Somnium Spirituality
Pneumatic Exercises for Applying the Universal Church to the Dream World
Introduction
Empirical Secular Vs. Multivalent Transcendent: How many worlds do we live in?
Current Modalities for Utilizing the Dream World
A Theocentric Multivalent Epistemology Incorporates the Dream World as Legitimate
Bringing the Waking World to the Dream World
Bringing the Dream World to the Waking World
Introduction
Once a Muslim friend of mine and I were discussing sacred scripture. In the course of the conversation he derided the book of Revelations as evidence of how the Christian scriptures had become corrupt over time. “I mean, isn’t it a book about someone’s dream? What good is that? Why would anyone care what someone else dreamed? You can’t trust that.” I considered it a just question from his point of view, and we had a good discussion around the topic of the nature and role of scripture in a revealed religion.
But perhaps a more interesting topic would have been to ponder whether or not looking at dreams and the dream world is a “waste of time”. I have a clear memory of being in college once and doing homework in the library. Typical of that time in my life, I fell asleep at my task. While I drift in the vague middle ground between the waking world and the dream world I had a dream which was basically once scene. All I remember of it was that it incorporated the Crucified Christ who, in the dream, was physically connected to a sort of hierarchical yet dynamic assemblage of the Church. That collage style assemblage consisted of people, clerically dressed as well as, saintly and lay, but also art, buildings, symbols and other, more mysterious elements. That is a poor description, but the dream itself was extremely emotionally impactful. So much so that I still remember it decades later. I cannot imagine that such a dream is a “waste of time” at least not as it personally relates to me and my relationship with God.
The purpose of this treatise is to explore somnium spirituality, that is, a spirituality that incorporates the dream world as a way to come to an experience of God, foster devotion, and inform one’s view of the waking world. We will first discuss current presumptions concerning the dream world in modern western society, how we arrived at our view of dreams and some problems inherent in our current view. We will also discuss how the existence of the individual dream world challenges some of our assumptions about the nature of reality itself. Next will be a discussion on how the modern psychological sciences have tried to find a use for dream experiences in accordance with a secular worldview. From that the treatise will draw those techniques toward a wider implication of connectivity between the dream world and our experience of religion and begin the groundwork for a religiously invested view of reality that incorporates both the dream world and the conscious verifiable world which function as a unity. After that specific skills concerning somnium spirituality will be explored, including how to bring the conscious world into the dream world as well as how to bring the dream world into the conscious world, and how to use these skill to a spiritually edifying end.
Empirical Secular Vs. Multivalent Transcendent: How many worlds do we live in?
The scientific revolution and subsequent hyperfocus on verifiable sense data has been the undoing of any gavitas accorded to the dream world. This situation boils down both epistemological concerns and very pragmatic, very practical concerns. The devaluation of the dream world hinges on the criteria by which we define how we know what we know, and then the emphasis on how we use what we know.
These two angles feed off of each other because the “how we know what we know” of the empirically minded person is not more substantiated than any other epistemological theory. But when one takes a very pragmatic, practical and “secular” view of the world, it is the most reasonable epistemological theory to hold to.
First, how we know what we know according to a scientific cosmology is learned by every grade school student in the form of the scientific method. First to know something you must be able to experience it by means of your senses. Anything that cannot be directly experienced by the sense is not knowable. Once one has sensory experience, the second criteria for knowing something is that you can verify it with others by means of their senses. This means that you must be able to reproduce the experience for the observers by means of controlled experiments. This ability to demonstrate assumes, but does not prove, a strict law of causality. If something is known by this method it is called part of the “physical” world. One thing that will be explored throughout this treatise is the mistaken perception that the physical world is what you experience by your senses. This may be commonly assumed as a definition for the physical world, but when pressed on the nature of dreams or what a hallucination is, these things, though valid sense experiences of the individual, are not part of the “physical world”. Hence in this treatise we shall distinguish not just between the dream world and the physical world, but also between the “waking world” and the “physical world”. The waking world is one’s every experience as they are awake, but the secular scientific definition of knowledge concerning the “physical world” and public verifiability would exclude ghosts, hallucinations, visions etc.
Once something is known, it is then helpful if it is seen as “useful” to secular existence. By that we mean that the information or process discovered can help people in the physical world be more productive and/or more efficient in some way, or at least potentially meet these goals. If there is no “use” to the knowledge, if it doesn't produce other physical things or make production more efficient, there is no reason to pursue such knowledge. The scientific method has been very helpful in alleviating certain types of suffering in the world and for that it should certainly be commended. But it is rare that people play out what the complete set of philosophical implications would be if this were the only valid type of knowledge out there. Instead it is just assumed that this is the only way to access valuable knowledge, and therefore many important aspects of human life that have been deeply ingrained in our human experience are beginning to fall by the wayside in cultures that imply scientific method as the only means of acquiring sound and useful knowledge.
At the very least over focus on this view of knowledge has lead to an existential bifurcation of the human who wholly buys into it. One exists in the past, in that there are past experiences that one draws on for knowledge. One exists in the future in that one seeks in a reproducible way to demonstrate one’s own past experience to others by means of controlled experimentation. All of this uses past experience to help shape future events, especially to the ends of shaping the future world regarding productivity and efficiency. At the same time, this worldview completely ignores the “existential moment”, that is, this epistemology has no accounting for the present, the inability to “be still and know that I am God.” Thus the modern secular minded individual lives under the constant assumption of a split in their sense of self between their past experience, which is inaccessible, and their future expectation or calculation thereof, which is only potential. While recognizing all the good the scientific method has brought to humanity, it is worth noting that this existential bifurcation has certainly lead to a particular type of unsatisfactory life in the modern world, which springs from not being able to live in the present.
One of the worldviews that is supposed to help the particular type of dissatisfaction that comes with a simple reliance on scientific method for knowledge is a transcendent or religious view. This view should be a binding belief system that recognises a multivalent expression of truth presented to humanity that must be accessed by many avenues. A healthy religion’s job is to be the binding agent that recognises access by multiple means and seeks to bring them under a coherent system of knowledge and purpose. Because of the multivalent nature of a religious structure “purpose” usually comes out to be quite different than productivity and efficiency of a secular worldview. Remember this worldview seeks to alleviate temporal suffering as a primary goal. Alleviation of suffering is a noble goal, but in with multivalent epistemology suffering may be an avenue to some particular kind of knowledge.
With the increased interest in knowledge of the scientific variety, religions also have sought to reorient their focus of knowledge using the scientific method. This adaptation to culture is a necessary and good thing. If religions are unintelligible to culture, they become irrelevant. But when the view of what is supposed to be a binding interpretive system in a multivalent epistemology takes the narrow focus of a singular epistemological point of view trouble arises.
How this plays out, for example, in the Catholic tradition is a hyper-focus on theology, the knowledge of doctrine and dogma, and how one knows them to be true. Under this influence scripture studies becomes historical validation using science based methodologies, or validation of doctrine by means of pseudo-scientific proof texting. And following that most of theology becomes apologetics, a focus of validation by rigorous application of criteria. This more scholastic view brings all the benefits of scientific methodology, but also robs one of the lived experience of the moment by clutching one in the existential bifurcation of an argumentative stance. The combatant is stuck probing the past data in order to score a future victory in some theological argument.
What’s lost in an over theological Catholicism is any sense of mystical Catholicism. The mystical view is more apt to be epistemologically multivalent. It is more in tune with the sacramental nature of Roman Catholicism. By that I do not mean arguing the validity, necessity, proper execution or effect of the seven sacraments from scripture, facts of Christian history or magisterial statements. I mean the ability to immerse oneself in a sacramental worldview where the “physical world” is far more than physical, that the invisible God conveys invisible grace through physical objects. And the ability to experience such grace regardless of the ability to argue about it, or even the feeling of the need to argue about it in such ways. The mystical worldview holds that, for temporal creatures, the moment holds the summation of reality, and that in the experience of the moment one connects to God and to eternity. Mystical theology seeks to shed knowledge and assumed perceptions to the gift of the moment which is given by the divine to the creature. A singular focus on this worldview also comes with its own set of dangers, but the multivalent view of knowledge it embraces makes one more open to different kinds of knowledge than simply validation, for example, an artistic sense of truth. That is the ability to stand in the presence of good art and get a sense in that moment of a deep human experience. This type of truth is validated by panhuman experience, though not of the specifically reproducible variety, and can be better interpreted through Jungian archetypes for example. Any good religious tradition will use a healthy balance of theology and mysticism and the Catholic faith is no exception. But the Church is losing the mystical battle of investing the world with an experience of grace through the sacraments and the cognitive battle of bringing a good understanding of the sacramental worldview, which is most definitely invested with a multivalent epistemology.
This treatise is going to attempt, through theology, to bring in a tool for a multivalent epistemology by means of somnian spirituality. This means that we must formulate an operable understanding of the dream world such that we can garner utility from our experience there.
One of the more seemingly relevant fields of dream study right now is oneirology. This is a scientific study of dreams that analyzes them neurobiologically and seeks some understanding of dreams from data gathered in the physical world. This field does not indulge in dream interpretation of any variety, in fact dreams or “the dream world” are not seen as useful at all in this discipline. From a strict scientific point of view, the dream world is not “real” because even though they are sensory experiences of an individual, and even though the experience of the dream world is generally a pan-human experience, the events there are not individually empirically reproducible. Given the lack of ontological validity for the dream world it is curious why one would study it. First oneirology seeks to see how brain activity during dream experience relates to brain activity as related to memory function. This is of course important for those invested in a scientific worldview because of the impact of existential bifurcation. It becomes a terror to lose one’s memories as it will not allow one to properly relate to the future.
Perhaps more interestingly oneirology studies activity of the brain during the experience of dreaming as it relates to how a brain functions in those possessed of a “mental disorder”. This brings up such fascinating questions as, what is a mental disorder, who gets to define such a thing, why does there seem to be a link between experience of the dream world and experience of a waking mental disorder? Most of these questions are beyond the scope of this treatise. But it is likely the link between the dream world and mental disorders has everything to do with the problems the experience of the dream world brings up for the strictly focused scientific worldview.
Those defined as mentally ill are often giving the classification by a scientifically minded community, and they are demarcated such because of their inability to sync with the scientific worldview. They don’t “see reason”, meaning, they don’t properly relate their past experience to their future expectation. Even when such a person is harmless it is assumed that they would much benefit from seeing things “the right way” and, unlike a multivalent epistemological worldview, it seems impossible that such a person may have valuable knowledge to impart on the rest of us. To assume specific connection between these two experiences makes sense because both of them fly in the face of the strict scientific interpretation of what is real and what matters. Once again, despite common assumption, that interpretation is not founded simply on sensorial experience, but sensorial experience coupled with public reproducibility under the auspices of an assumed law of causality.
The mentally ill person, especially one who hallucinates, is an affront to the scientific worldview. But as an individual they can be dismissed as defective. Given the common assumptions concerning the “physical world” it only makes sense that something is physically wrong with their brain. But the existence of the dream world as a panhuman experience is harder to dismiss. This world, being experienced by the senses, hurts that worldview because causality does not apply, yet everything that happens there is intimately experienced and in the experience itself it often “makes sense”. In the dream world the inability to use the past to predict the future renders the entire project of a secular scientific worldview as the exclusive worldview problematic and this will not do. This dismissiveness is also applied in the same way to the fairly common experience of ghosts, specifically the apparition of dead loved ones. Oneirology is an attempt to discredit the dream world by means of guilt by association, but whether or not the mentally ill are even the guilty party is a just question for another treatise.
The dream world poses many specific and damaging problems for the exclusivist secular scientific worldview. First there is the absence of specific verifiability of the dream world. One cannot publically reproduce the specific situations one experienced there. One can only share the fact of the dream world experience with others who happen to remember their own experiences there. The lack of public verifiability concerning how events relate in the dream world undergirds the assumption of the pointlessness of the dream world. However “memory” does not function much better. That one has a memory of a “past event”, for example “I went to that restaurant once!” is fairly hard to publicly verify as well. Admittedly, you can increase the probability that such a memory is “true” by visiting the restaurant and validating its existence, then further increasing the probability that the memory is “true” perhaps by asking workers if you were there given their memory, or testing your ability to successfully find the restaurant by means of your memory. But in reality, such testings rarely happen since it doesn’t make much sense to doubt the memory. The only use of such a memory is to help in the future decide whether or not you want to return, and if the answer is yes, facilitate the return. Once again reflection on the past to manipulate the future. But memories are not subject to the devaluing that the dream world is. We absolutely trust our memories as long as the serve the existential bifurcation of the past/future interplay, but we absolutely distrust our experience of the dream world because it seems to be as much about the present as anything else. Any “use” of the dream world isn’t achieved through strict scientific method because causality and continuity are not in play.
All this leads to a general view that dreams “don’t mean anything”. However, not to be confusing but, what can this even mean? Science is not generally in the business of speculating on meaning concerning experience, only facts and utility. From a secular scientific point of view, that dreams don’t “mean anything” can only mean that dreams don’t produce experience that is useful for production or efficiency. But as a panhuman experience it seems as though there must be value. Why, just because it doesn’t fit into the strict and narrow view of the physical world according to secular science, does the dream world have no meaning? Why is it assumed that there is no type of validity to the dream world at all? And why is there an attempt to validate this assumption by linking the dream world to the, already suspiciously define, mentally ill by current psychological studies?
In the modern view the dream world is simply psychological experience, the figment is a mental movie so to speak. But, for our purposes it may be helpful to keep in mind the remote possibility that the dream world is a true “place”. As an experience it is a true world, unlike a movie, unlike even virtual reality to a point.
It must be remembered that the view of the dream world as simple figment is connected to the scientific empirical focus on causality as a fundamental and ontologically defining law of nature as opposed to a view that was radically empirical. Thus the “exterior sense data” has a causal effect on the physical brain and manifest as figments in the dream state. The assumption of this causal relationship allows for psychologists to assert that past data from the physical world effects the dream state, but the assumption is that the dream state only relates to the future with regards to one’s awareness of the dreams and how they use them pragmatically. Interestingly this assumption once again devalues the dream world and how it interacts with the future physical world adding to the suspension of ontological validity of the dream world. If one suspends absolute rigidity with the assumptions of the physical world being the only “real” world, then one could recognize the common human experience of how the dream world affects the “physical world” and not just one’s perception of it. Many people have an experience of “knowing what is about to happen” or having experienced this before in a dream”, deja vue. So much so that if the experiencer of deja vu is quick witted enough as they are undergoing such an experience, they seem to themselves to be able to predict the immediate future. When previous experiences from the physical world affect the dream world it’s seen as proof that this world is a solipsistic figment. When the dream world seems to affect the future “physical world” as such, the scientific mindset writes these experiences off as poor memory of the dream state. It is seen as foolish that data we are gathering in the dream world could at all be affecting our experience in the waking world. But there is no way to verify this, it is simply an assumption based on faith in a particular cosmology. If the dream world is as valid as the waking world, such effects are just as possible.
All of our speculation is not an attempt to reject scientific method outright. Such methodology has been and is extremely useful as part of a healthy and inclusive worldview. But in a narrow view, many important aspects of the human experience can suffer. A multivalent epistemology has the ability to make good use of the experience of the dream world because such a view can recognise the present as much as the past and future and in that it can recognise that any experience can be a chance to find truth and wider still meaning in one’s life.
Current Modalities for Utilizing the Dream World
At best our culture assumes that the dream world exists to serve the waking physical world. That dreams need to be interpreted or used is about the only way they are seen as “useful” for us. Yet this assumption has not always been evident. Cultures have existed and do exist where the dream world is understood as a world in its own right. To assume that interpretation for utility is the only reason for dreams, or the only way to interact with them puts the dream world in a subservient position to the waking “physical” world. This suites the scientific cosmology, but not necessarily the lived experience of most of humanity.
Classically, how have dreams been seen as useful? Probably the most popular way of understanding this is that dreams somehow predict the future. This exact use is seen from time to time in the Bible. It is also this view that is used by the empiricist to cast dispersion onto the dream world. Scientific method reliably predicts the future through experience coupled with an understanding of causality. But the dream world does not exhibit causality in it’s own right, and scientific study bears out that it is no reliable predictor of the future.
However, even as dreams are debunked as a real “physical” experience because of lack of individual specific public verifiability, the evidence relating to the panhuman experience of the dream world is dismissed. But if that evidence is taken into account there may be more general psycho-spiritual applications of the dream world as opposed to pharaoh's dream of seven fats and seven leans specifically predicting the future. Those uses would concern using dreams to learn about yourself, psycho-spiritually, including learning about your relationship to others. Dreams may actually be a help in predicting future activity inasmuch as our relationships often manifest as self fulfilling prophecies.
Another possibility is that the dream world gives knowledge that is not of a scientific nature, but is of a deeper variety, one concerned with meaning. It will be a theme of this treatise that the dream world is a panhuman experience which allows knowledge of and access to the sacred. The sacred is different than the secular. The secular is concerned with the “physical world” as we defined it, and specifically with production and efficiency in that world in order to alleviate suffering. Concern for the sacred is a teleological concern. The sacred focuses on the inner or fundamental meaning of the universe and of human life. It does not concern itself with facts of the “physical world” or the relationships of causality that apply there, but of affairs that transcend time and space and connect all humanity together across both of these mediums. Along with sacred rituals, artifacts, stories and myths, dreams are a tool for queuing into the sacred world and participating in the deep meaning of humanity.This view brings us to William James the first of three people whose speculation on the dream world we will briefly survey.
William James is famous as both a pragmatic philosopher and a psychologist. He definitely adhered to a multivalent epistemology, though it sometimes seemed to veer inadvertently into solipsism. He adhered to a radical empiricism, which is a different philosophy than the scientific empiricism. Such a stance sees experience as a continual stream that can never be halted for an entirely objective analysis. Thus the mind and its experiences, and nature are inseparable and the metal regard of the observer will necessarily influence the observation. In his view the dream world and the waking world are both equally valid to the subject in as much as they are useful to him or her, the physical world is certainly not the preferred to either of these other two.
James stands against the standard scientific account of the “physical world” and because of this has a certain respect for the dream world as a valid experience in and of itself. He states in his Principles of Psychology,
The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely when we wake, the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day, it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being
James was a great respecter of any human experience that he deemed useful. He was critical of the lack of academic pursuit in the study of religious experience and critical of the scientific dismissal of unseen reality. For James the dream world is legitimate in it’s own right and one sees in this passage how he begins to develop a relationship between the dream world and the physical world. According to this passage one mostly disregards the opposing world as one abides in whichever present world. But sometimes the dream world lingers in the waking world with a presence that forces attention.
Jame’s adamance that any useful experience is worth taking into account leads to other very prominent thinkers to take up a possible meaning or usefulness to the dream world. Two of these whose thought concerning dreams we will now briefly explore will be Sigmund Freud and his worthy student Carl Jung. Each of these men view the dream world as a useful experience, but in quite different ways. As we shall see, Freud views the dream world as a theater where one plays out wish fulfillment that one has acquired due to past experience. Jung, on the other hand, sees the dream world as this, as well as a place where we connect in archetypal form to the collective unconscious of the human family and queue into some primal meaning or sense of who we are as humans. Interestingly both of these thinkers will posit that there is more to the dream than is what “observed” by the dreamer.
Sigmund Freud is the most “scientific” of the three pillars of psychology we are going to review. He did not necessarily ponder the ontological validity of the dream world, or see it as a world “just as valid” as the physical world. His psychological theories most definitely facilitate the modern view of the dream world as a “figment” and not a stand alone reality. However, he did take James's pragmatism and apply it to the dream world as a human experience worth noting and studying to see if some use can be determined as one engages in the physical world.
Much of Freud’s psychological outlook revolves around wish fulfillment desires and the neurosis caused by suppression of these desires. For Freud dreams fit into this schema as the brain's attempt to keep the person in slumber asleep by acting out the wish fulfillment desires so that the desire itself does not awaken the slumberer. The fodder for the images is supplied by the sense data acquired by the dreamer throughout the day. However, since the wishes and desires do not conform to what “decent society” may allow, Freud believed that the mind shields the conscious self from shame by showing dreams in a manifest form that covered a latent meaning. The manifest form may come off as nonsensical, but in truth it is disguises latent content that the dreamer desires to happen by means of condensation, displacement, and distortion. These changes supply the manifest content of the dream to the dreamer.
For Freud the dream world is not a “world” in itself, but it is a solipsistic manifestation of the mind amalgamated from the sense experience gathered in the “physical world”, which is public and verifiable and thereby oppositional to the dream state. However, unlike many scientific empiricists, Freud did not believe that dreams “don’t mean anything”. His theory that they are self disguised wish fulfillment fantasies comprised of manifest and latent content leads him to find use in dream analysis. His purpose for this meets the one of our aforementioned uses of the dream world, that of self knowledge. Being scientifically minded Freud definitely sought to utilize past experience to predict or influence future action, but not in a way that believed that the manifest content of the dream state somehow shows objective events happening in the future in the physical world. Instead the self knowledge garnered from the past dream allows the dreamer to better know their own disposition toward the physical world and as one tool among the entire structure of psychoanalysis will allow them to better adjust to their environment in the future.
Further still, under freudian theory, the scientific model is deeply assumed in that the suppressed desires, the latent content of the dreams, are usually firmly entrenched in the past of the patient, such as some sort of trauma or confusion rooted in a childhood experience. And since it is these desires present in the waking world as neurosis, there is an assumed interplay of set causal relations between the waking world and the dream world.
Freud's methodology for utilizing dreams to influence the waking world consists of free association dialogue with a psychoanalyst in order to unpack the latent content and acquire self knowledge. This self knowledge revolves around one’s desires concerning the waking world that are too scandalous for the dreamer to admit to one’s self given the restrictions that society places on the individual in order to maintain a peaceful coexistence within civilization. Freud believed suppression of these desires manifest in waking life as neurotic activity of the individual, who would not even be aware of why they are acting this way, given the cloaked nature of their scandalous desires. One can then use the information garnered through psychoanalysis to help the individual patient alleviate any neurotic manifestation that are inhibiting their free exercise in the waking world.
Freud’s student Carl Jung had quite a different take on the dream world, what it means, and how it is useful. Whereas Freud saw the relationship between the individual and society as a struggle to be fought, Jung saw this relationship as a struggle to be assumed. Jung describes the process of individuation as one where the individual brings both their own personal unconscious self and what he calls the collective unconscious into their conscious world and harmonizes all three realities. Each these are mental states and are not part of the “physical world” as we defined it, but similar to Freud, Jung believes the psychological world does affect one’s acts and dispositions in the physical world.
Contrary to Freud, Jung believed the dream world is not simply a personally constructed solipsistic world that is only fed into by the individual’s waking sense data. His concept of the collective unconscious encompasses the collective psyche of humanity as a whole. In his essay, “The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology", Jung wrote:
And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.
So, much like genetic material and instinctual actions may be passed physically from one being to the next through the process of generation, so too psychological material may as well. The collective unconscious is a storehouse of unconscious psychic memory that runs deep into human ancestry. This subconscious strata can be likened to bio-instinct in the physical strata in that it is innate and is not based on personal experience.
The collective unconscious is composed of “primordial forms” or archetypes, which are hard to define, being that they exist solely in the unconscious realm. They seem to be the innate ordering principle of the human psyche, but they only acquire form with the individual’s encounter of the physical world. The synthesis of the amorphous collective unconscious and the experience of the human generates archetypal representations under various forms such as archetypal events, for example birth, death, separation from parents, marriage, the union of opposites; archetypal figures such as the great mother or father, the child, the devil, god, the wise old figure, the trickster, the hero and archetypal motifs: the apocalypse, the deluge, the creation. These are presented to humanity in a network of “non-scientific” yet invaluable panhuman phenomenon such as the creation of myth, the dream world, religious devotion, a sense of transcendence etc. These are then taken codified by the collective conscious, the social world’s organization and analysis of the primal material as it is first presented and turned into social structures such as religion.
The notion of the collective unconscious expanded Freud’s understanding of dream function and analysis. Jung saw two basic way of interpreting dreams, the objective and the subjective. Much like manifest and latent content, there is an obvious and hidden meaning to the dream. The objective content is self presented, in this interpretation the persons and things represent what they present as, your mother is your mother, your son is your son. However in the subjective approach to dream interpretation, the characters are manifestations of the dreamer himself. Learning to view these manifestations as aspects of one’s self helps by decoding of archetypal significances one come to an awareness of unconscious attitudes one has.
Concerning methodologies for dream use, Jung delineated two approaches, a causal approach and a final approach. The causal approach was redolent of Freud's own approach wherein each detail of the dream is analyzed and decoded in lieu of the patient’s own personal experience in order to find a latent or subjective content. This allows one to ponder the significance of the symbol used and infer personal knowledge from the process.
The methodology Jungs calls the final approach is much more like “dream distillation”. Instead of focusing on a point by point causal interpretation of each “symbol” in the dream, Jung advised boiling the dream down to the basic narrative. From this one gets the basic theme or meaning behind the entire scope of the narrative, which provides it’s own window into the workings of the unconscious.
Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious cues one in to the fact that, contrary to a strict scientific empirical view, he believed life a spiritual purpose and meaning beyond just material substance with minimized suffering in the physical world. He understood his concept of “individuation” as the heart or final goal of humanities great religions. Jung seems to believe that the healthy practice of religion in a social context is essential to the well being of the individual as we are psychologically constructed. Jung offers a better developed sense of the multivalent epistemology that this treatise will draw upon to give a deep expression to somnium spirituality. This is primarily because the dream world is not just seen as a useful tool for the individual for their waking experience, but as an integrated part of a whole experience of both the individual and humanity. For the rest of this treatise, we will attempt to develop a coherent spirituality for the dream world, and then develop skills for abidance in that world, how it interacts with the waking world and lastly cognitive techniques for bridging the two worlds.
A Theocentric Multivalent Epistemology Incorporates the Dream World as Legitimate
We have discussed how the dream world as a world in and of itself has been devalued by a secular empirical worldview. Even where the dream world is respected in a way by Freud, it is respected according to the goals and aims of secular empiricism, and not as a value in itself. The dream is deemed “not real”, but only images collected past sense experience. One may wonder how much of a role the advent of modern cinematography played into the hands of this rigid view of the dream world. The ability to have stories animate before one that are not real but representation of the past, is applied to one’s own dream experience. It is not uncommon to conceive of one’s dreams this way, but watching my children grow up, that does not seem to be the default mode. My oldest child had a keen sense of the fact that she entered a separate world each night, and for more than a year would ask me if this or that object or thing existed “in this world”. I believe most modern parents assume the secular empirical cosmology and immediately seek to correct their children, afraid that they may manifest as mentally ill if they can’t assess the difference in ontological status between this world and the dream world. I surmise most parents in recent times affect the trick of devaluing the dream world by quipping that “dreams aren’t real, they’re just like movies you watch at night.”
We have had ample discussion above on how this view may not be the best or most healthy view of the dream world, but now we may want to turn to a how one does cultivate a proper view of the dream world in and of itself that is useful. We are going to call this view somnium spirituality, and by it we are going to seek a view and a cultivation of spiritual practices that will be suitable for the Roman Catholic to fully invest in their dream world.
As was hinted above, the dream world is more in tune with the sacred as opposed to the secular world. It forces one into the present by the suspension of causality and a standard existential summoning to the moment. The dream world itself seems to access a sacred, or etymologically “set apart”, space and time that the individual enters. The experiences there seem to gear one to a transcendent mindset that is intuitive and emotive as opposed to causal and analytic. According to each of the dream theorist we went over the dream world is a place where one can connect to one’s deeper self, and possibly to a deeper humanity. It is also a place where abstracts become real and one can engage with unseen realities in visual form.
In my life I have had many experiences of waking in the night to ease nature and as I came to my self in the waking world, my entire being was imbued with an extremely pleasurable sense of connectivity to the cosmos and to ultimate transcendence. Conversely I have also awakened with a sense of existential dread. In these cases I do not necessarily remember experiences of the dream world, but I cannot doubt that whatever happened there had crossed over briefly to make waking experience.
If one the layers on top of the radical empirical view of James concerning the dream world a theocentric outlook, that God has purposes and methodologies that one orients one’s life toward, then ignorance of the dream world may be the shutting of a vast span of opportunity to the spiritual pilgrim.
The dream world actually has a deep connection to the religious sentiments of humanity. One thing that sets religion apart from science and the secular are its adherence to things beyond the realm of scientifically verifiable sensation. Such things would include visions, personally experienced beings, invisible beings or beings that bridge this realm and another, and very notably, an afterlife.
The after life is actually intimately connected to the dream world in religious traditions. When one realizes that for the outside observer there is little difference between a sleeping body and a dead body save the rhythmic breath, one begins to see how easy it is deduce a life after death. People fall into slumber and seem to enter a different world, and this happens as a regular human experience. If one takes that world as legitimate, then how natural is it to assume that when one hits “the big sleep” one transitions permanently. The only objection a modern could have is the cessation of measurable brain activity at death as opposed to active measurable brain activity during sleep, but the separate conclusions are each based on unprovable cosmological assumptions, because we are dealing in each case with worlds that are subjectively experienced outside the scope of the “physical world”.
The delineation between waking world, dream world and immortal world is clearly laid out in chapter eighth of the Chandogya Upanishad. In this chapter Indra is taught by Prajapati the four states of consciousness that humans have. The first is waking life and the second is the dream world. The third state of consciousness is the self in deep sleep, where Indra is disturbed at the utter annihilation of the self. From this Prajapati drew Indra into an understanding of the immortal true self,
"O Indra, this body is mortal, always held by death. It is the abode of the Self which is immortal and incorporeal. The embodied self is the victim of pleasure and pain. So long as one is identified with the body, there is no cessation of pleasure and pain. But neither pleasure nor pain touches one who is not identified with the body. . . "He who is aware of the thought: ‘Let me think this,’ he is the Self; the mind is his divine eye. He, the Self sees all these desires in the World of Brahman through the divine eye, the mind and rejoices. "The gods meditate on that Self. Therefore all worlds belong to them and all desires. He who knows that Self and understands It obtains all worlds and all desires." Thus said Prajapati, yea, thus said Prajapati.
There is a similar connection between the the dream world and everlasting life in the Gilgamesh Epic. While seeking the secret to everlasting life Gilgamesh asks Utnapishtim how he could escape death, Utnapishtim gives him a series of impossible tasks before counselling him to put off his quest. One of these tasks is to stay awake for seven days. The negation of the dream world one enters after slumber seems a naturally understandable way to negate shifting to the realm of existence after death. The imagery of connecting sleep to death culminates in the gospels when Jesus suffered his agony in the garden while the apostles sleep. They are unable to stay awake, that is “live” without Jesus’ help. Yet a compatible interpretation of the story is that after his “suffering” concerning his death the sleepers (dead) are able to be awoken, but they could not stay awake themselves. Add to this the multifaceted role that the dream world plays in shamanistic religions and one gets a sense that there is a prevalent view in human history that the dream world is a valid experience at least if not a world in and of itself and this acceptance of an alternate world that is experienced on a regular basis facilitates an easy acceptance of an alternate world one enters after life here ends.
In the Bible there are quite a few levitical laws that revolve specifically around rest. There are a host of festivals in Judaism which require no work to be done. These would include Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, parts of Sukkot, Shavuot and Passover, not to mention the all important Sabbath. The Sabbath rest laws are explained as a mercy from God who is unlike the cruel pharaoh of Exodus who allowed no rest. Also in other places it is linked to God who rested on the seventh day of creation, seeming to sanctify rest as a legitimate form of spiritual being. One can also draw a connection between the necessity, by religious law, conscious and intentional rest in the waking world every seven days and the divinely instituted necessity of physical sleep, hopefully on a daily cycle, which is by biological necessity.
These rest laws are oft circumvented by modern secular culture because they impinge on two of its most precious virtues, efficiency and productivity. But it seems that by the gift of sleep God has built in a natural break that we must take in despite our best efforts to limit it by means of electric lights and caffeinated beverages. These daily oceans of rest set up natural times for re-centering, as it is not easy to work at this time. Much longer intervals sleep were available for most of human history, facilitating what seems to be a regular tradition in many faiths of raising in the middle of the night for prayers. Such traditions would include Compline prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours or Qiyaam al-Layl Islam. Such ritual would certainly naturally lend itself to many of the techniques we are about to discuss. But this type of lifestyle has been absolutely limited. Sleep is viewed now as an interruption in productivity, and therefore to be limited to as small a period as is possible, such that production can continue efficiency. Sleep itself is seen as completely useless.
To view sleep something to be approached with a certain spirituality seems counterintuitive. But sleep is not about efficiency, all of life is built to lead us to God. The simple connection between physical sleep and the rhythm of the sabbath is just a baseline of the possibilities for a sleep spirituality and the possible importance concerning how one is to regard one’s dreams.
In the Bible, the dream world seems to be a realm of communication to a biblical character from the divine realm concerning either their own personal state of affairs or the general state of affairs in their world. Since the individual mind must make sense of the state of affairs of the world in which it abides these two are not mutually exclusive.
Examples of the former would be Samuel, Jacob and Joseph. Samuel is well known for his dream revelation, during which he is sleeping next to the ark and the Lord calls him to service. The entire story is set up by the recognition that visions of God are rare as well as a notation on the unreliability of sense date in the physical world as is symbolized by Eli’s blindness. The revelation Samuel gets from God concerns the destruction of Eli’s house, which bears directly on his judgeship and priesthood over Israel. When Eli draws the revelation out of Samuel, his response is, “It is the Lord. What is pleasing in the Lord’s sight, the Lord will do.” It is an interesting but not biblically or mythologically unique device that the blind man is the one who is able to recognize the value of both the dream world and the value of accepting the will of God. The theme of being able to recognize God’s will over your own plays out in our two other examples of individually significant dreaming in the Old Testament.
In Jacob’s most well known dream experience, three worlds collide in that his dream involves an intuition that the ground he is sleeping on is a portal between this world and the heavenly world. In that spot God offers him protection and extended life in the form of descendents. Yet, typical of Jacob, his inordinate attachment to worldly goods and ability to acquire them by trickery land him in a state of alienation from all of his loved ones as the story moves on. Genesis chapter 32 states, “Jacob was left there alone. Then a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When the man saw that he could not prevail over him, he struck Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that Jacob’s socket was dislocated as he wrestled with him.” The man could be congruently interpreted as an angel, God or Jacob’s own conscience. The dislocation of Jacob’s hip and subsequent life long limp seem to discount this experience as a dream world experience, until one remembers that absent sleep paralysis people in the dream states can thrash around quite a bit. It is curious that the text makes a point that Jacob is all alone, yet immediately conveys this struggle with “a man”. The revelation he gets is the change of his physical being and of his name, indicating a necessary change in disposition. From that point on Jacob uses his negotiating skills for good, not greed.
The last dreamer we will review who has personally significant dreams is Joseph. His dreams of the sheaves as well as of the sun, stars, and moon bowing down to him infuriated his brothers because they are indicative of the current state of affairs. Joseph, being the oldest son of Rebekah the favored wife, is the favored child even though he is the second to last born among his eleven brothers. His father’s favoritism manifests in Joseph's dream world, but the dreams then manifest as predictive after a long struggle that Joseph must undergo concerning his arrogance. In this journey he learns to use his skill and fortune for others not to bolster his own sense of self. A pivotal moment in his journey is his discovery of his own ability (gifted by God) to predictively interpret dreams while in prison, only to be detained there for two more years until the cupbearer remembers him to Pharaoh. Upon successfully predictively interpreting Pharaoh’s dream and giving credit to God, Joseph’s dreams of glory become true as well. This entire story is utilized by Matthew as applied to Joseph, foster father of Jesus, who also utilizes his dreams to live in accord with the will of God and by fading into the background and allowing God to work, brings about God’s own glory on Earth in the form of redemption for all mankind.
Harmony with the divine manifests itself in a point by point demonstration in causal reality in these dreams, but like Jung’s distinction between the causal and the final approach, we can see a wider narrative in effect, the gradual bending of one’s will to God’s will. The dream world seems to have a part to play in this process according to the Bible. One possible piece of revelation here is the realization that this tactic is applicable to our dreams. Information we need to need to alter our lives toward harmony is brought to us by our dreams according to the Bible. This is no different the Jung or Freud who have the same notion, the difference is that the harmony is theocentric as opposed to sociological. Such that at the very least, when we analyze our dreams by any method we do it with God’s plan for us in mind.
Then there are dreams in the Bible that seem to lay out a social situation. As opposed to revealing to the dreamer specific information regarding their life, these dreams seem to be geared at helping the dreamer understand that God is in control in the big picture sense, or that God is faithful regarding those to whom he is bound. An example of such a dream would be the dream of the Midianite Guard overheard by Gideon in chapter seven of the book of Judges.
When Gideon arrived, one man was telling another about a dream. “I had a dream,” he said, “that a round loaf of barley bread was rolling into the camp of Midian. It came to a certain tent and struck it and turned it upside down, and the tent collapsed.”
“This can only be the sword of the Israelite Gideon, son of Joash,” the other replied. “God has delivered Midian and all the camp into his power.”
When Gideon heard the account of the dream and its explanation, he bowed down. Then returning to the camp of Israel, he said, “Arise, for the LORD has delivered the camp of Midian into your power.”
The dream of the Midianite is indicative of the political situation of the time and the awareness that the one true God keeps his promise of deliverance. The midianites had been on a trade circuit which took them past Israel yearly at just the right time to steal all their crops. Israel is the Midianite bread source. So in this dream bread (Israel) overturns the tent (“house of Midian”). The cyclical narrative of the book of Judges was predictable in that once Israel turned to God and cried out for help, God would raise a judge to deliver them. The narrative assumes that the guard knows this information and, in modern terms, his subconscious fears are manifest in dream form, as his fellow guard relays to him by telling him the latent meaning. Gideon then intuits the fear of both the dreamer and the interpreter, who must also be in fear to be able to so aptly interpret the dream, and devises a strategy that relies on God’s dominion and not weapons or numbers.
The book of Esther opens with Mordecai having a similar styled dream
In the second year of the reign of Ahasuerus the great, on the first day of Nisan, Mordecai, son of Jair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, of the tribe of Benjamin, had a dream. He was a Jew residing in the city of Susa, a prominent man who served at the king’s court, and one of the captives whom Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had taken from Jerusalem with Jeconiah, king of Judah.
This was his dream. There was noise and tumult, thunder and earthquake—confusion upon the earth. Two great dragons advanced, both poised for combat. They uttered a mighty cry, and at their cry every nation prepared for war, to fight against the nation of the just. It was a dark and gloomy day. Tribulation and distress, evil and great confusion, lay upon the earth. The whole nation of the just was shaken with fear at the evils to come upon them, and they expected to perish. Then they cried out to God, and from their crying there arose, as though from a tiny spring, a mighty river, a flood of water. The light of the sun broke forth; the lowly were exalted and they devoured the boastful.
Having seen this dream and what God intended to do, Mordecai awoke. He kept it in mind, and tried in every way, until night, to understand its meaning.
This dream also sets a social stage of conflict and once again, in this dream, God uses the weak to thwart the mighty. A difference in this dream, thematically, is that the mighty seem too engaged in their own turmoil to even notice the weak, who tremble in fear of these imperial powers symbolized by two dragons. Being a captive of a major power, Persia, Mordecai's dream shows his experience of society and the constant conflict between the powers of Mesopotamia and Egypt which had regionally broiled for all of Israelite history. Yet, typical of the faithful Hebrew outlook, the assumption is that a crying out to God by the just society would protect the weak and thwart the mighty. That this is cultural outlook supplied the latent content of Mordecai’s dream, and is typical of dreams whose meaning deals with social narratives in the Bible.
A final example of this same theme would be any book or section of the Bible where are apocalyptic in genre. Both Daniel and Ezekiel take place also take place in the Babylonian captivity, and each of their dream like ecstasies show a social theme of the perceived mighty being thwarted by the power of God. Additionally, The Book of Revelations is an entire work where the author is swept up in an ecstatic vision, possibly taking place in the waking world or the dream world but certainly not in the physical world. This book is addressed to the suffering churches, and is a story of abuse of power, persecution, tribulation and ultimate peace for those who trust God.
Each of the biblical dreams whose latent content deals with society have an overarching narrative that recognizes established powers, yet holds them as opposed to justice. Also each of these dreams sees God as faithful to the just and the ultimate power of creation. Each dream also gives the dreamer a disposition toward suffering as an endurance toward a greater justice of God. Each of the dreams that deal with the character of the individual, point out some destiny for that person that involves some kind of change in their personal character.
As we enter the methodologies of somnium spirituality these dreams give us inspired scripture’s framework for how to approach these two types of dreams. We may need to foster acceptance that the dream world is one of many communication systems God has established in the human psyche in order to bring one’s self into better accord with God personally and with how one regards one’s situation in society.
As we dream, what do the manifest and latent content tell us about ourselves? Do we need a change in our life? Freud would have said this was an express purpose and use of dreams pragmatically. For the purposes of this treatise, this is a religious concern and therefore we have a specific moral and theological framework or backdrop to apply our calculations outside of freudian theory. As we dream, what do the manifest and latent content tell us about our outlook on and relation to society. This would certainly be a more Jungian approach or concern. Do we have the typical Judeo-Christian outlook on society where the dominant worldly powers are held at a distance and God saves the just? Possibly our dreams obsessed with manipulating the dominant power structures, or hopelessly fearing them. If the latter is the case, we have learned something valuable about ourselves, and we may have some spiritual readjustments to do in the waking world. In order to facilitate this, some basic dream interpretive tools may be helpful.
In order to begin with somnium spirituality the first thing one must do is be able to recollect dreams. For some people this is simply impossible. Even for those who do remember dreams, it is often hard to retain them long. The best strategy is the pre-resolution and practice of waking with a sense of conscious awareness toward remembering one’s dreams. This may need to begin as one goes to sleep through the cultivation of a disciplined resolution to wake and remember. If one can acquire the ability to remember upon waking, it would then be best to review one’s dream repeatedly in the first hour or two of the waking day. This will help solidify the memory. Once one can recall dreams one can begin to garner use from them.
Many of the techniques we may want to employ have already been at least hinted at in the review of our three major dream theorists above. So for example, the sense data one processes in the waking world is most likely the material from which the unconscious sculpts the dreams. This can be material that was recently acquired (when the dreamer was awake the day before), or standard in the dreamers life (their childhood home for example). As both Jung a Freud point out it is important to notice the point by point representations in the dream and regard them in several ways.
Free association is a good technique, and this may be best practiced with a dream partner who you discuss your dreams with and who knows you well. But simply having a good ability to interpret narrative in general would be helpful. The more one is able to be immersed in both myth and literature and make associations, translate symbols, or garner meaning from the stories there, the more one is likely to be able to do the same from one’s own dreams as regards to one’s own life. These are not scientific skills, despite what Freud and Jung may have thought. As Jung pointed out, dreams are not puzzles to be objectively solved, but this objectivity is the aim of the scientific methodology. Rather, they are a symbolic communication system. Thus the skills of a classic liberal arts education, a field often seen as “useless” in modern society, are much more applicable here. If you regard literary narrative, drama, poetry, music, art etc. as simply entertainment and not a place to find meaning or wisdom, then the dream world will also seem as one dimensional to you.
Next, apropos the Jungian “final approach”, one would certainly want to engage in dream distillation. One will notice in each biblical account above, the end meaning was the summation of a grand narrative of the dream, then applied to the grand narrative of the dreamer’s life or worldview. This grand narrative will give one a matrix for both how the symbolic representations are to be interpreted vis a vi the dream, and help one understand whether or not this dream primarily concerns one’s individual situation or is a dream that is more socially geared, given our two biblical models.
Once such techniques can be practiced to the point of adeptness, one can begin to successfully interpret dreams. For example, one can take a particular symbol “I was in this car”, and decode the symbol. A car is typical of travel, changes (in location or life etc.), power, autonomy, status and on and on. Any of these symbols could be in effect depending on the rest of the dream, any other details concerning the car, and the disposition of the dreamer toward these things. Thus, in order to do garner symbolic meaning one relates the role the particular symbol plays in the grand narrative of the dream, and then relates it to how they symbol functions in the waking world of the dreamer. Then one applies general literary symbolic interpretive skills to the entire scope of how these interrelate.
After this is done, one would also want to pay attention to the emotional state one has as the dream plays out and how one emotionally regards the symbols presented in the dreams as they experience them. This emotive state is also a good key to interpreting a dream. If one is overly literarily minded and sees the dream as a movie that is being watched, one may forget that one is an active participant in the dream world, and the reactions one has as a subject in the dream are indicative of the meaning behind it.
As one begins to explore their dream life as a communication system one will become familiar with recurring symbols and grand narratives that are present in the dream world. It is important to note these as recurrent because how one regards the symbol as well as stories and how that regard may change will also help one better understand how one may be developing and changing in the waking world. A symbol that recurs is indicative that whatever it is symbolizing is important to the dreamer. A grand narrative that recourse indicates importance of something that needs to be resolved or continually paid attention to. Lastly a specific recurring dream means the same importance, but specifically. Here especially the dreamer would want to note emotional changes and dispositions since the manifest content remains the same. Such changes could be introspectively helpful.
These skills are generally helpful tools to begin to understand and apply somnium spirituality to one’s life. One needs a theocentric outlook in order to begin to invest dreams with deep meaning and begin to use dreams in concert with the rest of the structures in their spiritual lives to help one understand God’s call to change and God’s call to view the world a certain way. These skills are also basic to the secular scientific view of dreaming. White washed of spirituality, they would still be useful to an atheist to explore their own psychodynamics, depending on their cosmology. For the next two sections of this treatise, we are going to explore specific skills that would be successively harder and harder for a secular scientific mind to buy into. We are going to practice ways to bridge the two worlds and bring each into the other. Actually, by the skills we have just delineated we have already begun this process, but there is much further to go. Each section will practice a particular skill. The first will be skills concerning bringing the waking world into the dream world. The second will be skills concerning bringing the dream world into the waking world. With all of these skills working in concert it would be difficult to escape a multivalent epistemological worldview, because the world would be far too large to simply consist of the “physical world”.
Bringing the Waking World to the Dream World
There are two major skills we are going to attempt to explore. The first will be bringing the waking world into the dream world. By doing this and the second skill set in the next section practitioners will begin to balance the importance of the dream world with that of the waking world. These skills seek to interface the two worlds and not to make one serve the other. These techniques are meant to give spiritual credibility to both worlds and utilize how they interconnect in order to facilitate a more diverse epistemology.
The first skill set we are going to explore is geared toward those who are more cerebral as opposed to mystic. It will involve bringing consciousness onto the dream world, and therefore someone who likes to maintain a sense of conscious control will find the skills discussed here more appealing. We shall explore developing this bridge in two distinct ways. One way will involve techniques that help one experience the dream world with the same level of conscious awareness as one experiences the waking world, that is lucid dreaming. But first we will explore how to manipulate the immediate environment of the waking world as we transition into the dream world such that it is predisposed for our set purposes, this is called dream incubation.
Basically, dream incubation is setting yourself up for a dream by means of intention and environment as you go to sleep. One must go into sleep imbued with a conscious realization that life in all forms is a communication with God. The dream world is no different, thus a development of respect for this that lingers across the dream and waking world is helpful.
The first step of dream is the ability to drift into sleep with vague awareness. This is a basic further focusing on the previous skill concerning dream retention. This mindfulness can’t be a strong enough conscious force to stay one within the waking world. Thus, in itself, it mostly likely begins many minutes before sleep as an intention to be spiritually invested in your immanent transition. Patience in learning these techniques is required. It is hard for people in general to eschew habit and live a conscious life. How much harder would it be to practice mindfulness when the very intention is to lose consciousness itself. But with incremental practice, such techniques can begin to pay off.
Once one has a basic mastery of the skill of entering the dream world with intention, one can possibly cultivate the skill of holding a conscious state that floats between the dream and the waking worlds. In this one is beginning to bridge the dreaming and waking world and further maintain a sense of the sacred into the dream world. This particular skill will help one develop further into lucid dreaming which will be discussed below.
The next technique in dream incubation is setting one’s environment as one transitions such that the environment carries one over into the dream world with an investment of the sacred. So for example, calm spiritual music that gives one a sense of the presence of God, or the “other worldly” could be very helpful. Any of these environmental techniques would need to be suited to the individual’s personality and spiritual intuition. So Gregorian chant or celestial organ music may seem as natural for a Roman Catholic as sitar ragas would be for a Hindu. But if sitar ragas do the job for a Roman Catholic and Gregorian chant for a Hindu, what works works. Maybe new age ambient music suites you best.
That said, perhaps music may not work for some people at all. Another possibility is “holy reading” one’s self to sleep. The Bible may be a good sources for this, but like music it depends on the individual’s spirituality. Books that have short self contained passages, so if it be the Bible, perhaps books such as Psalms or Proverbs are most suitable unless one is very familiar with the book they are reading. For example if you love the letter to the Romans and practically have it memorized, reading it without distracting concentration to the task at hand would be possible. That said, the Bible in no way needs to be the source. Other possibilities would also best be comprised of short self contained passages. Some examples would be The Saying of the desert Fathers, Imitation of Christ, The “I Answer”s of the Summa (if one is so disposed), or the Theological Dictionary of Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler. Also simple prayer manuals work well, The Office of Readings or the popular Magnificat series could easily be used. Perhaps one is more magisterially minded and Catechism of the Catholic Church could be of aid. The choice of source is wholly dependent of the spirituality of the practitioner. But the short self contained nature of the passages of the work are important so one can take pause at each concept break and as one pauses longer one drifts. By this back and forth short passage after short passage, one carries the theme of the spiritual into one’s dream world.
One may also want to use prayer techniques themselves as a bridge. To go to sleep with rosary in hand transitioning with the mantra repeated over and over could be of aid. Another possibility for one far along in this skill would be the attendance of adoration as a dream incubation technique. I would advise a perpetual chapel in the dark morning hours where you are not the committed adorer for this. Also it would be appropriate to sit out of sight line of the committed adorer, so as not to cause scandal, but this is a legitimate form of prayer. The environment, the silence, the hour of night all work together to open one’s dreams as possible ways of encountering God. If use of adoration seems too far fetched, remember that this was Samuel’s technique before the Ark of the Covenant when he heard God’s voice calling him. It is not clear if he is sleeping directly before the ark, but that the text lets the reader know the ark is present in the temple seems hardly a useful reminder. Also when Samuel awakes the last time it says he, “he got up early and opened the doors of the temple of the Lord.” This also seems like useless information unless it is there to note that he is sleeping in the presence of the ark itself.
There seems to be a lost spirituality of dream incubation whose only remnant is prayers before sleep. In his manual from the 15th century Mirror for Christians Dietrich Kolde gives detailed instruction on how one should consciously and particularly prepare to enter sleep.
How a Person Should Conduct Himself When He Goes to Bed
In the evening, when you go to bed, you should kneel down in front of your bed, and if you wish you can stretch out your arms like a cross, as Christ did on the cross, and raise your eyes to heaven and say: O dear Lord, almighty God, I am a poor sinful person. I am guilty of not serving you fervently today; and of not saying my prayers with fervor; and of passing many hours, nearly all the time, idly; and of neglecting to do many good works. Further, here you should say what sins you committed that day, and cry out and ask God the Lord for compassion and grace and forgiveness for your sins, and resolve firmly to go to confession and to commit the sins no more. And if you were to die that night with such a resolution, you would never be damned. Further, you should thank our dear Lord and Mary his dear mother for the bitter suffering and the pain that Mary endured at the time of Vespers when she saw her dear child taken from the cross and laid on her virgin bosom; further, for how he was buried at the time of Compline and Mary, the blessed mother of our dear Lord, had to go away so bitterly grieving and weeping; and for how she came again to Jerusalem with bloody clothes; and how the women of Jerusalem stood before the entrance and said: O Lord God, how can the dear mother be so sadly troubled; oh what state the holy maternal heart must be in; oh the poor woman, what pain she has endured as she lost such a sweet dear child; and they said to her: O Mary, why are your clothes so bloody? You should weep when you think of this, and ask Mary on your behalf to ask her dear child for forgiveness of your sins, and for solace and rest for the poor souls in purgatory. And in this state of great fervor you should go to bed and think how the great lords of this world and many rich people who have lived and died in sins are now burning in hell, where they will never again rest or sleep. And because you know this, you should sleep sweetly and think about resting with St. John the Evangelist at the breast of Jesus. Oh how sweetly you will sleep, and how happily you will awake in the morning, and how happy you will be all day. If you awake in the night, you should say: O dear Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me and give rest to the souls in purgatory, because they are in great pain.
The grim spirituality of the late medieval period may shock the modern sentiments, but there are clear connections to our purpose here. Though he does not mention the dream world Fr. Kolde does make the clear connections formerly discussed concerning sleep and death. The two states are clearly linked here. I can only speculate on the types of dreams this particular meditation would bring the practitioner, but they would certainly be imbued with a concern for justice and theodicy. Though it’s spirituality may not connect to the experience of most readers, the passage reflects an extremely intentional and conscious process to the approach of sleep for a spiritual purpose. This seems to be a crafted art that is lost to recent Christianity.
It is not likely that Samuel was practicing some conscious form of dream incubation, given he did not recognize God calling in his state of sleep. Yet dream incubation works, whether consciously practiced or not. I can certainly remember being home sick once with a fever. I lay on the couch with no intention of dream incubation, yet at that time I had just rented the movie “Into Great Silence”. As the reader recalls, this movie is an almost three hour documentary excursion into the life of the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse. There is practically no dialogue, as those monks do not speak most of the year, only occasional chanting, and striking visuals. The movie is a perfect instrument for dream incubation, made all the more effective by my feverish state. I put the movie on and made a cyclical subtle shift back and forth from consciousness to unconsciousness, from this world to the dream world. I had not done this to set up a spiritual experience, but the effect came because the conditions were too perfect. As the reader reflects on their own dream experiences, could they relate. Could it be worth learning to cultivate as purposeful dream.
In a world where sleep itself is devalued and regulated by caffeine and pills, as well as clocks as opposed to biorhythms, this type of spirituality may seem hard to cultivate. But at the same time, in a sleep deprived culture, where time is a vice this may be one of the few times to regularly utilize a some sort of spiritual practice. Over and over those invested in consecrated life or the clergy remind the married of the importance of regular prayer and daily attendance of mass etc. I agree these practices are superlative, but they are possible only for those who do not have to earn a living with little to no safety net. Once the pressures of the world come to bear on a young family a somnium spirituality that uses the necessity of sleep may be the reminder, much like prayer at meals, that allows one to have a spirituality at all. If one is engaged in shift work, or has recently had a baby, then exhaustion of a variety that clerics and consecrated are unlikely to be familiar with sets in rather quickly. With this type of exhaustion quick shifts from the waking world to the dream world are shocking in their suddenness. If one is able to practice dream retention skills and incubation techniques we have gone over, this spirituality may be a source of strength for people in hard times.
The second skill for bringing the conscious world into the dream world is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the conscious awareness that you are dreaming as you are dreaming. At first this may seem like some sort of rare or impossible skill. If it is rare to be conscious in the dream world that one is dreaming it is as rare to be conscious in the waking world that one is awake. Mindfulness and self awareness are skills that mystical traditions are constantly seeking to instill because they are so rare even in the waking world. Yet when discussing the dream world we assume we move through we waking world with a particular awareness not afforded in the dream world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of our time in the waking world is governed by the force of habit and lack of conscious reflection. I would argue that the conscious experience of introspection by the average person would probably even out between the dream world and the waking world. I would also argue that one is actually is more likely to “realize they were dreaming” then “realize they were awake”. It is a particular kind of consciousness to “realize what world one is inhabiting” and if one believed only one world existed, then that kind of consciousness is not available, unless one if caught off guard in the wrong world.
Since we assume the waking world is “primary” to the dream world our practice of bringing greater conscious awareness will be based from the waking word into the dream world. After briefly exploring some techniques for fostering lucid dreaming we will discuss the usefulness of lucid dreaming with regards to somnium spirituality.
Cultivating the ability to dream lucidly is a matter of cognitive discipline. The first easy technique is to build bridges into the dream world by the practice of intentionality. This intention was already discussed concerning dream recollection, However, this skill is not just a matter of recollection, but of awareness once one abides on the dream world. A first intentionality technique is called mnemonically induced lucid dreaming. Mnemonically induced lucid dreaming is simply going to sleep with particular intention, this time the intention of being aware of the world one is inhabiting, the dream world. Once one has advanced into the ability to lucid dream in general, one can begin to “set intention”. This takes place as an advanced form of mnemonically induced lucid dreaming. For this technique one plans how one will interact with the dream once one becomes aware that one is in the dream world. This will foster elongated lucid dreaming as opposed to brief flashes of lucidity in the dream world. For our purposes, this skill will be most helpful as it will allow us to consciously bring our particular spirituality to the dream world as opposed to simply using the dream world as the ultimate “virtual reality experience” useful only for our entertainment.
The second set of techniques revolve around environmental recognition. The first skill is called “reflection” or reality testing. It assumes a level of conscious awareness, such that the dreamer realizes the lack of causal rule with regards to what is experienced, and then is able to recognize and be aware of the abidance in the dream world. In short once one cultivates the ability to recognize events that “would not be possible” given the nature of the physical world, one could then deduce that they were in the dream world and this consciousness would facilitate lucid dreaming. Another variant on this same idea is for the dreamer to journal his or her dreams out such that the dreamer can begin to recognise the symbolic systems of the dreams. Once in the dream world, if the dreamer encounters a series of common dream phenomenon, one can become aware of abidance in the dream world and begin enacting preconceived intention.
Lucid dreaming is a great way to bring the waking world into the dream world. It allows for a heightened consciousness, a skill much needed in the waking world as the dream world. But as I said, the point here is not to construct the greatest virtual reality experience ever for the sake of entertainment. Our purposes are spiritual. Once one can master lucid dreaming and begin the process of setting intention so as to shape dreams, one can begin to interact with dreams as a form of prayer and communication with God as laid out in the Bible. At this point I would point out that this communication with the divine is not unique to the dream world. Our point is a multivalent epistemology such that we understand that all of our experiences are leading us to God. Somnium spirituality is only one of many ways we commune with God.
If one sets intention and begins to form a basic narrative of a dream, one can also set the type of experience one may want to have spiritually. One can select symbols to inhabit the dream world upon entering by means of dream incubation of mnemonically induced lucid dreaming and then go on to interact consciously with the symbols allowing their manifest forms to communicate for the latent meanings.
One gets a sense that this is what is happening in the Book of Revelations. John is very clearly in some sort of ecstasy, possibly in the waking world, but lets say it is the dream world. He is very clearly psychologically conscious of his situation and is able to interact with the symbols and garner manifest and latent meanings in real time during the dream. He is able to interlocute with his dream and get answers to questions. The book itself plays very hard on the theme of manifest versus latent as he moves from point to point encountering symbols of the wider political and cultural world. It could be a worthy goal to be able to interact with one’s symbols like John of Patmos. His particular dream was one of the wider social context as opposed to personal revelation, yet he skillfully asked questions of the symbols and received answers.
As a general pattern he hears manifest content and then turned to see a symbolic replacement of the manifest with a latent equivalent. There seems to be a symbolic interchange from one symbolic system that is heard to another deeper symbolic system that is seen, which brings one to the ultimate latent materials of the Christian mysteries. For example, “Behold the Lion of Judah” is seen as a slaughtered lamb, each symbols of Christ, his meaning and methodology. Or again, “I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal, one hundred and forty-four thousand marked from every tribe of the Israelites. . . After this I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.” A passage indicating the army of the Lord twelve thousand from each tribe of Israel and likening it to those who are saved by the blood of the lamb, a countless number.
This brings us to an important reminder. The answers one would get in a dream will in no way be as clear cut as ones one would expect in the waking world. This is a world where abstracts are manifest to the sense and everything has at least two meanings. These characteristics are very present in John’s experience. Somnium spirituality allows one to interact with the deeper meanings and purposes of one’s life through this interplay between abstract and symbolic. It is not an overly complicated art, but the intuition of meaning takes great self knowledge and them the ability to apply symbolic interpretation. By practice of this spirituality one should also learn more about one’s self, then learn, by means of this practice how one may need to change. And then again use the dream world, whose self delusion is not rational but symbolic and therefore decodable by reason, to check progress on one’s spiritual journey. The dream world should not be held to the standards of the waking world. It is a different phenomenological framework, a different type of knowledge. From that re-iteration it is time to move to major skill number two, the moving from the dream world to the waking world.
Bringing the Dream World to the Waking World
I had a dream once where I was in a massive cavernous space. There were all these men and women there and they seemed to be undulating in a rhythm up and down. At the front of the room there was a man, but when I looked at him I noticed he was dressed like a woman. The people’s undulation seemed to be linked to his cues. He was standing very erect at a key moment the man stiffened he thrust something up into the space of the room. It was difficult to tell what it was. I felt like it embodied some supreme importance regarding women and men and how they relate to each other and to life.
In the previous section of the treatise we discussed how to bring the waking world into the dream world. We discussed techniques by which we can set up for entrance into the dream world as we abide in the waking world in order to experience the dream world under certain intentions and with a certain level of consciousness. In this section we shall do the opposite, we shall discuss bringing the dream world into the waking world. If the last section was more palatable to the “cognitive controller”, this section will be more palatable to the “mystic experiencer”. In order to bring the dream world into the waking world, it is best to set apart a space that is suited to the purposes. A place where one will not be disturbed from the actions and psychological movements needed to make the transition.
Such spaces are usually referred to a “sacred spaces” or “sanctuaries” in religious traditions and they go back further than recorded history. For example, it is a misconception that cave prehistoric cave paintings are some form of artistic expression and decoration connected to the dwelling place. As Joseph Campbell Points out in his work, Masks Of God: Primitive Mythology, “First among the features of the great caves that are of paramount importance to our study is the fact that the deep, labyrinthian grottos were not dwellings but sanctuaries” The paintings themselves are too deep and remote to be a place where people lived, also there are no artifacts to suggest habitation. Thus most likely these sites were used in rites that needed an environment that helped one enter “another world”. The Christian art in the catacombs of ancient Rome seem to be connected to some similar urge. It is unlikely the Christians “hid out” in the catechumens nor even had any eucharistic celebrations there. But some deep need to enter the world of the dead and create there a sacred space drove these early Christians to create their art. A well contrived space can be effective for many varieties of spiritualities and, as was noted with dream incubations, the importance of environment should not be downplayed.
Since the somnium spirituality we seek to learn is happening in the matrix of Roman Catholicism, it is fortunate that the churches of Roman Catholicism makes great use of sacred space. Indeed, Catholic Churches seem to be built and arranged such that the worshiper feels they have entered another world. Even the secular atheist, when entering an ornate Catholic church most likely feels transported at least back to a past dead world. The space is setup to contrast the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It is designed as a place to encounter quite and peace.
Another intentional point of the physical structure and arrangement of a Catholic Church is to make the invisible in visible, so it is particularly suited to the channel the dream world, where all visible things have an invisible meaning. The art and architecture constantly reveal a variety of types of invisible beings, the saints, the angels and even God himself. They are often arrayed architecturally such that their positioning gives keys to various meanings, surrounding the altar through an Iconostasis, raising to heaven in a dome, juxtaposed across from another person that has a relevant symbolic system etc. Another obvious way that invisible reality become visible in a Catholic Church is through the sacraments. The space itself is meant to channel an entire system where the invisible realities of grace become visible by physical signs.
The environment of the Church building facilitates the rituals that take place there and these rituals are perfectly set to practice bridging the dream world to the waking world in reverse of what was previously discussed. When one participates in the holy mass, especially the Liturgy of the Eucharist, many elements of the dream world are in play. In this ritual causality is less important, there is a highly symbolic communication system that is not dependent on locational utterances. Also in this environment abstracts, archetypes, and invisible beings become physically manifest, and language itself is particularly sculpted to invoke sentiment more than illicit reasonable understanding.
All of these things come together to set an environment perfect for suspension of scientific epistemology that cares only about the past’s relationship to the future, and instead to be in the moment. It is a time for what we are going to call “lucid waking”, that is the ability to realize that one is awake, that one is living in the moment now, invested with a multivalent epistemology that is informed by conscious and reflective experience of the dream world. Mass can be a bridge between the dream world and the waking world in that once one connects that its communication system is similar to that of the dream world, one can ask, “am I dreaming? No, I am awake” This is the exact skill of lucid dreaming applied to waking life and the more one has been able to practice it in lucid dreaming, the better one can practice it in the reverse as lucid waking. The thing that separates “lucid waking” from simple consciousness of one’s environment is the sense that there are different worlds one inhabits. When in the dream world, one does not assume one is awake, one assumes one is alive. It is not until one engages in lucid dreaming that one brings any sense of the waking world to the dream world. Thus lucid waking is indicative of the same phenomenological balance. The practitioner does not assume that the dream world serves the waking world or vice versa. The practitioner simply lets each world inform the other. The benefit of lucid waking is that it brings a consciousness of the dream world and all that it entails into the waking world. As one is informed by the dream world in one’s waking life one is more easily able to be informed by the world constructed by the liturgy.
The world of the mass also relates to the dream world in that it goes on to inform the other aspects of our waking world. We take the symbolic system and experiences we have there and apply them to how we relate to others and how we fundamentally understand the nature of the cosmos. Also, as the lay church, we sculpt a world of “sacramentals” with it’s own rich symbolic system rooted in the mass and ever leading back to it, such that somnium spirituality can be expressed in environments and ways of our own creating. Thus, much like one uses a dream for self knowledge in order to sculpt themselves, one uses liturgical and paraliturgical experiences to change the way they relate to the world. If one is fully invested in this type of spirituality and an non-believer were to deride you concerning your religious beliefs, “It’s like you're living in a dream world” your only response need be, “Thanks!”
All that being said, I do not want to give the impression that there is nothing to be understood or learned at mass. In fact the mass seems to be constructed such that there are parts where one would need to be cognitively engaged and stimulated and parts that are more apt to “lucid waking”. The two parts of the mass seem to reflect two different worlds. The Liturgy of the Word, especially in the reading of the scriptures and the delivering of the homily, seems geared toward stimulating conscious reason and understanding. This can especially be seen since the dawn of the reformation, which grew up alongside the enlightenment and it’s obsession with human reason. The far end of the protestant spectrum has lost any semblance of sacrament and focuses wholly on the scripture as something to be understood and used as a “proof” of one thing or another.
But this is a very modern development and as much as it is present in the Roman rite it is an adaption to this post enlightenment focus on reason and proof. Reason and proof are not bad things, and I enjoy a well delivered and well reasoned homily. But the liturgy in the pre reformation period may not have been so focused. The Bible itself is not so linear, nor necessarily written to be a proof text. The Liturgy of the Word, more likely, was meant to help instill the worldview and symbolic system by which to experience and then go on to live out the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The stories read, how they pair, the images and relations they get across give one the context for what happens next. Then, in the medieval period, give one the context for many actions outside the Mass itself. When I say that the Liturgy of the Word gives the symbolic context of how people go on to live out the liturgy, I do not mean “by being nice to others” or “by spreading the gospel”, I mean by investing their being in the liturgical year and the Liturgy of the Hours. It is in the Liturgy of the Word that one acquires the symbols and myth, the stories that give one the deep meaning of the universe. The liturgical year, the goes on to give a way for the Christian to be invested in or participate in this myth point by point through the life of Christ. Alan Watts explains this aspect of the Liturgy of the Hours in the preface of his book Myth and Ritual in Christianity
The seasonal ritual of the Work of God [The Liturgy of the Hours] whereby, day after day and year after year, the Catholic Church relives the life of Time's redeemer and creator. And this cyclic re/enactment is the surest sign that the Christ story is not primarily an event which happened some two thousand years ago, but something perennial, both in all time and beyond all time. As the changing miracle of the seasons brightens the mere march of days, so Time itself is delivered from mere inanity by being lived sub specie aeternitatis, under the shape of eternity.
In so far, then, as the inner life of Christianity the contemplation of God is not just the reverent remembering of a past history, but the recurrent celebration and reliving of a timeless truth, it is possible for us to discuss the Christian story as something much more profound than mere facts which once happened, to give it not only the status of history but also the tremendous dignity of myth, which is "once upon a time" in the sense that it is behind all time.
Possession of a multivalent epistemology would be necessary to accept this view of the liturgy if the hours and the practice of lucid waking would help this process of investment all the more. But without a cue into the myth itself, the symbols can only be as active as they are archetypal, which is still effective, but minimally so.
This leads us to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. If the Liturgy of the Word is experienced as a rational explanation, the Liturgy of the Eucharist is it’s dream like balance, where reason is downplayed toward the fostering of a more primal experience. The mass in this expression is for the mystic, one who seeks direct experience with God. If one brings a somnium spirituality to the Mass by practicing lucid waking, one can be deeply in tune with how the mass is a mystery. It is not a mystery because the participant “doesn’t understand what’s going on”. It is a mystery because the knowledge to be garnered happens on a multivalent field, and therefore is not necessarily related to causality or even rational in nature. This fact makes it all the more sad when one hears the complaint that someone doesn’t like mass because “they don’t understand it.” One cannot answer this complaint with a quick response, because there are things to understand going on, but to understand them takes a different worldview than the tunnel vision of post enlightenment scientific empiricism that gets applied to liturgy, snuck in through an otherwise helpful protestant scriptural ethos. The thing to understand is not information so much as allowance of an experience.
The Church sets the conditions for this experience and facilitates communion with the divine. The practitioner simply has to accept that it is happening and then let it happen. This is where somnium spirituality, by technique of lucid waking is particularly helpful. The symbolic system of a given mass will be standardly the same as set by the magisterium. But culturally adapted with regulations by the local bishop, and the the pastor and particular priest for a particular parish. This symbolic hierarchy fosters a repetitions that is important in the same way that recurrent symbols in dreams are important. They are gotten across in different ways and in different environments in different parishes and cultures. But, the more basic and important the symbol, the more it repeats. This is true in the dream world and the world of liturgy. As was noted above, the more often a dream recurres, the more important it’s message to the dreamer. For liturgy it is the same, but the repetition is willful as opposed to self presenting. Mass is minimally attended weekly, but possibly daily for the pious. If one is practicing lucid waking as a technique this repetition invests one with the same emotive state as having an impactful dream. Dreams that are of some importance to the psyche can linger for hours or days. If one is allowing the mass to act upon one’s psyche in the same way, the emotive awareness will also linger in a corresponding manner.
From this one can also now get a sense of why some people pay so much attention to the rubrics of the mass. Lex orandi, lex credendi it is prayer which leads to belief, it is liturgy which leads to theology. Thus a stricter control of the symbolic system makes for a more coherent experience. I am one who believes the mass is suited to adapt to the culture present, but there is a core that needs to be retained. That said, the tridentine latin mass is a master stroke of symbolic expression that is available to one who is invested with a somnium spirituality. The language barrier actually helps one detach from the rational and allow the symbolic experience. It seems the “higher” the mass, the better suited to such spirituality.
The more modern approaches to the liturgy are enlightenment influenced and therefore are more invested in explanation the symbolic initiative communication. I don’t think this adaptation is unwarranted, yet at the same time, to completely jettison the ancient rites because “they don’t make sense” fails to recognise that the enlightenment has a very narrow view of what makes sense. Perhaps there is much room for growth.
One must not have the impression that there is no room for reasoned thought even in a lucid waking practice of the liturgy. Granted, most likely the reasonable interpretation comes outside the context of the experience, much like one does not interpret a dream while one is dreaming, even if it is a lucid dream. Interpretation happens later, outside the experience. How one “interprets” the mass as a practitioner of lucid waking is similar to how one would interpret a dream. The interpretation itself varies from practitioner to practitioner. The magisterium of the church gives the symbolic system as well as a standard for interpretation, but lucid waking allows the practitioner to come to a direct experience of the mass by bringing the dream world to the waking world. Therefore interpretations are as varied as ways in which God approaches individual humans.
It is now time to revisit the dream that was quoted with no commentary at the beginning of this section. It may take getting to this point to see that this dream was the Liturgy of the Eucharist itself. This way of framing the experience if fraught with sexuality and our interpretation of the dream will take on a fairly freudian psycho-sexual tenor. This may be offensive to pious ears, but I am a married lay person, and by this, sexuality and sexual actions form a great part of my spirituality. As I enter this lucid waking experience, this is what I intuit upon further reflection. What does the dream of the Liturgy of the Eucharist mean? This dream means that God gives life.
The symbols I gave were a cavernous room. Inside this room there is a mass of men and women undulating, a very sexual motion. In this case the undulation is standing, sitting, kneeling etc. A large mass of people is redolent of population and procreation and a cavernous space is most certainly vaginal or reminiscent of a womb. The older churches are certainly vast and cavernous. My particular church has beautiful vaulted ceilings.
The rhythm is controlled by a man in a dress, the priest. His vestments, long flowing and lacy (pink twice a year) highlight his role as a transgender bridge. It takes both men and women to make life. When he stands erect and stiffens on the cavernous space this is also a very sexual phallic symbol. One does not have to have studied Freud to see the erect pillar in the cavernous space to has sexual relevance. When he does this “he thrust something up into the space of the room. It was difficult to tell what it was. I felt like it embodied some supreme importance regarding women and men and how they relate to each other and to life.” This is the elevation of the host. The thrusting into the void is once again an unmistakable sexual action. It is hard to tell what the “something” is. It looks like bread, but in this world, abstracts and invisibilities can become physical realities. It is not bread, it is the Body of Christ, the ultimate symbol of life.
In the treatise Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence the transgender nature of the eucharist was briefly touched upon.
The idea of Jesus giving his body to eat gave rise to accusations of cannibalism against the early church and today non-believers seeking to get a rise out of Christians jestfully call for defense against the same charge. It is a just question, men usually do not give their bodies for others to eat. But how typically masculine an outlook because, of course, women do all the time and a person aligned to the feminine would be keenly aware of how a person can give someone their flesh to eat, and why that would not even slightly conjure the image of brutal cannibalism, but instead an image of maternal nurturing. The sacrament given to us every Sunday is itself a very transgender reality. It crosses gender boundaries in that it is ostensibly the masculine form of sustenance and life by tradition of the Bible [from Genesis 3], that is, bread. Yet at the same time in it’s essence it performs sustenance in the most feminine way, that is, from the very body of the being doing the sustaining. The interior and unseen (essence) sustenance is feminine (body), while the exterior (accidents) sustenance is masculine (bread). It embodies every aspect of life giving power as we know it, both transcendent and immanent, masculine and feminine.
Here it is also interesting to note that at the elevation of the eucharist the transgender nature of the eucharist accidental male exterior of bread hiding true nature of the feminine body is counterbalanced by the priest holding it aloft. He is in truth male, but adorns his true nature with the accidental attributes of a female by means his flowing cloths. The charge that this is anachronistic cannot hold much given how irrelevant cloths would be except the the symbols are rigidly and particularly chosen by the magisterium, and the magisterium seems to prefer the feminine dress. The entire pyramidal structure of the elevation forms a beautiful chiastic pattern of gender paradox that shows the complete union of the two members of the binary.
I could go on here to relate the blood of the wine is symbolic of the bloody sacrificial death expected of a male to save and preserve life, especially regarding warfare in primal cultures. And then go on to liken it to menstrual blood, by which females are expected to bring life. All of these sexual life symbols are completely appropriate interpretations for one whose life path seeks to procreate with God and neighbor through the sacrament of marriage.
Fascinating as these interpretations may be, they are useful only as an aid to lucid waking as an experience of the liturgy. All of this complex of symbolic communication is simply meant to communicate impress upon the participant that Christ is the summation of life giving ability. It seems like an easy interpretation for such a complex of symbols, but dreams often hammer a simple point home in such a complex way. The unraveling of the complexity is entertaining. But in the liturgy of the eucharist itself, the lucid waking experience is paramount for the task at hand. By that I mean, if the message conveyed is not internalized and acted upon, both as experience and in life, the experience was useless. This goes for dreams and the liturgy. This is the use of lucid waking in the liturgy. Not the ability to think, but the ability to be absolutely present to the realities of the liturgy as they are experienced and internalizing them in a meaningful way.
This is only one of a certainly infinite number of ways to experience the mass in a lucid waking state. For example, one could easily sculpt a dream narrative for a spaceship that transports life to a new realm, or some such thing. The limits of lucid waking experience in the liturgy are proper doctrine, the layout of the space and ritual and the imagination of the practitioner. The technique of lucid waking is not primarily aimed at reasonable discourse or objective knowledge, it is aimed at effective experience.
Conclusion
How many worlds do you live in? It sounds like a question an insane person may ask you on the street. But as we have seen, those who are given the privilege by society to define sanity are not always the most ontologically astute. By strict belief in the exclusiveness of the physical world those practicing oneirology links the dream world to the waking world of the insane and devalue both visions and dreams. It is very reminiscent of our encounter with Samuel, a time when visions are rare, or at least rarely minded.
In this treatise we have sought to remedy that particularly by the study and development of a spirituality for dreaming, somnium spirituality. We started by redefining reality in order to recognize three different worlds, the physical world of scientific empiricism, the waking world of our experience and the dream world. We then explored current conceptions of dreams and their utility and discovered that both ancient and modern dream work entails an understanding of symbolism and hidden meaning. Next we looked to scripture to understand how dreams are seen as profitable in the stories of the bible. For there we deduced two forms of communication that dreams give, a personal communication of destiny and relations to God as well as a communication of the state of affairs of society and how one regards it. These we used to develop as regard for our own dream lives by applying modern psychological technique. Lastly we formed a two way bridge of somnium spirituality. The first way, for the more cerebral, brings the waking world into the dream world by means of dream incubation and lucid dreaming. The second way, geared to the more mystical, brings the dream world into the waking world by means of sacred ritual and lucid waking techniques as defined by this treatise.
I would like to finish with one of my favorite prayers by John Cardinal Newman. His prayer entitled “daily prayer” reads thus, “May Christ support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace in the end.” I believe this is an excellent prayer for waking in the morning and beginning one’s dream incubation process in the evening. This prayer seems to intuitively recognize that rest is holy, and given that the rest is happening at the end of the day one can easily surmise that it is sleep that is being prayed upon. The prayer regards sleep is holy and not simply medicinal at best or a waste of time is of paramount importance in order to even begin the development of a somnium spirituality. The second and most endearing quality of this prayer is that it is “life”, the waking of physical world, that is likened to feverish insanity, and holy rest and sleep that is linked to communion with God. Worldly utility is not the supreme good, and God is available through one’s every experience, even the ones we often deem as most useless.
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