Dreams and Religion

Dreams and Religion

There is a peculiarity of religion that is not often (if ever) remarked: its combination of the serious and the silly. I might even say commingling: the way the serious and the silly are interwoven, inextricably joined. Serious themes run through religion—life and death, right and wrong, cosmology. But at the same time, we find superstition, fantasy, fairy tales, risible rituals, preposterous costumes, and a general sense of absurdity. To an outsider much of religion seems silly, childish, hard to take seriously. The Catholic Church is a prime example, prompting attempts at silliness reduction over the centuries. One might even say that the serious-silly nexus is the essence of religion. I am not against silliness, still less seriousness, but the combination strikes me as anthropologically interesting; it bears examination. So, let’s take a scientific naturalistic attitude towards it—what is its psychological meaning? What does it tell us about the human mind? Can we explain it?

It is hard to find any convincing parallels to it. Plenty of things are serious, and plenty of things are silly—but the combination? One might think of pantomime and fairy tales—rich in silliness, yes, but rather lacking in seriousness (psychoanalysis notwithstanding). Still, worth keeping in mind; there is a kinship here. The closest cultural parallel I can think of is opera: the gaudiness, the costumes, the absurdities—yet the depth of the themes, their resonance. But the parallel is not close, or particularly illuminating. Opera shows that the human mind can tolerate, even welcome, the serious-silly nexus, but it would be pressing a point to suggest that opera is the model for religion (or religion the model for opera). Perhaps comedy could be adduced, its jokiness combined with (sometimes) serious themes: think of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, some of Charlie Chaplin, or Shakespeare’s comedies (e.g., A Midsummer Night’s Dream). But here too the parallel is not that close—laughing in church is really not on. Religion is characteristically humorless: priests are not comedians (God is not the funniest man ever). Is there anything in the human psyche that could be regarded as a precursor to religion, its psychological precondition? My title suggests an answer—dreams are the clearest analogue to religion. For they too combine the serious and the silly—stirring themes, preposterous performances. Wacky stuff occurs, nonsense obtrudes, yet there is an atmosphere of seriousness—there isn’t much laughter in the church of dreams. Nor is there much skepticism. Miracles occur, natural laws get flouted, people fly about, evil lurks, nonsense is rampant (verbal and physical)—not unlike religion. Fear and exhilaration coexist. There is the giddy feeling of being in contact with another world. In religious ceremonies people can go into a trance, as if possessed or hypnotized, but the same is true of dreams—a trancelike state in which the usual rules are suspended. A church is a dreamy place, full of other-worldly icons, spectacle, strange adventures. Dreams are vivid, but so are biblical stories, with all the illogic of dreams. And the Bible is full of dreams and dreamlike happenings. In dreams we take the silliness in our stride, not separating it from the seriousness; we don’t wonder how the two things can go together. In fact, they harmonize seamlessly. Thus, dreaming prepares us for religion; it provides the psychological foundation. It makes the religious experience possible. We already know how to combine the serious and the silly, because we are born dreamers. That is the hypothesis.

But there is another aspect of dreaming that really drives the analogy home. This is that the dream state is the primary arena for what might be called credulity enhancement. In dreams we don’t question what we experience—what the dream tells us. We just accept it, absurdity and all. In the waking state we would take ourselves to be hallucinating or undergoing an imagination malfunction, but in dreams we are utterly credulous—the dreamer is no skeptic. Sheer silliness is no impediment to abject credulity. We believe whatever is dished up to us, no questions asked. Isn’t this just like religious belief? People believe what they are told, or what is vividly depicted, or what is performed in front of them (miracle healings and the like). They might be more skeptical outside of the trance-inducing place of worship, but their critical faculties go into abeyance when the chanting starts, the stained-glass windows dazzle, and the lure of the fantatic beckons. They enter a kind of dream state in which the silly is transmuted (miraculously!) into conviction—what is called religious belief. We have faith in our dreams, as we have faith in our religious instruction. We don’t have evidence for rational belief in our dreams, and nor do we in the religious case—we are primed to believe, set up for it. Even hardboiled scientists have faith in their dreams. Thus, the religious state of mind resembles the dreaming state of mind in its susceptibility to belief formation. Dreaming is a pre-religious state of silliness acceptance: miracles occur in dreams and the dreamer blithely accepts them as real; ditto for the religious believer (note the term). In dreams we are all true believers, easily taken in; in religious contexts we are likewise highly susceptible to invitations to believe. And the silly stuff mingles with the serious to add weight to the pressure to believe; it isn’t just silly (though it can be very silly). This is where the power to persuade comes from in religious contexts—it mimics the dream state. Children, of course, are particularly susceptible to the persuasive power of dreams, having little in the way of critical faculties. But the same is notoriously true in the case of religion—which is why we get them when they are young. Imagine if the adults around you as a child were to reinforce the messages (as they might call them) contained in your dreams—about bogey men, ghosts, lurking killers. You would end up completely in the sway of your dreams. As it is, we say “It was only a dream”. But we don’t say “It was only religion” in order to temper the child’s natural credulity. Religion is like a socially sanctified dream, driving home the silliness. The reason the silliness is accepted is that dreams are full of it yet excite belief. Of course, believers don’t think it is silly, or at least they strive to overcome that feeling; and the reason for this is that they are psychologically primed to overlook silliness in dreams. Note that many cultures have believed that dreams are to be taken seriously, as containing important information about reality; they might be said to have a dream-based religion. They have achieved a total merger of the two. Silliness generally promotes skepticism, but not in certain areas of psychic activity. The person who was once religious and now rejects religion is like someone emerging from a dream: what once seemed real is now seen as so much fantasy. He might wonder at his prior state of mind, shaking his head in disbelief; it might comfort him to be told that he was living in a dream. Are deeply religious people unusually prone to vivid and compelling dreams? Are natural atheists lacking in dream experience? Do people who never dream (if there are such) put up more resistance to religious indoctrination? Is religion more likely to gain control of a person during a period of life in which dreams are particularly powerfui? These are all empirical questions, capable of investigation. In any case, dreams provide a prelude to religious conversion, or a platform from which to launch religious belief. Dreams provide a precursor of that ability to combine the serious and the silly that is so characteristic of religion as we know it.[1]

[1] Do we need religion? Do we have an appetite for it, possibly innately given? Can we be happy without religion? There is some evidence to suggest that this is so. If it is, the dream hypothesis explains it: for we do need to dream. Studies have shown that people deprived of dreaming become disconsolate and depressed. Why this should be so is not clear, but it seems to be a fact. We might try to fulfill the need by adopting some other equivalent activity—say, science. We make a religion out of science (including philosophy). We will need to ensure that we supply the silliness quotient as well as the seriousness quotient. Quantum mechanics might come in handy, or the big bang, or panpsychism, or possible world semantics—something seemingly preposterous. It will help to have scientific churches and a priestlike brotherhood (professors in universities). The need for religion might thus be met by something other than religion. However, it is not at all clear that the need to dream could be met by anything else (movies comes closest). Religious psychology is an underdeveloped branch of the science of psychology. We could call it the “religious faculty” and undertake an investigation of it analogous to our study of the language faculty: where does it come from, is it modular, what kind of pathologies beset it, what is its neural basis? It is clearly an aspect of the human mind (and brain), so it ought to have a psychology. I can imagine a book entitled The Religion Instinct, or a journal called The Journal of Experimental Religious Psychology, or a society of “Rel-Sci” devotees. There could be a natural science of supernatural belief.