The science of spiritual dreams
I started my dream journal to prove that I was not having precognitive dreams. I kept track of my dreams every morning by writing them down and dating every record. Then, whenever a possible match for a dream occurred in waking life, I compared it to the record of the dream in question. As an experiment, it was simple. Dreams of people in distant places required only the addition of a phone call, fax, or letter to verify.
Reincarnation dreams are more complicated. To verify one of those requires identifying a previous personality that matches details from the dream. I have never managed to accomplish this. I have, however, been able to verify other aspects of those dreams.
Spiritual dreams often make no reference to physical reality. Without such a reference, there is nothing to compare the dreams to for veridicality. Despite this, spiritual dreams can be very interesting and plausible. They are hard to ignore but are simultaneously impossible to prove in most cases.
For instance, in my recent post, “A Blameless Life”, I recounted a dream wherein I was given 2 messages. The first was that it is “better to live a blameless life than to wish for, and receive, a comfortable one”. The second was that a person who is not peaceable cannot enter a peaceable environment without changing the environment into a non-peaceable one. For that reason, they cannot be allowed to enter.
Both messages make sense. The question is whether the dream can be trusted as a genuine message passed to me from another mind or spirit. As a spiritual precept, no harm could be expected if a person followed the advice by trying to lead a blameless life to become peaceful of mind.
Other spiritual dreams can be harder to accept at face value because the cost of doing so is greater. I will be publishing some of those dreams in the next few days, possibly even today. Those dreams do not equivocate about the existence of God. According to them, God is real, period. Some clearly indicate a future event that resembles Apocalyptic visions from the Bible. Others counsel behavioral changes to avoid the worst of future cataclysms.
Those dreams are not “free”. Acceptance of the more dramatic spiritual dreams would amount to changing one’s worldview, religion, and beliefs. Those are not easily accomplished.
At this point, I’d like to add a disclaimer that I usually insert into discussions of spiritual dreams, a disclaimer that critics inevitably ignore as if it were not present:
At the time I first experienced a spiritual dream and for hundreds of spiritual dreams afterward, I was an atheist. I had no interest in religion or spirituality. I had never researched any aspect of religion and could be counted as ignorant, naive, and illiterate regarding all religious-themed subjects. I started looking into this type of dream in 2004 and changed my views.
I am no longer an atheist. However, although I am no longer as naive regarding religion as I once was, my knowledge of religion and religious teaching remains fragmentary. I am not an evangelist. However, I have had dreams regarding matters considered proprietary to certain religions. In many cases, those dreams predate my knowledge of similar material in the literature of religion. My discussion of these dreams should not be confused with evangelism. I report on the content of the dreams, nothing more.
Some time ago, I spent about 7 years writing a group of peer-reviewed journal articles on my dreams. I wanted to write an article about my spiritual dreams but realized I couldn’t without first creating a foundation for the article by writing about veridical dreams. To do that, I designed a group of articles to establish the following:
Dreams of future events can be validated through comparison with waking reality.
Dreams of simultaneous events at a distance, also known as “out of body experiences” (OBE), can be verified by interviewing people identified in the dream.
Dreams of people at or around the time of their death can be validated by comparison with relevant data.
True symbols in dreams are much less common than literature on the subject would suggest, and much less subject to multiple interpretations when they do occur.
I chose these subjects because each formed a step in my learning process as I learned what could be trusted, and what shouldn’t be, in dreams. The first article quickly demonstrates that psi is real. If a dream convincingly presages a later unusual and unpredictable event, then time must not be as linear as we think it is. If we can have an OBE, then we must have spirits. If a spirit can communicate after the body it was connected to has died, then our spirits can exist independent of physical bodies. If dreams are not entirely symbolic but only rarely are, then we have a better way of identifying meaningful dream content.
All of the articles just mentioned establish the foundation for spiritual dreams, which amount to communication with discarnate spirits, though of an elevated nature. After I’d finished writing them and had them published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, I wrote my article on spiritual dreams. Finally, I had done what I had set out to do. Unfortunately, the JSE wouldn’t publish it. They said I was “evangelizing”. Based on the content of the article, their only justification for that claim is that I mention subjects that are also discussed in theology. In other words, it appeared as if the JSE couldn’t publish any article that touched on the subject of religion, or touched on it in a way that didn’t discredit it.
I was disappointed, and let the article languish on my computer for almost a year. Then, a colleague suggested I submit somewhere else. I did, and it was almost immediately published. Now, I was truly done with the subject. Or was I?
I have had a number of dreams, all of them “spiritual” by my definition of the term, wherein I am asked to share certain dreams of mine, all of them spiritual. In some of these dreams, I have tacitly accepted the task, and in others, I am given information related to it. Regardless of the details, the group of dreams together make it clear that I have been given certain dreams for a purpose. The purpose is to share them with others.
I have already done that to an extent in my book, “Dreamer” but some dreams are left out, some I hadn’t had yet. With this SubStack, I will share those dreams and others besides, depending on what seems appropriate on the day. I have already laid some of the groundwork by talking about my 9/11 dreams (precognition), my Uncle Tim’s painting (OBE), and a couple of spiritual dreams. Next though, I think I’ll post an article or two about ghosts. After that, we’ll get back to spiritual dreams.