God

Jung says that while the Catholic Church admits of dreams sent by God, most theologians make little attempt to understand dreams in relationship to God.

Being a god: You are always the hero of your own life. You are the central character of your own drama of experience. As such you are the deed doer, the hero or fallen god, especially when the dream is portraying dramatic life events.

God in a dream can depict several things: A set of emotions we use to deal with anxiety – i.e. our own belief that a higher power is in charge, so therefore we are okay in the world and are not responsible – thus an escape from responsibility; a parent image from early infancy; a set of moral or philosophical beliefs one holds; self judgement; something/someone we worship; a feeling of connection with humanity; an expression of the fundamental creative/destructive process in oneself; a sense of ones living interaction or relationship with all beings and the universe.

So to dream of God might be an expression of your religious feelings or emotional feelings about God. But it is helpful to remember that if you have strong feelings for a friend, or think about them and feel uplifted or moved, the feelings in no way are that friend. They are only about that friend. So in most cases, when someone tells us they were moved by God, they are usually meaning they were moved by feelings or ideas they experienced about God.

God also depicts processes in oneself that can be enormously transformative. Seen in a very practical way, if a person has no belief that there is anything in life that stand beyond their present situation and weakness, they might never open to the possibility of it. Even if God is only an idea, opening to the influence of that idea allows the action within oneself of an enormous enlargement of functions such as self-healing, widening of awareness, and reaching beyond ones previous limitations and boundaries.

In some dreams however, one has an experience almost as if there is no separation between what is sensed as God, and oneself. This formless, often emotionless experience, may be thought of as an opening to your fundamental and core self.

The archetypal image of God when investigated in dreams, often reveals itself to be an underlying sense that we have within us of our own core self – and so therefore in some way – life itself, the creative impulse of life. This unconscious realisation that we are the Creator, that the holy essence of life itself is expressing as our own being, is so difficult to accept that it is usually projected outward to form an external God. We approach this external God as if it is something distinct from ourselves. Yet again and again, when people delve deeply into themselves they arrive at the realisation – I AM GOD – I AM THAT I AM.

The powerful emotions we sometimes experience about God may well be connected with our tremendous childhood need for love and approval from parents. But equally as likely is that the immense feelings we have about meeting God in a dream, may express the wonder and perhaps terror we experience in meeting the enormity of realising we are the Creator. As the ego melts and realises itself as the One Great Life, undifferentiated, there can no longer be a sense of real separation.

Example: When I explored the emotions that had surfaced in recent dreams about God, I came across something totally unexpected. I had decided I would treat the image of God like a dream image, and ‘get inside it’, find out what was behind it. When I managed to do this I found with amazement that my desperate need for my father’s love, a love he found difficult to express, had been transported into my internal sense of God.

At this point I suddenly saw that my urge for God is actually the urge for my father’s love. My unsatisfied urge to receive love from my father, became a power to create an image of a loving God, an image of a cosmic father who can love – and from this inner creation of the psyche I can get the love I need. I created a loving God because that was my need. But others may create an avenging God to deal with their feelings of guilt; or a mysterious beautiful ever present God to deal with a sense of parental loss, and so on. The image takes the place of real human love – a second best. I see also that it is much more honest to say – not God loves me – but I love myself. I have become the father. I am the God. I have dared to take on the role of father and God. Tony C.

Example: I felt myself to be a primitive tribal male. Suddenly I encountered a force – or what I saw as an immense being. This being I felt was a god or God, but looking back it wasn’t an all encompassing being, so was more like a god, or an aspect of God. My visual impression of it though, was of something so huge yet visible, that I was at first terrified, and so were my ‘people’. If one can imagine an immense skyscraper rising into the clouds and beyond, yet not a building but a living being, this was my view of it. This being I knew as the All Shaper. It was the power which gave form or shape to everything. As such it could influence the shape one had become through the errors of history or the deeds of ones family or oneself. The pristine shape or matrix which guides the cells to form organs could be restored.

There was a problem however. This being was terrifying and beyond the gods of my people. To stand before it or acknowledge it was akin to transgressing all the lore of the tribe, all its customs. So not only was the All Shaper something more than we had known before and so threatening to our – and my – world view, but also to take it as ones god was to break with all the tribal traditions and to stand apart and different to ones whole tribe. Christopher.

Here is another view of God – there can be any number of such views.

At this point I experienced the living God, the influence of which, (the spirit we had felt). I had been aware of this God before, but never in such detail. It was experienced by me as the buzzing, radiating consciousness of all creatures. It was the united consciousness of all people and creatures everywhere. Not simply an aggregate of influence, but a living unity of consciousness. In the dream “we” were praying to this God, which is at the same time, oneself and more than self, and I here understood how such prayers work or fail. Because this God is not simply separate people doing things in the outer world, but collectively is unified effort, and is both the individual and collective consciousness. It can therefore both receive, be influenced by, and influence, individuals and groups. But because it is the collective being, its buzzing being is concerned, if that is the right word, with communal interest, with the whole, with the individual in their relationship with the collective. Where there is a collective desire, it is so powerful it becomes a certainty in realisation. There is so much power behind it, virtually nothing could stand in its way. Even though at first it is only held in collective mind, a certainty of it becoming manifested is almost absolute. This is rather like insurance statistics as reliable guide to future events. So if we pray for something that is of value collectively, the power of “God” is behind its manifestation.

But what I saw was that this is only one form of God. There are many gods – but for some people, this appears to be the absolute God.

See: god and dreams; religion and dreams.