What Do Dreams/Visions Mean

A lot of the Bible is based on dreams and visions. Paul is treated by Christians as someone who "knows the rules of the faith." The writing attributed to Paul is believed to be the voice of God or Jesus. The reason Paul claims to be an authority in the faith is that he talked to Jesus numerous times after Jesus was dead. The most referred to time was in a "vision." While Paul or someone later added a sentence in the Bible that many were with Paul to verify the appearance of Jesus there are no names or testimony of any of them. Under the circumstances is it possible, I will say probable, Paul or someone later made up this tale. It is incredulous millions believe such a vision/dream involved the actual Jesus speaking to Paul. How can millions of people believe such nonsense?

About a thousand years ago, French Jesuits were intent on coming to this continent and converting the Iroquois to Catholic Christianity. The Iroquois nation was a group of six tribes in some of now Pennsylvania, Northern New York and Eastern Canada. The Jesuits learned local languages and no doubt some Iroquois learned to speak French. A wonderful body of literature sent to their home office by the Jesuits about the Iroquois has been preserved.

The Iroquois schooled the Jesuits about dreams. Dreams were so important to the Iroquois it sounds much like those in the Bible. Perhaps dream meaning of the Iroquois and that in Biblical times is a window into the ancient world writ large. 

The Iroquois had concluded that each human was not one person, but two. One was the person we know, awake and aware of his own existence. This human, however, is not the important one. The other and more important one is that which shows up in dreams. The person in dreams often does not speak directly but has experiences. These experiences are the "language" the dream person uses to communicate messages.

Interpreting the message in a dream was a preoccupation of the Iroquois. When a person had a dream to interpret meetings were called to discuss what the meaning might be. It sounds identical to Christians getting together in Bible study saying to each other, "What this means is..." 

In the Bible world, there is not a clear line between dreams and real events. So it was in the Iroquois' world and possibly everywhere. While the spiritual world of the Iroquois was ridiculed by the French Jesuits, the Christian world of the Jesuits deserves the same critique.

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