A few months ago, I had a conversation with a couple of friends of mine about the subject of lucid dreams [1]. For as long as I can remember, I have from time to time had some awareness of my dream life, at times ranging to full control of the dream, at times having false awakenings, and at other times finding that the lucid awareness of dreams, even where there was awareness that it was just a dream, was still enough to trigger panic attacks that left me awake but that also left me temporarily paralyzed with fright. At still other times the lucid dream was accompanied by an awareness of the mundane nature of the dream itself. For a period of several years I had an entirely different job on a regular basis in my lucid dreams from night to night, and would often wake up somewhat tired because in my mind I had worked during the night, and was not rested up. I was reminded of this topic today because last night I had a lucid dream about being in high school again, and that is not the sort of dream that is likely to bring me any pleasure at this stage in life. I find it rather unjust that I should be a person who struggles so mightily to get to sleep, and then find that my sleep is full of such profitless toil, and is not even refreshing even on those rare occasions when I can sleep well enough.

Dreams are a matter of considerable interest in the Bible. Perhaps my favorite story about dreams in the Bible, and the source of a great deal of musing on my part, has been the story of the dreams of Pharaoh’s servants in Genesis 40. Let us look at the brief section in Genesis 40:1-8: “It came to pass after these things that the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt offended their lord, the king of Egypt. And Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief butler and the chief baker. So he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, in the prison, the place where Joseph was confined. And the captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he served them; so they were in custody for a while. Then the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison, had a dream, both of them, each man’s dream in one night and each man’s dream with its own interpretation. And Joseph came in to them in the morning and looked at them, and saw that they were sad. So he asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in the custody of his lord’s house, saying, “Why do you look so sad today?” And they said to him, “We each have had a dream, and there is no interpreter of it.” So Joseph said to them, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me, please.””

Here we see the classic presentation of the biblical view of dreams. At times we may be puzzled because we do not know what a dream means, and we do not have anyone or anything that we trust to interpret those dreams for us. At other times, we may have a good idea what a dream means but not be particularly happy that we are dreaming about such things, nor know what we can do to keep those dreams or what they portend from coming to pass. In any case, this particular passage reminds us that dreams belong to God, that dreams are one of the ways that God chooses to communicate with us [2], and that the skill in interpreting dreams is itself a gift that comes from God, and one that we should be appreciative of. There is, for those who are students of such matters, a certain degree of formal symbolism. If we remember Joseph’s dreams about his family, his brothers were represented by stars in the sky and stalks of grain bowing, his father by the son, and his stepmother/aunt (as his mother was dead by this point) as the moon. His father was able, without any trouble whatsoever, and without Joseph himself understanding (or stating) the meaning of the dream, to know what dreams meant. Small wonder that Joseph himself was skilled at interpreting dreams. Given the fact that we are more vulnerable and open to communication when we are asleep, it would appear that our dream life would be rich with potential communication from God.

Yet that is not always a pleasant thought, to know that dreams themselves present an opportunity for communication, because not all such communication is likely to be present. For a mind like mine, dreaming presents some serious problems. To be classified as a lucid dream, according to researchers of Gestalt psychology [3], seven conditions must be met: awareness of the dream state, awareness of the capacity to make decisions, awareness of memory functions, awareness of identity, awareness of the dream environment, awareness of the meaning of the dream, and awareness of concentration and focus. All of these elements are present on a somewhat regular basis in my dream life, and they are not the source of unmixed pleasure, and indeed are the source of considerable irritation that my dream life should be so singularly unsuited to refreshing me from the toil of my waking life. Every second of the night I live another life, just as full of work and effort as my waking life, and just as terrifying and unpleasant. I deeply wish it was otherwise, that my mind would find some rest and some pleasure at some point in its existence, that it might not view life as an endless grind whether asleep or awake. Yet my wishes seem not to count for very much in this existence.

[1] See: https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/a-walk-in-the-park/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/better-than-our-wildest-dreams/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/all-i-have-to-do-is-dream/

[3] See, for example:

Tholey P. (1980) Klarträume als Gegenstand empirischer Untersuchungen [Conscious Dreams as an Object of Empirical Examination]. Gestalt Theory 2: 175–91.

Tholey P. (1981) Empirische Untersuchungen über Klartraüme [Empirical Examination of Conscious Dreams]. Gestalt Theory 3: 21–62.