Bible - Dreams and Symbols

Tony Crisp

And He said, “Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream” (Num. 12:6). “I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:17). "For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then He openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, That He may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword." (Job 33:14- 18).

There are about 121 mentions of dreaming in the Bible and 89 mentions of sleep. (King James version.) The very first description of sleep is that in connection with Adam.

Genesis 002:021 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.

Next, in Genesis 015:012, Abraham meets a powerful experience in sleep : And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And - The Lord - he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.

Joseph telling his dream.

From that point on dreams are mentioned openly in such phrases as ‘020:006 And God said unto him in a dream’ - or ‘020:003 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him’ or ‘028:012 And he dreamed’. Most of us can understand that such dreams or visions as Abraham experienced, and later Jacob and Joseph, are not recognisable as the type most of us wake from and remember. One might say these are a ‘once in a lifetime’ kind of dream. Explaining these dreams, and criticising the modern regard for dreams, some Christians are inclined to believe that only in the past did God directly communicate with ordinary men and women, and such a relationship does not apply to us today. But that is not true. In the past dreams were seen as deeply important, whereas today they are seen in general society as ephemeral and of little consequence. As man people have dreams directly relating them to God as did people in the past.

The Tribal Dream

In trying to understand the way dreams were interpreted by the people of the bible, it must be remembered that these early tribal people did not emerge from a vacuum. They inherited views and concepts about all aspects of life, including dreams, from previous cultures. They also lived within a particular view of the world and a system of beliefs that coloured their dreams, what they expected of them, and their manner of reporting them. Therefore it is worth looking at this background to biblical dreams.

The first written account of a dream is in the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh. This dates from many hundreds of years BC. The very latest written version of the story has been dated at 600 BC. In the story Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, dreams a meteor falls from the sky, and his mother tells him it foretells his meeting with a character who will play an important part in his life. This character is Enkidu. Gilgamesh is pondering on his mortality, and sets out with Enkidu to seek eternal life. The story therefore links dreams with prophecy and also the search for the meaning of life and immortality. The story is also the earliest recorded literature.

The story was only captured because writing was invented around 4000 BC by the Sumerians, and there was a long history of oral passage of information prior to that. So beliefs about the meaning of dreams obviously preceded any written information about them. The Babylonians classified dreams into several types. Those of rulers and leaders such as priests were seen as one type, and those of common people of another. There was also a division between good dreams and bad dreams. If one goes into any large book-store and looks at dream dictionaries written before the advent of modern psychotherapy, it can easily be seen that most definitions are still written in the same style - that the dream will bring good or bad luck regarding money, romance or health. In fact they are bad derivations of the ancient Babylonian dream books. These speculations, observations and collection of folk beliefs were put into book form by the Babylonians, and are thought to have contained texts on dreams dating back to 5000 BC. These ancient Babylonian dream dictionaries were copied and taken to the library at Nineveh by king Assurbanipal. The great dream encyclopedist Artemidorus later drew on these records for his own learning. The part of the Jewish Talmud which was written during the Babylonian captivity is also full of dream interpretations and ways of dealing with dreams, and undoubtedly drew on the Babylonian library.

Babylonian Tree of Life

The Babylonians also had a creation epic, a flood and a Noah called Utnapishtim. Considering that these epic myths preceded the writing of Genesis by about two to three thousand years, it is certain they were taken by the early Israelites during their sojourn in Babylon. That does not of course mean they are groundless superstitions.

In the bible, the very first mention of sleep occurs when we are told that God caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep. These statements were written in Hebrew, a language whose alphabetical characters each had a symbolic meaning, much as the characters alpha and omega mean something by themselves in the Greek alphabet. The words ‘deep sleep’, when used in connection with Adam were ‘thareddemah’. The roots of this word - according to Fred Myers - are rad and dam. In the English language we use the ‘rad’ root in such words as radiate, radium, radical. The Hebrew word ‘radah’ means to rule to govern. The same root used as a ‘passive’ verb means to be insensible, to be fast asleep, or to lose consciousness and control.

The root ‘dam’ means to be connected through blood, similarity, kinship or identity. In old english the word dam is still used to describe the female parentage of animals, and in a similar way we say the grand dame. The whole Hebrew word suggests something much deeper than ordinary sleep. It describes a state of trance or deep, hypnotic sleep in which the patient not only becomes unconscious but for the time being loses his very “self-hood,” and becomes subject to, and entirely entered by, the will of another.See: The Unknown God.

This concept of sleep and dreams suggests the possibility of ones mind and experience being directed by another will, in fact the Divine will, and itlies at the root of the way dreams were considered in the Bible. Both Adam’s sleep, and Abraham’s vision, have to do with identity. With Adam something emerged from him that was different from his usual sense of self, and which led to an awareness of self outside God. So this story is about the emerging of a personal will into an existence that had been linked wholly with the will of God.

If the concept of God has difficult associations we can substitute the idea of early humankind having little sense of separate identity from their instints, their environment and their tribe. Their feeling of a collective identity with nature, the mysterious process of life and their tribe we can give an overall name of God - the forces which gave them existence. A study of the Australian aborigines particularly illustrates this enormous identification with the tribal territory and with the tribe itself. With the Aborigines their sense of self was in direct relationship with the territory in which they lived, and their tribal group. But in substituting these concepts for the word God, I believe we must understand that the emergence dream of identity is not simply from association with tribe and environment. It is also the emergence from a primal state of awareness or consciousness. Outside of religious or spiritual terms, Carl Jung's definition of the collective unconscious is the nearest of modern definitions. See: Australian Aborigine Beliefs;Individuation.

The Struggle for Independent Identity These definitions are important because much of the story in Genesis is about a tribal people trying to attain and maintain an identity. This is true of most tribal people. They struggle to establish and maintain their identity as a group of people in competition with other tribes or kingdoms, and this explains much of their behaviour. Just as our body destroys millions of bacteria each day in its attempt to maintain its integrity, so the tribal peoples often killed their rivals as a part of establishing their own identity and territory. Belief systems such as the tribal religion were of immense importance in this. Abraham’s visionary communication with God - the overall and powerful factors underlying his existence - set a path which enabled Abraham’s people to survive as a group through experiences which could easily have disintegrated the tribal cohesion. A common religious belief acted as a social ‘glue’ and a means of establishing mutual direction and the ability to work toward a goal as a group. It was a form of agreed law which established order in the community. Anything threatening the religious belief threatened the community, just as much as bacteria which disrupt the integrated working of our body threatens our personal existence. The social glue of Judaism still holds Jewish people together all over the world. It has enabled them to meet the impact with many other cultures.

Looked at from this standpoint, many of the dreams reported in the Bible are about the direction an individual can take regarding the destiny of the family or nation. Such dreams were not only important to the individual, but also became landmarks and pointers for later generations. They were and still are great statements summarising the beliefs, possibilities and character of the people. They looked at possibilities from the collective viewpoint - the good of the group - and gained insights which would benefit the tribe or nation. In the book Black Elk Speaks, the American Indian Black Elk tells how many of his great visions were about the healing of tribal conflicts or uncertainties. See: American Indian Dream Beliefs.

However, the dream in which Jacob sees a ladder to heaven hold not only tribal information, but also something else also.

Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.

He came to a certain place, and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. He took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. He dreamed. Behold, a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. Behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. Behold, Yahweh stood above it, and said, "I am Yahweh, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon you lie, to you will I give it, and to your seed. Your seed will be as the dust of the earth, and you will spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. In you and in your seed will all the families of the earth be blessed.

Behold, I am with you, and will keep you, wherever you go, and will bring you again into this land. For I will not leave you, until I have done that which I have spoken of to you."

Jacob awakened out of his sleep, and he said, "Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I didn`t know it." He was afraid, and said, "How dreadful is this place! This is none other than God`s house, and this is the gate of heaven." Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil on the top of it.

In the dream Jacob experiences assurances of his future and the future of his tribe. But he also experiences a direct awareness of God and an insight into the usually hidden workings of the spiritual world - or what today we often call the mind or consciousness.

The Vision of God - The Primal Self

The vision of God, the dream in which the Divine - the primal state of consciousness - is directly experienced within us is not isolated to any one culture. Remembering this helps one to gain a clearer picture of just what such dreams or visions such as Jacob's are. For instance a Hindu visionary does not meet with the divine in the image of the Christian God, but with a vision of Krishna or Shiva. The Indian visionary or dreamer makes contact with their own sense of the collective via their personal cultural images of the divine. The American Indian visionary met their sense of the collective psyche or tribe through an image of their own totem animal or family spirit. If ones own identity is deeply embedded in one religious belief system, then such alien images as those belonging to another culture might be as threatening as the invasion of bacteria already mentioned. They might undermine ones sense of self based on a particular belief system.

If we can accept that, as a human, we have the capacity to touch parts of the mind that have the amazing ability to integrate personal and cultural information, and from it present a view of where current trends and social moods are leading, then we have an understanding from which insight into Biblical dreams and visions can arise. If it is also seen that the form of the vision is shaped by cultural ideas and feelings about divinity - the collective and cultural forces underlying personal existence - then many of the Biblical dreams become understandable. See: Spiritual Life in Dreams.

As the Bible proceeds, the dreams mentioned become more linked with personal rather than social identity and destiny. Joseph’s dream of his brothers sheaves of wheat bowing down to him, and paying homage, is less to do with tribal direction than the vision of Abraham. (Genesis 37:05).

037:006 And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed: For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf. And his brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words. And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me.

Joseph and his family clearly understood that the sheaves of wheat in his dream represented themselves. But Pharaoh’s dream of the fat and thin cattle is back in the mould of a dream showing the way for his nation. A fascinating aspect to this dream is the way it was interpreted. The story of Joseph interpreting the dream of Pharaoh suggests that Joseph did not know through his own thinking process what Pharaoh's dream meant, but sought help from God. Whether we believe in God as described as a sort of father figure or not doesn't matter. We are looking at a piece of anthropological information couched in the language of the times. What is important is that in the story we see a very different form of interpretation other than from the rigid association of certain images with particular meanings. See Prayer and Dream Interpretation.

The meaning of symbols and images was clearly understood by many ancient people. Perhaps they could not verbalise exactly what the image meant, but it was often a deeply felt part of their life. It is this aspect of the Bible which is often completely overlooked by readers today. Is the story of Adam and Eve talking about two individuals who were divinely created and walked the earth in a golden age? Is the story of Jonah and the whale literally true? Are the stories of Jesus about a historical character? Or are they wonderfully evocative images which tell of another sort of truth than that of historical fact?

Adam and Eve - The Story of Human Life

This side of the Bible is incredibly rich. It stands beyond all the attempts to fix a literal and dogmatic meaning to it, and speaks of life experience which most of us can identify with and understand. If we look at the Bible as if it were a description of a dream instead of a statement of history, light shines through the stories and enlivens us.

Starting with the story of Adam and Eve, it is clearly about the beginning of life. It is about human consciousness and its beginnings. In the manner of dreams, where each part expresses some aspect of our own life and feelings, God, Adam, Eve and Eden are all aspects of the one being - the human being. In fact in Hebrew the word Adam is a plural word, not singular, so the story is talking about the human essence, not about a man and a woman. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Notice that God is given to speak the word ‘us’ showing there are creative forces rather than one creator. Also the man who is created is referred to as ‘them’.

The Garden of Eden suggests a state of mind or a state of existence other than our present normality. The story tells us that there was a condition humans lived in prior to their present one. This prior condition was lost. And if the descriptions in the story of the state of Eden are compared with the condition that Adam and Eve found themselves in after Eden was lost, we can see that the story suggests women and men at first had no will of their own. They responded to life out of their sense of connection with what is called God – their connection with their life process.

This is not a revolutionary idea. Every one of us go through such enormous personal changes. From the condition of the womb, in which we know no language or organised thought, where there is no need to make an effort to breathe or exist, we are thrust into separation, into survival, into independent existence. But we still have no language or organised thoughts. In yet another fantastic leap, our brain takes in the programming of language and achieves self awareness and the sense of aloneness. Prior to this we had no concept of time or space.

So Adam – the human race - at first existed in a state in which there was no sense of time, without any personal will. In an animal we would call this instinct. Instinct guides the animal without the animal needing to have any personal ideas or decisions. It doesn’t have to think, it responds. Many people have associated this life in Eden as the period we each spend in the womb, and when we are cast out of Eden that is birth. But the story has a larger picture. In fact human beings in their development have lived in a transitional period when they were guided by instinct, and later developed refined language and the ability to make personal decisions in some degree. In our growth from the womb we pass through the whole range of our developmental modes, right from the creature with gills to the air breathing life form with a developing sense of personal identity.

Reading about Eve (Aisha), and how she listened to promptings to do a deed her inner life, her habits, her instincts, forbade, the story takes us to the emergence of personal will. Interestingly, in the original Hebrew, up until this point in the story the word for mankind was always Adam. But as soon as this new being is formed the word for mankind is Aish, and the new being is Aisha. The new human being that has come about, Aish (Adam) says is ‘now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’ confirming that in fact the story is about one being, not two. But it is a new being with a will of its own. See: Symbolism of Adam and Eve.

Many years ago I read the true account of a Bali tribesman who had need one day to leave his tribal village. This was the first time in his life that he was going to depart from his people. As he got to the boundary of his tribal territory he fainted.

If we have been born and raised in a modern Western society, we will find it difficult to understand the enormous part the tribal group and the tribal beliefs play in the psyche of the tribesman. It is difficult for us to understand what it is like to feel so much a part of a group or a family that simply walking away from it can cause one to collapse. Developing a will of our own, learning to exist outside of our family and tribal group, has cost us a lot, and the story of Adam who becomes Aish and Aisha, sums up the price that is paid by modern humans as they meet the anxiety, the guilt, the loneliness of life as an individual. We are, like Aisha, caste out from a sense of belonging to nature, the universe and our tribe. We have lost a feeling of being in harmony even within ourselves. We no longer have the innocence of an animal or a child. We are alone together.

The New Testament's Hidden Meanings

The New Testament moves on and uses different symbols and images. The story of Mary’s virgin birth while married to an old man; of how a divine child is born, and how this wondrous child matures and heals others and is the way to regain heaven, is a further chapter in the story of human development.

Looking at the New Testament once more as a dream, Joseph represents the rational mind which is not capable of going beyond reason to touch any sense of personal wholeness. Only Mary, the integrated feelings and thoughts, which are capable of being virginal, without prior conception (without holding on to prior conceptions as to the nature of life) can bring forth the birth of an intuition, a new response to oneself and ones environment, that transforms ones life. This is a living relationship with the mystery which underlies our life. If we generate a ‘Mary’ part of us, a part that is not held prisoner by habits of thought, stereotypes of behaviour, then we can begin to allow into consciousness what was previously impossible to know. Mary, the virginal or open state of mind and feelings, acts as a link between the identity or personality, and the deep unconscious life processes. This link allows a birth of realisations and inner change that brings healing and a possibility of experiencing the eternal aspect of oneself. This is a great boon considering the rational mind, the independent will, has closed the door to personal experience of the timeless. This experience of the transcendent, or ones own wholeness is what Christ represents.

The story of Joseph, Mary and Jesus is a continuation of the events depicted in the Old Testament. The emergent individual lost any sense of connection with the whole, and with the community of which he or she was a part. Erich Fromm, in his bookEscape From Freedom, explains the recent historical events and psychological changes in people that have widened this gap between the security that was at one time felt by individuals with a sense of being part of nature, or part of a community. The shift the New Testament symbols depict is that of the individual rekindling an awareness of his/her connection with the living power of nature and community. In fact one of the major rites of Christianity - communion - directly celebrates this. This communion is not a loss of self as portrayed in Eastern religious teachings, but a willing connection made between an aware individual and the whole.

Looked at through its symbols instead of its historical relevance, the Bible unfolds the drama not only of personal growth toward maturity, toward an independent identity, and toward a greater realisation of your own potential, it also paints the great picture of the pathway humanity took toward personal awareness. It depicts in its stories and characters the wonder and difficulties of becoming an individual and of discovering satisfaction in ones life. See: Yield; Dream Interpretation through Prayer; God and Dreams; individuation; myths legends and fairy tales in dreams; religion and dreams; spiritual life in dreams; Christian Dream Interpretation.

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