Can You Meet God in Your Dreams?

The fragmentation I see around us in American culture (and even beyond) is distressing. We’re split from each other societally, huge swaths of us are lonelier than ever before, and we are fragmented within – sometimes even at war within ourselves. I believe strongly that the cultural story we are immersed in, the dominant Western worldview, sadly fosters that fragmentation.

How can we hope to come to a place of wholeness? How can we change our relationships with each other and with the very earth that we depend upon?

I think the only way is to find a new story – one that is whole-making, one that integrates us at all levels – and new practices to internalize that story. I find such whole-making resources in the work of Carl Gustav Jung and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. They tell us that at the levels of the cosmos and of the psyche, Reality is marked by three primary characteristics: value, relationality, and transformation. When we understand this at a deep level, and experience that Reality for ourselves through practices like dream work that foster sacred encounter, we learn that we matter, we belong, and we can experience positive change.

This is a deeply hopeful message. But how can we take this message into our bones and let it change our experience of life?

Many psychologists who study religious or mystical experience, like Kenneth Pargament, Ralph Hood, and Walter Houston Clark, have all made strong claims about the healing power of encounters with what Rudolf Otto called “the numinous.” As Clark points out, such healing experiences need not be religiously understood. Ecstatic experiences triggered through art, music, and other elements that carry us to a place that transcends our mundane lives can have the same effect.

Mystical experiences, though varied, are often, according to Pargament, “marked by powerful emotions, consisting of feelings of numinous consciousness and feelings of unity.” What we encounter in mystical experience is felt at a deep level to be “absolutely real” and a “foundational reality.”

Encounters of this kind can be life-altering and have long-lasting effects on behaviors, beliefs, and relationships, including a person’s relationship to embodied life itself. But how can people find such experiences today in our secular world?

I believe dream work is one way.

In his book The Shape of Practical Theology, Ray S. Anderson relates a conversation he had early in his ministry with a congregant who told him that

[I]t was easy to agree to the omnipotence of God—that [God] could do everything—but what was of more immediate concern was whether God could do anything in particular. If it is important to know and believe that God is omnipresent—that [God] is everywhere present—one could readily assent, but what one really longed for was to discover God present in the small space of one’s personal life.

If we are to meet God in the small spaces of our personal lives, God must be available to us in a real way, within the context of our embodied lives. Such a view is not theologically unprecedented, even if it is less widely appreciated.

While classical Christian theism often describes a God who is Absolute or the Unmoved Mover, philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead thought the relationship between God and the world was one of “process and possibility in mutual relationship” where each is received by the other, and where each influences—and is influenced by—the other. In Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, the infinite and finite, the eternal and temporal, are inextricably joined.

By integrating the psychology of Carl Jung, the philosophy of Whitehead, and current scientific and psychological views of the dreaming body-mind, we can see how dreams can be understood as completely natural and embodied while still being carriers of divine guidance.

I’ll be teaching a course on this called The Dreaming Body and Religious Experience through JungArchademy beginning on Feb. 2, 2022. Visit their website to register.

I hope you’ll join me.