionistic explanation is so little
grounded and so patently the result of an
inadequate development of the subject who
offers it that I do not grant it any degree of
probability. But I am not infallible. Despite the
certitude of my judgment, the possibility of
error and illusion remains. (Davis, 1984, p.
398)
Scholars will no doubt continue to debate the
issue of ecstasy, and shamans, prophets, and
mystics continue to experience it—if a
secularized world will let them do so.

See Also
Enthusiasm; Mystical Union in Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam; Mysticism; Psychedelic
Drugs; Shamanism.

Bibliography
Arberry, A. J. Sufism: An Account of the
Mystics of Islam (1950). London, 1979.
Arbman, Ernst. Ecstasy or Religious Trance. 3
vols. Edited by Åke Hultkrantz. Stockholm,
1963–1970.
99
Davis, Charles. "Wherein There Is No
Ecstasy." Studies in Religion / Sciences
religieuses 13 (1984): 393–400.
Eliade, Mircea. Yoga: Immortality and
Freedom. 2d ed. Princeton, 1969.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy. Rev. & enl. ed. New
York, 1964.
Inge, W. R. "Ecstasy." In Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings,
vol. 5. Edinburgh, 1912.
Leeuw, Gerardus van der. Religion in Essence
and Manifestation, vol. 1. Translated by J. E.
Turner. London, 1938.
Lewis, I. M. Ecstatic Religion: An
Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and
Shamanism. Harmondsworth, 1971.
Mahadevan, T. M. P. Outlines of Hinduism.
Bombay, 1956.
Maslow, Abraham. Religions, Values, and
Peak-Experiences. Columbus, Ohio, 1964.

100
Nyanatiloka. Buddhist Dictionary. Colombo,
1950.
Progoff, Ira, ed. and trans. The Cloud of
Unknowing. New York, 1957.
Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught.
Rev. ed. Bedford, U.K., 1967.
Tart, Charles T., ed. Altered States of
Consciousness: A Book of Readings. New
York, 1969.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism (1911). 12th ed.
New York, 1961.
Walker, Benjamin. The Hindu World, vol. 2.
New York, 1968.
Wavell, Stewart, Audrey Butt, and Nina
Epton. Trances. London, 1966.
Zaehner, R. C. Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism.
New York, 1972.
Arvind Sharma (1987)
Encyclopedia of Religion

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Ecstasy
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103
Ectognathous
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VISIONS
VISIONS . Usage of the term vision goes back to the thirteenth-century Italian
theologian Thomas Aquinas, who first used the word to refer to a "supernatural"
manifestation. It describes a religious experience that involves seeing and,
frequently, the other senses as well. The quality of the experience suggests that
the content of the perception is real, a direct, unmediated contact with a
nonordinary aspect of reality that is external and independent of the perceiver.
"[Vision] is very real," says Lame Deer, a medicine man of the Sioux nation. "It hits
you sharp and clear like an electric shock. You are wide awake and, suddenly,
there is a person standing next to you who you know can't be there at all" (Lame
Deer, Seeker of Visions, New York, 1972, p. 65).

The explanation that visions are due to imaginings, pseudoperception, or errors of

perception is an expression of the cultural difference between the visionary and the
present-day Western psychologist in their views concerning the nature of reality, a
topic that would stray too far afield here. But a stand should be taken against those
psychiatrists who clinically equate vision with hallucination. In hallucination the
content of what is reported is something to which nothing real corresponds; it is a
delusion. For the health professional the presence of delusions is a sign of insanity,
and in an application of the so-called pathology model of religious experience,
visionaries are classified as mentally ill—a diagnosis often imputed to shamans.
Yet in clinically healthy subjects visions dissolve spontaneously (as will be seen
below), and, what is even more important for the institutionalization of the visionary
experience, they can be induced and terminated ritually. This cannot be said of the
hallucinations that are associated with insanity. Furthermore, one should be wary
when encountering references to dreams in religious contexts. Semantically, the
English word dream includes the notion that its content does not represent
anything real. Non-Westerners, however, often set in opposition a dream category
that is taken to be "real" or "valid" with one that is considered "ordinary." The latter
category includes fleeting, or "invalid," dreams. The dreams referred to in such
remarks as "Old Spotted Wolf had a painted lodge, which he was advised to make
by the buffalo, in a dream" (George B. Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians, vol. 1,
1972, p. 234), the dreams known from shamanistic traditions of flying, initiation,
and dismemberment, and even the many revelatory dreams of the Hebrew
scriptures (Old Testament) should all properly be considered visions.

Visionary Experience

104
Contrary to commonly held Western views, having a vision is not a singular or rare
event. The father of this Western misconception is once more Thomas Aquinas,
who held that the human world and the sacred realm are separated by a wide
chasm. A report of a vision was therefore indicative of a rare event, something that
could take place only under extraordinary circumstances. In reality, visions are
known to all societies, and their use in ritual is widespread.

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When a type of behavior thus crosses boundaries, irrespective of ethnic or
religious divisions, one may have to look to physical rather than cultural reasons.
After all, human beings constitute one species only. Humans all have the same
kind of body, the same nervous system. And, indeed, countless reports and
modern field observations by anthropologists indicate that, when a person has a
vision, certain physical changes occur. In what is popularly called a trance, the
pupils may widen, muscles become rigid, and breathing seem shallow. Some
visionaries will fall into what appears to be a deep sleep or even a dead faint. In
such a trance, as Barbara W. Lex, a medical anthropologist, maintains, two
opposing arousals of the nervous system are experienced. Their alternating action
produces relaxation, and this accounts for the trance's beneficial effect.
Simultaneously, the brain synthesizes β-endorphins (the body's own painkillers), as
this writer learned in a study in which the trance experience was induced in a
religiously neutral environment. (See Ingrid Müller's M. D. dissertation, University
of Freiburg im Breisgau.) These endorphins are thought to be responsible on the
biological level for the joy, euphoria, and "sweetness" that are often reported in the
visions of Christian mystics. As this writer learned from fieldwork, these
physiological changes must be produced before the visions can occur. In some
mysterious way, then, the body becomes a perceiving organ for the sacred
dimension of reality.

This manner of viewing the visionary event runs counter to another cherished
notion inherited from the Middle Ages, namely that humans are dualistic in nature,
consisting of a body and a separate soul. Rather, it seems to modern science that
human beings are biopsychological systems. This view echoes ideas put forth by
Galen, a Greek physician of the second century ce, who contended that mind and
matter are different aspects of the same stuff. In other words, not the soul but the
entire human being is having the vision.

The ritual trance, or ecstasy, as an altered state of consciousness, is responsible

for even basic perceptions of a nonordinary quality. "Hearing" voices is not plain
hearing. Those who experience voices can readily distinguish them from ordinary
speech. "I do not hear it in so many words," explained a German university student
who reported being possessed by demons and hearing Jesus and Mary speaking
to her; "I am given to know." (See Felicitas D. Goodman, The Exorcism of
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Anneliese Michel, New York, 1981.) "Seeing" also takes place on a different level.
As a blind !Kung San explained, the great god kept his eyeballs for him in a little
pouch, giving them to him only during the medicine dance; and when the dance
was over, he had to return them to the god. That is, he could see only while in
trance. A changed quality is also reported during experience with an incubus—that
is, when a spirit has sexual intercourse with a human being. In classical Greek
tradition such sexual contact might make a diviner out of a woman, as happened
when Apollo "raped" Cassandra. The Inquisition endlessly quizzed women
accused of witchcraft concerning intercourse with Satan. When given the chance,
these women testified that this was not like making love in ordinary reality.

Under certain circumstances, about which very little is known, clinically healthy
human beings may inadvertently create the necessary biopsychological
preconditions for a visionary experience—that is, they may "stray" into it. When this
happens, as this writer found during fieldwork observations of a millenarian
movement in the Yucatán, in Mexico, a regular pattern will assert itself, which, if
experienced in its entirety, will take about thirty-five or forty days. The trance
episode is apparently most intense at the beginning, and what is seen by
participants during this time typically is white. The man who started the Yucatán
millenarian movement initially saw white demons. A woman from another apostolic
congregation in the same area saw "white angels on white horses galloping by,
carrying white flags, very, very white." From the New Testament it is known that
when the women went to Jesus' tomb, whatever they saw there—an angel, two
angels, two men, or one young man—the vision was bathed in dazzling light, white
as snow. The initial vision of Kotama, the founder of Sūkyō Mahikari, one of the
"new religions" of Japan, was of a white-haired old man standing in a white cloud.
The next phase of the trance is characterized by a gold or orange glow: The
Yucatecan apostolic saw burning candles; Kotama's old man was washing clothes
in a golden tub. Finally, there is a "double" vision, with ordinary and nonordinary
perception overlapping. The Yucatecan went to the cathedral in Mérida and saw a
procession of priests whose heads were those of demons. The woman from the
other apostolic congregation saw a big Bible fastened above the entrance to the
hospital where she was taken. The prophet Muḥammad watched the angel Gabriel
astride the horizon, and no matter which way he turned, the angel was always
there on the horizon. The widely reported voices are probably also part of this last
phase in many instances, as another superimposition of a visionary (i.e., auditory)
perception on the ordinary environment. Kotama's episode, for instance, concluded
with a voice telling him his new name and giving him instructions. Eventually the
vision dissolves, leaving only ordinary reality as the perceptual field.

Not everyone goes through the entire visionary sequence. It is possible to stray
into it anywhere along the way. But whether complete or not, its extraordinary and
impressive character can result in a conversion experience for the visionary and if
the social configuration is right, religious innovation follows. According to legend,

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the Buddha's enlightenment came at daybreak after a sequence of visions in which
he saw first all his own rebirths, then other beings dying and passing into the five
destinies of existence, and finally the chain that bound all beings to continued,
recurrent death and rebirth. Muḥammad's prophethood was heralded by a
complete visionary sequence. First he experienced "true visions" resembling the
brightness of daybreak. Several days later the angel Gabriel came to him with a
coverlet of brocade (gold?) with some writing on it and commanded him to read it.
Still later, Muḥammad beheld Gabriel on the horizon. A hundred years ago
Wovoka, the Ghost Dance messiah, told of his vision that, "when the sun died, I
went up to heaven and saw God and all the people that had died a long time ago.
God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one
another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people."
And in this century, the cargo cults of Melanesia have been characterized by
spontaneously occurring visions. Leaders of various cults have told of hearing
voices, seeing lights, and meeting native gods and fairylike beings of the forests
and waters. They have spoken, too, of journeys to heaven (an idea borrowed from
Westerners) and of visits to the Hiyoyoa, their own otherworld.

While these spontaneous episodes of visionary experience dissolve without the aid
of ritual, there is another class of vision in which this is not the case. This is the so-
called shamanistic illness, reported predominantly in Asia but also in Africa, North
America, and, sporadically, other areas as well. Medical anthropologists suspect
that in some instances the triggering mechanism may be biochemical, for example,
resulting from a socially prescribed change in nutrition, but such causes cannot
often be pinpointed. Its onset is variously signaled by high fever, swelling of either
the limbs or the entire body, prolonged unconsciousness, and inability to eat; at
times, there is also an indomitable urge to flee into the wilderness. These changes
are preceded, accompanied, or followed by visions. The condition, which may
linger for years, is classed not only as an illness but also as a sign that the sufferer
is destined, singled out by an agency of the sacred ranges of reality, for a future as
a religious specialist. Cure is effected by a ritual that is usually initiatory in nature.

One example among many comes from the German ethnographer Peter Snoy. In
his book Bagrot (Graz, 1975), Snoy tells of a Yeshkun shaman from the Karakoram
Mountains (part of the Himalayan system). When this man was about twenty he
was walking home one day when suddenly he saw five fairies dancing in the fields.
They did not talk to him, but the next day he had the unconquerable urge to run
away into the mountains to join them. He started raging, and five men finally
managed to tie him up. He was kept tied up in his house for a whole year, and the
fairies visited him several times each day, descending through the smoke hole and
singing and dancing for him. Eventually, the man's village arranged an initiation
feast for him. A goat was sacrificed, and he drank its blood, which the fairies told
him was milk. And for the first time he danced, performing what is in his society an
important part of shamanistic séances. Subsequently, the man worked as a healer
and diviner.

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Reporting from Africa, the British social anthropologist Adrian Boshier, in "African
Apprenticeship" (in Parapsychology and Anthropology, New York, 1974), tells the
story of Dorca, a Zulu sangoma, that is, a diviner and healer. For three years,
Dorca was sick in bed. During this time her spirit left her body every night, and she
saw many things and visited places where she had never been. One night in a
vision her dead grandfather came to see her. He told her that he liked her very
much and that his spirit would enter her body so that she would be able to help her
people. She refused, but spirit sangoma s came to her every night, showed her
beads and herbs and a feather headdress she was to make, and sang her a song
that she was to learn. Finally her grandfather's spirit threatened to kill her if she
continued to resist. Her mother thereupon took her to the house of an aunt who
was also a sangoma. There Dorca sang the spirit song and danced for many
hours. This was the beginning of her training as a sangoma.

In most non-Western societies, visions are an integral part of religious ritual. As

Lame Deer says, "By themselves these things [rituals] mean nothing. Without the
vision and the power this learning will do no good" (1972, p. 13). It is
understandable, therefore, that such societies cannot rely on the fortuitous
occurrence of visionary experiences but need ways for inducing them.

Many strategies for inducing visions utilize rhythmic stimulation. Inuit (Eskimo)
ritual specialists use drums, as do various Siberian shamans, for whom the drum
represents the magic horse on which they ride to the beyond. Such stimulation is
so effective that by merely shaking a gourd rattle and using traditional postures, a
visionary experience can be induced in volunteers in a religiously neutral
environment. (See this writer's article "Body Posture and the Religious Altered
State of Consciousness: An Experimental Investigation," Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, 1984.) Other methods involve sensory deprivation, as used by the
Shakers and by the Spiritual Baptists of Saint Vincent Island in their mourning
ritual; isolation and fasting, as practiced by the Oglala Indians and other societies;
and fasting and self-mortification, as in the initiation ritual of the Plains Indians,
during which adolescents seeking a vision would fast, bathe in icy streams, and
crawl naked over jagged rocks in order to acquire a guardian spirit. Christian
mystics employed similar strategies. The German monk Suso (Heinrich Süse, c.
1295–1366), for instance, was able to achieve several visions daily for a period of
about sixteen years by fasting extensively and by sleeping in a tight undergarment
through which nails protruded into his skin.

Even intense concentration in combination with nothing more than certain

breathing techniques may bring about visions, as has been learned from the
Chinese Daoist philosopher and mystic Zhuangzi (369–286? bce). Zhuangzi told of
a master called Ciqi, who "sat leaning on his armrest, staring up at the sky and
breathing—vacant and far away." The changes wrought in him were striking to his
companion, who asked, "What is this? Can you really make the body like a
withered tree and the mind like ashes? The man leaning on the armrest now is not
the one who leaned on it before" (quoted in Poetry and Speculation of the Rg

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Veda by Willard Johnson, Berkeley, 1980, p. xxvii). Ciqi explained that by virtue of
this change he was able to hear the piping of the earth and the piping of the
heavens.

Other societies employ a number of different psychedelics to achieve visions. The

use of such drugs goes back to antiquity and is widely distributed geographically.
Mushrooms such as the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) were probably known to
Mesolithic Paleosiberians (about 8000 bce). Mesoamerica and South America are
particularly rich in plants that contain the requisite alkaloids, and many societies
there utilize them ritually. But there are also reports of their religious application
from every other continent. At first glance, the use of psychedelics seems to
represent an easy way of achieving visions, and for this reason many North
American Indians reject them. As Lame Deer said contemptuously, "Even the
butcher boy at his meat counter will have a vision after eating peyote" (1972, p.
64). Actually, though, matters are not quite that simple. Many of the substances
bring about an undifferentiated condition of intoxication, and seeing the right vision
requires training. Thus Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, in his book Amazonian
Cosmos (Chicago, 1971), discusses the use of Banisteriopsis caapi by the Desana
Indians of South America. He tells that during intoxication, the Desana religious
specialist needs to learn to see the Milky Way as a road, the hills and pools as
communal houses of the spirits, and the animals as people. Those who are unable
to go so far in their visions see only clouds and stones, "and the birds laugh at
them." In another instance reported by Reichel-Dolmatoff, during a communal rite
of the same society, the men take the drug, and the priest, who has abstained,
talks them through their visions.

Forms Of Visions And Types Of Society

It appears that, cross-culturally, the neurophysiology of visionary experience
remains the same. Neither does the form in which it is expressed vary much, if one
contemplates only the religions of a particular type of society, of agriculturalists, for
instance. However, salient differences appear when comparing the religious
expression of one societal type with that of another, that of agriculturalists, for
example, with that of hunters. There are, of course, syncretic patterns, for societies
change, and so do their religions. But it is still possible to recognize certain
fundamental forms.

(In the following passages, the "ethnographic present" is used in giving examples
from non-Western societies, although in many instances the rituals mentioned
have fallen victim to Western conquest and aggressive missionizing.)

Visions of hunter-gatherers
The way of life of the hunter-gatherer is the most ancient and venerable of all
human adaptations. Humans' antecedents were hunters and gatherers for a million
years or more before any cultivation of the soil was introduced. In such societies

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that are still extant, visionary experiences are varied, involving a highly
sophisticated use of religious trance. Hunter-gatherers understand the ordinary and
the nonordinary aspects of reality to be closely intertwined, indeed to coexist in
time and space, as one Pygmy elder from the Ituri rain forest expressed it. All adult
men can easily switch from seeing ordinary reality to seeing its nonordinary aspect,
having learned to do so early on, usually during initiation rites. In the sacred range
a man can see the "spirits," that is, the nonordinary aspects of stones, mountains,
waters, and winds, of plants, insects, and animals. He sees the spirits of the
unborn, one of which he has to take to his wife before she bears his child. The
spirits of the dead gather around when a feast is being prepared or during a
medicine dance, and they need to be invited to take part. An individual spirit of a
dead loved one may appear to teach a man or a woman a new song, game, or
ritual. A murderer's essence may loiter at the tomb of his victim, and beings of
curious shape may warn the living of danger. If they penetrate someone's body,
they make him ill by leaving behind a bone, visible to the healer, who will remove it
in a curing ritual by sucking it out. People also tell of seeing strange neighbors,
such as the "no-knees" of the San, beings who catch the sun as it sets and kill it.
After the sun has been cooked, the no-knees eat it and throw its shoulder blade to
the east, where it rises once more.

The most spectacular institutionalized visionary experience of hunter-gatherers,

however, is the spirit journey, a perfect expression of the hunter's life way, in which
individual initiative is of paramount importance. The Pygmies embark on this
journey by "crossing a river." On the "other side," they may visit the realm of the
spirits of the dead, where everything is reversed but still as orderly as is earthly
existence. For the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert the great god used to let down
a cord from the sky by which he allowed the medicine man to climb up to visit him.
Nowadays, however, during the medicine dance, medicine men send their spirits
out to fly into the veld while their bodies lie lifeless, for there is nothing to hold them
up. They might see the spirits of the dead there, or the great god, or perhaps they
go because they need to order a lion to stop disturbing people by roaring at night.
An Australian medicine man takes a postulant up to the sky by assuming the form
of a skeleton and fastening a pouch to himself into which he places the postulant,
who is reduced to the size of a very small child. Sitting astride a rainbow, the
medicine man pulls himself up with an arm-over-arm action. When near the top, he
throws the young man out onto the sky as part of his initiation. An Inuit shaman will
swim muscle-naked through rock to the underworld in order to seek out Tornassuq,
the earth spirit, and inquire of him the reasons for recent misfortunes of his band.
Other spirit journeys, as told of by North American Indians, are undertaken to
recover a lost soul, whose absence makes its owner sick.

Visionary experiences serve many important functions within hunter-gatherer

society. On the individual level, a vision bestows well-being and strength as well as
power to speak impressively, to cure and to divine, and to protect the group against
danger from the outside. For the community, visions are a part of many rituals. A
spirit journey, for example, is an important communal event. When an Inuit shaman
starts out on his trip, the entire village is present, and all are there when he comes

110
back to tell of his adventures. Among the Salish, a tribe of North American Indians,
the dramatization of the journey in a spirit canoe in quest of a lost soul is a most
impressive performance. What was perceived in a vision is represented on cave
walls, or on rocks, painted on bark, or carved in bone for all to see. For a while,
such innovative iconography will be confined to the originating group, but
unencumbered by written tradition, it eventually diffuses to neighboring bands and
even to the wider cultural area, continually reinvigorating religious life.

Visions of horticulturalists
About ten to twelve thousand years ago human beings began growing some of
their own food instead of merely collecting it. The areas cultivated were no more
than gardens, hence the name horticulturalist. Horticulturalists also continued
hunting, some extensively, others less so, depending on the ecology of their
respective region. While European tradition retains no memory of the hunter-
gatherer past, the horticulturalist way of life is reflected in recorded history. What is
known of the Celtic, Germanic, and Greek societies clearly indicates their
horticulturalist character. Societies of this type survive in Southeast Asia and,
especially, in Mesoamerica and South America. Their members' visions have much
in common with those of hunter-gatherers, but not all horticulturalists learn the
behavior. Instead, there is a more or less pronounced tendency for religious
specialists to assume the spiritual role that is performed by all male hunter-
gatherers.

The spirit journey of the hunter-gatherer has undergone significant permutations in

various horticulturalist societies. Their legends tell of full-fledged spirit journeys like
those of the hunter-gatherers: of the Teutonic god Óðinn (Odin) who travels the
earth, of a famous medicine man of the South American Guaraní who calls on First
Woman in her maize garden in the mythical East. But horticulturalists cannot
explore such distant ranges with impunity. Just as Orpheus cannot retrieve
Eurydice from the underworld, no Amazonian Akwe-Shavante can ever visit the
village of the spirits of the dead, although some have had offers from the spirits of
friendly departed relatives to take them there. Instead, horticulturalists undertake a
lesser experience, an actual journey that culminates in the desired vision. Initiates
of the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece descended into caves; the Huichol
Indians of Mexico travel over land in search of peyote; adherents of Shinto
climb Mount Fuji. Even the North American Indians' vision quest and their search
for the guardian spirit is of this nature. The spirit journey may also be entirely
vicarious, as when the Brazilian Yanomamö Indians send their friends, the
miniature hekura spirits who live under stones and in mountains, to enemy villages
to eat the souls of the children there. (See Napoleon A. Changnon, Yanomamö:
The Fierce People, New York, 1977.) Visions are given shape in paintings on rock
and in carvings, embroidery, and clay. They invest the practitioner not only with
personal stature but also with power that leads to success in curing, hunting, and
war, all in the service of the com-munity.

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Visions of nomadic pastoralists
Nomadic-pastoralist societies appear in a number of different adaptations. Some
such societies arose from hunters who had attached themselves to wild herds of
animals, such as reindeer, or from hunters who had acquired pet animals, such as
horses, which had expanded into domesticated herds. Other nomadic-pastoralist
societies arose as extensions of agriculturalist societies, and still others developed
in which only the men are pastoralists, while the women cultivate the soil. The
visionary experiences of nomadic pastoralists correlate with the differences in their
origins.

Among reindeer herders, for instance, such as the Evenki of northern Siberia, the
hunter's richly appointed sacred dimension is still preserved, although it is
accessible only to the shaman. In his visions, the shaman constructs the fence that
surrounds his clan's territory and protects it against enemy shamans. He
communicates with the ruling spirits, the "masters" of waters, mountains, forests,
and species of beasts. In his spirit journeys he guides departing souls to the lower
world, at which time he must ask the mistress of that world for permission for the
soul to enter. He also travels to the upper world, where he calls on Grandfather
Spirit and the supreme spirit ruler of all animal and plant life as well as on the
spirits of the sun, moon, stars, thunder, clouds, sunset, and daybreak. He even
knows the way to the storehouse of the unborn, which is guarded by Bear. In
addition, he masters the art of the vicarious spirit journey by swallowing his helping
spirits and then sending them out to hunt down a disease spirit or fight an enemy
shaman. He is healer and diviner, and the marvelous ritual dramas of his visions
were, until their destruction by Soviet authorities, at the heart of his society's social
life.

Traditions die hard, however. The Hungarian horse nomads have been cut off from
their own cultural area in Inner Asia for over a millennium. By the year 1000 they
had been converted to Roman Catholicism, and their economy changed radically.
Yet to this day they retain a clandestine shamanistic tradition, with
one táltos (shaman) fighting the other in visionary battles, and with "women of
knowledge" who are able to see the spirits of the dead.

In passing to a discussion of nomadic-pastoralist societies with important ties to

agriculture, this article leaves the visionary world of the hunters entirely behind.
The Nilotic Dodoth, for instance, whose women garden while the men tend the
cattle—a pattern found only in Africa—have but one god. This god is so remote
and vague that little is known about him. He communicates with humans by such
messengers as shooting stars, and no shaman ever visits him, although his
worshipers send him sacrificial oxen. The most important ritual specialist among
the Dodoth is the diviner, whose oracles have a literal quality: "[Lomotin] would see
it raining in a dream, then see a red ox being sacrificed and he would know, when
he awoke, that the sacrifice of such an ox would bring rain. He was uncannily right"
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Warrior Herdsmen, New York, 1965, p. 173).

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For the Tuareg, nomads of the Sahara and nominally Islamic, God (Allāh) is
equally a distant overseer, who sends the spirits of Islamic saints as messengers,
or angels, who are often identified with lightning. In a faint outline of pre-Islamic
religion, Tuareg men have dealings with spirits called kel asouf, which attach
themselves to their hair, help them divine, and are seen doing battle with each
other.

The messenger complex is reminiscent of Judeo-Christian tradition, and, indeed,

both Judaism and Islam have their roots in nomadic pastoralism. Angels as
messengers abound in both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, from
the one that spoke to Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, to the heavenly host who
announced the birth of Jesus and the white-haired angel wearing a golden girdle
who appeared to John according to the Book of Revelation. Muḥammad's
numerous contacts with the angel Gabriel have been mentioned before.

Spirit journeys are reported both of Moses and of Muḥammad, with the former, for
instance, going up Mount Sinai and there encountering God, and the latter rising
through the night, ascending to heaven, and conversing with God. Traces of these
journeys are even contained in the New Testament, as in Matthew 4:1–3: "Then
Jesus was led into the desert by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil. And he
fasted forty days and forty nights and afterwards he was hungry. And the tempter
came to him."

The spirit journey was later taken up by the Islamic Ṣūfī mystics. The first one of
these to give a personal account of such experiences was Najm al-Dīn (c. 1145–
1223), the famous mystic and teacher of the city of Khorezm, an important center
of learning at the time. Among the many mystic experiences he reported are
visions of Muḥammad as well as numerous spirit journeys. (See Die fawāʾih al-
ğamāl wa fawātiḥ al-ğalal des Nağmuddīn al-Kubrā, translated by Fritz Meier,
Wiesbaden, 1957.) Kubrā's spirit journeys were not metaphorical but were entirely
real to him. He experienced the sensations of being lifted off the ground into the
air, of being borne aloft by angels, and of flying. It was not his body that flew but
"he himself, his heart or holy spirit, which leaves the body through a hole on the
right side, opened by the formula of contemplating God." Once in heaven, he
encountered God's properties at various locations, and while passing them he
incorporated them into his being. Kubrā, who traveled widely and who carried
Classical Greek and medieval Christian ideas back with him to Inner Asia, no doubt
also knew about the Jewish mystics of his time, such as Mosheh ben Naḥman
(Nahmanides) and perhaps also of the Italian friar Francis of Assisi.

By the early thirteenth century, however, mysticism was no longer part of European
popular culture but was, rather, an enterprise of the intelligentsia, who induced
mystical experiences for personal enlightenment. In fact, Moses ben Naḥman was
criticized for having made mysticism accessible to the masses, because it gave

113
rise to visionaries, who supposedly were followed blindly by the credulous. Thomas
Aquinas's premise that visions are a rarely occurring bridge between the human
and the divine must be seen in this context. Barely two generations later, Suso
warned some nuns not to attempt any mystic experiences, although he himself had
extensive visions. Once, while in a faint, "it seemed to him in a vision that he was
being conducted to a choir, where the mass was being sung. A large number of the
heavenly host was present in that choir, sent by God, where they were to sing a
sweet melody of heavenly sound. This they did, and they sang a new and joyous
melody that he had never heard before, and it was so very sweet that it seemed to
him that his soul would dissolve for great joy" (Briefbüchlein, translation by this
writer). The mystics soon found themselves in opposition to orthodoxy in all three
monotheistic traditions, and within the century both Franciscans and Ṣūfīs were
being executed for blasphemy. The pagan traditions of popular culture, with its
legends of a wild huntsman and witches' sabbaths, deteriorated without
institutionalization or support from the larger society, eventually to be wiped out by
the Inquisition.

Visions of agriculturalists
As humans turn to tilling ever larger open fields and to the consuming task of
exerting control over their habitat, the institutionalization of the visionary
experience disappears entirely, and even spontaneous occurrence is suppressed
because of its perceived threat to the written tradition. It is difficult, for instance, to
gain recognition for a new shrine from the Vatican authorities, because claims of
"genuine" visions are rarely credited. The predominant experience in the religions
of large agricultural societies, such as Chinese popular religion, Christianity, and
Hinduism, is instead spirit possession.

The urban adaptation

The situation in modern urban centers is similar to that in agriculturalist religions.
Large urban movements such as pentecostalism or Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian
healing cult, as well as some Japanese "new religions," rely on possession. If
visions occur at all, they usually come about outside the religious context, as was
the case with the near-death experiences investigated by the physician Raymond
A. Moody, Jr.

In general, it seems that as human beings develop various adaptations to their

habitat beyond that of hunting and gathering, the frequency and rich variety of
visionary experience in their world begins to diminish. Indeed, this reduction
appears to be in inverse proportion to their control over the habitat, for as control
over ordinary reality increases, the grasp on the sacred dimension as it is
expressed in visions starts to slip away. In the spirit journey the initiative belongs to
humans; in spirit possession humans are manipulated. Institutionalization of the
visionary experience causes it to dissolve even faster—in the West, ending with

114
the mystics. Since the biological capacity described earlier remains intact,
however, a resurgence of all modes of ecstasy may be seen as more leisure time
becomes available in the postindustrial era. Tendencies toward such a
development are evident in the countercultures of both the United States and
Europe.

See Also
Angels; Cargo Cults; Drums; Hierophany; Images; Psychedelic
Drugs; Revelation; Shamanism; Spirit Possession.

Bibliography
A well-written biography of Francis of Assisi incorporating much recent research is
Adolf Holl's The Last Christian, translated by Peter Heinegg (Garden City, N. Y.,
1980). The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 3 vols., translated and
edited by E. Allison Peers (New York, 1946), contains illuminating accounts of the
mystic experiences of Teresa of Ávila. In the section entitled "Interior Castle" she
describes her pioneering attempt to protect her nuns from the Inquisition by
pointing to illness as a possible cause for visions. Hans Peter
Duerr's Dreamtime (Oxford, 1984), reviews the prehistory and later struggles of
pagan religion in Europe that involved contact with the sacred dimension, with
special regard to the role of women. The footnotes in particular contain a wealth of
interesting material. An excellent study of Sufism is Annemarie
Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1975).

Carlos Castaneda's work, especially The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of

Knowledge (Berkeley, Calif., 1968) and A Separate Reality: Further Conversations
with Don Juan (New York, 1971), whether entirely reliable ethnographically or not,
still represents a graphic description of the feel of altered states of consciousness.
For an unimpeachably authentic view of American Indian visionary
experience, Black Elk Speaks (1961; reprint, Lincoln, Nebr., 1979), as told by the
holy man of the Oglala Lakota through John G. Neihardt, the poet laureate of
Nebraska, remains unsurpassed. The anthropologist Michael Harner, in The Way
of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing (New York, 1980), provides
instructions for self-experimentation on the basis of what he learned in his fieldwork
with Indian societies of South America. The interest of the counterculture in such
experiments is reviewed in Tom Pinkson's study A Quest for Vision (San
Francisco, 1976). A readable collection of case histories of near-death experiences
was put together by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., in Life after Life (New York, 1975).

New Sources
Amat, Jacqueline. Songes et visions. L'au-delà dans la littérature latine tardive.
Paris, 1985.

115
Benz, Ernst. Vision und Offenbarung. Gesammelte Swedenborg-Aufs ätze. Zürich,
1979. Vision as revelation in the experience of Swedenborg.

Casadio, Giovanni. "Patterns of Vision in Some Gnostic Tractates from Nag

Hammadi." In Actes du IVe Congrès copte, II. De la linguistique au gnosticisme,
pp. 395–401. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 1992. Including a selected bibliography
on visions in Gnosticism.

Couliano, Ioan Petru, Expériences de l'extase. Paris, 1984. A typology of visionary

experiences from Greek antiquity until Middle Ages.

Goodman, Felicitas. Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality. Bloomington and

Indianapolis, Ind., 1988. An theory of religion based on the study of religious
trances and controlled dreams in a cross-disciplinary perspective.

Holm, Nils G. Religious Ecstasy. Stockholm, 1982. A collection of essays by

Scandinavian scholars tackling visionary experiences in psycho-physiological
research and historical case-studies from primal cultures to Book religions.

Zinser, Hartmut. "Ekstase." In Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe,

vol. 2, pp. 253–258. Stuttgart, 1990. Stuttgart, 1990.

Sogni, visioni e profezie nell'antico cristianesimo edited by the Institutum

Patristicum augustinianum. Rome, 1989. Dreams, visions and prophecies in early
Christianity and Gnosticism.

Felicitas D. Goodman (1987)

Revised Bibliography
Encyclopedia of Religion Goodman, Felicitas

Visions
Views 2,050,824Updated Jun 19 2020

VISIONS
The Hebrew Bible contains descriptions of many visions, especially those of God
and His angel (or angels). When the appearance of God is mentioned as part of
the biblical narrative, it is difficult to say if, in that specific case, the author thought
that it was reality or a vision. The idea developed already at a very ancient period
of Judaism that God has no shape, and, therefore, the appearance of God and His
angels to the prophets was evidently understood by them as a vision
(see *Prophecy). This is surely so in the case of Ezekiel's vision of God and the
heavenly world. Prophets, however, have also seen visions of simple or imaginary

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objects and persons, which they interpreted in a symbolic way, the persons or
objects themselves having already acquired a symbolic meaning. At the beginning
of the Second Temple period visions were often interpreted to the prophets by an
angel. This is also the manner of visions and their interpretation by angels in the
later apocalyptic literature.

It may be asked if the later prophets at the beginning of the Second Temple period
really believed they saw what they describe and interpret, or if visions merely
became a literary form for prophecy or teaching. Sometimes, such descriptions
evidently contained only a grain of actual vision (cf. the apocalyptic literature), and
sometimes there was obviously no actual foundation (cf. the Vision of Seventy
Shepherds in the Book of Enoch). In many cases (e.g., in the Fourth Book of Ezra),
the question of an actual basis for a symbolic vision cannot be clearly answered,
because this often depends on the extent to which the true author persuaded
himself. The literary convention overcomes the religious or visionary experience in
apocalyptic literature, because the authors did not write in their own names, but in
the names of biblical persons of the past. A special type of vision in the apocalyptic
literature is celestial journeys of biblical personalities, during which they visited
both heaven and earth (heavenly paradise and hell). The oldest book which
contains such visionary trips is the Book of Enoch; this book is thus the beginning
of a chain leading to Dante. Chapter 14 in the book contains a description of God's
heavenly palace, where Enoch sees the Glory of God. This is the oldest example in
the tradition of visionary ascents to God's dwelling place following similar
descriptions by biblical prophets, the earliest precursors of the heikhalot and
the *Merkabah literature. A fragment describing God's dwelling place in the same
spirit is also preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Jewish mystics in antiquity, as well as other persons, definitely had visionary

experiences. Josephus refers to John Hyrcanus, who saw God announcing to him
which of his sons would be his heir. Both Josephus and rabbinic literature relate
that John Hyrcanus heard a heavenly voice in the Temple announcing the victory
of his sons. This heavenly voice (*bat kol) is often attested in rabbinical literature;
the incidents referred to are both from the Second Temple period and later.
Rabbinic literature often mentions the appearance of the prophet Elijah (see *Elijah
in the  Aggadah); the oldest reference comes from Ben Sira (48:11; "blessed is he
who sees him"). The Second Book of Maccabees often speaks about visions of
angels, especially as signs for future victory. The story of the appearance of angels
to Heliodoros and punishment meted through them, narrated in this book, are also
famous.

[David Flusser]

In Medieval Hebrew Literature

Following the prophetic visions in the Bible, and the frequent appearance of angels
and other divine beings in talmudic and midrashic literature, medieval literature
contains many descriptions of different kinds of visions. They appear chiefly in

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mystical works, but they are also to be found in the fiction of the period
(see *Fiction) as well as in its popular literature. The fundamental Jewish tenet that
God and His guardian angels are always close to man served as a basis for the
belief in the objective reality of such visions. There prevailed, moreover, a profound
belief in the existence of *demonic powers, which were also held to reveal
themselves supernaturally.

The earliest body of Hebrew mystical works – the heikhalot and the Merkabah

literature – is essentially devoted to visions. The mystics who make the ascent to
the Divine Chariot, a practice usually attributed in these texts to R. Akiva and R.
Ishmael b. Elisha and their circle, behold and then describe the glory of the
heavenly world, the hierarchy of the angels and other heavenly beings, the Throne
of Glory (kisse hakavod), and the songs of praise sung by the angels. The visitors
are usually guided by an angel, very often *Metatron, the angelic incarnation of the
mortal Enoch, who did not die but was translated to heaven and became one of the
greatest angels in the divine hierarchy. This motif of a visionary "guided tour" in the
divine world reappears in the literature of the Middle Ages.

Early Middle Ages

In the literature of medieval Europe, visions were most commonly seen in a dream;
they might either occur spontaneously or be deliberately invoked. Whoever wished
to invoke a vision would purify himself before going to sleep, and then ask she'elat
ḥalom ("a question asked of a dream"), believing that his question would be
answered by the nature of the dream that he was about to have. It was customary
to make a she'elat ḥalom not only for matters relating to mysticism but also in
connection with practical problems; and even questions of halakhah were
answered in this way. A collection of such answers by *Jacob of Marvège is still
extant, and it is known that other halakhists made similar compilations. The answer
in the dream was frequently, although not always, accompanied by a vision.

Neither the mystic nor the ordinary Jew doubted the objective reality or the
authenticity of angelic and demonic visions; even philosophers and Ashkenazi
ḥasidic scholars (see *Ḥasidei Ashkenaz) devoted lengthy treatises to the nature of
such visions, and also to those witnessed by the prophets. But most of the
philosophers, and some of the Ḥasidim, believed the visions, albeit inspired by
God, to be a product of the imagination of the individual. This view, however, was
not widely accepted and both scholars and simple folk told and retold numerous
stories of visions reported to have been seen.

One of the most common beliefs concerned the prophet Elijah, who did not die but
ascended to the heavens. Following the pattern of talmudic literature, countless
medieval folktales recount how he appeared to human beings in order to assist or
to punish them. For scholars and mystics his most important role was that of
teaching to mortal beings hidden truths which were known only to the *Academy on
High. Thus, contemporaneous with the initial development of the Kabbalah in

118
 th
Provence in the 12  century are stories describing how Elijah appeared in the
schools of the rabbis who were teaching the new ideas there.

At the same time, it was commonly believed, especially among the Jews of
medieval Germany, Northern France, and Central Europe, that demons and the
spirits of the dead appeared in visions to the living, either when they were awake or
else in a dream. Many descriptions of such visions have been preserved in *Sefer
Ḥasidim and other works written by the Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. The object of the
visions was not always the same. Sometimes the dead appeared in order to
request the completion of an act which they had begun in their lifetime but had not
lived to finish; sometimes it was to pay a debt, or to complain of a fault in the way
or the place in which they were buried. Sometimes they spoke of the other world,
of the way that the righteous were rewarded and the wicked punished. Demons
made their appearance either when invoked by magical means in order to perform
a certain task, or else to punish those who had dealt too much in magic. One of the
methods most widely used to invoke such visions was to pour oil upon a bright
surface, whereupon the demons appeared and were obliged to answer any request
asked of them. This practice was used even for such purposes as catching a thief
or finding a lost article.

Later Middle Ages
There are manifold descriptions of visions in the kabbalistic literature written after
th
the 13  century. The prophetic kabbalism of Abraham b. Samuel *Abulafia and his
followers is merely one example; many other kabbalists had mystical experiences
– sometimes when awake, sometimes when in a state of dream or trance – and in
these visions they were granted revelations of hidden truths from the heavenly
spheres. *Isaac b. Samuel of Acre describes in detail the frequent visitations which
he received from Metatron, some in dreams and some while he was in the state
between sleeping and waking; he also had revelations from even higher Sefirot.
th
The 14 -century author of Sefer ha-*Kanah and of Sefer ha-*Temunah relates
numerous stories describing how esoteric knowledge was revealed to members of
the devout Kanah family, many of whom were mystics. The Castilian kabbalists
that gathered around Jacob ha-Kohen b. Mordecai Gaon and his sons and
th
disciples in the second half of the 13  century also give accounts of such contacts
with higher beings.

The *Zohar contains numerous descriptions of visions revealed to Simeon b. Yoḥai

and his followers. For example, while the mystics were sitting and studying the
Kabbalah, heavenly fire surrounded them, the *Shekhinah rested upon them, and
they saw allegorical visions of hidden truths. Some of these revelations also
intimate the appearance of evil powers representing Satan, the sitra aḥra. Later
kabbalistic writings, modeling themselves upon the Zohar and the descriptions
which it gave, also narrated occurrences in the higher spheres as if they were
visions actually witnessed by the kabbalists.

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Visions of a completely different nature appear in some literary works, and
particularly in Hebrew maqamāt and prose narratives, for instance in Ibn Zabarra
or Al-Ḥarizi, or in some polemic writings, such as the Mostrador de Justicia of the
Converso Abner de Burgos, where "a big man" appears in dreams for explaining
the "craziness and stupidity" of the Jews that do not recognize the truth. Something
equivalent appears also in a rhymed prose composition written as an answer to it
by Samuel ibn Sasson, a poet from Carrion and a contemporary of *Santob de
Carrion.

Later Writings
The motif of visionary ascents to higher spheres, with an angel or some other
divine being as a guide, appeared very frequently in Hebrew literature after the
works of Dante became popular, and after *Immanuel b. Solomon of Rome
followed Dante in describing a visit to heaven and hell (although even before
Dante, Abraham *Ibn Ezra had dealt with a similar theme in his Ḥai Ben Mekiẓ). In
Italy from the Renaissance on, many Hebrew writers composed works of a similar
nature, one of the most notable being Abraham b. Hananiah de Galicchi
*Jagel's Sefer Gei Ḥizzayon ("Book of the Valley of Visions"). The author, who was
in prison at the time, relates how his dead father visited him and took his soul upon
a visionary tour of the heavens. There many secrets were revealed to them,
different spirits told them stories, and answers were given to their theological
questions.

The Shekhinah, Metatron, and other heavenly beings appear frequently in the later
th
Kabbalah, usually in order to reveal divine secrets. After the 16  century they were
often described as *maggid (heavenly mentor), and important kabbalistic works
were written as if dictated by them, as for example Joseph *Caro's Maggid
Meisharim and Moses Ḥayyim *Luzzatto's Zohar Tinyana.

Visions constituted an important element in the *Shabbatean movement founded

by the prophet *Nathan of Gaza, and many of its adherents described the different
messianic visions that were revealed to them. Belief in visions persisted in the
th
ḥasidic movement as late as the 18  century, and several stories of *Israel b.
Eliezer Ba'al Shem Tov describe how his soul ascended to heaven and the visions
he experienced there.

[Joseph Dan]

Bibliography:
Scholem, Mysticism, 119–56 and passim; idem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah
Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition (1960); E. Gottlieb, in: Fourth World Congress of
Jewish Studies, Papers, 2 (1968), 327–34; R. Margaliot, She'elot u-Teshuvot min
ha-Shamayim (1957); R.J.Z. Werblowsky, Joseph Karo; Lawyer and Mystic (1962),

120
38–83; J. Dan, in: Tarbiz, 32 (1963), 359–69; A.Z. Aescoly (ed.), R. Ḥayyim
Vital, Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot (1954).
Encyclopaedia Judaica Flusser, David; Dan, Joseph

Visions
Views 3,084,349Updated May 16 2020

Visions
Avision consists of something seen other than by ordinary sight. Throughout the
centuries, mystics, prophets, and ordinary people from all religions have
experienced visions from their deities or higher levels of consciousness that have
informed them, warned them, or enlightened them. From Genesis to Revelation in
the Bible, God uses visions and dreams as a principal means of communicating
with his prophets and his people. In Numbers 12:6, God declares, "If there is a
prophet among you, I the Lord make Myself known to him in a vision and speak to
him in a dream." And in Joel 2:28: "And it shall come to pass afterward that I shall
pour out my spirit upon flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions."

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135–1204) conceived of revelations

received through visions as a continuous emanation from the Divine Being, which
is transmitted to all those men and women who are endowed with a certain
imaginative faculty and who have achieved a certain moral and mental standard.
The revelatory transmission is filtered through the medium of the active intellect,
first to the visionary's rational faculty, then to his or her imaginative faculty. In this
way the distribution of prophetic illumination occurs in conformity with a natural
law of emanation.

Roman Catholic scholarship holds that there are two kinds of visions. One is the
imaginative vision, in which the object seen is but a mental concept of symbol,
such as Jacob's Ladder leading up to heaven. St. Teresa of Avila (151–1582) had
numerous visions, including images of Christ, which church authorities have judged
were of this symbolic kind of vision. The other is the corporeal vision, in which the
figure seen is externally present or in which a supernatural power has so modified
the retina of the eye as to produce the effect of three-dimensional solidarity.

In 1976 an extensive survey conducted by the administrators of the Gallup Poll

indicated that 31 percent of Americans had experienced an "otherworldly" feeling
of union with a divine being. The survey was based on in-home interviews with
adults in more than 300 scientifically selected localities across the nation, and a
further breakdown of the percentages revealed that 34 percent of the women
polled and 27 percent of the men admitted that they had had a "religious
experience."

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To refute the often-heard suggestion that people with little formal education are
more likely to undergo such experiences, the poll disclosed little difference in the
educational level of the respondents: college background, 29 percent; high school,
31 percent; grade school, 30 percent. According to the pollsters, "Whether one
regards these experiences as in the nature of self-delusion or wishful thinking, the
important fact remains that, for the persons concerned, such experiences are very
real and meaningful. Most important, perhaps, is the finding that these religious
experiences are widespread and not limited to particular groups [or] one's
circumstances in life…rich or poor, educated or uneducated, churched or
unchurched."

According to a press release issued by the Gallup office in Princeton, New Jersey,

these kinds of experiences "appear to have a profound effect on the outlook and
direction of a person's life." A 29-year-old office worker in Lynnwood, Washington,
told a Gallup interviewer that she had been reading the Bible one night and was
unable to sleep. A vision appeared to her that rendered her frozen, motionless. "I
saw an unusual light that wasn't there—but was," she said. "There was a greater
awareness of someone else being in that room with me. And ever since, it is as if
someone else is walking with me."

A spokesperson for the Gallup Poll commented: "One of the most interesting
aspects of these phenomena is that they happen to the nonchurched and the
nonreligious as well as to persons who attend church regularly or who say religion
plays an important role in their lives."

On January 23, 1994, USA Today published the results of an analysis of the most

comprehensive data available at that time of private religious experience based on
a national sociological survey conducted for the National Opinion Research Center,
University of Chicago, which reveals that more than two-thirds of Americans claim
to have had at least one mystical experience. According to Jeffrey S. Levin, an
associate professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, Virginia, such
experiences as visions and the feeling of being connected to a powerful spiritual
force that elevates one's consciousness are reported less by those people who are
active in church or synagogue. All types of mystical experiences have been around
since "time immemorial," Levin acknowledges, but "some kind of stigma" may have
prevented people from reporting them. However, while only 5 percent of the
population has such experiences somewhat regularly, such occurrences are
becoming "more common with each successive generation."

As these many polls and surveys demonstrate, visions come to the religious, the
non-religious, and the antireligious alike. To the psychologist, these experiences
may be revelations of the personal unconscious of the individual and attempts at
psychic integration or psychic wholeness. Dr. Robert E. L. Masters and Dr. Jean
Houston were among the first researchers to have recognized that throughout
history people have sought altered states of consciousness as gateways "to
subjective realities." At their Foundation for Mind Research, which they established

122
in 1966, they concluded on the basis of hundreds of experiments with normal,
healthy persons that the "brain-mind system has a built-in contact point with what is
experienced as God, fundamental reality, or the profoundly sacred."
(Time, October 5, 1970).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scientists have begun asking if the
"brain-mind system," with its built-in contact point with God or a greater reality that
produces such mystical experiences as visions, can be better explained in terms of
neural networks, neurotransmitters, and brain chemistry. Philadelphia scientist
Andrew Newberg, who wrote the book Why God Won't Go Away (2001), says that
the human brain is set up in such a way as to have spiritual and religious
experiences. Michael Persinger, a professor of neuroscience at Laurentian
University in Sudbury, Ontario, conducts experiments with a helmet-like device that
runs a weak electro-magnetic signal around the skulls of volunteers. Persinger
claims that four in five people report a mystical experience of some kind when they
don this magnetic headpiece. Matthew Alper, author of The "God" Part of the
Brain (1998), a book about the neuroscience of belief, goes so far as to declare
that dogmatic religious beliefs that insist that particular faiths are unique, rather
than the results of universal brain chemistry, are irrational and dangerous.

Daniel Batson, a University of Kansas psychologist who studies the effect of

religion on people, states that the brain may be the hardware through which
religion is experienced, but for certain neurotheologians to say that the brain
produces religion "is like saying a piano produces music." In his book The Faith of
Biology and the Biology of Faith (2000), Robert Pollack concedes that religious
experience may seem irrational to a materialistic scientist, but he argues that
irrational experiences are not necessarily unreal. In fact, he states, they can be just
as real, just as much a part of being human, as those things which are known
through reason.

Numerous believers in the possibility of experiencing visions and religious

apparitions argue that if God created the universe, wouldn't it make sense that he
would wire the human brain so it would be possible to have mystical experiences?

Huston Smith (1919– ), author of The World's Religions (first published as The

Religions of Man in 1958), was six weeks short of earning his Ph.D. in naturalistic
theism—a philosophical system that emphasizes science over religion—when he
happened to read philosopher Gerald Heard's (1889–1971) sympathetic treatment
of the mystical experience in Pain, Sex and Time (1939). Smith said that he
experienced an epiphany when he read Heard's argument that mysticism is the
true experience of God. He completed his degree in naturalistic theism, but for the
next 45 years he has sought out the mystic path in every religion he has
encountered. In Why Religion Matters: The Future of Faith in an Age of
Disbelief (2001), Smith seeks to explain the differences between science and
religion. Where science attempts to define reality through numbers, formulas, and
facts, religion strives to know it through spiritual practice and devotion. "Scientism,"

123
the belief that only science has all the answers, ultimately fails when it attempts to
answer the questions that have troubled humans since the beginning of human
existence—who are we…why are we here, and how should we behave while we
are here?

Writer Eddie Ensley believes that the visionary dimension of spirituality has the
ability to transform a person and reconnect humanity to its innate yearning for God.
Ensley, of Native American descent, states in Visions: The Soul's Path to the
Sacred (2000), that human beings are "fashioned to see God" and nurture a "deep
desire for this mystery and an ability to be open to it and receive it." Ensley, who
has a master's degree in pastoral ministry from Loyola University in New Orleans,
also says that the Christian, Jewish, and Native American ancestors "understood
the subtle interrelationships of flesh and spirit more accurately than we do. When
they received visions, they knew what to do with them."

Because sociological, psychological, and religious research have all discovered

that visions are much more common than scholars once believed, Ensley is of the
opinion that such experiences should be treated differently by both the church and
society at large. "People who have mystical experiences are not crazy," he said.
"Some research suggests that they tend to be (mentally) healthier."

Numerous studies substantiate Ensley's high opinion regarding the mental health
of visionaries. Among such studies is one conducted by psychologists at Carleton
University of Ottawa, Canada, published in the November 1993 issue of
the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, in which they reported that those individuals
examined who had "seemingly bizarre experiences," such as mystical visions,
missing time, and so forth, were just as intelligent and psychologically healthy as
other people. Recognizing that their findings contradicted the previously held
notion that such individuals had "wild imaginations" and could be "easily swayed
into believing the unbelievable," the psychologists who had administered an
extensive battery of psychological tests to the subjects found that they tended to be
"white-collar, relatively well-educated representatives of the middle class."

Albacete, a Roman Catholic priest and a professor of theology at St. Joseph's

Seminary in Yonkers, acknowledges that until recently psychiatric orthodoxy held
the view that the more "sensational a person's religious experience (voices,
visions…extraordinary missions), the more pathological the underlying conflict."
Then, in 1994, the American Psychiatric Association softened its position and
officially recognized the "religious or spiritual" as a normal dimension of life.

"As a believer and as a priest, as well as a former scientist," Albacete says that he
finds himself "somewhat nervous about this blurring." He suggests that it is only
right that psychiatrists and neurologists should find it difficult to incorporate the
transcendent into scientific methodology and that they should look upon mystics
and visionaries as if they were suffering mental disturbances. "If the religious
experience is an authentic contact with a transcendent mystery, it not only will but

124
should exceed the grasp of science," he reasons. "Otherwise what about it would
be transcendent?"

Albacete quotes Monika Grygiel, who told him that as a psychiatrist, she
experienced "great poverty before the mystery perceived in the religious
experience." As a psychiatrist who was also a person of faith, she said that her
hope was that she would not "destroy the patient's extraordinary experience, but
help him or her integrate it into the rest of life as harmoniously as possible."

Delving Deeper
Alper, Matthew. The "God" Part of the Brain. Rogue Press, 2001.

Benson, Carmen. Supernatural Dreams & Visions. Planfield, N.J.: Logos

International, 1970.

Ensley, Eddie. Visions: The Soul's Path to the Sacred. New Orleans: Loyola Press,
2001.

Newberg, Andrew, Eugene G. D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. Why God Won't Go

Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine, 2001.

Smith, Huston. Why Religion Matters: The Future of Faith in an Age of

Disbelief. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001.
Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained

Visions
Views 2,341,051Updated Jun 03 2020

Visions
Term derived from Latin visus, past participle of videre, to see, indicating the
appearance to human beings of supernatural persons or scenes. Of great
frequency in early and medieval times, and among primitive or semi-civilized races,
visions seem to have decreased proportionately with the advance of learning and
enlightenment. Thus, among the Greeks and Romans of the classic period, they
were comparatively rare, although visions of demons or gods were occasionally
seen. On the other hand, among Oriental races, the seeing of visions was a
common occurrence, and these visions took more varied shapes.

In medieval Europe, visions were almost commonplace, and directions were given

by the church to enable men to distinguish visions of divine origin from false

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delusions which were either self-generated or the work of the demons and/or the
devil.

Visions may be roughly divided into two classes—those which are spontaneous
and those which are induced. The great majority belong to the latter class.

In 1854, Joseph Ennemoser, in his work The History of Magic, enumerated

causative factors in the appearance of visions to an individual: (1) a sensitive
organism and delicate constitution; (2) a religious education and ascetic life
(fasting, penance, etc.);(3) narcotics—opium, wine, incense, narcotic salves (witch-
salves); (4) delirium, monomania; and/or (5) fear and expectation, preparatory
words, songs, and prayers.

Among the visions induced by prayer and fasting and the severe self-discipline of
the religious ascetic, must be included many historical or traditional instances—the
visions of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Anthony, St. Bernard Ignatius, St. Catherine of
Siena, St. Hildegarde, and Joan of Arc. It may be noted that the convent has often
been the special haunt of religious visions. A wave of apparitions of the Virgin
Mary began in France early in the nineteenth century and several hundred
incidents have been reported in the intervening decades to the present time.
(See Garabandal; Medjugorje )

But the most potent means for the induction of visionary appearances are those
discovered and used by indigenous people around the world. Over the ages people
have indulged in narcotic substances, especially those with hallucinogenic
properties, from opium and hashish to peyote. They have also used a variety of
spiritual, psychic, and physical disciplines. Thus some fakirs, yogis, and other
practitioners have been known to gaze for hours at a time at one object or remain
for months in practically the same position, or practice various mortifications of the
body, so that they may fall at length into a visionary state. Another ancient method
of inducing visionary experience was staring into a shiny object such as a crystal or
magic mirror.

The narcotic salves with which some anoint themselves are said to be similar to
the witch unguents used in the Middle Ages, which induced in the witch the
hallucination that she was flying through the air on a goat or a broomstick. Opium
is also said to produce a sensation of flying, as well as visions of celestial delight.
Alcoholic intoxication can induce visions of a more negative nature, most notably of
insects or animals, as those who have experienced delirium can attest. Nitrogen
may have a similar effect. The vapors rising from the ground in some places, or
those found in certain caverns, are said to exercise an influence similar to that of
narcotics.

Native Americans practiced external methods of inducing visions—solitude, fasting,

and the use of salves or ointments. The vision quest was a popular activity of
young men in many tribes. In some African, West Indian, and Arabic countries

126
certain dances produced altered conferences, helping participants toward the
desired visionary ecstasy. Rhythmic and repetitive music also assisted this
process.

Spontaneous Visions
Spontaneous visions, although less common, are yet sufficiently numerous to merit
attention here. The difficulty is, of course, to know just how far "fear and
expectation" may have operated to induce the vision. In many cases, as in that of
the seer Emanuel Swedenborg, the visions may have commenced as "visions of
the night," hardly to be distinguished from dreams, and so from vision of an
"internal" nature to clearly externalized apparitions. Swedenborg himself declared
that when seeing visions of the latter class he used his senses exactly as when
awake, dwelling with the spirits as a spirit, but able to return to his body when he
pleased. The artist Benvenuto Cellini, like Swedenborg, had a number of
spontaneous visions, though little of the same positive results.

Visions are by no means confined to the sense of sight. Taste, hearing, smelling,
and touch may all be experienced in a vision. Joan of Arc, for instance, heard
voices encouraging her to be the deliverer of her country. Examples may be drawn
from the Hebrew Bible, as the case of the child Samuel in the temple (I Sam. 3:4),
and instances could be multiplied from all ages and all times.

The visions of John Pordage (1607-1681) and the "Philadelphia Society," or, as
they called themselves later, the "Angelic Brethren," a British organization
stemming from the mysticism of Jakob Boehme in 1651, were noteworthy in this
respect because they included the taste of "brimstone, salt, and soot." In the
presence of the "Angelic Brethren," pictures were drawn on the windowpanes by
invisible hands and were seen to move about.

Physiological explanations of visions have, from the earliest times, been

offered. Plato observed:

"The eye is the organ of a fire which does not burn but gives a mild light. The rays
proceeding from the eye meet those of the outward light. With the departure of the
outward light the inner also becomes less active; all inward movements become
calmer and less disturbed; and should any more prominent influences have
remained they become in various points where they congregate, so many pictures
of the fancy."

Democritus held that visions and dreams are passing shapes, ideal forms
proceeding from other beings. Of deathbed visions Plutarch said:

"It is not probable that in death the soul gains new powers which it was not before
possessed of when the heart was confined within the chains of the body; but it is
much more probable that these powers were always in being, though dimmed and
clogged by the body; and the soul is only then able to practise them when the

127
corporeal bonds are loosened, and the drooping limbs and stagnating juices no
longer oppress it."

The Spiritualist theory of visions can hardly be called a physiological one, save
insofar as spirit may be regarded as refined matter. An old theory of visionary
ecstasy on these lines was that the soul left the body and proceeded to celestial
spheres, where it remained in contemplation of divine scenes and persons.

In modern times, the idea of the soul as an entity distinct from the physical body
has been studied under the name of out-of-the-body travel. Stemming from this
concept is the modern study of near-death experiences, in which individuals
regarded as clinically dead have been revived and have described visionary
experiences (see death ).

Similar to this was the doctrine of Swedenborg, whose spirit, he believed, could
commune with discarnate spirits (the souls of the dead) as one of themselves. To
this may be traced the doctrines of modern Spiritualism, which thus regarded
visions as actual spirits or spirit scenes, visible to the ecstatic or entranced subject
whose spirit was projected to discarnate planes.

The question whether or not visions are contagious has been much disputed. It has
been said that such appearances may be transferred from one person to another
by the laying on of hands. In the case of those Scottish seers who claimed second
sight, such a transference may take place even by accidental contact with the
seer. The vision of the second person is, however, less distinct than that of the
original seer.

The same idea prevailed with regard to the visions of "magnetized" patients in the
days of animal magnetism. Insofar as these may be identified with the collective
hallucinations of the hypnotic state, there is no definite scientific evidence to prove
their existence.

Visions occur to people of all cultures and all states and positions. They come to
the irreligious and educated, and by no means have they been confined to the
ignorant or the superstitious. Many men of genius have been subject to visionary
appearance. While Raphael was trying to paint the Madonna, she appeared to him
in a vision. The famous composition known as the "Devil's Sonata" was said to
have been dictated to Tartini by the devil himself. Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe also had visions. William Blake 's portraits of the Patriarchs were done
from visionary beings which appeared to him in the night. There have been a
number of such instances.

Sources:
Barrett, Sir William. Death Bed Visions. London: Methuen, 1926.

128
Besterman, Theodore. Crystal-Gazing: A Study in the History, Distribution, Theory
and Practice of Scrying. London: William Rider, 1924. Reprint, New Hyde Park,
N.Y.: University Books, 1965.

Fielding-Ould, Fielding. The Wonders of the Saints in the Light of

Spiritualism. London: John M. Watkins, 1919.

Halifax, Joan. Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives. New York: E. P.

Dutton, 1979.

Hall, Manly P. Visions and Metaphysical Experiences. Los Angeles: Philosophical

Research Society, n.d.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. London: Chatto & Windus, 1954.

Reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Klonsky, Milton. William Blake: The Seer and His Visions. New York: Crown
Publishers, 1977.

Lewis, David. The Life of S. Teresa of Jesus. London, 1970.

Muldoon, Sylvan J., and Hereward Carrington. The Projection of the Astral

Body. London: Rider, 1929.

Pordage, John. Truth Appearing Through the Clouds of Unde-served

Scandal. N.p., 1655.

Ring, Kenneth. Life at Death; A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death

Experience. New York: William Morrow, 1980.
Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology

Visions
Views 1,441,619Updated May 29 2020

VISIONS
A supernatural vision is a charism (gratia gratis data) through which an individual
perceives some object that is naturally invisible to man. The term "supernatural" is
used to distinguish true visions from illusions or hallucinations caused by
pathological mental states or diabolical influence. The term "charismatic" is used to
exclude the illuminations that ordinarily accompany mystical activity (cf. St. John of
the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk. 2, ch. 11, 17, 24; St. Teresa of Avila, The
Life, ch. 28–29; Interior Castle, 6th Mansions ch. 9). St. Augustine, and after him,
St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Thomas Aquinas, divided visions
into corporeal, imaginative, and intellectual.

129
In a corporeal vision, also called an apparition, the eyes perceive an object that is
normally invisible to the sense of sight. This may be caused by an external object
or by some power impressing an image directly on the sense of sight. A corporeal
vision could be caused directly by God or mediately through an angelic power. It
could also be caused by the devil or be a purely natural phenomenon (optical
illusion). Imaginative vision is a phantasm supernaturally caused in the imagination
without the aid of the sense of sight. It may occur during sleep, or in waking hours
when it is usually accompanied by ecstasy. The vision may be symbolic (the ladder
in Jacob's dream), personal (vision of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary), or
dramatic (the vision during the mystical espousal of St. Catherine of Siena). Signs
of the supernatural origin of imaginative visions are that they produce greater virtue
in the soul; they cannot be produced or dismissed at will; they leave the soul in
great peace (cf. St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 6th Mansions, ch. 10; J. G.
Arintero, The Mystical Evolution, v. 2, ch. 7). Imaginative visions can proceed also
from diabolical influence or purely natural causes. In an intellectual vision a simple
intuitive knowledge is produced supernaturally without the aid of any impressed
species in the internal or external senses (see species, intentional). The
impression may last for hours or days, unlike the lower types of vision, which are
usually transitory. It may occur during sleep or in waking hours, but only God can
produce it, since only God has access to the human intellect. It gives remarkable
certitude to the visionary. The vision is often a simple mental intuition of some truth
or mystery that is seen by the intellect without any form or image (cf. St. Teresa of
Avila, The Life, ch. 27; Interior Castle 6th Mansions, ch. 8).

Apparitions of Christ, Mary, and the blessed are to be considered as

representations effected through the instrumentality of angels (cf. St. Thomas, In 4
sent. 44 sol. 3 ad 4). Visions of the divine essence are to be considered as "some
kind of representation" (cf. St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 7th Mansions, ch. 1)
and not an intuitive vision of the divine essence, although some theologians admit
the possibility of a transitory beatific vision in this life (cf. St. Thomas, Summa
theologiae 2a2ae, 175.3). Angels or demons could be permitted by God to assume
some material form, as of a cloud, vapor, or rays of light. The same explanation
can be offered for the appearance of those who are dead, for the separated human
soul is a purely spiritual substance (cf. St. Thomas, ibid. 1a, 51.2 ad 2; Suppl.
69.3). The appearance of persons still living on earth is an apparent bilocation and
is to be judged accordingly (see mystical phenomena).

Like charisms, visions are primarily for the good of others. They are not proofs of
sanctity and are not to be sought or desired, since they are not necessary for
salvation or sanctity. On the other hand, illuminations that are concomitant with the
mystical state are primarily for the benefit of the mystic who receives them and
they may be desired.

The word of a visionary cannot be taken as certain proof that a vision was
supernatural in origin. It could have been the result of diabolical intervention or the
pathological state of the individual. Even in devout souls it is possible for the
subliminal activity of the subconscious to influence the conscious mind so that the

130
individual is unwittingly a victim of illusion. In such instances the most that can be
granted is a negative approval, namely, that there is nothing in the vision contrary
to faith and morals.

Bibliography: john of the cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk 2, v.1 of Complete

Works, ed. P. silverio de santa teresa and e. a. peers, 3 v. (Westminster, Md.
1953). teresa of avila, Complete Works, ed. p. silverio de santa teresa and e. a.
peers, 3v. (New York 1946), v.1 The Life, 10–300; v.2 Interior Castle, 199–351.
thomas aquinas, Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 171–175. j.g. arintero, The Mystical
Evolution in the Development and Vitality of the Church, tr. j. aumann, 2 v. (St.
Louis 1949–51) 2:304–333. a. royo and j. aumann, The Theology of Christian
Perfection (Dubuque, IA 1962) 655–658. r. garrigou-lagrange, The Three Ages of
the Interior Life, tr. t. doyle, 2 v. (St. Louis 1947–48) 2:280-288. a. f. poulain, The
Graces of Interior Prayer, tr. l. l. smith (6th ed. St. Louis 1950) 266–297.

[j. aumann]
New Catholic Encyclopedia AUMANN, J.

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 Visiting Hours
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Illumination
The Buddha (c. 563–c. 483 b.c.e.) had spent one week in samadhi, a state of
deep awareness when, on the morning of December 8, 528 b.c.e., he looked up at
Venus, the morning star, beheld its brilliance, and exclaimed in a state of
enlightenment, "That's it! That's me! That's me that's shining so brilliantly!"

Rinzai Zen master Shodo Harada Roshi (1940– ) writes, in Morning Dewdrops of
the Mind: Teachings of a Contemporary Zen Master (1993), that Buddha, in the
rebirth of his consciousness, looked around and saw how wondrous it was that all
beings were shining with the brilliance of the morning star. From such a deep
illumination of the mind of Buddha, all of Buddha's wisdom was born and all of Zen
was held within the deep impression of Buddha's mind at that moment. Therefore,
each year as the eighth of December approaches, Zen monks anticipate
the rohatsu sesshin (intensive meditation retreat) and vow to experience the
brilliance of such a deep realization.

In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934), D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) describes

satori, the state of illumination attained by reaching a higher level of
consciousness, as the state that the masters of Zen call the mind of Buddha, the
knowledge whereby humans experience enlightenment or Prajna, the highest
wisdom. "It is the godly light, the inner heaven, the key of all the treasures of the
mind, the focal point of thought and consciousness, the source of power and might,
the seat of goodness, of justice, of sympathy, of the measure of all things," Suzuki
states. "When this inmost knowledge is fully awakened, we are able to understand
that each of us is identical in spirit, in being, and in nature with universal life."

The Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita's instruction on how best to practice Yoga ends
with the promise that "…when the mind of the Yogi is in harmony and finds rest in
the Spirit within, all restless desires gone, then he is a Yukta, one in God. Then his
soul is a lamp whose light is steady, for it burns in a shelter where no winds come."

In the chapter on "Basic Mystical Experience" in his Watcher on the Hills (1959),

Dr. Raynor C. Johnson (1901–1987) places "the appearance of light" at the top of
his list of illumination characteristics:

1. The Appearance of light. This observation is uniformly made, and may be regarded

as a criterion of the contact of soul and Spirit.
2. Ecstasy, love, bliss. Directly or by implication, almost all the accounts [of mystical
experience] refer to the supreme emotional tones of the experience.

134
3. The Approach to one-ness. In the union of soul with Spirit, the former acquires a
sense of unity with all things.

Johnson lists other aspects of the illumination as profound insights given to the
recipient of the experience; a positive effect on the person's health and vitality; a
sense that time has been obscured or altered; and a positive effect on the
individual's lifestyle. Johnson quotes a recipient of the illumination experience who
said, "Its significance for me has been incalculable and has helped me through
sorrows and stresses."

In her autobiographical work Don't Fall Off the Mountain (1970),

actress/author Shirley MacLaine (1934– ) tells of the night that she lay shivering in
a Bhutanese hut in the Paro Valley of the Himalayas, wondering how she might
overcome the terrible cold. Suddenly she remembered the words of a Yoga
instructor in Calcutta who had told her that there was a center in her mind that was
her nucleus, the center of her universe. Once she would find this nucleus, neither
pain, fear, nor sorrow, could touch her. He had instructed her that it would look like
a tiny sun. "The sun is the center of every solar system and the reason for all life
on all planets in all universes," he had said. "So it is with yours."

With her teeth chattering, she closed her eyes and searched for the center of her
mind. Then the cold room and the wind outside began to leave her conscious mind.
Slowly in the center of her mind's eye a tiny, round, orange ball appeared. She
stared and stared at it. Then she felt as though she had become the little orange
ball. Heat began to spread down through her neck and arms and finally stopped in
her stomach. She felt drops of perspiration on her midriff and forehead.

MacLaine writes that the light grew brighter and brighter until she finally sat up on
her cot with a start and opened her eyes, fully expecting to find that someone had
turned on a light. "I lay back," she said. "I felt as though I was glowing.… The
instructor was right; hidden beneath the surface there was something greater than
my outer self."

Parapsychologist Dr. W. G. Roll has commented that "It is true that this light
phenomenon does occur. Some people believe it's a sort of quasi-physical light.
When we get into these areas, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the
physical and the spiritual worlds. What we call the spiritual, the physical, and the
mental, are probably all the same thing."

Dr. Walter Houston Clark speaks of the phenomenon of the blinding light of
illumination in connection with those who have undergone revelatory experiences
as "…a kind of symbol of the new and freeing insight into the nature of the
subject's existence. However, I am inclined to think that the profundity and
excitement of the experience causes some kind of nervous activity that produces
the light. Of course, in some sense, this may have a cosmic origin."

135
Writing in Psychiatry (Vol. 29, 1966), Dr. Arthur J. Deikman refers to the mystical
perceptions of encompassing light in terms of his hypothesis of a "sensory
translation," which he defines as "the perception of psychic action (conflict,
repression, problem solving, attentiveness, and so forth) via the relatively
unstructured sensations of light, color, movement, force, sound, smell or taste.
… 'Sensory translation' refers to the experience of nonverbal, simple, concrete
perceptual equivalents of psychic action." In Deikman's theory, "light" may be more
than a metaphor for mystical experience: "Illumination may be derived from an
actual sensory experience occurring when, in the cognitive act of unification, a
liberation of energy takes place, or when a resolution of unconscious conflict
occurs, permitting the experience of 'peace,' 'presence,' and the like. Liberated
energy experienced as light may be the core sensory experience of mysticism."

According to research conducted at the University of Wales, Christians, Jews, and

Muslims have similar experiences in which they describe an intense light and a
sense of encompassing love. The research-in-progress, funded by the Sir Alister
Hardy Trust, has collected 6,000 accounts of religious experiences from people of
all ages and backgrounds. About 1,000 of these describe a light which enters the
room, and others tell of being enveloped or filled with light. Most people are alone
when they have such an experience, but the researchers have collected accounts
of a number of individuals witnessing the same light.

Sir Alister Hardy (1896–1985) formed the Religious Experience Research Unit,
Manchester College, Oxford, in 1969 and began the program by studying a more
general kind of spiritual awareness—the feeling of being in touch with some
"transcendental power, whether called God or not, which leads to a better life."
Although the researchers stressed their interest in collecting these kinds of reports,
they immediately received an almost equal number "of the more ecstatic mystical
type," which included experiences with the light phenomenon that accompanied
illumination.

In his book The Divine Flame (1966) Hardy suggested that science should

"entertain the possibility that the rapture of spiritual experience…may…be a part of
natural history…and that perhaps it may have only developed as religion when
man's speech enabled him to compare and discuss this strange feeling of what
[Rudolf] Otto called the numinous…[and] what I am calling a divine flame as an
integral part of the creative evolutionary process which man, with his greater
perceptive faculties, is now becoming aware."

Hardy concedes that science can no more be concerned with the "inner essence"
of religion than it can be with the nature of art or the poetry of human love. But he
does maintain that "an organized scientific knowledge— indeed one closely related
to psychology— dealing with the records of man's religious experience…need not
destroy the elements of religion which are most precious to man—any more than

136
our biological knowledge of sex need diminish the passion and beauty of human
love."

With the advent of the twenty-first century, many scientists are involved in research
projects dealing with religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences. Varieties of
Anomalous Experiences (2000), edited by Etzel Cardena, of the University of
Texas Pan American in Edinburg, Steven J. Lynn, of the State University of New
York at Binghamton, and Stanley Krippner, of the Saybrook Graduate School
in San Francisco, examines the scientific evidence for altered states of
consciousness associated with mystical experiences and other so-called
anomalous events. According to Science News (February 17, 2001), the three
psychologists "see no reason to assume that supernatural worlds…exist outside of
the minds of people who report them. Instead [they] want to launch a science to
study the characteristics of human consciousness that make mystical experiences
possible. Their focus on a spectrum of consciousness defies the mainstream
notion that there's a single type of awareness.…"

David M. Wulff, a psychologist at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, has

said that mystical experiences occur on a continuum: "Even if they are not
religiously inspired, they can be striking, such as the transcendent feelings
musicians sometimes get while they perform. I have colleagues who say they've
had mystical experiences, although they have various ways to explain them."

Other scientists pursuing the study of mystical experiences suggest that the
transcendent feelings noted by musicians, actors, and artists; the claims of two-
thirds of American adults who claim to have been in touch with a force or spirit
outside of themselves; and even the illumination of Buddha or the heavenly voices
heard by Moses (14th–13th century b.c.e.), Muhammed (c. 570c.e.–632c.e.), and
Jesus (c. 6 b.c.e.–c. 30 c.e.) were nothing more than the decreased activity of the
brain's parietal lobe, which helps regulate the sense of self and physical
orientation. And what of the feelings of unconditional love and overwhelming
compassion for all living things that come over so many of those who claim
illumination? These scientists argue that perhaps prayer, meditation, chanting, or
some other religious or spiritual practice could have activated the temporal lobe,
which imbues certain experiences with personal significance.

Other scientists testing the boundaries of the human psyche and the wonders of
illumination are more open to the reality of the individual mystical experience.
While researchers like Matthew Alper, author of The "God" Part of the
Brain (1998), argue that human brains are hardwired for God and religious
experiences, others, such as Daniel Batson, a University of Kansas psychologist,
respond that the "brain is the hardware through which religion is experienced."

Duke psychiatrist Roy Mathew told the Washington Post (June 18, 2001) that too
many of the contemporary neuroscientists and neurotheologians are "taking the
viewpoints of the physicists of the last century that everything is matter. I am open

137
to the possibility that there is more to this than what meets the eye. I don't believe
in the omnipotence of science or that we have a foolproof explanation."

Delving Deeper
Bach, Marcus. The Inner Ecstasy. New York, Cleveland: World Publishing, 1969.

James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience. Garden City, N.Y.: Masterworks

Program, 1902.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. New York: Galaxy Books, 1958.

Suzuki, D. T. Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist. New York: Perennial, 1971.

Tart, Charles T. Altered States of Consciousness. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1969.

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. New York: Dutton, 1961.

Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained

Illumination
Views 2,884,731Updated May 29 2020

ILLUMINATION
The idea of a divine "illumination" in the mind occurs in both philosophical and
religious contexts. Often it forms one of the links between the two types of thought,
and sometimes it bears distinctly religious overtones even in its more philosophical
applications. This is one of the characteristic features of the theory of illumination in
the thought of Plato, where it played, for the first time in its long history, a major
part. Plato, like many other thinkers, creative artists, prophets, and mystics, spoke
readily of the sudden flash of understanding or insight in the mind as a flood of light
(see, for example, his Seventh Letter, 341c, 344b). The image is, indeed, one that
occurs naturally in many languages and is especially apt for the description of
insight thought to have been achieved as a result of external aid of some kind, of
an "inspiration." The language of inspiration is based on the entry of breath, and
that of illumination on the entry of light into the mind. The Stoic tradition can be
said to have developed the former analogy in its metaphysics; Plato was
undoubtedly the father of the philosophical tradition to which the analogy of light is
fundamental.

In his Republic, Plato employed the analogy of light and vision to describe the
process of understanding or of knowledge in general (Books V–VIII). The mind's
knowledge of the world of intelligible reality, of the forms or ideas, was held to be
analogous to the awareness of material objects accessible to the eye's vision when

138
illuminated by the light of the sun. Plato developed a detailed correspondence
between physical and intellectual sight (Republic 507f.), according to which the
mind corresponds to the eye and the form to the physical object seen; an
"intellectual light" emanating from the supreme form, the Good, and pervasive of
the whole intelligible world as well as the mind, corresponds to the sun.
Understanding, in terms of this analogy, depends on the intellectual illumination of
the mind and its objects, just as vision depends on a physical illumination of the
eye and its objects.

A theory of this type, in one or another of many variant forms, became an essential
part of a vast body of thought cast in Platonic molds. During the Hellenistic and
Roman periods it was widely diffused and incorporated into Jewish and Christian
thought. In the Hellenized Judaic milieu of Alexandria the divine wisdom was
sometimes spoken of in terms of light, for instance, by the author of the book of
Wisdom, who referred to it as "an effulgence of eternal light," which he interpreted
as an image of God's goodness (7, 26). Thoughts of this kind found a place in the
work of Philo and in the prologue to the Fourth Gospel. Middle-Platonist thinkers,
such as Albinus, took the step—perhaps already hinted at by Plato in some
passages—of placing the forms within a divine mind and, in effect, identifying the
"intelligible world" with the mind of God. In this way a long and rich future was
prepared for the theory of illumination within the body of Christian thought.

In Christian thought it is in the work of St. Augustine of Hippo that the theory of
illumination is found in its most highly developed form. Like Plato, Augustine
thought of understanding as analogous to seeing. Understanding, or intellectual
sight, was therefore, he held, conditional on illumination, just as physical sight was;
only here the light was the intelligible light that emanated from the divine mind and
in illuminating the human mind endowed it with understanding. Understanding, in
the last resort, was an inward participation of the human mind in the divine. The
scope of illumination was further extended, at the cost of precision, in the work of
the pseudo-Dionysius. His favorite designation for God, the absolutely
transcendent One, was in terms of light. God is the intelligible light beyond all light
and the inexhaustibly rich source of brightness that extends to all intelligence. His
illuminating activity gathers and reunites all that it touches; it perfects creatures
endowed with reason and understanding by uniting them with the one all-pervading
light (De Divinus Nominibus, IV, 6). In true Neoplatonic fashion, the pseudo-
Dionysius conceived of the cosmos as a hierarchically ordered system, descending
in order of reality and value from its source, the One. Illumination, in general terms,
is the means by which intellectual creatures ascend and return to unity, and the
"hierarchy" (understood as extending through both the cosmos and the church) is
defined as the divine arrangement whereby all things, participating in their measure
in the divine light, are brought back to as close a union with the source of this light
as is possible for them (De Coelestia Hierarchia, III, 1). In a more special sense,
illumination is the second of three phases—namely purification, illumination, and
perfection—of man's return to the One. In this more specialized sense the church's
sacramental system and the grades in the ecclesiastical hierarchy concerned with
139
its administration are agencies of divine illumination. Illumination is the
intermediate stage of approach to God, between initial purification and final
perfection (De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, V, 1, 3). In the most restricted sacramental
contexts "illumination" thus becomes synonymous, in accordance with an old
Christian usage, with "baptism." In the work of the pseudo-Dionysius the theory of
illumination was merged with an inclusive conception of the spiritual life formulated
in the language of light and illumination.

The reputation enjoyed by Augustine and by the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius

in the Middle Ages assured their views a long future. In the thirteenth century the
rise of Christian Aristotelianism provided the first serious alternative theory of
knowledge. In this there was no place for the intervention of a divine illumination as
an essential constituent of knowledge. Knowledge was accounted for entirely in
terms of mental activity and its objects, and no reference to God was necessary to
explain it. Nevertheless, the lumen intellectuale of the mind was held to be a
participation in the lumen divinum of the divine mind, since God was present
everywhere, in the mind no less than in other things. In this way Christian
Aristotelians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, were able to endorse some
characteristically Augustinian statements in spite of the fact that their theories of
knowledge were built on a radically different structure. The Augustinian version of
the theory of illumination continued to have a vogue among some thinkers of the
thirteenth century, such as St. Bonaventure, and even later. It found echoes in the
thought of some modern philosophers, such as Nicolas Malebranche. Increasingly,
however, in the later Middle Ages and after, the language of illumination, especially
as elaborated by the pseudo-Dionysius, became the special property of mystical
writers and writers on the spiritual life.

See also Alcinous; Augustine, St.; Bonaventure, St.; Malebranche,

Nicolas; Plato; Pseudo-Dionysius; Thomas Aquinas, St.

Bibliography
Allers, R. "St. Augustine's Doctrine on Illumination." Franciscan Studies 12 (1952):
27–46.

Geach, P. Mental Acts. London: Routledge and Paul, 1957. Section 11 and the
appendix include corrections of the standard account of Thomas Aquinas's theory
of concept formation.

Gersh, Stephen. From Iamblichus to Erigena: An Investigation of the Prehistory

and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 1978.

Jolivet, R. Dieu soleil des esprits. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934. A study of the
theory of illumination.

140
Markus, R. A. "St. Augustine on Signs." Phronesis 2 (1957): 60–83. Includes a
discussion of illumination in Augustine's theory of knowledge.

Marrone, Steven. The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God

in the Thirteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

Pasnau, Robert. "Henry of Ghent and the Twilight of Divine Illumination." Review

of Metaphysics 49 (1995): 49–75.

Pasnau, Robert. Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of

Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
2002.

R. A. Markus (1967)

Bibliography updated by Christian B. Miller (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy Markus, R.

Illumination
Views 3,000,129Updated Jun 03 2020

ILLUMINATION
Literally, the action of illuminating or the condition of being illuminated; in
philosophy and theology, a special divine influence aiding man in obtaining certain,
necessary, and universal knowledge. The latter notion is discussed here in its
sources, in Augustinian thought, and in some later applications.

Sources. In ancient and medieval thought, light was considered ontologically as

both a physical and a spiritual substance. On this basis a metaphysics of light
developed; its offspring was a noetics of light called the theory of illumination. The
premises for such a theory were found in the monistic system of emanation of
plotinus, who taught that the world soul emanates from the One via the Nous. This
world soul sends its rays and mirrors itself in bodies as the fourth hypostasis. Such
illumination is a two-way process, however, for the rays reflected from the bodies
return to the soul, to the Nous, to the One in a mystic ascent, and to a final reunion
in which being and cognition are identical.

Plotinus's teaching was transmitted to the later Middle Ages through neoplatonism.

The Arabs generally adopted the theory, but brought into it Aristotelian notions. In
this amalgam the intellectus agens of Aristotle was no longer an individual human
possession, but one for the entire human species, identified with the tenth Cosmic
Intelligence.

141
Augustine's Theory. St. augustine utilized the doctrine of divine light in St. John's
gospel to develop a theory of knowledge. Convinced of man's personal nature,
Augustine was safe from Plotinus's monopsychism of the fourth hypostasis; human
knowledge, for him, does not originate in an identity of man with the intelligible
world, but rather in an encounter with this world without loss of personal
uniqueness.

Augustine's theory of knowledge distinguishes an object, a subject, and a medium

of knowledge. These three components are proportioned to, and cooperate with,
one another in the noetic process. The objects are the material and immaterial
things known. The knowledge of sensible things, as well as the knowledge of
spiritual objects, can be obtained only under the influence of divine illumination.
The senses draw the soul's attention to what is happening outside the soul, and
their reports are judged in the divine light by the intellect. The true objects of
knowledge are the eternal reasons, which rank higher than the created intellect,
being contained in the divine intelligence. They constitute the intelligible world of
truths hierarchically ordered to, and culminating in, eternal truth. By participation in
these rationes aeternae a thing is what it is. Therefore, the human intellect can find
these reasons in all things. It depends on these truths for its judgment and
certainty.

The subject in this process of knowledge is the knowing intellect, man's soul. The
soul is not the very nature of truth. Although "all men are lamps" (In Ioann. 23.3),
they remain in darkness unless they are illuminated by the true Light. And while
man, by virtue of his intellectual nature, corresponds to the intelligible truths in the
divine light, the whole man (intellect and will) is required in knowing by divine
illumination. The medium through which object and subject unite in knowledge is
the divine light. God alone is the true light. It is He who enlightens and makes
intelligible.

Later Developments. In the 13th century, because of contact with Arabian

theories of knowledge and with translations of Aristotle's works (especially William
of Moerbeke's), Augustine's theory of illumination—until then the only theory of
knowledge for Christian thinkers —was gradually supplanted by the theory of
abstrac tion. St. bonaventure, however, while using the Aristotelian theory to
explain sense knowledge, invoked divine illumination—i.e., direct action of the
eternal reasons upon the intellect—as necessary for making infallible judgments.

St. thomas aquinas replaced divine illumination by the agent intellect, a power
created and given by God to man for the purpose of knowing and judging. Thus, for
him, the illuminating factor is given in man's nature. In a "conversion to the
phantasm" the agent intellect makes the noetic object appear in the human
consciousness. But that which is seen (illuminated) is not the thing as such (a form
in matter) but a form abstracted from matter, the universal abstracted from the
particular, the intelligible species abstracted from the phantasm. "Therefore, we
must say that our intellect understands material things by abstracting from the

142
phantasms; and through material things thus considered we acquire some
knowledge of immaterial things" (Summa theologiae 1a, 85.1).

A return to the illumination theory occurred in the 17th century with Nicolas
malebranche. He says in his answer to the first objection to the tenth of
his Éclaircissements sur les six livres de la Recherche de la Verit é (Paris 1678,
3:124): "Naturally, the mind is capable of movement in its ideas…. But it does not
move itself, it does not enlighten itself; it is God who effects everything (qui fait
tout ) in the minds as well as in the bodies." This ontological premise led
Malebranche directly to oc casionalism, which holds that God establishes
occasional causes in order to produce definite effects—such as the individual
man's recognizing and knowing the here-and-now presented object.

A 20th-century controversy arose over interpretations of St. Augustine's

illumination theory, with various scholars favoring the ontologistic, the historical, the
concordant, and the existential schools respectively. Although many issues of
Augustinian epistemology were thus clarified, there remained a shadow of
opaqueness, for Augustine himself never completely elucidated the function of the
divine light in the noetic realm.

See Also: illuminism; knowledge, theories of

Bibliography: f. c. copleston, History of Philosophy (Westminster, Md. 1946) v. 2,

4. s. vanni-rovighi, Enciclopedia filosofica 2:1237–41. j. auer, Lexikon für Theologie
und Kirche, ed. j. hofer and k. rahner, 10 v. (2d new ed. Freiburg 1957–65) 5:624–
625. É. h. gilson and t. d. langan, Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant (New
York 1963). a. a. maurer, Medieval Philosophy (New York 1962). k. rahner, Geist
in Welt (2d ed. Munich 1957). j. ratzinger, "Licht und Erleuchtung: Erwägungen zur
Stellung und Entwicklung des Themas in der abendländischen
Geistesgeschichte," Studium generale 13 (1960) 368–378. c. e. schÜtzinger, The
German Controversy on St. Augustine's Illumination Theory (New York 1960).

[c. e. schÜtzinger]

New Catholic Encyclopedia SCH ÜTZINGER, C. E.

Illumination
Views 3,031,873Updated May 17 2020

Illumination

143
The art of illumination—embellishing pages of manuscripts with hand-painted
decorations and illustrations—arose during the Middle Ages. Illuminated books
often featured large elaborate capital letters at the beginning of each section and
colorful illustrations in the margins. Artists of the Renaissance built on medieval*
traditions of illumination and also created new styles. Various cities in Italy and
other parts of Europe developed their own distinct styles of illumination.

New Developments and Old Traditions. One of the main changes that occurred
in the Renaissance involved a new style of script. In the early 1400s scholars in
Florence, including Poggio Bracciolini and Coluccio Salutati, developed a form of
writing consisting of both capital and lowercase letters. The new script spread
quickly among humanist* scholars. One of its distinctive characteristics was an
initial capital letter known as white vine, which featured vines twining through and
around the letter against a colored background.

At the same time, illumination artists remained faithful to many of the traditions of
the Middle Ages. They worked mostly on Bibles and other religious texts. They
followed medieval examples in their choice of subject, placement of illustrations,
and decorative style. For example, they continued to show an image of Christ on
the cross on missals (books with the text of the Roman Catholic Mass) and to use
popular decorative elements of the Middle Ages, such as leaves, flowers, and fruit.

Throughout the Middle Ages, religious institutions such as monasteries had played
a major role in manuscript production. This continued during the Renaissance, and
many scribes* and some illuminators were members of the clergy. However, in
many cities a network of people outside the church became involved in producing
manuscripts and books. These included entrepreneurs who paid for the materials,
commissioned the work, and sold the finished products, as well as the scribes,
illuminators, and binders who worked on the manuscripts. Well-to-do nobles and
merchants provided a growing market for these manuscripts as they sought to
build their libraries. Religious houses also supported the book trade by buying
manuscripts.

Italian Illumination. Florence was the most important center of illumination in the

1400s. Wealthy patrons* such as the Medici family promoted the enterprise.
Lorenzo de' Medici even ordered a series of illuminated prayer books for the
weddings of his daughters. The development of the university and the growth of
humanist studies also helped boost the local book trade. In addition, some of
Florence's leading artists, such as Fra Angelico, worked as illuminators.

144
Milan became a major center of illumination around 1400. Many of the best
illustrators in the region continued to work in the Gothic* style of the Middle Ages.
Members of Milan's ruling Visconti family were important patrons and eventually
collected a magnificent library. But after France conquered Lombardy (the region
around Milan) in 1499, the library fell into French hands.

In Venice, state papers were often illuminated. Artist Leonardo Bellini decorated
many of these documents, using some of the new artistic styles favored by his
uncle, the painter Jacopo Bellini. However, the most innovative artists of the mid-
1400s worked anonymously. The first books printed in Venice contained blank
areas where illuminations could be added by hand. Many of the artists who
illustrated these books later produced woodcuts* for printed works.

In Rome, popes and other church leaders provided patronage for many
illuminators. This support reached a peak in the mid-1400s under Pope Nicholas V,
who promoted the arts and learning. Popes and cardinals often hired illuminators
from their home cities. Some of the most splendid illuminated manuscripts
produced in Rome in the latter part of the 1400s were made for Pope Sixtus IV.

Many towns in Italy provided work for illuminators, and important nobles, such as
members of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, were major patrons. In Urbino, Duke
Federico da Montefeltro spent 30,000 ducats of his personal fortune on
manuscripts for his library. Wealthy monasteries also commissioned illuminated
works, particularly sets of choir books. In northeastern Italy, the dukes of Ferrara
were the leading patrons. The most famous of all Italian Renaissance manuscripts,
a great Bible, was created for Duke Borso d'Este between 1455 and 1462. It
featured an illuminated opening for each book of the Bible.

Later Developments. In the late 1400s patrons in Spain and northern Europe
began buying illuminated Italian manuscripts or receiving them as gifts. Italian
works circulated as far away as England. The king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus,
even persuaded Italian illuminators to move to his court to produce their work.
Northern European artists who traveled to Italy to study brought home new styles,
such as the white vine initial. However, most illuminators in northern Europe
continued to favor late Gothic, rather than Italian, styles.

The growth of printing in the 1500s severely weakened the market for illuminated
manuscripts. However, the art form was still used for state documents in Venice
and for missals in Rome. One of the greatest illuminators of the Renaissance,
Giulio Clovino, worked in Rome during this period. The art historian Giorgio
Vasari called him the "Michelangelo of small works." In fact, Clovino was a friend
and admirer of Michelangelo. He also had a high regard for the work of German
artist Albrecht DÜrer, whose prints influenced many later illuminators. Although the

145
production of illuminated books declined, they continued to be highly valued into
the late 1500s.

(See alsoArt; Art in Italy; Books and Manuscripts; Libraries. )

* medieval

referring to the Middle Ages, a period that began around a.d. 400 and ended
around 1400 in Italy and 1500 in the rest of Europe

* humanist

referring to a Renaissance cultural movement promoting the study of the

humanities (the languages, literature, and history of ancient Greece and
Rome) as a guide to living

* scribe

person who copies manuscripts

* patron

supporter or financial sponsor of an artist or writer

* Gothic

artistic style marked by bright colors, elongated proportions, and intricate

detail

* woodcut

print made from a block of wood with an image carved into it

Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students

Illumination
Views 2,133,703Updated May 30 2020

"Illumination"
"ILLUMINATION." As early as 1702, the term "illuminate" meant "to decorate
profusely with lights, as a sign of festivity or in honour of some person or some
event" (sixth definition in the Oxford English Dictionary). A notable instance of such
a display occurred on 24 October 1781. Colonel Tench Tilghman had reached
Philadelphia at 3:00 a.m. on 22 October with news of the Yorktown surrender. A
Committee of Safety handbill, headed "Illumination," announced that "those
Citizens who chuse to illuminate on the glorious occasion, will do it this evening at

146
Six, and extinguish their lights at Nine o'clock. Decorum and harmony are earnestly
recommended to every citizen, and a general discountenance to the least
appearance of riot."

In her account of the Brunswick general Baron Friedrich Riedesel's service in

Canada, Louise Hall Tharp related the following anecdote about an illumination at
Quebec City:

The next day [4 June 1776] was the birthday of George III. The city of Quebec was
"illuminated" in the evening by means of lighted candles set in every window. It
was well known that a good many French people living in Quebec had hoped that
the Americans would win. Yet it seemed that in all of Quebec's fifteen hundred
houses, everyone was joyously burning candles in honor of the King of England.
The reason for this was soon apparent, however. Soldiers were going about
heaving rocks through any unlighted windows. (Tharp, pp. 42-43)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lancaster, Bruce. American Heritage History of the American Revolution. New
York: ibooks, 2003. (Contains a reproduction of the handbill).

Tharp, Louise Hall. The Baroness and the General. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

                              revised by Harold E. Selesky

Encyclopedia of the American Revolution: Library of Military History

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Views 1,619,902Updated May 29 2020
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Views 2,209,630Updated Jun 03 2020
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