The Religious Content of Dreams: A New Scientific Foundation

Abstract

Dream content is meaningfully related to waking life religiosity, so much so that reading a person's dream reports "blindly," without any other personal information or associations from the dreamer, can reveal with surprising accuracy his or her basic waking attitude toward religion and spirituality. Two long-term dream journals are analyzed in this manner, and the results demonstrate that dream content is an accurate reflection of a person's religious beliefs, practices, and experiences. The significance of this for pastoral psychologists lies not in specific new techniques of dream interpretation but more fundamentally in supporting the practice of paying attention to dreams in the first place. The goal of the article is to build a bridge between pastoral psychological interest in dreams and the latest findings in the scientific study of dreaming. Contrary to the assumption that religion and science inevitably conflict with each other, dreaming offers an area of potential religion-science convergence.

Dream Content is Continuous with Waking Thought, Based on Preoccupations, Concerns, and Interests

“…Two detailed case studies, one based on the dreams of a child molester, one based on the dreams of middle-age normal adult, are used to demonstrate these points in detail, but there are other cases that can be drawn on, including a comparison of the dreams of Freud and Jung. 6,[37][38][39] It is necessary, however, to temper these generalities about continuity in three ways. First, the continuity is not with day-to-day events, but with general concerns.…”

Commentary: Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery

“…Idols (murti) are quite common in the villages and cities of Nepal, and a prominent part of Hindu religious life in particular. Thus, in association with the continuity hypothesis (see e.g., Domhoff, 1996;Bulkeley, 2009), I propose the frequency of counterintuitive object types in a dream report sample is a function of waking circumstances. Hence, a Christian or Muslim sample should reveal a lower frequency of counterintuitive artifacts than a Hindu one.…”

The Language of Dreams: Application of Linguistics-Based Approaches for the Automated Analysis of Dream Experiences

“…The use of modern dictionary-based text analysis approaches had an important precursor in studies that employed search engines of large dream databases (e.g., DreamBank; [ 56 ]) to identify the occurrence in dream reports of predefined word strings related to particular themes and contents of interest [ 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 ]. While limited in their application to pre-existing databases, these works clearly demonstrated the potential value of automated, dictionary-based methods as fast, reliable, and objective alternatives to manual scoring.…”