Counterintuitiveness theory, which holds that concepts violating basic cognitive categories are especially memorable and likely to be treated as religious, is tested on religious dream imagery. The article adopts a fractionated approach focusing on supernatural agent (SA) cognitions as building blocks of purportedly religious dreaming. It maps contemporary theorizing about counterintuitiveness onto empirical data, exploring the pervasiveness of cognitive counterintuitiveness in dreams, testing Barrett's counterintuitiveness coding scheme for intercoder reliability, and examining base rate frequencies of counterintuitiveness in dream reports. The work aims to contribute methodology and cross-cultural base rates for future research on religious dream cognition.
Dreaming, particularly dreams with minimally counterintuitive content, is linked to religious beliefs and practices in traditional societies. Among Hindu Nepalese, such dream content appears frequently and is associated with a greater likelihood of communicating dreams, especially to religious experts, and with higher reported religiosity. The findings support the theory that dreaming is a primary source of religious belief and practice, and they suggest that counterintuitive dream imagery may enhance the cultural transmission and credibility of religious representations.
Dreams are often seen as sources of trusted information for divination, a practice called oneiromancy. The CARDD theory proposes that certain dream features—nightmarish content, lack of self-agency, bizarre or counterintuitive elements, and SA imagery—make dreams more likely to be shared and used for divination. This study tested those predictions using ethnographic data from Nepalese Hindus. Only one feature, the omission of self-agency models in dream imagery, significantly predicted whether dreams were communicated and used for divination. This finding supports the idea that formal features of "ostensive detachment" are key factors in how divinatory practices are culturally transmitted.
Dreams frequently contain supernatural agent imagery and are used for ritual and divinatory purposes while awake. Less studied is dream imagery about rituals (DIR). This article surveys and analyzes DIR items and interactions by combining dream and ritual theories with ethnographic fieldwork among Hindus in Nepal. The analysis defines ritual through its obvious aspects and traits, drawing on cognitive and evolutionary accounts of ritualization alongside threat simulation theory and social simulation theory from dream research. The goal is to develop a new strategy for examining imagined ritual traits in dreaming, advancing the methodology and theoretical understanding of religious dream cognition.