Dreams as a Source of Spiritual Experience

Lecture Description

In this lecture, Dr.Lionel Corbett talks about dreams (and visionary experiences) as a source of the ‘religious function’ of the psyche. This function is described by Jung as a spontaneous tendency of the psyche to produce spiritual experiences. This is what Jung refers to as numinous experiences.

Often, these experiences are seen as confined to saints, mystics or ‘special’ people. Dr.Corbett instead encourages us to examine our own relationships to the sacred. He draws on Jung’s model, where the sacred or the divine manifests itself through our own subjectivity. By locating the source of these experiences deep within our psyches, we see that they are accessible at a very fundamental level, to all of us. And dreams and visions are one of the main forms of access we have.

When we have dreams and visions of this nature, we may discover that the culture we live in does not take these experiences seriously. Or that traditional ways of experiencing the sacred or holy are sometimes not broad enough to encompass the many ways it can appear in our lives. We may find that these experiences have nothing to do with the traditions most familiar to us or come from a completely different one altogether. The Unconscious will choose imagery that is really relevant to us and it may not be the image that we expect.

As we listen to the many dreams and visions, both his and others, that Dr.Corbett shares, we begin to understand how these experiences can have a deep healing effect. They bring us new knowledge and information that we hitherto did not have access to. He shares a wide selection of the different types of numinous dreams that people can have.

These lectures were originally presented at the C.G. Jung Society of St. Louis and have been remastered by Jung Platform.

This lecture is ideal if

• You want to understand the qualities/criteria that make up a spiritual experience.
• You want help to recognise these kinds of experiences when they happen to you.
• You want to learn how these experiences can be healing and bring something that we need to make us whole.

By the end of this lecture you will

• Be able to expand your notion of the way the sacred or the holy can manifest itself in our lives.
• Recognize how dreams can be a source of spiritual experience and how this can be healing.
• Have a greater understanding of Jung’s view of the sacred & spiritual as different from traditional approaches.