The Dream Diary of a Catholic
Monk Priest:
Otherworldly Origins or Personal Angst?
In the 10 years of my editorship of Lucidity Letter, a newsletter which became a journal devoted to articles about lucid dreaming and related phenomena, I (first author) came into contact with a variety of interesting contributors. Perhaps the most fascinating for me were the articles, excerpted from letters and dream diaries, of a Catholic monk priest, Father X (Father X, 1985; 1988; 1989; 1990). On Sept. 8, 1990 I received the "final installment" of his experiences, an 82 page, ten year diary. Excerpts from the diary and cover letter appeared in Lucidity Letter, (Father X, 1990).
With his usual humility Father X commented, "I am also aware that I may be overestimating the importance of my experiences, and some may see them as nothing more than the 'hallucinations' of a 'mad monk'. That doesn't concern me, as my only purpose was to contribute, along with others, to the slowly accumulating data of this most strange phenomenon (p. 55)." By this he meant his lucid dreams and out-of-body-experiences (OBE) which had been with him for 20 years.
His primary analysis of his experiences over his years of contributing to Lucidity Letter was consistently that they were of otherworldly origin, "Every time I enter an experience I feel like an astronaut landing on Mars for the first time and finding a thriving civilization . . . To simply label them as "dream characters" and let it go at that seems to me to be more than over-simple. There is a lot more going on here, as I am convinced that they have some kind of personal consciousness. (Father X, 1990; p. 56)." To further elaborate his otherworldly reaction there is his analysis of the demonic:
Prior to my experiences, I counted myself among those 'modern' religious believers who saw the devil as nothing more than a quaint symbol for our own disordered passions, but now, after all these strange experiences -- well, now I'm not so sure about that anymore. It is really mind-boggling -- the fellow that we thought we had ridiculed into oblivion may actually exist. He is after all the second-most important figure in the New Testament (Father X, 1989; p. 45).
His commentary was always tempered with a clear realization of the skeptical reaction that others of this culture would take:
There are times when I think that it may take another Darwin to figure all this out, because I honestly believe deep in my gut that something very important for the study of human consciousness is going on here. However, I must admit that there are other times when I feel that these experiences have no meaning at all outside my own muddled-up subconscious, that they are just some erratic chemical/electrical connections firing off haphazardly in my brain (Father X, 1990; p. 57).
His concern was brought home later in the same letter (unpublished):
I grew up in a tenement apartment . . . with a hopelessly alcoholic father who was finally pulled out of a river by the ... police. . . It was a childhood I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and the scars from it have followed me throughout my life.
As evidenced in my earlier presentation with Don Kuiken at this conference, my work since immigrating to Canada has increasingly been concerned with the relationship between transpersonal or otherworldly type experiences and intrapsychic elements which may or may not account for them or interact with them. This has especially been brought into focus for me in my contacts with Aboriginal peoples (Gackenbach & Prince, 1992; Gackenbach, 1992-93; Gackenbach, 1995).
The paradox of Canadian Native peoples today is echoed in the story of the death of Crowwoman (Gackenbach, in preparation), who finally attained psychological health at the time of her physical bodies disintegration. Her last weeks of life consisted of an almost continual movement from waking consensual reality to the world of the grandfathers from which she would return with information, messages, and visions. Her life is a template of the extremes in Native communities:
the existence of severe bodily illness in the mentally healthy; histories of violence/abuse paralleling spiritual transcendence experiences; and a pattern of family and community obligations and support in the context of a larger culture which stresses individualism.
More specifically, the Natives I've come to know see their dreams as foretelling the future, speak of the bear coming during a night ceremony, fear bad medicine, frequently tease each other with hearty belly laughs, are very erotic, sometimes suffer violence, and hold family above all.Whereas many in the dominant white culture seem clustered in the hill of the distribution ranging from pathology to transcendence, it seems to me that Aboriginals cluster at both ends at once. By looking at these extremes I have been somewhat able to see the full range of human experience into which we are all thrown.
It seems that I have come full circle by now addressing this otherworldly/pathology issue from a lucid dreaming diary. With this in mind I decided to use Father X's dream diary as a class project in a Sleep and Dreams class I taught in the fall of 1994 at Augustana University College.