Previously we’ve seen that biblical visions were multisensory experiences with an intense physicality. So what about dreams? Before thinking carefully about revelatory dreams in the Bible, we need to think first about dreams generally.
Here I need to make a confession. As a psychiatrist I have no interest in the content of dreams. What someone dreams about has no bearing on diagnosis and treatment in psychiatry generally. In the two standard textbooks about clinical features to be identified for diagnosis in psychiatry (Fish and Sims, for any who know), there are fewer than one and a half pages on dreams out of over 600, and these are essentially to state their unimportance. Consistent with this, in my whole career I’ve never made any use of the content or alleged meaning of a dream.
However, there are disorders which involve damage to the mechanisms which produce dreams in which we are interested. Hence, I do ask questions about dreams, though not about the contents of dreams. Sigmund Freud is to blame for burdening psychiatrists with a lot, of which the idea that dream contents are of interest is one. And he was not a psychiatrist and never saw any cases with mental illness (from his reports). Anyway…
