Modern Beliefs About Dreaming

Modern beliefs, one might think, ought to be in the rationalist mould of the Enlightenment, but little or nothing is taught about the psychology of consciousness in schools, except in terms of religious studies. Religion has had a decisive influence on thought on dreaming, and it is undergoing a revival in many parts of the world. In particular, fundamentalism is becoming increasingly popular in both the East and the West. The UK has been spared so far, but while the majority of the population is religiously inactive in terms of church-going, a large proportion would call themselves Christians, their spiritual beliefs having been informed by Christian teaching.

The established Church of England is at one with other Christian churches in upholding the claims of the New Testament while keeping quiet about some of the Old Testament stories. Religious education in schools is of course compulsory in the UK, and is taught using children's versions of the Bible, such as Horton's Stories of the Early Church (1963) and Robertson's The Ladybird New Testament (1981). The bowdlerization in these books make it clear that there is little doubt about the credibility of the revelations reported in the New Testament, apart from those which occur to people who are awake. That is, biblical accounts of supernatural visitations during dreams, and dreams foretelling the future, are presented without comment; however, visitations occurring during wakefulness are altered to become visitations during dreams.

The Hull survey included questions on whether spirits visited the body to cause dreams, whether dreams could foretell the future, whether nightmares could be caused by evil spirits, and whether the soul can leave the body during sleep. The respondents were also asked whether the dreams reported in the New Testament could be literally true.

More than half the respondents considered that dreams could foretell the future, and amongst those who believed in the literal truth of the accounts of dreaming in the New Testament this proportion was much higher. Very few thought that nightmares could be caused by demons, or that the soul leaves the body during sleep. Only two of the 15 believers in the Bible accounts agreed that spirits could visit us during dreams, although it is crucial to the sense of these accounts that God made himself known to individuals during dreams, d actually visited them in their dreams.

This demonstrates that even well educated people can hold mutually contradictory beliefs (a proposition that social psychologists would find quite uncontroversial). In this context it is obvious that we must be careful not to oversimplify the ideology of distant cultures, either in time or in space, simply for our own ease of comprehension. A modern anthropological study of Zulu people in South Africa (Ngubane, 1976) reports that ancestral spirits are believed to visit their descendants in their sleep and through dreams make their wishes known. Sleep is ubuthongo, and an ancestral spirit is ithongo. The etymology here could well indicate the contact during sleep between the living and the dead, in which case sleep may be regarded as a miniature death that takes a person away from the conscious life of the day.

Li imputing this degree of credulity to people who live far away in foreign cultures, are anthropologists liable to be careless in the way they ask their questions? The official religion in the UK - Christianity - invokes supernatural dreams; and yet even the most devout Anglicans are most unlikely to interpret their own dreams as messages from a deity. Among the sample of Hull University students over half of those questioned thought that the dreams of Joseph, the Magi and so on were literally true, but it would be naive to conclude from this that they really believed that communications of this sort were still possible - that is, presumably they happened in Biblical times by unique divine intervention that would never be repeated. A surprising contrast to what any anthropologist would have to report about the religious beliefs of modern Westerners is TurnbulPs {1961) authoritative and intimate account of the lives of pigmies in the forests of the Congo - this contains no references to dreaming at all, and offers very little evidence of pigmy mysticism.

Rather than modern Western beliefs being less mystic than those in antiquity or in underdeveloped communities, they seem equally if not more so than some. It could be argued that the very incomprehensibility of the modern world has made us even more credulous. Many of the quite commonplace products of modern technology might as well be magic, for all that any normal person could be expected to understand how they work.