The Encyclopedia of World Religions

124 S dreams and religion

rightly predicting the fate of two fellow-prisoners from their dreams, and then foretelling the seven good years and seven lean years on the basis of pharaoh’s dream. In the N EW T ESTAMENT another Joseph, the spouse of M ARY the mother of J ESUS , was told by an ANGEL in a dream that her child was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and later was warned in the same way to take the infant to Egypt and avoid the wrath of Herod. The Greeks and Romans also considered dreams to be messages from the gods, though they recognized they were not always reliable. Penelope, in a famous pas sage in The Odyssey, said that there are two gates through which dreams pass: the gate of ivory, whose dreams are deceitful, and the gate of horn, whose dreams are true. The ancients, like the Chinese more recently, would also practice incu bation or sleeping in a temple in order to receive advice from a god through a dream. C HRISTIANITY has sometimes seen dreams as a means of divine revelation, but has also recognized that demons can tempt the unwary through dreams. The hazy and fleeting nature of dreams has also had religious meaning. Buddhist literature such as the D IAMOND S UTRA has spoken of this world with its empty attractions as like a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a dew-drop, and a flash of lightning. Here dreams mean not revela tions of truth, but illusion and unreality. Yet East ern accounts have also presented positive expe riences of dreams, and there are advanced yoga techniques for controlling and using them. Twentieth-century analytic psychology in the tradition of Carl Gustav J UNG has given dreams a renewed spiritual importance as mirrors or indica tors of what is going on in one’s psychic and spiri tual life. Jung pointed to the marked similarity of the symbolic language of dreams to the language of the world’s mythologies and religions, showing that, rightly understood, one’s dreams could be like a personal story telling what is needed to fulfill one’s life. Other modern psychologists, however, have said there is very little of real importance in dreams, thus closing the door on a venerable reli gious tradition. In any case, dreams have always been important in the myths and religions of the

are dramatic traditions within I SLAM ; for example, more Muslims live in Indonesia, with its traditions of dance drama and puppet theater, than in any other country in the world. Despite very strong traditions of drama within Hinduism, even in Hindu worship, the Laws of M ANU did not look favorably upon drama. In Bud dhism, too, the ten precepts followed by MONKS AND NUNS , novices, and devout laypeople forbid atten dance at worldly amusements such as the theater. Such amusements encourage attachment to sen sory pleasure and, through the presentation of fic tions, distract the mind from waking up to reality. In North America, too, some religious people have opposed drama. One such group to do so were the Puritans ( see P URITANISM ). Today churches in some traditions of P ROTESTANTISM , such as the H OLINESS MOVEMENT , either reject theatrical enter tainment altogether or find it highly suspicious as a source of immorality and vice. It might be suggested that religious people who oppose drama recognize the immense power of performance and theater. They simply view that power as evil, just as religious people who use drama see in it as a potential source of great benef it. Further reading: Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); Victor Witter Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982). dreams and religion Dreams of religious sig nificance. Dreams have been thought to have spiri tual importance in many traditions. The 19th-cen tury anthropologist Edward Tylor, in fact, thought that the origin of religion lay in the experience of dreams. It seemed natural to think that figures appearing in those mysterious nighttime adven tures might be gods or spirits of ancestors, and that their words or stories might bear divine mes sages. The ability to interpret dreams rightly was also a divine gift. In the biblical book of Genesis, J OSEPH was able to win his freedom from prison by