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BRLSI BELIEF LECTURE SERIES To some an irrelevance, to others vital sustenance. Belief is a touchstone to the human predicament. An unquenched thirst for spirituality coexists with numbing materialism. Thinning congregations in some communities belie proliferation in others. In some ecstatic, in others vacuous. What is belief? Why does it bind, why does it divide? This New Series offers no pulpits; we seek speakers whose subjects will interest no less the Unsure than the Believer – they should fascinate all.
Belief Through Dreams: Joseph, Dream Journals & the Internet Nick Gulliford Lay Preacher 3 March 2004 This talk was illustrated with pictures by William Blake, Rembrandt, and He Qi1. One of the characters in T.S. Elliot’s Murder in the Cathedral says: Humankind cannot bear very much reality- a phrase which Elliot repeats in a poem (possibly in East Coker). I believe that dreams can help us bear our own reality, and I’d like to begin with a nightmare of Clementine Churchill’s. Early in WWI, her husband Winston Churchill began training as a pilot. The predictable life span for these pilots was very brief. Clementine was pregnant and obsessed with the idea that Winston’s death would be the end of her child. One day she sent him this cable: I had a miserable night haunted by hideous dreams... I dreamed that I had my baby, but the doctor and nurse wouldn’t show it to me and hid it away... I humped out of bed and ran all over the house searching for it. At last I found it in a darkened room... I feverishly undressed it, and counted its fingers and toes. It seemed quite normal, and I ran out of the room with it in my arms. And then in the daylight I saw it was a gaping idiot... I wanted the doctor to kill it - but he was shocked and took it away from me... I woke up and went to sleep again and dreamed it a second time. I feel very nervous and unhappy, and the little thing has been fluttering all morning. Your telegram arrived last night... to announce that you had not been killed flying. I ... went to bed, relieved and reassured, but this morning, after the nightmare, I looked at it again for consolation, and found to my horror that it was from Sheerness, and not from Dover, where I thought you were going first. So you are probably at it again at this very moment... Winston’s reply was instantaneous: My Darling One, I will fly no more until at any rate you have recovered from your kitten (no doubt meaning fright). Later he wrote; but I must admit that the numerous fatalities of this year would justify you in complaining if I continued to share the risks, as I am proud to do, of these good fellows. So I give it up, decidedly for many months, and perhaps forever. This is a gift, so stupidly am I made, which costs me more than anything that could be bought with money. So I gladly lay it at your feet, because I know it will rejoice and relieve your heart. You can see why it was described as ‘a nightmare that changed world history’. We should heed our spouses’ dreams. Certainly my wife brings hers to my attention, and I mine to her. The Book of Numbers [12:6] says: And he said, Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream
( illus 1 © The Annunciation by He Qui ) thus equating clearly the common origin and significance of dreams and visions; it is resting upon very good psychological foundations. But the Bible likewise often equates the appearance of an angel with a dream or vision. In Matthew 1:20, as Joseph considers putting Mary away quietly after discovering her pregnancy we read that, The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, bidding him to retain Mary as his wife and telling him her child is of the Holy Spirit. In Matthew 2:12, Wise Men, having found and worshipped the child Jesus, are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. In Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language [chapter 6], John Sanford says: We find in the first two chapters of Matthew no less than five dreams, and we further establish that every decision in this action-packed section is based upon a revelation made by God through a dream. Matthew is not the only Gospel writer who does this. In Luke for instance we find that Zechariah’s experience with the angel Gabriel is a vision. The angels who appeared to the women after the Resurrection were regarded as a vision: Yea, and certain woman also of our company made us astonished which were early at the sepulchre. And when they found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of the angels, which had said that he was alive. And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said; but him they saw not [Luke 24: 22-24]. The Bible clearly equates the revelations given by angels, with those given by dreams and visions. To give an example from the abundant material in Acts: the centurion Cornelius has an experience in which an angel comes to him in a vision. This is followed by Peter’s dream: a certain vessel descending upon him as it had been a great sheet, knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth, wherein were all manner of four footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts and creeping things and fowls of the air. This is interesting because Peter’s dream immediately follows the experience of Cornelius. There’s an immediate connection between them. Going back to Abraham: As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham, and lo a dread and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abraham, ‘Know of a surety that your descendants will be sojourned in a land that is not theirs, and be slaves there, and will be oppressed for four hundred years’ [Genesis 15:12-13]. It refers to a deep sleep, so its obvious that Abraham has a dream experience. Then after continuing with this prediction of things to come, we read: When the sun had gone down, and it was dark, behold a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces, that is a heifer, a she-goat, a ram of three years old, a turtle dove and a young pigeon. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham [Genesis 15:17-18]. Genesis only hints at the epic dream that came to Abraham when he beheld God as a fiery furnace. Here certainly is a precursor of those experiences, which have led people to picture the Holy Spirit as fire. The story comes up again before Stephen is martyred: The God of Glory appeared to our father Abraham…But God spoke in this way: that his descendants would sojourn in a foreign land, and that they would bring them into bondage and oppress them four hundred years [Acts 7]. Before he is stoned, Stephen goes through the complete history of Israel, and refers to this story of Abraham, not mentioning a dream but saying just that God spoke in this way, corresponding clearly to the language of that time. The stoning of Stephen was painted by Rembrandt. Another interesting story from the time of Abraham concerns Abimelech, a local chieftain: But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night [Genesis 20:3]. In this dream Abimelech is warned by God that Sarah is Abraham’s wife. Abraham has tried to pass her off as his sister, thinking things will go better for him that way, but Abimelech is warned in this dream not to touch her. We now go on to Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, and the Ladder: And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night … And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it [Genesis 28:10-12].
[ illus 3. © Jacob’s Ladder by William Blake.] Jacob’s son Joseph was of course one of the great dreamers of the Old Testament, and he dreams of his sheaf standing upright in the field and those of his brothers bowing down, and then again, of the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him. We see Joseph recounting his dreams and infuriating his family.
[illus 4. © Joseph’s Dream by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)] As a consequence, they sell Joseph to some Midianites or Ishmaelites who sell him as a servant to Potiphar in Egypt, whose wife tries to seduce him, but Joseph very sensibly backs away. She however clutches his cloak, as alleged evidence that the attempt was his, and Joseph is thrown into prison. The Pharaoh’s chief baker and chief butler dream their dreams and take them so seriously that Joseph is called upon as an interpreter. Joseph says: Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me, I pray you [Genesis 40:5 ff]. Following Joseph’s interpretation, the baker loses his head and the butler is restored to his post. Pharaoh then has a dream. The butler remembers that Joseph can interpret dreams, and he is brought before Pharaoh. When Joseph is asked to interpret, Joseph says: It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh a favourable answer. And later adds: The dream of Pharaoh is one; God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do [Genesis 41:16, 25]. It is clear from these examples that dreams were regarded as manifestations of divine intention, as one of God’s ways of communicating with people. A person inspired by God might interpret dreams with great benefit to the dreamer, for through understanding his dreams and acting in accordance with them, Pharaoh was able to avert a great catastrophe. And now we come to Samuel, then Saul, then David, and then his son Solomon. The Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night, and God said: ‘Ask what I shall give thee’. Solomon answers that he wants wisdom. And now o Lord my God, thou hast made thy servant King instead of David my father, and I am but a little child. I know not how to go out or come in… Give therefore the servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad; for who is able to judge this thy so great people? Immediately afterwards comes the story of the two women who have a baby. One of them has lost her baby. Solomon’s instruction is that they divide it in half. Then spake the woman whose living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said ‘O my Lord, give her (the other woman) the living child, and in no wise slay it’. But the other said: ‘Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it’, following Solomon’s instruction. And the King answered and said: ‘Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it.’ Thus Solomon gives the child to the woman (obviously from her reaction and humanity the true mother) who had offered it to the other.
Some of the books of the Bible are almost entirely taken up with visions, like the Book of Revelations, the Book of Ezekiel, and the Book of Joel which is quoted in the ‘Book of Acts’, in this significant verse: And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. So we have a very fine line between visions, dreams, the appearance of angels, and an outpouring of the spirit of God. In Ezekiel's Vision of God (of Four Beasts and a Wheel within a Wheel [Ezekiel 1:1-28]: There are four living creatures, each with four faces, one facing in each of the four directions. These are terribly and wonderfully made creatures who seem to express by their quaternity something very important. From Genesis to Revelation, the number four seems to feature quite prominently: there are four rivers that form the Garden of Eden; four corners that embrace all the earth; the heavenly Jerusalem will be laid out with four equidistant sides. Jung has shown that there are four functions of the psyche: sensing, intuition, thinking and feeling. In trying to prepare this talk, I was wondering how to appeal to those who have different preferences. Mine is for intuition, and I have difficulties with my sensing function. Some people have a strong preference for thinking of feeling, and those with a preference for thinking may find more difficulty than others in accepting dreams as rational or suitable. I hope however to convince you of the evidence that it is rational to consider our dreams. And now, Nebuchadnezzor’s dream: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth; and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. Its leaves were fair and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the air dwelt in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it. I saw in the visions of my head as I lay in bed, and behold, a watcher and an holy one, came down from heaven. He cried aloud and said thus: ‘Hew down the tree and cut off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit; let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches. But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven; let his lot be with the beasts in the grass of the earth; let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let a beast’s mind be given to him; and let seven times pass over him. The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men, and gives it to whom he will, and sets over it the lowliest of men.’ Daniel sees at once the extraordinary and dreadful meaning of this dream, and his thoughts alarm him. He warns King Nebuchadnezzor that he has become like the tree, great and spacious, flowing with life and beauty, but because Nebuchadnezzor has regarded himself as the author of his power and has assumed divine prerogatives and a godlike role, the almighty God will cut him down. The dream is an attempt to compensate for Nebuchadnezzor’s hubris (and reminds one of another ruler from that part of the world, Saddam Hussein). Now we come to the tribulations of Job, with his comforters, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. Eliphaz is speaking: Now a word was brought to me stealthily, my ear received the whisper of it. Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance. A form was before my eyes; there was silence, then I heard a voice: ‘Can mortal man be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker? [Job 4:12-17] Eliphaz is right in his thinking that dreams are important, but insists that Job has done something wrong. Job however feels that he should not be suffering as he is, and contends with God that he has done nothing wrong: Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Am I the sea, or a sea monster, that thou settest guard over me? When I say: ‘My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint’, then thou dost scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions [Job 7:11-14]. Job continues to protest his innocence, but Elihu also refers to dreams and tries to correct Job. Behold, in this you are not right. I will answer you. God is greater than man. Why do you contend against him, saying, ‘He will answer none of my words’? For God speaks in one way, and in two, though man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, while they slumber on their beds, then he opens the ears of men, and terrifies them with warnings, that he may turn man aside from his deed, and cut off pride from man; he keeps back his soul from the Pit, his life from perishing by the sword [Job 33:12-18]. In different ways, I identify with the characters of Job and Jonah, particularly Jonah: Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me…’ And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, ‘Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee’ [Jonah 1:1-2 & 3:1-2]. After the first experience, Jonah just disappears to the other end of the Mediterranean, uninterested in his dream, but after being spat out by the whale, he has the dream again, rather like Clementine Churchill, and this time Jonah does as bid and very quickly the people of Nineveh respond to his preaching. Obviously, there can be abuses. Since dreams and revelations were regarded as revelations from God, we would expect that abuses would enter into their interpretation. This is hinted at in Numbers [12:8], where dreams are referred to as the Dark Speech of God. The Prophet Jeremiah speaks quite clearly of the divine authorship of dreams, and he warns against false interpreters, and those who pretend that they’ve had dreams when they have not. For instance: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own mind, not from the mouth of the Lord. I am afraid there will always be people who misinterpret or exploit something that is really very precious. Pilate ignores his wife’s dream: For he knew that for envy they had delivered him. When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying: "Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him." But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus [Mat 27:18-20]. It’s quite a contrast, isn’t it, with Winston Churchill, the story of Pilate not paying attention to his wife’s dream. I would also like to say that dreams cost us something. Pilate’s wife says: Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him. Even if they speak to us and we act upon them, it may still cost us quite a lot in coming to terms with them. Trying to work on them may not give us an easy life, but the effort may have important meaning. In summary, we may say that dreams and visions were regarded in both the Old and New Testaments as revelations from God:
Viewed from this perspective, the entire Bible is the story of God’s breakthrough into the human conscious mind via the unconscious. Many other religious experiences (such as Jacob’s wrestling with the adversary, or Moses’ encounter with the burning bush) were of a visionary kind, and the Early Church regarded dreams (as does the Bible) as revelations from God. I quote John Sanford’s well expressed conclusions: But today many of us have decided we do not want to "contaminate" our contemplation of the divine by allowing anything as nebulous and unsettling as the unconscious to intrude. We have decided that we may find God through rational thinking, or a "group experience", or education, or formal worship - everywhere except in our own soul, which is in fact the fountainhead of religious experience. The result is that we Christians are afraid today of that very soul from which our heritage springs. We want creeds, not religious experiences, and dogma, not inspiration. Above all, we refuse to accept the non-rational unconscious, because it threatens the tyranny of rationality that has gripped us today. Just because the churches have decided to pay no attention to their unconscious does not mean that God will stop trying to speak to us. So it is that scientific psychology and medicine, in search of a way to help us find healing and wholeness, have discovered what the Bible knew all along but Christians had forgotten: that dreams and their interpretation can heal the sick soul. Carl Jung, more perceptive and receptive than his contemporaries, discovered that the dreams of people today are not only dreams about themselves, but also about God; that at the basis of our dreams there is a religious process. In the Bible there are 508 references to prayer, pray, praying etc and 446 references to dreams, visions, and angels and so on. How many of our faith leaders understand the nature of the religious experiences of most people today? My experience is that there is much talk about prayer, which is obviously important, but very little about dreams. It’s almost as if we’re invited to keep on asking, but never to listen. Harry Wilmer’s How Dreams Help makes some points: The nature of the conventional (Freudian) unconscious reflects events in our personal real-life stories. The collective (Jungian) unconscious, however, is beyond personal elements of our outer lives. Its images, symbols, and stories reveal the existence of a common humanity of all human beings. Often both unconscious elements appear in the sane dream. Call them archaic if you wish, but they exist in all of us. It is no wonder that the public stigmatizes the mentally ill and casts them aside. The problem, however, is that all the crazy things in the psychotic world exist in the lower basement of everyone’s psyche [pp 97-8]. People find this difficult to accept; we tend to spurn people who are mentally ill, and not recognize, as Wilmer puts it, that in the lower basement of our own psyche, we have the same sorts of problems, and if we are willing to acknowledge the reality that we have the same problems as those we spurn, we can lead lives that are more whole. I hope to convince you that belief through dreams is important. Wilmer quotes the start of The Pilgrim’s Progress: As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden on his back…I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and as he read he wept and trembled, and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying ‘What shall I do?’ From a point of view of morals and dreams, it is worth remembering that John Bunyan had joined the Baptist Church in England and refused to bow to royal edicts banning nonconformist preaching. This action led to his imprisonment (1660 –1672), during which time he read the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and wrote many books. In 1675 when he was again imprisoned, he wrote his most celebrated work The Pilgrim’s Progress. We don’t know what’s going to come out of it if we look into ourselves and into our dreams. We can perhaps resist something we believe to be wrong, and then find enormous creativity out of the agony we may have been through. As T.S. Elliot put it (in East Coker): You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not. Dreams are not easy, but their exploring and their sharing, can enhance our understanding of life. It is helpful, if difficult, to record one’s dreams. With a friend I developed an internet software package, originally called Inner Life Explorer, but renamed for the American market Dream-EZ, which provides a convenient format for recording dreams, and by remembering previous entries, prompts the user with further questions. It is quite useful as a record, and indeed as a basis for discussion at some later time, which is always worthwhile anyway. Summarised by Martin Sturge
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