drugs
person cares about most in their life, although specific dreams are not
necessarily universal.
Dreams are a source for religious concepts, experience, and guidance.
Native American Indians take dreams seriously as indicators and mes-
sengers about what a person should do with their life or other mundane
events by bringing individuals into contact with supernatural beings.
Dreams contribute to healing, acquiring of powers, and wisdom among
Native American Indians. Among such religions, dreams overlap with
visions, trance states, possession, and hallucination. Even though they
happen in a private realm, Native American Indians often make their
dreams public by means of myth, public narrative, confession, or by
drawing depictions on shields or tents. Due to the images that they pro-
duce, dreams manifest a content that is a form of seeing. Emotions,
imagination, and delusion based on waking experience can generate
dreams during sleep. Moreover, dreams possess a liminal nature because
they occur between waking consciousness and being unconscious, and
some religions believe that the soul wanders during sleep.
In India, dreams are believed to give a sleeper a glimpse of god amidst
an ability to see the real and the unreal. In this sense, dreams not only
reflect reality, but they can bring it about. Hindus have traditionally
believed that having a series of dreams and not being able to recall them
is a wasteful exercise. Having an auspicious dream and suddenly awak-
ening is believed to bring good luck. Hindus also believed that it is pos-
sible to dream the dreams of other people.
In general, dreams have two directions: backward and forward. The
former is directed to a beginning point, whereas the latter leads to a
destructive ending. Dreams also function like memory, a lost and restored
memory. By recalling and restoring lost memory, dreams can expand our
identity by helping to unbind a dreamer from the present, open and
expand boundaries, help to recall former experiences, and disclose prior
ruptures in a dreamer’s life.
Further reading: Bulkeley (2008); Shulman and Stroumsa (1999)
DRUGS
Within the context of ordinary life, drugs can cure illness by destroying
germs, or they can destroy the patient if they are misused. In a religious
context, drugs have been used to alter states of consciousness in ancient
religious cultures and more contemporary cults surrounding drugs such as