This article has been reworked from Thomas Paine's 1807 work titled "An Essay on Dream." It has been edited and condensed to make the language and the concepts more accessible to a contemporary audience. The full original essay is available online here.
Introduction
Since much is said in the New Testament about dreams, it is first necessary to explain the nature of dreams, and to discuss how the mind operates while sleeping. This understanding will make it easier to judge whether any reliance can be placed upon dreams; and consequently, whether the matters in the New Testament related to dreams deserve the credit given to them by the writers of that book, as well as from priests and other commentators.
The Faculties of the Mind
In order to understand the nature of dreams, it is first
necessary to understand the makeup of the human mind. The three great faculties
of the mind are imagination, judgment, and memory. Every
thought or idea of the mind comes
under one
of these faculties. While you are awake, these three faculties are
all active. But that is seldom the case in sleep, which is why our dreams are
not as regular and rational as our waking thoughts.
The source of these faculties is in the human brain. There is no visible demonstration of this anatomically, but accidents happening to living persons [as well as a wealth of modern scientific research] show it to be so. An injury such as a concussion or skull fracture will sometimes change a wise man into a childish idiot; a person without a mind. The brain is well-protected so that we (fortunately) seldom see such accidents. But we often see it happening by long and habitual alcohol or drug abuse, as well as diseases of the brain.
The Mind in a Dream
As these three faculties either sleep, doze, or keep awake during a dream, in that same proportion will the dream be reasonable or frantic, remembered or forgotten.
If there is any faculty of our mind that never sleeps, it is that volatile thing called imagination. The case is different with judgment and memory. The calm and steady nature of judgment easily allows it to rest; and as to the memory, it records in silence and is active only when it is called upon.
Judgment During a Dream
We can see that judgment soon goes to sleep when we
sometimes start to dream before we are fully asleep ourselves. Some random
thought runs through our mind, and we are startled, as it were, into realizing that
we are dreaming between sleeping and waking.
If the judgment sleeps completely while the imagination keeps awake, the dream will be a wild collection of strange images and ranting ideas, and the more active the imagination is, the wilder the dream will be. The most inconsistent and the most impossible things will seem right, or at least go without being questioned during the dream, because the faculty whose job it is to keep order is in a state of absence. The schoolteacher has gone out and the students are in an uproar!
Memory During a Dream
If the memory sleeps, we shall have no other knowledge of
the dream than that we have dreamt, without knowing what it was about.
In this
case it is sensation rather than recollection that acts. The dream has given us
some sense of pain or trouble, and we feel it as a hurt, rather than remember
it as vision.
If the memory dozes we shall have a faint remembrance of the dream, and after a few minutes it will sometimes happen that the principal passages of the dream will occur to us more fully. The cause of this is that the memory will sometimes continue slumbering after we are awake ourselves. It sometimes happens that we do not immediately remember where we are, nor what we have been doing or need to do. But when the memory becomes fully awake, it brings the knowledge of these things back upon us like a flood of light, and sometimes the dream with it.
Our Best Friend and our Worst Enemy — Imagination During a Dream
By far the most curious ability of the mind in a state of dream
is the power it has to assume the role of every person, character and thing of
which it dreams. It carries on conversations with many people, asks
questions, hears answers, gives and receives information, and it acts all of these
parts itself.
Despite how good the imagination may be at creating images
and ideas, it cannot take the place of memory with respect to things that were
unknown when we are awake. For example, if we have forgotten the name of a
person, and dream of seeing him and asking him his name, he cannot tell it; for
it is ourselves asking ourselves the question.
Although the imagination cannot supply the place of real
memories, it has the wild faculty of inventing
memories! It dreams of persons it never knew, and talks to them as if it
remembered them as old acquaintances. It relates circumstances that never
happened, and tells them as if they had happened. It goes to places that never
existed, and knows where all the streets and houses are, as if we had been
there before. The scenes it creates sometimes resemble scenes remembered, but
with significant changes.
The imagination will sometimes act out a dream within a dream, and, in the delusion of dreaming, tell a dream it never dreamed, and tell it as if it was from memory.
It should also be noted that the imagination in a dream has
no true concept of time! It counts only by circumstances. If many circumstances take
place in a dream that would require a great length of time to accomplish, it
will appear to the dreamer that that length of time has passed.
Conclusions
As this is the state of the mind in a dream, it may reasonably be said that every person is insane once in twenty-four hours, for if we acted during the day the way we dream at night, we would be confined as lunatics. In a state of wakefulness, those three faculties all being active and acting in unison constitute the rational human mind. In dreams it is otherwise. The state which is called insanity appears to be no other than a loss of judgment while awake, similar to what we so often experience during sleep.
For Personal Guidance
The only thing that you can learn from a dream is that it can uncover thoughts that were running around in your unconscious mind. For example, if you are continually dreaming of yourself on a sailboat, maybe you harbor secret desires to take up sailing. If you keep dreaming of yourself with a son or daughter, that probably means you want a child.
Dreams as Psychic Visions
Dreams are not some sort of psychic vision of the future. If you someday find yourself on a sailboat after the aforementioned dream, it is either a coincidence, or possibly because you got the idea from the dream. The dream was not foretelling the future in any real sense.
If you find yourself talking to a long-dead friend or relative in a dream, that could mean you missed that person, or you feel in some way that they have let you down. Or it could mean nothing. The important thing to remember is that the role of the dead person — just like all characters in all dreams — was simply being played by your imagination. You were not actually conversing with the dead!
It would be absurd to take any drastic action based solely on something you saw in a dream, or because you thought it was "trying to tell you something". Remember that the dream is simply a result of your imagination. So you are the only one who was trying to tell you something.
Related to Religious Prophecy
Not only is it absurd to place too much significance or reliance upon dreams, it is even more absurd to make them a foundation for religious beliefs. Yet the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, begotten by the Holy Ghost, a being never heard of before, stands on the story of an old man's dream. (Matthew 1:20)
After this we have stories of three or four other dreams: about Joseph going into Egypt; about his coming back again; about this, and about that. This story of dreams has thrown much of western culture into a dream for more than two thousand years. All the efforts that science, reason, and conscience have made to awaken man from the dream have been called the work of the devil by priests and ministers and their superstition. Those who preached it and did not believe it, still believed the delusion necessary. They were not bold enough to be honest, nor honest enough to be bold.
The subsequent section of this web site on New Testament Prophecies goes into great detail on the real basis behind Christianity.
