In Abrahamic religions

Jacob's dream of a ladder of angels, c. 1690, by Michael Willmann

In Judaism, dreams are considered part of the experience of the world that can be interpreted and that lessons can be garnered from. It is discussed in the Talmud, Tractate Berachot, Second Part.

The ancient Hebrews connected their dreams heavily with their religion, though the Hebrews were monotheistic and believed that dreams were the voice of one god alone. Hebrews also differentiated between good dreams (from God) and bad dreams (from evil spirits). The Hebrews, like many other ancient cultures, incubated dreams in order to receive divine revelation. For example, the Hebrew prophet Samuel, would "lie down and sleep in the temple at Shiloh before the Ark and receive the word of the Lord." Most of the dreams in the Bible are in the Book of Genesis.^[15]

Christians mostly shared their beliefs with the Hebrews and thought that dreams were of the supernatural element because the Old Testament had frequent stories of dreams with divine inspiration. The most famous of these dream stories was Jacob's dream that stretched from Earth to Heaven. Many Christian men preached that God talked to his people through their dreams.

Iain R. Edgar has researched the role of dreams in Islam.^[16] He has argued that dreams play an important role in the history of Islam and the lives of Muslims. Ishtikara, or dream interpretation, is the only way that Muslims can receive revelations from God after the death of the last Prophet Mohammed.^[17]

Dreams and philosophical realism

Some philosophers have concluded that what we think of as the "real world" could be or is an illusion (an idea known as the skeptical hypothesis about ontology).

The first recorded mention of the idea was by Zhuangzi, and it is also discussed in Hinduism, which makes extensive use of the argument in its writings.^[18] It was formally introduced to Western philosophy by Descartes in the 17th century in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Stimulus, usually an auditory one, becomes a part of a dream, eventually then awakening the dreamer.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 679