Visions and Hallucinations
In biblical times people thought of dreams and visions as ways of getting communication from God. Visions are dreamlike perceptions that occur while one is awake. Hebrew Scripture sometimes refers to dreams as visions of the night. Virtually every ancient culture and most traditional cultures have regarded dreams and visions as ways of making contact with the spiritual realm. Many people in our culture find it difficult to take such an idea seriously. They are apt to regard visionary experiences as a type off hallucination.
My dictionary defines the word “hallucination” as “an apparent perception of an external object not physically present.” It adds that such things “may occur in certain mental disorders.” The addition reflects a widespread view in our culture that normal sensory experiences are caused by physical objects, and perceptions that are not caused in this way are deficient. The usual assumption is that these deviant perceptions should be treated as projections of an individual’s mind that might arise from being mentally unbalanced or from some physiological condition that compromises optimal functioning. Given this way of thinking, it is not surprising that the word “hallucination” has negative connotations. Describing an experience as a hallucination, yet thinking of it as a genuine contact with reality sounds odd to most people.
The oddness arises from assuming a dichotomy that is open to question. If we think that the only alternatives are perceptions caused by the presence of a physical object or perceptions caused by a purely subjective process, it will seem apparent that visions don’t tell us anything about reality. But there is another possibility. A visionary experience involves receiving input from the unconscious mind, and there is reason to think that some of what we receive from the unconscious mind is information about reality beyond what we acquire through the senses.
In the nineteenth century, researchers who investigated what they called crisis apparitions were intrigued by cases in which someone became aware of a crisis, usually death, that was occurring at a distance. For cases in which the information acquired in this way could be verified as correct, they coined the term “veridical hallucination” to distinguish between cases where the experience could be thought of as purely subjective from cases where it involved some contact with reality.
In our time people have become familiar with the phenomenon of near-death experiences. People who have these experiences often report perceptions of things such as what was happening in the operating room at a time when they could not have perceived the events by ordinary sensory means. In some cases, their reports can be verified as factual information that they couldn’t have guessed. Their accounts also include experiences of transcendent places and beings, including people who have died and spirit beings. We can’t verify the second kind of experience by means of ordinary sense experience, but people who have near-death experiences are almost always convinced that they have encountered something real. They could be wrong, but if the unconscious mind is sometimes a channel through which there is contact with reality, we may not be able to confidently rule it out in this kind of case.
People in our culture are often reluctant to talk about visionary experiences, but research has shown that the occurrence of visionary experiences among people who do not have mental deficiencies is more common than we might expect. Citing contemporary research, David Hufford claims that some classes of visionary experiences that are known to be normal for human beings should be distinguished “from hallucinations as that term has traditionally been used.” He lists near-death experiences and experiences of a loved one who has died as examples. Hufford refers to such visions as “extraordinary spiritual experiences,” and he notes that such experiences often result in significant positive transformations.
These transformations depend on thinking that the experience involves a genuine encounter with reality. Hufford says that someone who accepts that the experience is “reality based” needs reasons not to dismiss it as a subjective hallucination. In biblical cultures people could appeal to a widespread assumption that visions were a way to make contact with the spiritual realm. In our culture appropriate reasons would include evidence that verifiable information sometimes comes through visions, along with evidence that this kind of experience happens to people who are not mentally unbalanced. Even if such reasons are not proof, they can provide a basis for trusting what has been experienced.
It can be startling for contemporary Christians to be aware of how central visionary experiences were to biblical experiences of God. There are frequent references to visions in both Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament. For example, the book of Acts mentions multiple cases in which Paul receives divine guidance through a vision. Even when visions are not mentioned, there is often reason to think that biblical descriptions of encounters with God should be construed in visionary terms. Contemporary visionary experiences in which people are unshakably convinced that what has been encountered is real are suggestive with regard to the sense of certainty biblical characters had about encounters with something transcending ordinary reality.
Even if visions are sometimes revelatory, they call for interpretation. It is often not obvious what should be interpreted literally and what should be understood as a symbolic way of representing some truth. For example, an encounter with an angelic or demonic presence might be understood as an event to be taken at face value or as a kind of dramatization of some message. But despite the interpretive difficulties, visionary experiences often lead to an unshakable conviction of having encountered a deeper level of reality, as well as transformations arising from a shift in understanding one’s own nature and what is important in life.
For a fuller discussion of this topic, see chapter 7: Dream Messages and chapter 8: Revelatory Visions in Making Room For Mystery: Anomalous Events, Extraordinary Experiences, and Christian Faith.
