In our Study of the Day feature series, we highlight a research publication related to a John Templeton Foundation-supported project, connecting the fascinating and unique research we fund to important conversations happening around the world.
In one of the earliest surviving dream accounts, recorded in cuneiform on a terracotta cylinder around 2125 BCE, a Mesopotamian king named Gudea is visited in his sleep by a supernatural giant who tells him to build a temple. He eventually does so, but the decision takes him a while. “Outstanding though his mind was,” the account of Gudea’s dream notes, “the message remained to be understood for him.” So Gudea undertakes a multi-day journey by canal boat, stopping at several shrines along the way, to ask the goddess Nanse to confirm that the dream’s true meaning was in fact the literal one. The message was there all along, but it took some time to sink in.
A recent study of modern dreams in which supernatural agents appear highlights something similar: when people have dreams about supernatural figures (demons, angels, fairies, sprites, ghosts, and the like), it has an effect on their waking religious outlook, but the effect takes a few days to set in. The study, led by psychologist John Balch of National University in San Diego, was less concerned with the interpretation of dreams in the traditional sense than with exploring the relationship between people’s conceptions of the supernatural in dreams and in their waking lives.
Using a combination of high-tech REM-monitoring headbands and old-school dream journals, Balch’s team undertook a series of studies that looked at the immediate and lagging effects of dreams that featured supernatural agents on two aspects of waking religiosity: the sense of closeness to God and the conception of God as an authoritarian figure.
They found that a little over 18 percent of the recorded dreams contained supernatural elements, and that such dreams were rarely pleasant: people reported feeling powerless and described the dream experiences as more bizarre, strange, and scary than other dreams. Even controlling for baseline spirituality,
the researchers found that having supernatural dreams yielded changes in people’s religious experience afterwards.
Supernatural content in a dream was negatively associated with levels of closeness-to-god feelings, with the effect most pronounced three to four days later, suggesting that if you dream about spirits on Monday, you are likely to feel less close to God by Friday. When examining how dreams affect how much the dreamer perceives God as authoritarian, the researchers found evidence that positive dreams (regardless of supernatural content) correlated with decreased authoritarian views of God the next morning, but that the effect reversed after four days — although these patterns did not hold up as reliably as the closeness-to-God findings.
The presence of spiritual agents in the dream occurs in parallel with other factors: a given dream might be generally positive or negative, and might include feelings of increased or diminished agency. And although most spiritual dreams included negative feelings and a decreased sense of agency, the causality of that relationship could go either way: does dreaming about supernatural powers create feelings of powerlessness, or does a starting feeling of powerlessness lead a dreamer to envision figures that seem supernaturally powerful by comparison?
The authors speculate that the lagging effect may represent the brain’s need to use multiple sleeping and waking cycles to incorporate its psychological response to a striking dream. Spiritual dreams may not spur the building of majestic temples, as in Gudea’s dream-narrative, but they can, with small delays, change the structure of the dreamer’s everyday spirituality.
Still Curious?
Nate Barksdale writes about the intersection of science, history, philosophy, faith, and popular culture. He was editor of the magazine re:generation quarterly and is a frequent contributor to History.com.
