Thread: Does faith have something to do with it?

Are you familiar with dream schemata? Basically your subconscious builds dreams from thoughts that are already in yur mind - they're sort of like a series of cliches and plots it uses to write the scripts. Here's a good description of the process:

How are Dreams Created?

Dreams are created naturally by the subconscious mind. Although once you are lucid it is possible to make changes to your current dream and direct the creation of new dream worlds consciously, the majority of the work here is still carried out by the subconscious mind.

For example you might choose to make a red sports car appear in front of you, but that’s pretty much all the direction you would consciously give. The exact shape of the car, the feel of the materials, the controls and displays on the dashboard, in fact all the details of the car have been created automatically for you by your subconscious.

Your subconscious creates dreams from Schemata you have built up from your experience and understanding of the world. A Schema is an abstract mental structure, like a set of rules, which functions to organize our knowledge and represents our understanding of the world. They are your expectations of what things are and what things should be.

This process begins with a single idea or image coming into your mind, what this image will be can be fairly random, but will usually be linked to whatever thought was in your mind as you were falling asleep. In this example let’s say this image was a pencil.

Now your mind will begin to build a dream, using the set of schemata that you unconsciously associate with a pencil:
- When you think of a pencil your schema says you most commonly use a pencil when sitting at a desk, so this detail is added into the dream.
- When you think of sitting at a desk you think of being at school.
- When you think of being at school, you think of being in an exam, and feeling anxious, and like you just want to run away.

Using the above schemata and starting from that one idea of a pencil your mind has created a dream (or a nightmare), where you are back in your first school, where you are feeling anxious, running around the building trying to escape.

This is how all our dreams are created, and governs much of how the dream evolves and progresses. Your mind simply adds in the content of rich visual images and a storyline to your inbuilt expectations of what ‘should be’.

SOURCE

If you're experiening powerful emotions they're going to govern the content and tone of your dreams (obviously). So if you have religious beliefs and feel that you need to act on them that's going to kick some powerful schema into action and shape your dreams. There's a rich set of collective schema surrounding the Bible and God already, which automatically come to mind if a person feels they need to be saved, creating hellish dreams, or after converting providing dreams of blissful heavenly intervention.

Generally dreams of aliens means you feel alienated and feel you don't fit into society the way you should. Being cut up and examined by aliens might mean you feel like someone has been prying into your life in a cold unfeeling fashion, or examining you - maybe doctors or some prying relative or friend that you feel doesn't really have good intentions.

This was before the metoers came down on us....I believe it's a sign from God

Are natural disasters really the only way he knows to communicate with us? So crude and hard to interpret - he really needs to get Twitter or something.

Originally Posted by sonicwhite

This was before the metoers came down on us....I believe it's a sign from God

god has nothing to do with dreams / anything really.. only the god you are imagining. u could believe a fairy was our creator and it would be the same but with a fairy.. its all in your mind

Dreams are a creation of your mind, and as a Christian you're going to have certain things on your mind, but also you should remind yourself that if you belong to Christ, that lake of fire you're seeing is not something you need to fear. It could motivate you to witness to others though.

I can't say my dreams have changed much in the 25 years since I became a Christian. I dreamed about heaven a couple times and I find myself having a conscience even in dreams, but that's about it. They've always been vivid.

Faith has everything to do with the formation of dreams, for the reasons Darkmatters already described.

It isn't just faith in God; it can be faith in other gods, in ourselves, in science, in our parents, in our own ability to lucid dream, in the supernatural, in our social lives, etc, etc, etc. If you are convinced an idea is real and personally important to you, that idea will -- indeed must -- be processed as perceived reality by your unconscious mind in dreams.

And BTW I tend to agree with Darkmatters: a God who can create an infinite universe populated by a hundred billion galaxies ought to have better communication skills than simply throwing rocks.