The connection between dreaming and religion has long fascinated researchers from anthropology, depth psychology, and the history of religions ((Freud 1965; Jung 1974; Von Grunebaum and Callois 1966; Tedlock 1987; Young 2001; Trompf 1990; Radin 1936; O’Flaherty 1984; Miller 1994; Lincoln 1935; Lohmann 2003; Lamoreaux 2002; Kelsey 1991; Jedrej and Shaw 1992; Irwin 1994; Hermansen 2001; Benedict 1922). These researchers have shown that dreaming has played a remarkable variety of roles in the world’s religious traditions: as a wellspring of prophecy and revelation, as a locus for ritual practice, healing, and initiation, as a visionary opening to new apprehensions of reality. Although it is impossible to prove E.B. Tylor’s assertion that dreaming is the origin of religion, the evidence is now clear that dreaming is, at the very least, a dynamic influence on the religious beliefs and experiences of people all over the world. This chapter will bring that historical and cross-cultural evidence into dialogue with the latest findings of neuroscience regarding the roots of dreaming in the brain-mind system. The discovery of REM and NREM sleep in the 1950’s has been followed by extensive research on the form and content of dreaming in relation to the neurophysiological processes of the mammalian sleep cycle (Aserinsky and Kleitman 1953, 1955; Domhoff 2003; Foulkes 1999; Hartmann 1998; Hobson 1988; Hunt 1989; Kahan 2001; Pace-Schott et al. 2003; Solms 1997). This chapter will argue that the neurscientific research, though often couched in materialist, anti-religious terms, may actually complement and enrich the view that dreaming is a powerful, unpredictable, often iconoclastic force in human religious life. In the investigation of dreams, a combination of religious studies and brain-mind science is not only helpful, it is absolutely necessary to do full justice to the rich phenomenology of dreaming experience.
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