Dreams and Visions: The Interface between Religion and Psychology
by Insook Lee
A long time ago, I served a medium-sized church as a seminarian. One day, the associate pastor’s wife came to see me. I knew that she and her husband had had conflicts with the senior pastor and suffered significantly from that relationship. On that day we met, she shared her dreams in which the senior pastor was miserably ill and dying. I had a strong sense that she believed her dream was a sign from God: the senior pastor would be punished for doing wrong to her and her husband. Although I knew her desire to get my confirmation, I simply asked, “Do you wish God to punish the pastor to die?” How should Christians in the 21st century understand their dreams?
The Bible tells us that God can use any means, including dreams and visions, to communicate God’s plan. We see numerous examples in both the Old and New Testaments (e.g., the dreams of Jacob, Solomon, Daniel, and Mary’s husband Joseph). However, many Christians would agree that we now have the Bible, the complete revelation of God’s plan for us. Therefore, if we have a dream that we believe came from God, we first have to check whether that dream is in agreement with the Bible. Personal dreams cannot override the authority of the Bible. With this in mind, it may be fruitful to first understand why we dream at all.
According to dream scientists, our brain during sleep remains much more active than we might think. Normal sleep has a predictable cycle, Non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and REM sleep.1 Non-REM sleep has four stages: stages 1 and 2 (light sleep) are characterized by the theta brain waves, while states 3 and 4 (our deepest sleep) are characterized by delta waves. Dreams can occur anytime during these stages of sleep, as dream research indicates, but the most vividly remembered dreams appear to arise in REM sleep when the brain is most active. Following stages 1-4, the brain enters into REM sleep to process daily information before it is stored in long-term memory. In this stage, the sleeper experiences a combination of wakefulness and relaxation: the brain is active while the body is paralyzed. What matters here is how the brain recreates waking experiences. Psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung provide invaluable insight on this matter.
Freud is the first psychologist to theorize the concept of the unconscious. According to him, we split our unwanted thoughts, emotions, and wishes and bury them in the psychic basement of our unconscious. Once buried there, its contents are completely alienated from our conscious mind, and, as a result, we are not even aware of their existence. It is through our dreams, Freud argued, that we have access to the content of the unconscious.2 In this interpretation, dreams mediate between the unconscious and conscious mind. During sleep, unfulfilled wishes which have been repressed in the unconscious float up to the surface of consciousness. A dream in this sense represents wish-fulfillment, both positive and negative.
Freud’s approach to dreams gives us valuable insight, but questions about a different type of dream still lingers. For example, we have Joseph’s dream in which God warned him to flee to Egypt, “for Herod is about to search for the child [Jesus], to destroy him” (Mt. 2:13 NRSV). This dream is about the future, not the past on which Freud developed his theory of the unconscious. Therefore, we need something more than a Freudian approach. Carl Jung addressed this issue by expanding the Freudian theory of the unconscious.3 Initially, Jung followed Freud and considered dreams merely as a phenomenon resulting from the personal repression of unfulfilled wishes. Later, however, Jung modified the theory to include his own idea of the collective unconscious. He believed that every human being, from birth, is endowed with a psychic layer of the collective unconscious which stores human experiences, knowledge, and wisdom from generation to generation. Distinct from Freud’s personal unconscious, the collective unconscious belongs to society, culture, and the human race.
Jung describes this collective unconscious as a universal library of human knowledge, a source of transcendental wisdom that cannot be acquired through education. Jung’s interpretation of dream-states is built on the idea that humans can access the symbols and data of the collective unconscious while dreaming. He claims that our religious life is also embedded within this storehouse of accumulated wisdom of humankind. Even God, for Jung, is experienced like an archetype on this psychic level.4
Interestingly enough, Jung developed the concept of the collective unconscious at the time when he was working with schizophrenic patients in a psychiatric hospital. People with schizophrenia are known to experience delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech or behavior, and impaired cognitive ability.5 Most of all, they have difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is imaginary, and as a result, their thought processes are bizarrely fragmented and disorganized. This schizophrenic state is similar to a dream state, but the difference is that the former occurs during their waking hours. This day-time experience of a dream-like state is called vision or hallucination. The Bible also distinguishes between dream and vision: a dream occurs when a person is asleep, whereas a vision is received while awake. Thus, dream is described as a vision at night: “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals, while they slumber on their beds, then he opens their ears” (Job 33: 15). God communicates both in visions and dreams: “I the Lord make myself known to them in visions; I speak to them in dreams” (Numbers 12:6). These religious visions are often similar to schizophrenic hallucinations in psychology. This similarity raises an interesting question: how can psychology and religion interface with each other to create meanings for vision, either in the day or at night?
Anton Boisen, the founder of Clinical Pastoral Education, explored this very question. His approach to schizophrenia is radical in the sense that he did not see it simply as a mental illness. Instead, he perceived it as a creative problem-solving process. According to him, mental illness results from “the sense of personal failure”6 originated by maladjustment to a life situation. For him, there are three major ways to react to the sense of personal failure.
The first is “drifting”7 which refers to the avoidance of a problem and a drifting down toward dissolution and destruction to the point of personality disintegration. People in this state may turn to alcohol or drugs in order to numb painful feelings of failure. Serious clinical depression could be a result.
The second reaction is “delusional malformation.”8 People in this category do not avoid reality, but rather attempt to resolve the tension between perception and reality. However, they do so in an unhealthy or delusional way which distorts their experience of reality itself. An example is a person with paranoia who consistently misinterprets reality and, as a consequence, considers him/herself a victim persecuted by others. This reaction prevents the person from developing creative problem-solving coping mechanisms.
The last type of reaction to personal failure is “acute upheaval,”9 referring to serious psychosis or schizophrenia that may even require hospitalization. Surprisingly, Boisen saw the most hope for healing in this last type. For him, these serious psychotic symptoms are essentially problem-solving efforts and are closely related to religious experiences. Boisen did extensive research on this group and found that they often reported bizarre visions, hallucinations, and dreams which, in many cases, contained religious content. Among the most common religious content are: “the sense of the mysterious,” “the sense of peril,” and “the sense of personal responsibility.”10 These symptoms were basically about unresolved issues in a person’s life. Boisen argued that these bizarre symptoms were signs of attempts to resolve those issues, not to avoid them. Indeed, they squarely face a problem even to the point of destruction. Why, then, are these symptoms so bizarre and fragmented? Because, in intense psychological conflict, the “person’s deeper level of mind is tapped.”11 Boisen called this phenomenon a “journey to the lower regions.”12 Here, the lower regions refer to the unconscious, especially Jung’s collective unconscious, which functions as the storehouse of accumulated wisdom and resource of humankind.
This psychotic upheaval presented as mental illness to medical doctors but, for Boisen, this acute mental state was actually an unconscious attempt at cure and reorganization. He saw people in this group as having the most potential for healing because their psychotic process was an attempt to reorganize the total personality structure through upheaval. Indeed, the person is in crisis. This phenomenon is similar to Biblical religious conversion: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17). Such acute upheaval, not drifting or delusional malformation, provides a chance for personality transformation. This does not mean that everyone in this upheaval will succeed in personality reorganization; there is a great risk for the person to break down and end up in full personality dissolution. In this case, the task of reorganization fails, and the person’s mental state dangerously worsens. In spite of such a great risk, however, acute upheaval still provides a chance for successful transformation.
The same thing can be said about Christians who report extraordinary visions, dreams, and hallucinations they believe to have come from God. Both religious and psychological perspectives give us insight on how to interpret them. Spiritually, these visions and dreams must be carefully unpacked to understand whether or not they are in agreement with God’s messages as revealed in the Bible. As previously indicated, personal dreams and visions cannot usurp the authority of the Bible. Psychologically, these dreams and visions can be a sign that the person is struggling with some unresolved issues, either personal or communal, and is trying hard to resolve them. Such people must be carefully taken care of, using all available methods, including medical, psychological, and spiritual approaches. It is imperative to recognize that there is a high risk for psychological breakdown if the content of their so-called Jungian collective unconscious overwhelms their personality structure. Extraordinary, seemingly bizarre visions and dreams experienced by Christians, as well as those of others, require a careful, holistic approach.
The associate pastor’s wife in the beginning of this article was understandably disturbed by my question. She said, “How can I, a Christian, wish such a dreadful thing to happen? But if that were God’s will…I would abide by it.” It is fruitful to reveal, both psychologically and religiously, the underlying construction of the conscious and unconscious mind that gives rise to questions surrounding dream interpretation.
Notes
1. M. A. Carskadon and W. C. Dement, “Monitoring and Staging Human Sleep,” in Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, ed. T. Roth and W. C. Dement (St. Louis: Elsevier Saunders, 2011), 16-26.
2. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dream, 3rd ed., trans. Trans. by A. A. Brill (Boston: Digireads.com, 2017).
3. Carl Gustave Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1968).
4. Ibid.
5. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
6. Anton Boisen, The Exploration of the Inner World (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 29.
7. Ibid., 28
8. Ibid., 29.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 30-36.
11. Ibid., 32.
12. Ibid.
