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Scriptural Symbolic Dreams: Relevant or Redundant in the 21st Century?
Kate Adams
Objective: This paper asks if the ancient relationship between dreams and religion can contribute to contemporary dream research, focussing particularly on one type of dream that is detailed in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic scriptures: the visual symbolic message dream, through which God/Allah conveys a message to the dreamer encoded in symbols that need interpreting.
Method: The paper begins by examining the scriptural dream narratives to identify recurring themes in their content and interpretations. It then compares these with information obtained in interviews with 9-12 year old children from Christian, Muslim and Secular backgrounds (n=94) about their divine dreams. When children identified a message in their dream, both the dream and the message were coded according to their type. The focus of this paper is on those dreams that were coded as visually symbolic (n=25) and it examines the types of messages that the children believed they contained, comparing them with those in the holy texts.
Results: The majority of the themes in the messages that the children identified resembled those in the scriptures, including instruction, warnings and future predictions. These spanned the sample groups.
Conclusions: The paper concludes that the scriptural dreams have relevance for contemporary dream research as children’s experience of divine dreams has parallels with them. Future research can explore the divine dreams of children belonging to other faiths and children’s interpretations of dreams that they do not assign a divine connection to. (Sleep and Hypnosis 2004;6(3):111-118)
| Keywords: divine dreams, children’s dreams, dream interpretation, religious dreams, symbolic dreams, dreams about God, dreams from Allah |
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