Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [198]
Almost all aspects of our dream experience are sensitive to training. We can stimulate our remembrances of dreams directly by waking up during the dream and reciting or writing them down. Other techniques for remembering dreams include consciously or unconsciously creating conditions that disturb sleep indirectly-such as anxiety, mourning, eating too much or little, or praying.
Dreams, too, are very much related to daily experience, both in content and emotional tone. That would mean that anyone who spent his or her time in careful exegesis of the “ascent texts” which describe the heavens, the divine throne room, and the journey there, would likely eventually dream about the same details. Besides reflecting the “unconscious” issues of life, with training, people are sometimes consciously able to manipulate the content and even the progress of their dreams, a phenomenon known as “lucid dreaming.” Lastly, oral reporting and literary processes are always available to subject the dream experience to correction when it goes far from the expected details.
We should note that a person who seeks out a dream and treats it as a revelation is relying, from our point of view, on ordinary human experience but is choosing to treat the experience as a revelation, in short, a RISC. Because of the value attached to the experience, we should expect that techniques for receiving and remembering dreams would easily enter religious life either directly or indirectly in various rituals. And since we should not privilege any sort of experience from what we normally expect in our modern world, that is all that we mean when we say that someone is receiving a dream-vision. We cannot say what the dream actually was before the person sets out to explain it. If the person does explain it, necessarily more cognitive issues will come into play, including difficulties in remembering it, and the natural tendency to edit the memory in transmitting it.
However, there are some times when sleep experience is evidently treated quite differently in our society, mostly because we do not understand all of the processes of sleep. For instance, a New York Times science article describes an unusual sleep phenomenon.7 A physical condition, known as sleep paralysis, common in some people especially at the onset or subsidence of sleep, can be interpreted as a witch attack in Newfoundland, known as “the old hag,” or even as an alien abduction in the United States. It can involve paralysis, pressure in the head, weight on the chest, struggle for breath, ringing in the ears-even a near death experience. In Japan, where there is both a predisposition and a regular name for “sleep paralysis” (kanashibari), people recognize it as a particular medical complaint.
This seems to suggest that many phenomena that are common in our psychic lives are evaluated by whatever religious or cultural criteria are available. Culture imposes an etiology and explanation on a great variety of our experiences. If this is true of our sleep states, it must be equally true of our waking states. Altered waking states, such as visions, ecstasy, or out-of-body experiences, are explained in a culture by whatever mechanisms are available in religion and mythology. Depending on those explanations, the culture makes a decision about the “sanity” of the actor.
Furthermore, there is a perfectly normal reflex of dreaming which can appear as a waking vision; that is the phenomenon known variously as the “hypnagogic state” or the “hypnopompic state,” depending on whether it is experienced upon entering sleep or upon reawakening. Some people, but evidently not all of us (at least not without training), can easily induce this state. As its name suggests, it is related to hypnosis and, though it occurs during sleep, is very susceptible to conscious suggestion. It can also happen during meditation or other kinds of deep thought and it is sometimes also a state in which out-of-body experiences take place.8
Dan Merkur has made this state the basis for his analysis of gnosticism.9