Learning Spiritual Lessons from the Dreams:

The religions of the world have found a way to disagree on almost any subject you can
think of. They’ve clashed over everything from the nature of the soul to the reality of
God, from sexual morality to what foods we should and shouldn’t eat. But on one small
point most religions do agree, and that’s a point about the nature of dreams. Nearly all
the world’s religions share the belief that some dreams are true revelations of the Divine,
bringing people into direct contact with some kind of transpersonal being, force, or
reality. Not all dreams are believed to have this power; most traditions emphasize that
the majority of dreams are related to ordinary daily events and have no unusual, heavensent
meaning. But almost every religion in the world recognizes that at least once or
twice in their lives people have dreams that are different, that have a special energy,
vividness, and intensity to them. The Mohave Indians of the American Southwest call
these dreams “sumach ahot,” or “lucky dreams,” while the Jamaa church people of
Western Africa call them “mawazo,” or “holy dreams.” Medieval Islamic theologians
referred to them as “clear dream visions” sent directly from God, and ancient Hindu
philosophers spoke of them as “dreams under the influence of a deity.”
These unusual types of dream are not merely the relics of ancient religious superstition.
People in our society today experience dreams that are virtually identical to the dream
revelations reported in a wide variety of religious traditions. Although many individuals
in the modern world use non-religious language to describe their dreams, the dream
experiences themselves always have a vivid intensity that sharply distinguishes them
from more ordinary types of dreaming. These are the dreams we never forget—the
dreams we can’t help but remember, the dreams that throughout our lives linger in our
memories and haunt our imaginations.
Carl Jung referred to these momentous experiences as “big dreams,” and he said that such
dreams could, if people learned to appreciate their meanings, become “the richest jewels
in the treasure-house of the soul.” Unfortunately, many people in modern society have
no idea what to think or do when they experience a big dream. They worry that having
such strangely vivid and powerful dreams must mean there’s something wrong with
them. “Where did that come from?” the dreamers nervously ask themselves, “I’ve never
experienced anything like that before, whether I was awake or asleep….”