John Woolman's light in the night: An analysis.

Abstract

This is an analysis of a religious experience in the night recorded in the journal of John Woolman, a colonial Quaker. As a basisfor analysis, I try to clarify the data of Woolman's experience without presuppositions about causes, states of consciousness, three-dimensional space, or meaning. I then study the phenomena in the light of what we know about perception, dreaming, hallucinatory geometric forms, light, and other people's comparable experiences. Because different modalities of his experience appear to be in different states at the same time, I examine each part of his experience separately. There is discussion of the relationship of dreams to visions and hallucinations, the concept of discrete states of consciousness, and the distinction between simulation and authentic experience while dreaming. The article is both an analysis of a religiolls experience recorded in 1757 and a discussion of methods of analysis.

Dreams and dreamless sleep.

“…The distinction that I make between dream imagery and elementary imagery is the same as that made between complex and elementary visual hallucinatory forms (Siegel & Jarvik, 1975; Slade & Bentall, 1988). This distinction is discussed further in Gillespie (2000).…”

“…These include tunnels, funnels, spirals, cones, star fields, kaleidoscopic fields, geometric patterns, lattices, cobwebs, spectral arrays ... (Moss, 1985a, p.16) The distinction that I make between dream imagery and elementary imagery is the same as that made between complex and elementary visual hallucinatory forms (Siegel & Jarvik, 1975;Slade & Bentall, 1988). This distinction is discussed further in Gillespie (2000). 7.…”

“…These include tunnels, funnels, spirals, cones, star fields, kaleidoscopic fields, geometric patterns, lattices, cobwebs, spectral arrays…(Moss, 1985a, p.16)The distinction that I make between dream imagery and elementary imagery is the same as that made between complex and elementary visual hallucinatory forms (Siegel & Jarvik, 1975; Slade & Bentall, 1988). This distinction is discussed further in Gillespie (2000). The dreamer may experience true perception or true body experience, for example, by hearing a bell ring or by feeling a heavy weight lying on the feet.The experiences, related here, of darkness, light, a blank visual field, and of elementary imagery all stem from accounts of lucid dreaming. These examples reinforce the Tibetan teaching that dreamless sleep imagery grows out of procedures during lucid dreaming.…”