Dreaming Spirits

Religious identity, religious dreams, hypnagogia, and absorption interact in complex ways. Analysis of the Threshold Worlds dream survey shows correlations among these variables, with participants reporting religious dreams and hallucinatory experiences during liminal states. The authors discuss the challenges of defining and theorizing nocturnal religious and spiritual experiences. They introduce a new framework—"religious amplification"—to explain the looping, dialectical relationship between religiousness and religious cultural affordances, sensory-perceptual experiences, and personal predispositions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the interaction of four variables captured qualitatively and quantitatively in the Threshold Worlds dream survey: religious identity (or religiousness), religious dreams, hypnagogia, and absorption. Drawing on participants’ examples of religious dreams and hallucinatory experiences during liminal states of consciousness, the complex correlations and relationships between these variables are exposed and discussed—with considerable attention given to both the measures used to gather such data in the survey and the conceptual challenges of defining and theorizing nocturnal religious and spiritual experiences. Finally, a new theoretical framework—religious amplification—is introduced to help make sense of the looping and dialectical manner by which religiousness and religious cultural affordances interrelate with our sensory-perceptual experiences as well as our personal predispositions.