CP #13 Intricacies: Dreams and Visions

Here, we are trying to see the role that dreams and visions play in Christian pragmatics whereby individual believers conduct their normal and everyday activities.  Because dreams and visions are so ingrained in religion, I will include some ideas in Judaism to do justice to the role that these play in religion over thousands of years.

Personal Story

When I was ten years old, living in Buffalo, NY, my mother and father divorced.  In those days, there was a social stigma associated with getting a divorce, so my mother took her money from the settlement and took my sister, 6 years old than I, and me to New York City, where she completed a degree program at New York University, and set out to look for work as a legal secretary.  My sister needed to complete high school and I was still in elementary school.

Anyway, while preparing to move to New York City, we kids--there was another sister who was just about to marry and stay behind--would gather around my mother and try to picture life 500 miles away in the Big Apple.  One day in this interim period, I recall having a vision.  I pictured an apartment building near a park to the right about a block away, a high school, which if you looked out one of the windows in the front of the apartment, you could barely see the top of it on a side street immediately to the left of the block the building was on.  I recall duly reporting the vision to my mother and the sister who was going with us. I think I was trying to reassure them that this move would really be great, since we'd have a nice place to live (from what I could tell in the vision). 

Mom decided to take my sister Sheila with her to New York to find a place to live.  They knew my vision; and so in the back of their minds, they carried the thought with them. After the trip to reconnoiter the city and locate an apartment, they returned full of news.  My sister blurted out, "We found your place and leased an apartment just where you said it would be!"  (I had mentioned it would be on the first floor and something about the entrance, I said, was strange.  As it turned out, the apartment had a private entrance off the main entrance to the complex.) 

When I saw the place upon moving, I confirmed that it was indeed very much like what I had envisioned it to be.

How do you explain this vision (as I remember it) that happened some 60 years ago? 

I think it explicable as an anticipatory experience that could take place as it did to my mother and sister in their inaugural trip to New York, which, in having it, they forthwith laid claim to, i.e., took possession of.  That is to say, once they saw what I said they would see through my vision, Mom immediately signed the lease!   Afterward, they--Mom and Sheila--learned from our neighbors in the area that we were paying too much for the apartment, since it was under municipal rental control; and the rent was thereupon drastically reduced (praise God!).  But Mom knew nothing about rental ceilings when she signed the lease, because she never had lived in an apartment in her life!

The Metaphysical Status of Dreams and Visions in Christianity   

My vision was an experience I had; and I reported it to my mother and my sister.  They, not only accepted it at face value, i.e., as something I had, but its contents were parallel what they saw at the location at which there was an apartment for rent, and as part of the vision, became reasons for laying claim to the apartment, i.e., leasing it. 

And in general, the elements of visions and dreams become a portrayal of events and objects in the world to whom a community, not just an individual who has had the vision or dream, can lay claim to as their own property.  This is the meaning dreams and visions have, once their contents are shared and adopted by some group.

Note that the book of Revelation is filled with visions, but no one but perhaps the early Church used  them as motivating.  Now the Zionist-Jews, on the other hand, have on more than one occasion laid claim to the Holy Land, that land flowing with milk and honey, as their own land, given by YAHWEH God in perpetuity to them. 

Can't you just imagine how thrilling it was for the Mormons who found their way to the lush plains of Utah to claim the land as God's promise to them!  This is what we're talking about here--how the power of God directs human beings through the occurrence of dreams and visions--totally physical, ordinary events that perhaps even dogs and lower forms of life experience regularly--to do miraculous things in their lives!  And reap their congratulatory reward, signified in their singing praise to God from whom all blessings come!

I have pointed out to the Jews that think the land in the Near East their sacred property that they could have moved from Europe to South Africa or anywhere other on the planet just by simply refusing to claim the vision as their promised land!