Toward a Christian View of the Nature of Dreams

• Main Authors: Lien-Yueh Wei, 魏連嶽
• Other Authors: Ken-pa Chin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/br82g9

碩士 === 中原大學 === 宗教研究所 === 92 === People spend more than one third of their lifetime in sleeping. The only activity they can perceive in sleeping is dreaming. As a common experience to all human beings, dream exists as the unique and most mysterious part in human’s life. Before the period of the Enlightenment, most people consider dream is the sacred phenomena and they preserved many records of them in temples. In modern times, most people view dream as the wish-fulfillment of unconscious, or as the subjective awareness of brain activation in sleep. Apparently, modern people do not care so much about their dreams. Undoubtedly, modern oneirology’s views of the nature of dreams, the reductionism’s views brewed by rationalism, greatly influence the opinions of modern people about dream. Yet, those views not only exclude any mysteries from the world of dreams, but also offer common meanings to any particular phenomenon. Because we disagree with the approaches of modern oneirology, we try to find the way out of them from the views prior to modern times. Moreover, since pre-modern Christianity has heritages full in abundance, this thesis will explore other dimensions of the nature of dreams based on the position of Christianity. In addition, since we believe that many phenomena of dreams have relations with religion, this thesis employs the “Phenomenology of Religion” as the method of research in order to seek the nature of religious phenomena in dreams. The nature of dreams will be revealed by describing various phenomena of dreams. We then establish the nature of “common dreams” as the activity of soul, the soul passing on messages to the mind, the functional characteristics, the transcending time and reality. We also establish the nature of “special dreams” as the sacred space, God passing on messages to the dreamer and the faith in hope. Nowadays, it is the moment of modern oneirology, based on Freud’s theory, existing more than one hundred years, and it is the millennium of rethinking and reinterpreting all kinds of themes of oneirology. This thesis based on the stance of Christianity tries to propose a different interpretation from the modern oneirology, bringing up the profound meaning of dreams to the people of this century.