Last week, I developed a Biblical argument for understanding your dreams, interpreting your dreams, and recognizing dreams as God’s speech. This week, I will develop a historical argument for the same. It’s important to realize before we go into the next 8 weeks of spiritual formation via dreams that dreams have extremely solid historical grounding. In fact, the Western Evangelical church, Carl Jung said, was the only group of people in history to disregard their dreams. Today we are going to look at the theologians, the martyrs, the desert mothers and fathers, the bishops, and the scholars from the last 2000 years. The people who gave us the creeds, the canon, and the contemplative tradition that shaped Christian spirituality to this day. None of them thought God had stopped speaking in the night. We are going to see that God never stopped using dreams then, or now.
Many of us were taught, or grew up in traditions that didn’t align with anything that couldn’t be explained. We lost the mystery. We lost the awe. And many of us enjoy Christianity for its rational and intellectual rigor, but we were never taught that we are the only ones in Christian history to not take dreams seriously. We were taught “safe, orthodox or responsible” Christianity. We maybe even were taught that giving creed to dreams was dangerous, New Age, or witchcraft. There is nothing in historical or Biblical record to support that. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Our First Discernment Practice
In 210 AD, Tertullian of Carthage wrote De Anima (On the Soul), one of the first systematic treatments of psychology in Christian writing. Tertullian was a major early church father, writing in Latin, and the first to introduce the vocabulary of the trinity. He also wrote on discernment of dreams.
Tertullian recognized three kinds of dreams: divine dreams, came from God; then demonic dreams that he recognized as counterfeit by the enemy; and natural dreams, arising, he said, from the soul’s activity and speech during sleep. His discernment is significant for a) the psychology of the dream life but also b) that he assumes the reader knows that dreams are a legitimate conversation between people and God. Tertullian never considered that he had to argue that dreams were a legitimate category of spiritual knowing; he assumed the reader had a Biblical understanding on dreams.
And this is where we need to reconsider our dreaming life: because church history never assumed that the Church would dismiss them at all. Instead, historically, we were taught to discern dreams. Not dismiss them.
Perpetua, the Martyr-Dreamer
Earlier than Tertullian, a young, wealthy woman named Perpetua was arrested and sent to the Roman arena to die for her faith. She was nursing her child, 22-years old, and began to dream in prison awaiting her execution. And she wrote the dreams down.
In one of her dreams, she was scaling a golden ladder that had knives and swords along its length, potentially tearing her flesh as she climbed. At the top of the ladder, however, was a garden in which a Shepherd offered her a mouthful of sweet milk. She awoke still tasting that sweet offering.
Upon awaking, Perpetua knew from the dreams images that she would die in the Roman arena, and would soon be in heaven with her shepherd. The dream offered her comfort, certainty, and a sense that God was shepherding her soul. Additionally, it was the presence of the Shepherd that most comforted her soul.
March 7, 203 AD: Perpetua dies as a martyr, as the dream suggested and the Church kept her dream diary.
For several centuries after Perpetua’s death, her dream journal was read in North African services alongside Scripture. Even more interesting was that Tertullian (a candidate of authorship to Perpetua’s Passion) called it new prophecy, continuous with Apostolic prophecy. The early church received Perpetua’s dreams as incredibly important, encouraging, and in line with Scriptural understanding.
The Dreaming Desert Fathers
Nearly a century after Perpetua was martyred and Tertullian authored a discernment on dreams, monastic men and women began to create communities in what we now call the Desert Fathers. These people gave us the contemplative Christian tradition through their writings and practices, and these fueled every renewal movement in Western Christianity for nearly a millennium.
The contemplative tradition took the interior life seriously, which included the messages of the night: the dream. The Apophthegmata Patrum (the library of the Desert Fathers, and the foundational text of the monastic tradition) references dreams as communication, warning, and soul formation. Their practice was developed around an idea called nepsis: watchful attentiveness to interior life. This was disciplined, prayerful, and discerning, and most practices around nepsis centered on proper discernment of those interior attentive practices. Questions guided their inquiry: is this God, the devil, or my body?
This nepsis practice guides much of Carl Jung’s Depth Psychology today.
Augustine’s Mother and her Prophetic Dream
Monica, the mother of Augustine of Hippo, prayed for her son’s conversion for seventeen years, based on a dream that encouraged her never to stop praying. The dream gave her the ability to maintain her prayers through his destructive years.
Augustine becomes, as many know, one of the greatest thinkers in Christianity, and he also held the dream as an integral part of a Christian’s life.
Jerome: Soul’s Direction and Calling Came in a Dream
Jerome, a great scholar of the ancient church, translated the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin (the Vulgate), the Bible that shaped Western Christianity for a thousand years. But that soul’s direction, the translation of the Bible, came as a result of a dream.
Jerome was a passionate reader of classical literature: Cicero, Plautus, and the great Roman authors. In a dream, he was brought before a heavenly court and asked to identify himself, to which he said: I am a Christian. The judge replied: you lie, you are a Ciceronian (an author he read), not a Christian. Then the judge pronounced judgment: where your treasure is, there your heart is also. In the dream, Jerome was flogged before the court. He woke in tears, bruised (testimonies say that he says the bruises were real), and the encounter pivoted his life’s calling.
The man who gave the Western church its Bible was called to do so in a dream.
Ignatius of Loyola and the Language of Interior Depth
In 1521, the soldier Ignacio de Loyola was struck by a cannonball at the siege of Pamplona in Spain. During his hospital stay, bored and in pain, he began reading about the life of Christ and a collection of saints’ lives.
Allowing his imagination to soar, he considered imitating the lives of the saints, and the sense of life and abundance filled him, deepening within him, giving him courage and motivation to live a life of righteousness. Even days later, these feelings of courage and motivation only deepened within him. He began developing what he called The Spiritual Exercises, published in 1548, after twenty-seven years of refinement. The Spiritual Exercises are a 30-day devotional retreat (with a longer 19-week version still used by millions) organized around interior movement as God-speech. The Exercises train the soul to recognize, attend to, and respond to that interior life with discernment and conviction.
The primary practice of the Exercises is imaginative contemplation: Takes a Gospel scene (the Nativity, the baptism of Jesus, the Last Supper) and enter it with all five senses. Be present to the five senses in that Biblical scene: smell the stable or climb the steps to the upper room, reach for Jesus’ hem, or walk on water like Peter. Ignatius gave rules for simple discernment practices that recognize God at work within you and your interior life.
Jung + Ignatius
Carl Jung read the Spiritual Exercises 400 years later and recognized the sophisticated system as something akin to his “Active Imagination.” In Psychology and Religion, his 1937 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Jung discussed the Ignatian method, recognizing that Ignatius’s imaginative contemplation was structurally identical to active imagination, which for Jung was the deliberate, receptive engagement with an interior image (from a dream or vision).
Jung understood that what Ignatius had built was not merely a spiritual technique but a psychological tool for engaging the non-rational interior life, for caring for what moves beneath the surface of conscious thought, and for discerning the real from the fake.
This week inside the paid tier, The Inner Room, I develop the Ignatian practice and its relationship to Jungian active imagination. Then how to apply Ignatius’s method of discernment to your own dream work.
Pause * Pray * Heal
Pause: Think about where you received your assumptions about dreams. Was it explicitly taught, someone told you that God does not speak in dreams anymore, or was it assumed, and/or absorbed? Sit with that for a moment. Notice where the assumption came from. It did not come from the early church, nor did it come from the Bible.
Pray: In the spirit of Acts 2:17:
Lord, I want to receive the fullness in which you speak. Not a version of Christianity narrowed by Enlightenment rationalism. Pour out Your Spirit on me, on my waking hours and on my sleeping ones. Speak in the night as You have always spoken. I am willing to hear what You have always been willing to say.
Heal: Journal through one dream that has stuck with you.
The Dreams Arc continues next week. We will begin to build the practice that this history makes possible: learning to receive, hold, and interpret what God is sending in the night.