[IR 8.

3 (2005) 281-298]

Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463-9955

Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743-1697

Implicit Religion in Dreams

JAMES GOLLNICK

Professor of Psychology of Religion, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

jgollnic@waterloo.ca

Throughout history, virtually every major religion has prized dreams as a

primary means of divine revelation. In the last quarter of the twentieth century,
many in the fields of psychotherapy and pastoral counseling have recognized
that dreams can help their clients develop the religious and spiritual dimensions
of their lives. This article argues that the concept of implicit religion can
encourage dreamers to appreciate spiritual wisdom they might otherwise
overlook in the secular and nonreligious imagery of their dreams.
Many psychotherapists and pastoral counsellors believe that their clients
can gain valuable insight through understanding the religious and spiritual aspects of their dreams. Noted dream researcher, Kelly Bulkeley,
has observed that despite the large number of books on dreams that
address the issue of spirituality, our understanding of the spiritual
potential of dreams is sadly underdeveloped. He offers the notion of
root metaphors drawn from current research in religious studies as an
important concept to deepen our understanding of the spiritual dimensions of dreams. I shall argue here that the concept of implicit religion
offers another valuable tool to uncover those spiritual aspects of dreams
that are easily overlooked because they are expressed in nonreligious or
secular imagery. In this essay, I would like to explore the religious
aspects of dreams in both their explicit and implicit dimensions.
I have to confess at the outset that I am a dreamer, not only in the general sense that we all dream for roughly an hour and a half every night,
and so for about four years in a seventy-year lifetime, but in the more
specific sense that I have spent over thirty years investigating the dreamworld from the vantage points of psychotherapy and the psychology of

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religion. In that time I have observed that religion is a fundamental

aspect of dreams, as seen in contemporary society and throughout history. For thousands of years, many have believed that dreams connect
human beings with the spiritual world and the divine. This spiritual
dimension of dreams has traditionally been understood in terms of explicit religious imagery, such as God, gods, goddesses, angels and the spirits
of the dead. But few dream commentators seem to recognize that dreams
often exhibit a depth dimension that is deeply spiritual and transformative, yet not expressed in traditional religious images and symbols.
Such nonreligious, spiritual dream symbolism corresponds on the psychological level to what Edward Bailey and other researchers have
referred to as implicit religion.
Implicit religion
Since Baileys (1990, 1997, 1998) pioneering efforts to establish the
notion of implicit religion as a valuable heuristic device in the social
sciences, there have been numerous attempts to explain this elusive
concept. Although the concept of implicit religion has been applied
mainly in the sociological arena, there is increasing awareness of its
value for getting at the inner processes at the heart of the psychological
understanding of religion. Wilhelm Dupr (2003: 12) points out that
the implicit religion concept calls attention to the margins of explicit
religion, to help us better understand the motives, interests and conditions under which people pursue their religious authenticity. In sociological perspective, these margins of religion are found in activities and
organizations that function as a religion, even though they do not
appear to be religion in the conventional sense (Hamilton 2001: 9).
In the psychological sphere, implicit religion can be observed in
peoples sense of identity, worldview, values, and meaning (Bailey 1998;
Gollnick 2002; Hamilton 2001; Nesti 1990; Stahl 1999). These basic
personality structures are fundamental to both implicit religion and
spirituality, though the further analysis required to distinguish implicit
religion from spirituality in relation to these psychological structures is
beyond the scope of this essay (Gollnick 2003). Traditionally, explicit
religion has contributed greatly to shaping these basic dimensions of
personality; in our secular society, a variety of internal and external
forces affect them. Psychotherapy has shown that dreams often influence these psychological structures, symbolizing how they function and
develop. Often people assume, but do not consciously reflect on, these

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personality structures, which therefore remain out of awareness. The

unconscious, semi-conscious, vague or not plainly expressed character
of peoples sense of identity, worldview, values, and meaning is, from the
psychological vantage point, precisely what is implicit about implicit
religion.
Schools of depth psychology frequently use dreams to access the
unconscious dimensions of these structures because dreams provide a
symbolic and metaphorical representation of a persons inner life. To
use Baileys (1998) terminology characterizing implicit religion, dreams
show the dreamers fundamental commitment(s), integrating foci, and
intensive concerns with extensive effects. Symbols and metaphors bring
the hidden to the surface; they operate in the area where shadow and
light interact, where truth is not explained but imaged, which is precisely the psychological region of implicit religion (Nesti 1990: 434). So
dream symbols and metaphors would seem to be a prime vehicle for
understanding the personality elements that constitute implicit religion.
Yet, until relatively recently, the sociological direction of most
research on implicit religion has made it unlikely to appear as a focus
within dream analysis. Then, too, implicit religion is not highly visible
in dream analysis because psychotherapy has tended to interpret the
psychological structures which represent implicit religion and spirituality in strictly secular terms. As clinical psychologists, psychiatrists,
psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists aspired to be objective, value free,
and scientific, on the model of the natural sciences, and so they did not
discuss religion and spirituality. Thus, they avoided traditional religious
language and stuck to a consistently nonreligious vocabulary when dealing with the foundational aspects of personality. If they considered religion at all, they interpreted it either as ego regression or psychosis
(Lukoff et al. 1992). Some maintain that this formative period in psychiatry and psychotherapy represented a serious repression of religion
(Kung 1990).
Because the mental health disciplines traditionally sought to exclude
questions of values and religious beliefs, it was unlikely that dreamers
would be directed to observe the spiritual and religious dimensions of
their quest for identity, meaning, orienting values in life, and a comprehensive worldview. As the history of dream analysis has shown,
what the analyst presupposes, expects, and highlights, largely determines
what the dreamer will notice in his or her dreams (Gollnick 1987). With
the systematic avoidance of religion by psychology in general, and

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psychoanalysis in particular, dreamers were unlikely to notice the spiritual or religious dimensions of their dreams unless the dream imagery
was explicitly, or even blatantly, religious. Carl Jung was one of the few
early psychoanalysts to recognize the spiritual dimension of the personality and also include dream interpretation as an essential part of his
analytical method. Later we shall explore the dream which led Jung to
formulate his concept of the collective unconscious. As we shall observe,
that dream also exhibits the basic psychological structures of implicit
religion.
Dream language
Dreams use the language of symbols and metaphors to convey their
meaning. We might say that dreams are an ideal way to get at the psychological structures of implicit religion because they reveal symbolically
and metaphorically what is happening in our lives and they shed light
on our changing circumstances. Louis Savary (1990), an expert on spiritual dreamwork, states that metaphor is the dominant language of both
dreams and spirituality. In his view, dreams provide metaphoric data
for the choices and decisions we are called upon to make and can be
considered the voice of the soul.
Dream symbols allow us to envision experiences of the mind or spirit
which we cannot directly see or describe. Carl Jung (1964) emphasized
that dream symbols have a life of their own and that the unknown
dimension of symbols, i.e. their wider, unconscious aspect, cannot be
fully defined or explained. From ancient times, dream interpreters have
recognized that most dreams portray aspects of the dreamers life in a
symbolic way, although some dreams communicate this information
through clear pictures or words. For Aristotle (1990: 111), understanding
symbolic dream images is like viewing images of objects reflected in
moving water, where the waters disturbance interferes with our ability
to recognize the objects. He contrasts this problem with the ease of interpreting those direct dream-visions that use unambiguous pictures or
words. Artemidorus (1975), perhaps the most famous dream interpreter
of antiquity, labeled those dreams that require an interpretation of
symbols allegorical dreams, and those dreams that show or say something
directly theorematic dreams. Likewise, in the twentieth century, Dr.
Louisa Rhine (1961) distinguished symbolic dreams (the first category)
from realistic dreams (the second category).

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Kelly Bulkeley (1992) prefers to speak of dream images as metaphors

rather than symbols. In his view, considering dream images as metaphors
reminds us that dreams use the categories of what we know, to try to
understand what we do not know. He objects to the term symbol
because he believes it implies an independent ontological entity floating about in an ideal Platonic realm, thus obscuring the connection to
peoples lived experience and cultural environment (p. 200). By contrast,
he views metaphors as related to actual people and cultures, always
depending on specific, context-bound notions for their meaning. In
Bulkeleys opinion, referring to dream images as metaphors rather than
as symbols avoids the tendency toward a naive universalization of
meaning.
While Bulkeleys sharp distinction between symbol and metaphor
strives to emphasize the specificity and concreteness of dream images, it
may obscure what symbols and metaphors have in common. The word
symbol derives from the Greek words sun (together) and bollein (to throw),
indicating that symbols bring together two different things, where one
thing represents something else. The word metaphor derives from the
Greek words meta (over) and pherein (to carry), indicating that metaphors
describe one thing in terms of another thing. Dream symbols and metaphors both show how aspects of our lives are like other things in our
experience. Already in ancient Greece, Aristotle (1990: 111-13) argued
that the key to understanding dreams is to notice resemblances. To
understand the meaning and reference of dream images, we must see
how they resemble certain aspects of our lives.
Many dream stories symbolize our spirituality and implicit religion
by showing who we are, how we view the world, how we find meaning,
and which values we choose to orient our lives. Typically, dreams envision a wide spectrum of phenomena from the dreamers body, mind and
spirit, to society and the environment. So dreams that symbolize the
dreamers identity, worldview, life meaning, and values (the psychological structures of implicit religion) represent only part of the entire
spectrum of dream phenomena. Dreams envision these aspects of life in
terms of sensory images, symbols, and metaphors in a narrative context.
For instance, the image of a house, as we shall see later in discussing
Jungs dream, frequently symbolizes the dreamers personality, with all
of its many facets that cannot be precisely defined.
Before we begin to examine specific examples of implicit religion in
dreams, we shall consider the more easily observed examples of explicit

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religion in dreams, where the symbols used to envision the dreamers

identity, values, worldview, and life meaning are explicitly religious.
Every religious tradition embodies certain notions of human identity,
worldview, and values (an ethical system), which help to shape these
psychological structures in its members.
Explicit religion in dreams
When people think about dreams in relation to religion, they usually
have in mind those dreams which contain obvious religious symbols,
such as a temple, mosque, synagogue, church, Star of David, crescent
moon, or cross, or an historical religious figure, for example the Buddha,
Mohammed, Moses, or Jesus. Such religious imagery in a dream may
indicate that the dream is commenting on the dreamers religious or
spiritual life. This focus on explicit religious symbols and figures is
consistent with the earliest attempts to discern the meaning of dreams
in the context of religious thought and experience.
People have recorded dramatic instances of religion in dreams throughout history. The ancients considered dreams to be a prime communication link between themselves and the divine or spirit world. They
viewed dreams as real experiences in which the dreamer encountered
God, the gods, spirits, or disembodied souls. Many ancient cultures cultivated dream interpretation as an inextricable facet of their religious
lives. At the foundations of Western civilization, for example, the Egyptians had a class of dream interpreters, called The Learned Men of the
Magic Library, who interpreted the dreams of people who came to their
temples to fast, pray, and dream. These temples were dedicated to the
dream god, Serapis. The Egyptian interpreters acknowledged three main
kinds of dreams, according to the type of divine communication: first,
the gods require something of the dreamer, such as repentance; second,
they warn of dangers; or third, they answer the dreamers questions.
The Greeks, too, built dream temples where people would come to
sleep and dream, in order to heal their illnesses or find an answer to
their problems. This practice, known as dream incubation, spread so
widely that eventually there were hundreds of dream temples throughout the areas of the ancient world governed by Greece and Rome. The
Greeks dedicated these dream temples to Asklepios, the god of medicine.
According to some of the extant testimonies, Asklepios himself would
enter the dream and heal the dreamer with his touch, or the snake who
regularly accompanied him would effect the healing. In other cases,

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Asklepios would instruct the dreamer what action or medicine to take.

Sometimes this instruction would be self-explanatory; at other times
the dreamer would need to consult a temple priest in order to understand the symbolic meaning of a healing dream.
Many people in Western culture are familiar with the numerous
instances of explicit religious dreams presented in the Hebrew scriptures.
Among these well-known stories are God giving Solomon great powers
of discernment in a dream, Jacobs dream of the ladder to heaven where
God foretold the destiny of Jacobs offspring, Josephs prophetic dreams
and his winning freedom for the Jews by interpreting the Pharaohs
dreams in Egypt, and Daniels gaining political power through interpreting Nebuchadnezzars dreams. These examples indicate the prominent role dreams have played in the religious life of the Hebrews.
The Christian scriptures carried on this reverence for dreams, as we
see in the dreams which helped Joseph to accept Marys pregnancy and
those dreams which later helped them to escape the wrath of Herod.
Emphasizing the importance of dreams in the Christian tradition,
Leroy Howe (1986: 267), Professor of Theology and Pastoral Care at
Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University in Dallas,
Texas, states: The abundance and variety of biblical texts referring to
dreams as vehicles for divine revelation is so evident as to pose serious
difficulties for anyone engaged in ministry who is neither willing nor
able to help people take their dreams seriously. Morton Kelsey (1974)
echoes this view, stating that Western Christianity held for a very long
time, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity holds right to the present, that
dreams are the principal way in which God speaks to human beings.
In Islam, dreams are absolutely central as they are intimately tied to
its origins and history. Over a period of several years, Muhammad
received through dreams much of the Koran, the sacred book of Islam.
Muslims have honored dreams from the very beginning of their tradition, as Muhammad regularly shared his dreams with his disciples and
enquired about their dreams. To underscore the importance of dreams
in Islam, noted Near East historian G. E. von Grunebaum (1966: 11)
stated that dreams play a part in virtually every aspect of Muslim life, at
both the individual and community levels.
Aboriginal peoples in various parts of the world have believed that
dreams link them to the spiritual world. In North America, many Native
traditions have emphasized the value of a dream-vision quest as the crucial social institution in their communities. The Ojibwa Native peoples

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in the area surrounding the Great Lakes provide a classic example of

this practice. In the Ojibwa dream-vision quest, boys between the ages
of ten and fifteen years old are sent out to fast for six or seven nights in
order to come in direct contact with the spirit world. Fasting and being
alone in the woods are designed to provoke pity from the other-thanhuman entities. The other-than-human grandfather often bestows
blessings, powers and songs upon the boys, who in turn bring them to
their people, thus enriching not only the individual dreamer, but the
entire community. Animal spirits, like the bear, wolf or deer, may come
to the boys to inspire a new adult identity and a vocation such as conjurer or medicine man. The social institution of the dream-vision quest
is central to Ojibwa spirituality which is rooted in an awareness of the
Great Spirit and the sacredness of the earth.
In the East, too, many recognized the role of dreams in connecting
human beings with the spiritual world. In China, for instance, people
believed that the spiritual soul (hun) would temporarily separate from
the body in dreams in order to journey to the land of the dead, where it
would encounter spirits or souls of the dead (Van de Castle 1994: 57).
Those who attend to their dreams frequently encounter images of
deceased relatives and friends. The Chinese have traditionally interpreted such dream experiences of the dead as real encounters with the
spirits of their ancestors. They also practiced dream incubation in temples, where they would perform preparatory rituals before the image of
the temple god in order to receive a divine dream. In one province (FuKien), people used to sleep on a grave to obtain a dream revelation (Van
de Castle 1994: 58).
In India, dreaming is viewed as an intermediate state between waking
life and the spiritual world. The Vedas, the sacred books of India, present
the meaning of certain dream symbols. There we read that the goddess
Usas can counter the effects of evil dreams. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad describes dreaming in terms of the soul leaving the body in order
to have real experiences in the world. According to this text, the dreamer
is able to see this world and the spiritual world at the same time.
We could multiply instances of explicit religion in dreams from traditions around the world, but the picture should be quite clear from the
examples already cited. Explicit religion in dreams is exceedingly prominent in the history of religion. Virtually every major religion in the
world has considered the dream as a principal means of divine revelation (Bulkeley 1995; Hall 1979; Kelsey 1974; Savary 1990).

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Examples of implicit religion in dreams

Now that we have noted the close relationship between dreams and
explicit religion, we turn to consider how implicit religion may appear
in dreams. Jungian analyst James Hall laid important groundwork for
observing implicit religion in dreams in an article entitled Religious
Images in Dreams, calling attention to a type of dream imagery which
he labels nonreligious images with religious meaning. There he studies
a series of dream images of a middle aged man to illustrate this nonreligious imagery. All of the images he examines represent the unification of
opposites. The first two dreams have a circular, mandala- like structure.
In the first dream, twelve divers with air hoses radiate from a single hose
in order to explore different areas of the sea and each comes back to a
huge central rock jutting out of the water. In the second dream, occurring six months later, the dreamer watches a man ride a gear wheel with
teeth as it spins counter clockwise. Gradually, the teeth break off until
the edge of the wheel is smooth and round. A voice says that the Stone
Age has ended and the Iron Age has begun.
The first dream seems to represent the dreamers process of psychological and spiritual development, whereby the conscious mind encounters various aspects of the unconscious (the divers exploring the sea) and
the central archetype (the central air hose and the huge rock) orchestrates these various and sometimes contradictory dimensions of the
dreamers personality. Hall interprets the second dream as the end of a
particular stage in the dreamers analysis whereby the patient temporarily regressed (represented by the counter clockwise movement of the
wheel) to a more primitive, nature-oriented stage (Stone Age) in order
to free him from the mechanical aspects of his life. This stage prepares
him to move forward again into the demands of civilization (in the direction of the more advanced Iron Age). The mandala-like wheel orchestrates the movement of this development. A final dream of this analysand
shows a small triangle in the apex of a large triangle. The word alto
appears as the name of the small triangle. The dreamers association
with alto is that it represents the lowest female voice and the highest
male voice, an image which suggests to Hall psychological androgyny
and the unification of psychological opposites.
In another example, Hall cites the dream of a woman in her mid forties. The dream portrays the conflict between a Good King and a Bad
King. In the course of the conflict, the Good King becomes partially

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bad, but is thereby able to defeat the Bad King. The dream ego then
discovers that the Bad King had cared for a small white kitten, so he was
not as evil and heartless as previously thought. In Halls view, this is the
dreamers attempt to reconcile the opposite tendencies within herself.
In these examples, we notice that Hall approaches the religious dimension of nonreligious dream imagery primarily in terms of the struggle
between psychological opposites (e.g. good/evil, masculine/feminine),
which Jung sees as a fundamentally spiritual problem at the core of
human personality. Hall (1979: 332) states: It is not rare for dreams to
represent symbolically a unification of opposites, which in a broad sense
suggests religious concern with relating man [sic] to that which is transcendent. Halls viewpoint focuses on the conflict of opposites found in
all of the main psychological structures of implicit religion, namely,
identity (seen in the alto triangle dream), values and worldview (especially represented in the Good King/Bad King dream). Hall, following
Jung, interprets the spontaneous mandala-like dreams (the divers radiating from a center and the gear-wheel) as natures attempt to reconcile
the opposites of the human condition, an ancient and fundamentally
religious quest, through nonreligious dream imagery.
Kelly Bulkeley (1995), too, contributes to our understanding implicit
religion in dreams. In his treatment of spiritual dreams, he calls attention to those dreams that speak to the ultimate existential concerns of
the dreamer, but do not necessarily have traditionally religious imagery.
He observes that many of these dreams appear on the surface to be quite
ordinary and unremarkable, and that they are experienced by both
religious and secular people alike, including those with no religious
affiliation, as well as die-hard atheists and skeptical agnostics (Bulkeley
1995: 3).
Bulkeley (1992) advances the notion of root metaphor dreams to
help us understand these nonreligious spiritual dreams. He defines root
metaphors as concrete images that metaphorically express our ultimate
existential concerns, that are powerful and challenging, and that have
deep, transformative effects on our lives (1992: 199). Bulkeleys reference to the transformative effects of such nonreligious dreams echoes
Baileys emphasis on the transformative effect that is a key element of
implicit religion. Bulkeley believes this concept, drawn from the writings of philosopher Paul Ricoeur and theologian Don Browning, gives
us a way to understand the spiritual meanings expressed in certain
important dreams. As illustrations of key root metaphor dreams he

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cites Jacobs ladder dream which reveals a world where the divine and
human realms are connected, and in various Native American traditions, guardian spirit dreams that shape the dreamers identities and
often guide their future life activities. While Bulkeley recognizes that
root metaphor dreams play a crucial role in explicit religion, he points
out that they are not restricted to explicit religion.
According to Bulkeley, many people develop their own personal root
metaphors through dreams that speak directly to the existential concerns of their lives. He insists that the root metaphor concept allows us
to understand better the spiritual dimensions of dreams that are not
explicitly religious and are expressed by those who do not belong to a
formal religious tradition. Bulkeley (1992: 201202) states: Indeed, one
of the greatest values of the root metaphor concept is that it helps us to
see how seemingly secular, nonreligious images in fact express meanings
that are essentially spiritual in nature. As an example of a nonreligious
root metaphor dream he cites the following case (1992: 202): For as
long as she can remember, a woman has the recurrent dream image of a
close-up view of a white, painted surface that is just beginning to blister
and bubble. She has vivid and intense feelings of despair, anguish and
terror at the sight of the bulges in the white painted surface. As she
reflects on the meaning of this dream in a dream group, she suddenly
realizes that it refers to childhood incidents of physical abuse and emotional trauma. The blistering white paint is a metaphor of how she has
covered up (whitewashed) those painful memories, and how this longrepressed suffering continues to bubble up from underneath the facade
of her life.
These experiences, says Bulkeley, were the most powerful forces
shaping this womans life, both her strong desire for social respectability
and her fear of social stigma and rejection. The root metaphor of blistering white paint spoke directly to the key existential issues of her life,
challenging her to acknowledge the still-painful wounds lying beneath
her carefully painted appearance of social acceptability, and to work
with other family members to heal their relationships. Bulkeleys notion
of root metaphor dreams that express profoundly spiritual meanings
even if they do not look spiritual is very close to our concept of implicit religion in dreams. In fact, Bulkeleys observation that not every dream
is spiritually meaningful, but any dream may be spiritually meaningful,
seems to echo Baileys view that anything can be implicit religion, which
is not to say that everything is implicit religion.

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Louis Savary (1990) believes that dreams put us in touch with our
ultimate values, and this is the essence of spirituality. In the following
example, he shows that the values dimension of spirituality is often
represented by nonreligious dream imagery: Marie, a forty-year-old
woman, dreamed that she had twins. One was well-loved and healthy,
and the other was forgotten, hungry and angry, with its head encased in
a seamless golden metal mask. In the course of working on this dream,
Marie began to recognize her own anger at being forced by her family
to live behind a mask most of her life. She realized that the angry cry of
the forgotten and hungry child was a call to live her life more fully, to
remove her mask and discover what was behind it.
Savary observes that this dream enabled Marie to live more in harmony with her ultimate values. The dream provided a striking metaphor
which helped her to grasp her situation and then tap into her deepest
resources in order to bring out her hidden potentials and integrate them
into her waking life. This example vividly illustrates how nonreligious
dream imagery can address the dreamers values, a fundamental psychological aspect of implicit religion.
The dream illustrations we have considered from Hall, Bulkeley and
Savary call attention to the kind of nonreligious imagery that expresses
implicit religion in dreams. Among the other nonreligious dream images
and themes Bulkeley examines in Spiritual Dreaming are snakes, nightmares, flying, creativity, healing and lucidity. He points out that many
dreamers overlook the spiritual meaning of such seemingly secular
images and themes in their dreams. To fill out the picture of implicit
religion in dreams, I would like to add a couple of illustrative cases
from my own work with dream groups. In these examples, we see that
the identity aspect of implicit religion is represented by the secular
dream images of choosing a hair style and driving a car.
In the first example, a nineteen year-old woman who grew up in a
very strict religious family was struggling with her desire to discover her
own distinct identity apart from being a member of her family. During
this tumultuous period, she had a vivid dream of finding herself in a
hair salon. In the dream she looks at pictures of various hair styles on
the walls of the salon. Most of them are traditional and conservative, but
she is drawn to a few pictures in one corner which show some wild and
provocative styles, some with bold hair coloring. She finds it exciting to
imagine herself wearing her hair in that fashion. After leaving the
salon, she finds herself driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

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In this example, the nonreligious images of how she might have her
hair done are an apt metaphor for her identity and how she is thinking
about herself and the world. Hair style in dreams frequently symbolizes
a way of thinking. Driving against the flow of traffic symbolizes her
feeling that finding her unique identity may go against her familys
expectations and desires.
In another example, David, a twenty-two year-old man, living at
home with his family while attending university, feels torn between the
values of his family and those of his friends and teachers at school.
Here is the essence of Davids dream: He drives his small car, a Toyota
Echo, into a car dealership to take care of a small repair. As he walks
toward the business office, he passes a large playpen where many little
children are playing on a jungle gym. One of his university instructors,
Professor Jones, is at the front desk and asks him if he would like to
buy a new Porsche. To convince him, the professor takes him to a room
and shows him a Ford Mustang. David says he always wanted a Porsche
and buys the car he is shown. Then David is at home and panics as he
realizes he now has two cars to finance. He is seated at the kitchen table
with his family and finally musters up the courage to tell them he has
bought a new car. His younger sister is pleased for him. His mother
disapproves and says the old car is good enough, so he should return
the new car. His father is unimpressed with the new car and says he
should have gotten a big SUV. An older brother says David cannot
afford such an expensive car and he should have gotten something
smaller and more appropriate.
In this dream, the car represents Davids identity, his way of moving
through life. Driving an Echo signals an element of his current identity
struggle, namely, his tendency to echo or reflect others opinions and
values rather than deciding things for himself. In this regard, he feels
like a child in a jungle of competing ideas and values (the children on
the jungle gym at the automobile dealership). Professor Jones represents
an authority for him, who suggests something attractive, but impractical
for his circumstances. When he actually gets a Mustang (something
wild), he is confused that an authority misled him. Yet he simply goes
along with the authoritys suggestion rather than trusting his own
awareness of the discrepancy between what he is told and what he sees
for himself. The family members seated around the kitchen table (where
one takes in, and digests things) represents the other forces shaping his

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approach to life and his attempt to come to terms with those competing
opinions, values and attitudes toward life.
Jungs dream of the collective unconscious
I offer one final illustration of implicit religion in dreams, drawn from
Jungs Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). This dream highlights the
structures of identity and worldview, both crucial psychological aspects
of implicit religion. Jung told this dream to Freud while they were on
board ship heading to the United States to receive honorary doctorates
from Clark University in 1909. The way both men interpreted this
dream reveals a good deal about their understanding of the world and
the human mind, as well as their working relationship.
Here is Jungs dream: He is in a house he does not know, but he is
aware that it is his own house. Initially he finds himself in the upper
storey of the house, in a salon furnished in rococo style. He is pleased
with this room, but realizes he does not know what the lower floor of his
house looks like. So he decides to explore the house further. When he
reaches the ground floor, everything is much older, from the fifteenth
century. Here the floors are made of red brick, and the rooms are rather
dark. He is intrigued by a heavy door which he opens at once. Through
this door he discovers a stone stairway leading downward. At the bottom
of this set of stairs is an exceedingly ancient, vaulted room of great
beauty, dating from Roman times. He notices a ring on one of the stone
slabs on the floor, and when he pulls it, the slab lifts, revealing a stairway of narrow stone steps leading into the depths of the earth, ending
in a low cave cut into the rock. He is amazed to find what appear to be
the remains of a primitive culture, scattered bones and broken pottery
amidst thick layers of dust on the floor. Among the bones, he comes
upon two ancient and partially disintegrated human skulls.
On hearing this dream, Freud immediately focused upon the skulls
in the cave and urged Jung to find a wish in relation to the skulls.
Freud assumed that they symbolized secret death wishes, in accordance
with his own understanding of dreams as the hidden fulfillment of a
repressed wish. Jung was nineteen years Freuds junior and his heir
apparent. Much of the correspondence during their collaboration shows
that Freud thought of Jung as his protg and psychological son. Freud
seemed to fear that Jung might harbor death wishes against him, as
such ideas fit with Freuds theory of the Oedipus complex, in which the

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son is a rival of the father and wishes to remove and replace him. Jung
resisted this line of interpreting the dream.
To Jung, the house represented an image of his psyche, and an
expression of his own identity and worldview. The salon in the upper
storey symbolized his conscious personality or ego. The ground floor
stood for the more accessible level of the unconscious, what Jung would
later call the personal unconscious which was composed of forgotten
and repressed memories, as well as subliminal impressions. The various
underground levels of the house, no longer directly inhabited, represented increasingly ancient aspects of the psyche. Finally, the cave,
with its remains of a primitive culture, symbolized the vestiges of the
primitive human being that still live on in the psyche even though conscious reflection can scarcely reach them. For Jung, the cave in the
depths of the earth was like the animal soul, reminiscent of the prehistoric caves which were often inhabited by animals before human
beings took them over.
From the perspective of this essay, we can see the house in Jungs
dream as an apt symbol of the identity and worldview aspects of his
implicit religion. The salon, the lived-in area of his house, is antiquated, furnished in the style of the 18th century, a fitting symbol of
Jungs life-long concern with the history of philosophy and religion,
and especially the historical antecedents of his own psychological
system. In particular, it highlights a crucial aspect of Jungs conscious
identity, namely, his strong identification with Goethe, who lived in
the same time-period as the furniture in the salon. Jung often referred
to the story that his grandfather was an illegitimate son of Goethe.
While Jung laughed off this story of a genetic link to Goethe, he
frequently exhibited a certain pride in retelling the story. Then, too,
Jung (1963: 87) spoke of Goethe as his godfather and authority and
regarded his thirty-year exploration of alchemical symbolism as a sign
of his inner relationship to Goethe, and to Goethes magnum opus, Faust.
We can see that the same dream which symbolizes crucial aspects of
Jungs identity also crystalizes his worldview and lays the groundwork
for his psychological theory. The essence of psychological development
is, in Jungs view, the confrontation of the conscious and unconscious
mind, represented in the dream by his dream ego (the conscious mind)
exploring the lower levels of the house (the unconscious mind). In
Jungs view, personality develops by confronting the unconscious,
especially through dreams issuing from its timeless depths (represented

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as discovering what is in the entire house and the cave below). So, this
dream symbolizes a view of the human being as connected to deeper,
even universal layers of the mind, where the psyche is extended in time
and space.
According to Jung, human beings have access to a realm that extends
beyond the individual. In his dream of the collective unconscious, this
mythical realm is represented by the ancient cave, buried deep beneath
the ground-level of his house. Dreams may tap into this region, commenting not only upon the identity, values, and worldview of the
dreamer, but also upon conditions of society or even the human species
as a whole. Jung calls these big dreams and points out that in ancient
times people were obliged to report such dreams to the Areopagus in
Athens or to the Senate in Rome. This collective, social or species-wide
perspective on dreams suggests that when we consider implicit religion
in dreams, we should also be aware that they may be commenting on
social, cultural, or even universal aspects of human identity, values,
worldview, and meaning. As an expression of implicit religion, this
dream had a transformative effect on Jung personally, in that it revealed
ancient mythological influences on his own psyche. Beyond this, however, the dream also helped shape his major contribution to our understanding of the human psyche in general, namely, the theory of the
collective unconscious.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have tried to show that dreams not only shape explicit
religion (as a principal means of divine revelation in virtually every
major religion), but they also effectively express the psychological structures of implicit religion. The concept of implicit religion calls attention to the way the dreamers identity, values, worldview and meaning
are frequently symbolized by nonreligious or secular dream imagery.
These nonreligious dream images frequently operate as symbols and
metaphors to help us understand the spiritual dimensions of our existence, even though we may not consider ourselves to be religious or spiritual. Attending to implicit religion in dreams encourages the dreamer to
sift carefully through dream images that might otherwise be discarded
as having little bearing on personal growth and spiritual development.
This discussion of implicit religion in dreams supports Baileys (2001: 4)
view that the concept of implicit religion encourages observation and

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facilitates the analysis of human phenomena that otherwise tend to be

over-looked, rather than under-stood.
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