Dreams as the Royal Road to Religious Enlightenment?

When he released his landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams at the dawn of the last century, Sigmund Freud was both being and not being original and revolutionary. Truth be told he was merely calling to mind again the fascination with dreams that people have had since the beginning of time. 

Muslims and Christians are no different in this regard. I have noted books on dreams in religious traditions on here over the years. Now we have another. Released in March of this year is a book by Bronwen Neil, Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400-1000 CE (Oxford UP, 2021), 256pp. About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Why did dreams matter to Jews, Byzantine Christians, and Muslims in the first millennium? Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400 - 1000 CE shows how the ability to interpret dreams universally attracted power and influence in the first millennium. In a time when prophetic dreams were viewed as God's intervention in human history, male and female prophets wielded was unparalleled power in imperial courts, military camps, and religious gatherings. The three faiths drew on the ancient Near Eastern tradition of dream key manuals, which offer an insight into the hopes and fears of ordinary people. They melded pagan dream divination with their own scriptural traditions to produce a novel and rich culture of dream interpretation.

Prophetic dreams enabled communities to understand their past and present circumstances as divinely ordained and helped to bolster the spiritual authority of dreamers and those who had the gift of interpreting their dreams. Bronwen Neil takes a gendered approach to the analysis of the common culture of dream interpretation across late antique Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic sources to 1000 CE, in order to expose the ways in which dreams offered women a unique opportunity to exercise influence. The epilogue to the volume reveals why dreams still matter today to many men and women of the monotheist traditions.

What Did the Fathers Dream About?

Freud, of course, called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious." But long before Freud, the capacity of dreams to reveal important messages was known by Jews and Christians as seen by the number of dreams of significance that show up in the Bible. Biblical dreams have been studied by scholars, but analysis of the uses of dreams and visions in post-biblical and especially patristic literature has tended to be piecemeal. But now we have a book-length study recently released:

Jesse Keskiaho, Dreams and Visions in the Early Middle Ages: The Reception and Use of Patristic Ideas, 400-900 (Cambridge, 2015), 240pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Dreams and visions played important roles in the Christian cultures of the early middle ages. But not only did tradition and authoritative texts teach that some dreams were divine: some also pointed out that this was not always the case. Exploring a broad range of narrative sources and manuscripts, Jesse Keskiaho investigates how the teachings of Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory the Great on dreams and visions were read and used in different contexts. Keskiaho argues that the early medieval processes of reception in a sense created patristic opinion about dreams and visions, resulting in a set of authoritative ideas that could be used both to defend and to question reports of individual visionary experiences. This book is a major contribution to discussions about the intellectual place of dreams and visions in the early middle ages, and underlines the creative nature of early medieval engagement with authoritative texts.

If I Dream of Byzantium Am I Really Dreaming of Deflowering My Sister?

More than twenty years ago now, I thought seriously about becoming a traditional, five-times-a-week-on-the-couch psychoanalyst--traditional in method, if not entirely in theory. By that I mean that I shared Christopher Lasch's judgment that Freud, in attending to phenomena in the individual psyche in a clinical setting, gave us often startling and brilliant insights of singular and lasting value; but the Freud of wide-ranging cultural theories (think Moses and Monotheism, Totem and Taboo or The Future of an Illusion or, more widely,  Civilization and Its Discontents) was completely out of his depth and can be safely ignored.

Thus, in broader matters I could never identify completely with Freud, and aligned myself (as noted previously) with other "neo-Freudian" figures such as the late Nina Coltart, author of the delightful collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Nevertheless, Freud's classical, and much abused and much mocked text The Interpretation of Dreams, remains very valuable in some ways. It came back to mind (!) tonight in reading of a new book released just last week: Christine Angelidi and George Calofonos, eds., Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond (Ashgate, 2014), 232pp.

About this book we are told:

Although the actual dreaming experience of the Byzantines lies beyond our reach, the remarkable number of dream narratives in the surviving sources of the period attests to the cardinal function of dreams as vehicles of meaning, and thus affords modern scholars access to the wider cultural fabric of symbolic representations of the Byzantine world. Whether recounting real or invented dreams, the narratives serve various purposes, such as political and religious agendas, personal aspirations or simply an author's display of literary skill. It is only in recent years that Byzantine dreaming has attracted scholarly attention, and important publications have suggested the way in which Byzantines reshaped ancient interpretative models and applied new perceptions to the functions of dreams. This book - the first collection of studies on Byzantine dreams to be published - aims to demonstrate further the importance of closely examining dreams in Byzantium in their wider historical and cultural, as well as narrative, context. Linked by this common thread, the essays offer insights into the function of dreams in hagiography, historiography, rhetoric, epistolography, and romance. They explore gender and erotic aspects of dreams; they examine cross-cultural facets of dreaming, provide new readings, and contextualize specific cases; they also look at the Greco-Roman background and Islamic influences of Byzantine dreams and their Christianization. The volume provides a broad variety of perspectives, including those of psychoanalysis and anthropology.