Religious Diary Themes:
Prayer and Positive/Negative Imagery:
Religious themes were the focus of several analyses either directly or indirectly. Father X clearly stated that the experience followed an specific prayer routine, called an office, or a general mass from very early in the day. The two offices he referred to repeatedly in the diary were Lauds, which is a prayerful rejoicing for the gift of a new day, and Vigils, which during holy times can last the greater part of a night with a liturgical format of reflection and prayer but at other times can be quite brief. Lauds is the first office of the day and usually takes place just before dawn. The term Lauds is derived from the Latin word laudate which literally means praise. Vigil is a very different office which commonly takes place just before a major church holiday or a sacred remembrance of a saint.
One can conclude from his diary that 48% of the experiences were from naps following religious services of some sort. Another more pragmatic distinction between Lauds, Mass and Vigils is that the experience after Vigils are sometimes after a night of sleep deprivation while those experiences after Lauds and Mass are naps after some sleep the night before. Some percentage of the remaining may be from naps but that is unclear from the diary. This association of naps as useful in increasing the frequency of lucid dreams has been empirically verified by LaBerge.
The qualitative-spiritual group examined the positive versus negative quality of classically Christian imagery as a function the two prayer practices, the office of Lauds and the office of Vigil. They hesitated in using a good/evil or God/Devil distinction in defining positive and negative imagery because an image representing God can invoke a positive reaction if it offers an image of God's agape love. If, however, the image reflects the wrath of God, it invokes a negative response. They focused on explicit religious imagery rather than on implicit imagery. The latter would be open to much more speculative interpretation and given that the author of the diary is a monk it is reasonable to assume that there should be ample explicit imagery to the extent that dreams reflect our daily lives.
The office of Vigils was mentioned 95 times in the diary while the office of Lauds was mentioned 18 times. This group used 68 experiences which occurred immediately after the office of Vigils and 12 following the office of Lauds in their analysis. Of these 80 experiences 18 or 23% evidenced explicit Christian religious imagery. Thus the majority of the dreams they examined did not have much explicit Christian imagery. Following Lauds 42% of the dreams had explicit religious imagery whereas following Vigils only 19% had such imagery. This imagery was fairly evenly distributed between the positive and negative type categories.
Rather than conclude that Father X demonstrates a balance in such imagery based on their quantitative analysis, they concluded that Father X appears to have a problem with balancing the negative and positive, both within himself and within the church as an institution. These incongruences were in the main between the nature of the image and the priests reaction to the image in the dream. These Lutheran college students point out a parallel to Martin Luther, a monk in the Augustine order who described his dreams as mental torture which were attempting to find a balance between the love and wrath of God. Here is an example from Father X's diary of a positive religious image being greeted with a negative response:
It looked like it might be a church so I walked in. Well, there was something that looked like an alter with a lot of different things on it, one of which looked like a crucifix, so I headed for it, but about halfway a man stopped me and asked me what I was doing there. I told him that I was heading for the crucifix on the alter so that I could honor and worship our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. At the mention of Christ's name he seemed to flinch, and he grabbed me and pushed me against the wall and accused me of being an agnostic; then another man came up and joined in and we all began fighting with each other.
Continuing their analogy to Martin Luther they note that just as the struggle for balance played itself out in Martin Luther's intestines, which tormented him during his years in the monastery, it may be that this struggle is manifest in Father X's drinking. This seems evident from this dream excerpt:
When I got to the door of the church I noticed a large glass window at a right angle to the church filled people. I found the door, and when I entered I could see that it was indeed a very plush cocktail lounge .
This tension between his alcoholism and spirituality was especially evident in this dream segment:
. . . I found myself in a bedroom beside the monastery cloister. One of the monks was helping me put on my monastic habit in preparation for mass. . . . When I got to the door of the church I noticed a large glass window at a right angle to the church filled with people. I found the door, and when I entered I could see that it was indeed a very plush cocktail lounge.
So even though Father X was preparing for a mass, the temptation to drink was more pressing then performing the rites within a service.
Go to: Services and OBE/Lucid Frequency