Abstract
In the following chapter I wish to make (which is not to say establish) three points. First, I would like to suggest, with a very large chorus of other thinkers, that dreaming is, potentially at least, a creative activity and, a bit more originally, that the dream is commonly tapped as a creative state in the humanities, particularly in religious studies, and especially in that subfield of religious studies that we might designate as the history of mysticism, that is, the historical, social and psychological study of altered states of consciousness as these are recorded or, better I think, “deposited”2 in texts.
In a sense, creativity is practical dreaming.
… penile erection is an invariable feature of REM sleep.
—James Hughes, Altered States: Creativity Under the Influence1
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Notes
James Hughes, Altered States: Creativity Under the Influence (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1999).
I am relying here on Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martins Press, 1992), 94–99. My thanks to Amy Hungerford for pointing this text and passage out to me.
Mircea Eliade, Autobiography: Volume I, 1907–1937, Journey East, Journey West (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 256.
Sergiu Al-George, “India in the Cultural Destiny of Mircea Eliade,” trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts with prefatory and concluding notes by J.W. Jamieson, The Mankind Quarterly (1978), 124.
Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 66.
Mircea Eliade, Two Strange Tales (Boston: Shambhala, 1970), 98.
Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 268.
Louis Massignon, “The Transfer of Suffering,” in Herbert Mason, Testimonies and Reflections: Essays of Louis Massignon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 158.
For three fuller descriptions and analyses, see: Christian Destremau and Jean Moncelon, Massignon (Paris: Plon, 1994), chap. 3;
Mary Louise Gude, Louis Massignon: The Crucible of Compassion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), chap. 2; Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, chap. 2.
See Hugh B. Urban, “A Dance of Masks: The Esoteric Ethics of Frithjof Schuon,” in G. William Barnard and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2001).
Quoted in J. Allan Hobson, Consciousness (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), 229.
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© 2001 Kelly Bulkeley
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Kripal, J. (2001). The Dream of Scholarship. In: Bulkeley, K. (eds) Dreams. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08545-0_16
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