The Harried Mystic

Or any recurring ones?

Saints Francis and Clare were respecters of dreams. In the Bible, prophecy is often prompted through dreams: Abimelech abstaining from touching Sarah, Abraham’s wife, as a result of a dream; Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven; Solomon’s dream of God’s open-ended offer of whatever he asked and his choice of Wisdom; Joseph’s dream about Mary’s pregnancy as the work of God; and the entire book of John’s Revelation as revealed while he was imprisoned on the Island of Patmos, to name a few).

In today’s western culture, the power and significance of dreams has been drowned out by the presumptions of a pervasive scientism. I am endlessly fascinated by the encoded narratives in dreams and their psycho-spiritual significance. My own diary of dreams informs my examination of where I am on my own journey. The imagination is the deeper gift that powers dreams to reawaken us; this is another road to communion with Christ.

What dreams inspire you as you examine how you are called on behalf of the Holy Spirit? Are there themes in your dreams worth excavating?

Outside of the Jungian circle of lovers of mysteries, archetypes, the collective unconscious and believers in prophecy, reflections on dreams are often relegated to the margins of fancy. Some neuroscientists believe that dreams are just random sets of neural activity designed to clean up the day’s clutter of mental content. I totally disagree.

I celebrate Francis’s faith that God speaks in all moments and in all ways (and certainly in dreams) as a telling reinforcement of Biblical wisdom and an invitation to all of us to similarly reinvest in what psychoanalyst Erich Fromm once called “The Forgotten Language.”

Happy dreaming!

© The Harried Mystic, 2018 and Br. Anton, TSSF. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.