The greatest modern psychologists have claimed that every dream carries a deep revelation about our subconscious. Each dream only needs to be interpreted properly for us to understand the message contained in it. But Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich and C. G. Jung all failed to consider seriously religious dreams or visions. The critical question that I want to raise here pertains to the significance of these religious phenomena in a cultural-historical context. Today we might be too inundated with external impulses and impressions to comprehend what is going on in that liminal time between sleep and being awake. By examining the religious dreams and visions But sometimes some of us still experience profound dreams and can relate them later to those willing to listen. Those ineffable experiences might then be the basis for a glorious poem, an art work, a musical composition, a sculpture, an architectural design, or a movie script, if not a brilliant plan or concept. 

Dreams and visions, two separate but in a way also overlapping phenomena, are not always simply reflections of a disturbed mind; instead, they can represent fundamental messages from a divine voice to our humble human existence, whether we understand them or not. Maybe we could even argue that much of our creative productivity is the result, whether consciously or not, of our participation in another dimension to which we are allowed to return only occasionally, if the individual possesses the necessary sensibility and receptivity, which happens either in dreams or during mysterious visions, if not simply in the creative act. 

From a cultural and religious-spiritual perspective, both dreams and visions have consistently been identified as some of the most fundamental media for an alternative epistemology. Eastern and Western scriptures are predicated on the non-material connection to another world, power, or spirit. Dreams and visions play a huge role in both in the Old and the New Testaments, from Jacob’s dream (Gen. 28:10–19) to the many experiences by the various figures and prophets (Gen. 20:3; 1 Sam. 28:15; Acts 2:17; Matt. 2:13, etc.). In Daniel 1:17 we read, for instance: “To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds.” In the Qur’an, the divine voice underscores repeatedly that the ultimate truth about God was revealed to people in the past by means of dreams (e.g., 5:12; 8:43; 10:94; 37:102). In the world of Hinduism, dreams also mattered centrally, such as in the Rig Veda (ca. 4000 B.C.E.), the Upanishads (ca. 700 B.C.E.), or the Charaka Samhitā (2nd century C.E.), which are closely paralleled by concepts embraced by Buddhists, such as in the Diamond Sutra (2nd or up to the 5th c. C.E.). Moreover, the same realization of the presence and workings of dreams and visions was valued by countless other cultures worldwide, such as in the Abenaki legends among Native Americans. Would we thus be justified in calling religion an enhanced form of dreams?

Experiencing visions while awake has always been dangerous because those privileged to receive them automatically undermine the power of the contemporary authorities (worldly or ecclesiastical) by promulgating those visions to the public on behalf of a higher being. 

Some of the greatest visionaries of all time were the medieval mystics, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schönau, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrud the Great, Brigit of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler, or Jacob Böhme, and the list goes on. Scholars have investigated their writing, poetry, and paintings from many different angles,, No one, however, can fully understand the mystics’ true experiences or intentions in writing down their visions. In these mystical visions they were in contact with the Divine. The godhead spoke with them in a divine language and exposed them to worlds beyond human comprehension. Their experience was apophatic, a reality beyond their own existence for which there are not really words. Often, a divine voice commanded them to record their apophatic experiences. 

While most modern commentators try to evaluate Scriptural dreams and visions in a more or less rational fashion, the mystics either did not have that opportunity, or simply refrained from submitting to this typically patriarchal or hegemonic discourse they employed poetic images.  Their poetic imagery makes it possible for us to grasp at least in a faint way what might have happened during this enrapture, this out-of-body sensation, or this spiritual vision when the mystic traveled through time and space, invited, fetched, and transported by an angel, a saint, or the Godhead into another dimension. Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) resorted to cosmic images tinged deeply with the notion of universal fertility, so when she writes, “After these things I saw a huge form, rounded and shadow, and shaped like an egg; it was pointed at the top, wide in the middle and narrower at the bottom. . . At times the fireball rose upwards and was met by more fire, which caused it to shoot out great long flames.”^[1] Or: “Beneath the ether I could see a layer of watery air, which had a white membrane beneath it. It spread out everywhere, giving off water to the whole of the world.” ^[2]

The Beguine Mechthild von Magdeburg (late thirteenth century), by contrast, relied on highly erotic images drawn from the world of courtly love poetry when she related her mystical visions, often in the form of a dialogue with the Godhead: “My body is in great torment, my soul is in sublime bliss, for she has both gazed upon and embraced her Lover in her arms. He causes her, poor wretch, torment. When he draws her up, she flows. She would like to speak, but she cannot, so utterly has she been enmeshed in sublime union with the awe-inspiring Trinity.”^[3] Henry Suso,  fourteenth-century Dominican priest and confessor for nuns, wrote in The Life of a Servant: “In the darkness beyond distinct manner of existing, all multiplicity disappears and the spirit loses what is its own. It disappears with regard to its own activity. This is the highest goal and the ‘where’ beyond boundaries. In this the spirituality of all spirits ends. Here to lose oneself forever is eternal happiness.” 

While these mystical visions provided an imminent, personal, passionate rapprochements of the loving soul and the Godhead, dreaming, as reflected in numerous literary texts, served primarily a prophetic function, whether based on divine messages, or whether simply warnings about the future. The famous Emperor Charlemagne was often depicted as dreaming, thereby receiving direct instructions from God about urgent actions he had to take to protect himself and his empire (e.g., Chanson de Roland, 11th c.). 

Dreams could also serve to foretell the future, such as in the didactic verse narrative Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener (ca. 1260). A farmer’s son wants to rise above his social class, and turns into a robber knight, soon committing horrible crimes. Before this happens, however, his father reveals to him a series of dreams in which he foresaw his son’s destiny, one event worse than the other, but young Helmbrecht ignores them all and departs, entirely disrespecting his father’s warning and those dreams. He certainly experiences quick success and becomes rich at first, but accomplishes it all through brutal and criminal robbery. At the end, his evil companions and Helmbrecht are finally caught by a judge and his servants, and exactly as the father’s dreams had anticipated, while all others are executed, the young man is punished in the following way: they cut off the left leg so that he can no longer step into stirrups and ride a horse; the right arm so that he can no longer wield a sword, and he is blinded so that he can no longer see the world. After a year of misery, Helmbrecht is lynched by previously victimized farmers when they get hold of him, which constitutes the final confirmation that his father’s dreams were truly prophetic.

Medieval authors firmly believed in the significance of dreams, as the many dream books demonstrate vividly. They represented the science of oneiromancy, which can be traced back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. Most influential for the western tradition were the Somniale Danielis, Cicero’s  Somnium Scipionis (144 B.C.E.), and Macrobius’s Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio which all exerted a great influence on the Middle Ages and early modernity, such as on the anonymous Expositio somniorum (end of the 13th c.). Many secular poets drew heavily from this tradition, such as Alain de Lille (De planctu naturae, late 12th c.), an anonymous Welsh poet (The Dream of Rhonabw, ca. 1150), Guillaume de Lorris (Roman de la rose, ca. 1230/40), together with his successor Jean de Meun (ca. 1260/70), John Gower (Vox Clamantis, ca. 1390), and others. Most famously, Dante Alighieri predicated his allegorical epic poem, Divina Commedia (completed ca. 1320) on the notion of Dante the pilgrim being guided, in a dream-like state, through hell and purgatory by Virgil and ultimately heaven, by his beloved, Beatrice. 

Dreams could thus assume many different functions, while visions were primarily religious in nature. Famously, the scholastic Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) developed a fully-fledged dream analysis in his commentary on Aristotle’s Parva naturalia and in his treatise De somno et vigilia. His even more famous student, the encyclopedist Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225-1274) viewed dreams more critically, warning about the danger of nightmares and superstition, such as in his Summa contra gentiles. Late medieval philosophers and scholars such as Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320/25-1382), John Travisa (1342-1402), and William of Vaurouillon (ca. 1390/94-1463) worked hard to comprehend the meaning of dreams and visions, but the discourse remained rather diverse, not leading to an agreed-upon interpretation. 

Finally, late medieval art contains numerous examples of dream visions, projecting the way which the soul is taking after a person’s death, probably best illustrated by Hieronymus Bosch’s “Ascent of the Blessed” (between 1505 and 1515, part of the polyptych, “Visions of the Hereafter;” today in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice, Italy). Here we observe how the blessed souls, helped by souls preparing them for the journey, float upwards and ascend through an enormous tunnel toward the divine afterlife where bright light is awaiting them. 

We could draw on countless other examples from early modern and modern art, literature, philosophy, theology, music, and sculpture to gain solid evidence that dreams and visions were intensively examined, discussed, analyzed, and projected in a myriad of fashions because they mattered so profoundly through their spiritual, epistemological function. This is not to argue in any way against modern psychoanalysis, for instance, but we face here overwhelming evidence that world religion and literature, above all, fully embraced the idea of the great relevance of dreams and visions. Today, we may have lost the direct connection to the divine or the afterworld by way of dreams or visions, perhaps because of the ever-growing onslaught of data, images, sounds, senses, etc., which drown out most of our sensitivity toward hidden signals contained in dreams and visions. Of course, some of the medieval mystics and spiritualists were also strongly suspected of being nothing but heretics or victims of the devil’s influence, a potential charge which all prophets and visionaries have suffered from throughout time. Many, however, gained full recognition and were worshipped as God’s mouthpieces here on earth. Tragically, of course, some, like Marguerite de Porète (d. 1310) and Joan of Arc (d. 1430) were even burned at the stake, but their poetry (Marguerite) and their accomplishments (Joan) are still admired today, and Bosch’s artistic depictions of his visions continue to awe us deeply. Whether dream, vision, or imagination, whether mystical experiences expressed in poetry, music, spiritual narratives, or paintings, we grasp here a different epistemology little connected with modern rationality. Yet, they have remained fully valid precisely because reflect a powerful alternative to human comprehension of the universe in its cosmic and microscopic dimensions, in material and in spiritual terms.

Further Reading:

Classen, Albrecht. “Dreams in the Middle Ages – Meaningful Experiences from the Past for Our Future?,” The Living Pulpit, (Dec. 1, 2018). http://www.pulpit.org/2018/12/dreams-meaningful-experiences-from-the-past-for-our-future/

Spearing, A. C. Medieval Dream-Poetry. Cambridge,1976.

Kruger, Steven F. Dreaming in the Midle Ages. Cambridge, 1992.

Haag, Guntram. Traum und Traumdeutung in mittelhochdeutscher Literatur. Stuttgart, 2003.

Wehrle, Jan. “Dreams and Dream Theory,” In Handbook of Medieval Studies, ed. A. Classen, 329-46. Berlin and New York, 2010, vol. 1. 

^[1]  Scivias

^[2] ibid.

^[3] The Flowing Light of the Godhead

About the author

Dr. Albrecht Classen wrote 9 articles for this publication.

Dr. Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor of German Studies at The University of Arizona, focusing on the Middle Ages and early modern age. He has published more than 80 scholarly books and nine volumes of his own poetry. He is editor of the journals, Mediaevistik and Humanities Open Access. He has received numerous research, teaching, and advising awards, such as the 2012 Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year Award.

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