The Scribes of Sleep

Abstract

Abstract Dream journals are a surprisingly powerful resource for psychological and spiritual discovery. Contemporary dream science has shown that as much as we can learn from single dreams, far more information can be derived from analyzing a series of dreams over time. Various people through history have intuitively understood this point, and they carefully recorded their dreams for years and even decades, drawing profound guidance from the patterns they discovered. This is the first book to gather historical and cross-cultural evidence showing the value of dream journals as a potent means of healing, religious experience, and metaphysical insight. Seven remarkable people who kept dream journals are profiled—Aelius Aristides of second-century Rome, Myōe Shonin of twelfth-century Japan, Lucrecia de León of sixteenth-century Spain, Emanuel Swedenborg of seventeenth-century Sweden, Benjamin Banneker of eighteenth-century America, Anna Kingsford of nineteenth-century Britain, and Wolfgang Pauli of twentieth-century Austria. Because dreams are so complex and multifaceted—especially when viewed in a series—an interdisciplinary approach is required to shed light on their meanings. In this work, three broad methods are applied to the seven journals: data science, depth psychology, and religious studies. As the findings of these different methods are woven together and mutually illuminated, it becomes clear that the practice of keeping a dream journal stimulates several specific qualities of religiosity, prompting the dreamers to move in more individualist, mystical, and pluralistic directions—toward becoming a free spirit.