Dreams as Spiritual Messages: How Different Traditions Understand the Dreaming Mind
Every night, something extraordinary happens. You close your eyes, and consciousness — instead of ceasing — enters a different dimension of experience. You live another life: encounter people long dead, visit places you've never been, experience emotions of startling intensity over events that will vanish within minutes of waking. You are simultaneously the protagonist of a story, its author, its stage, and its audience. And every single human being on Earth does this, without exception, every single night. Dreams are among the most universal and most persistently mysterious of human experiences. Every civilization that has ever existed has had something to say about them — what they mean, where they come from, what can be learned from them. And across the enormous diversity of these interpretations, certain themes recur with striking consistency: the sense that dreams are not merely neurological noise but meaningful communications, that they carry information unavailable to the w...