Mystical dreaming: Patterns in form, content, and meaning.

Abstract

This article enriches the psychological understanding of religious mysticism by exploring patterns of form, content, and meaning in self-described mystical dreams, drawing on extensive sleep and dream interviews conducted with 100 contemporary Americans. Four major hypotheses regarding mystical experience are tested: mysticism as psychopathological, as culturally constructed, as a mode of pure consciousness, and as characterized by four Jamesian "marks" (ineffability, noesis, transience, passivity). The data from this study indicate that mystical dreams are experienced by around half the population and by women more than men, and their prototypical form involves good fortunes, friendly interactions, and unusual or nonhuman characters. These findings provide only limited validation for the psychopathology and pure consciousness hypotheses and somewhat more support for the Jamesian and cultural construction approaches. Taken together, the results suggest that psychological efforts to understand religious mysticism will remain incomplete without systematic reference to contemporary dream research.

The Construction, Preliminary Validation, and Correlates of a Dream‐Specific Scale for Mystical Experience

“…Casto, for instance, found no evidence of ego loss, unity, noesis, and ineffability in the dream reports she collected (Casto :68). Bulkeley likewise refuted the presence of ineffability in the mystical dream reports he analyzed; he also failed to recognize other features of mystical experience described by the SDS (Bulkeley ). While the exact reasons for researchers’ failure to identify specific traits using the content analysis method are not always clear (although sample size and researcher bias are likely involved), the results of this study, in conjunction with the two previously cited, highlight the importance of subject verification.…”

“…Surprisingly, mystical dreams have generally been ignored or dismissed by the very group of researchers that perhaps ought to be most interested in them: scholars of mysticism. Bulkeley (:30) writes that the patriarch of mysticism studies, William James, mentioned dreams only once—in a footnote—throughout his landmark book The Varieties of Religious Experience . Another prominent scholar of mystical experience, Walter Terence Stace, has argued that dreaming cannot serve as the vehicle for bona fide mystical experience because the dreaming mind—unlike that which is awake—presents situations that are neither rational nor objective, and hence not real (Stace :140–42).…”

“…Stace ; Hood ). By comparing personal dream accounts and scholarly investigations of mystical and spiritual dreams, one finds support for the following mystical traits: positive and religious affect (Adams ; Casto ; Dwyer ), noesis (Bulkeley ), ego loss (Gebremedhin , ; Gillespie ), ineffability (Gebremedhin ; Gillespie ), timelessness/spacelessness (Casto ), inner subjectivity or the sense of life in one's surroundings (Casto ), and the sense of unity with one's surroundings (Gebremedhin ). These are the same traits that inform the items of Hood's M Scale (Hood ), which has been used in multitudinous studies of mystical experience.…”

Mysticism and Mind: Using Cognitive Science to Explore Religious Experience

“…There is indeed evidence to suggest that mystical experiences are highly memorable (cf. Barnard 1997;Bulkeley 2009;Hood 2001;Sears 2015). This memorability seems to obtain even in circumstances where the experiencer lacks an interpretive schema for making sense of the experience (cf.…”

Religion and spirituality in contemporary dreams

“…Eliade 1964;Kripal 1995Kripal , 2001, or within the context of spirituality in general, and focused on dream content, rather than on dream related beliefs (e.g. Bulkeley 2009;Casto 1995). Hall (1997) supports this contention in an even broader context when he states that in spite of there being a wealth of historical, anthropological and psychological literature on the many types of dreams and dreaming there has been scant research on what people think and believe about dreams.…”