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What Are Dreams Made Of?
Robert Walker, Soquel, CA.,USA
There are at least twelve pages in The Urantia Book which make mention of dreams from the ordinary ghost dream of ancient man to the extra-ordinary dreams of Joseph and the apostle Peter. Most of these references debunk the ordinary dream of its prophetic powers while recognizing their supermaterializing influence. Dreams are railed against for being used to suggest much more about life than they contain--as men are prone to do. "The interpretation of dreams is largely a superstitious and groundless system of ignorant fantastic speculation." (1681) Some sorting out of the implications of seemingly disparate references to dreams in the book is in order.
First off, it is clear that the book makes a significant distinction between "ordinary" and "extraordinary" dreams. "All down through the ages men have stood in awe of the apparitions of the night season, and the Hebrews were no exception.They truly believed that God spoke to them in dreams, despite the injunction of Moses against this idea. And Moses was right, for dreams are not the method employed by the personalities of the spiritual world when they seek to communicate with material beings." (954)
However, dreams that may be known to be "ordinary" by the spiritual personalities may not be so clearly "ordinary" to the mortal. It might be suggested that Peter's dream was not as celestially "extraordinary" as Joseph's. So it would be wise to apply the admonition taking mentation as Adjuster communication rather than human experience to whether a dream is "ordinary" or "extraordinary" as well. "...a human being would do better to err in rejecting an Adjuster's expression through believing it to be a purely human experience than to blunder into exalting a reaction of the mortal mind to the sphere of divine dignity." (1208)
With the descriptions of the dreams Joseph, Jesus' father, and the apostle Peter had, the book acknowledges dream life is sometimes used by celestial personalities to communicate something of spiritual import to an individual. In Joseph's case, the role of his son in this world was described to him in a dream with a "brilliant celestial messenger" (1347) when Joseph was still uncertain about it, and Peter was delivered from the bondage of fear to many traditions about things clean and unclean, by experiencing an extraordinary and vivid dream. (1713) There is the very strong implication that these dreams were the work of some celestial being, not necessarily originating with the Adjuster but perhaps through it. The fourth paragraph of page 1208 also indicates ordinary dreams are the result of unsuccessful Adjuster contact with the "supermind" or purely physiologic phenomena.
In the book's description regarding the origins of the religious reaction, fear and coincidence are mentioned causes. Indirectly, dreams and superstitions garnered a foothold in the thinking of primitive man as antidotes to fear of death and as explanations for coincidence, respectively. Like many evolutionary practices that modern man now evokes to overcome such as vanity, there has been associated therewith a valuable element to these behavioral activities. Dreams of the dead led to a belief about an afterlife and the supermaterial world. They were equated with the life of the soul. (954) However, in their efforts to then control the recognized spirit world (of which dreams were a significant part for primitive man), the 'ancients' began to attribute great significance to them to the point where objects in dreams became fetishes. (967)
Jesus comments in his discourse "Magic and Superstition" speak beyond the times but also have historical context. (1681) While he was certainly "denouncing soothsayer priests of primitive religions" who endowed dreams with prophetic meaning at every turn, his statements that dream interpretation is "superstitious" and "speculative" carries meaning of generalized import, so his language seems to indicate. Yet, how generalized are we to apply his statements to non-spiritual interpretations of ordinary dreams? He says dream interpretation is "largely a groundless system." (1681) Thus, some room, albeit small, is left for the rational interpretation of ordinary dreams through his use of the word "largely." Since his remarks are pre-Freudian, perhaps they could have been a bit more generous if made in modern times, but his book's characterization of dream life as "disordered and disconnected parade of the unco-ordinated sleeping mind" leaves no doubt what its authors think about the value and meaning of ordinary dreams to such a degree it would appear they think dream interpretation is not a worthwhile pursuit at all. (1208)
In today's age where mathematicians ponder theories about random phenomena and scientists delve the subtleties of nuclear particles, it is not so easy to dispense with the notion that there may be method in the madness of dreams. After all, what are the dreams like of a person whose Adjuster has successfully co-ordinated and "harmonized the divergent factors of the mind of man," (1208) or must one assume that such an individual does not dream anything but purely physiologic and ordered psychological reactions to life? The book and Jesus are primarily concerned with the superconscious, not the subconscious realm of dreams, so such issues are not addressed by either. Still, on page 1372, the book acknowledges Jesus had "revolting dreams of slaughter and suffering" after witnessing an animal sacrifice at Passover when young. There, the dream had obvious connection with his life experience. One can retain the notion there is at least some real life influence on dreams; they're not all fictionalized fantasy. One wonders exactly how would Jesus' Adjuster have had him harmonize the fact of his experience to negate it from his consciousness by objectifying the experience as a primitive practice of evolutionary man unworthy of his thoughts? How far does Freud's system using wish fulfillment and abortive conflict resolution for tools in interpretation disagree with Jesus' comments on page 1681? The book and Freud
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