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Key points
- Religious texts about dreams can provide valuable psychological insights.
- Dreams can come to people in desperate, stressful conditions to provide guidance and reassurance.
- Dreaming is especially important now, in the darkest time of year, as a source of hope for the future.
Before the rise of psychology as an academic discipline in the 19th century, religion was the primary arena in which people discussed, analyzed, and theorized about their dreams. Psychologists today can learn a great deal about dreams from these religious sources, even if we do not agree with their metaphysical beliefs and assumptions.
One of the best examples of this appears every year at Christmas, when the story of Jesus’ birth takes center stage in Christian churches and places of worship. Although rarely noted, the Gospel of Matthew includes five separate dreams experienced by Joseph, the husband of Mary, dreams that directly guide them in preparing for the birth of their child and then protecting him from imminent peril. The first dream encourages Joseph not to divorce Mary but to stay with her, even though she was pregnant, and instructs him to name her child Jesus. The next four dreams offer timely warnings, prompting Joseph and Mary to flee with their infant son from one hiding place to another as they seek to escape the murderous King Herod.
The Gospel of Matthew is the first book of the New Testament, and these five dreams occur in Chapters 1 and 2, within the first 50 verses of the text. This prominent placement emphasizes the indispensable importance of dreaming to the founding myth of Christianity. It also signals to modern psychologists the presence of insights about the nature and functions of dreaming that can be valuable to non-Christians, too. These insights include the following:
- Dreams can come to people in desperate, highly stressful conditions to provide guidance and reassurance.
- Dreams can have a prophetic quality, envisioning possible threats ahead and preparing the dreamer to respond effectively.
- Dreams can shed new light on a moral conflict that may require a different solution than the one prescribed by society.
- Dreams offer a fundamental source of hope, an opening towards the future, and a sense of new life, new birth, new beginnings.
- Dreaming is especially important now, as a reminder that even in the darkest and coldest time of year, a spark of vital energy still shines within each of us.
These powerful psychological ideas about dreams are directly woven into the story of Jesus’ birth. For anyone within the Christian tradition, this is strong encouragement to pay attention to one’s own dreams and their potentially divine wisdom, especially during times of crisis and uncertainty. For present-day psychologists, the dreams surrounding the birth of Jesus offer an ancient mythological expression of ideas that also emerge from current scientific research on dreaming. Whether or not there really was a man named Joseph who had these exact dreams, it’s significant that people more than 2,000 years ago recognized that someone in these circumstances—poor and homeless, a child on the way, running from the authorities—would plausibly have dreams like these, dreams of reassurance, warning, and guidance.
Understood psychologically, this could be the story of any of us, if we were driven into such desperate conditions that we had nothing but our dreams to keep hope alive. To celebrate the birth of Jesus is to celebrate this deep capacity for visionary insight and spiritual resilience in all humans, Christians and non-Christians alike.
