The Borrowed Dream
“The majority of mankind get their knowledge of God from dreams.” —Tertullian
George Bernard Shaw called it “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict”; Thomas Jefferson—“the ravings of a maniac”; C.G. Jung, far less committed, called the book simply “unworthy of serious study…the whole subject is felt to be an embarrassing one.” Eminent literary critic Northrop Frye, however, found the book a sublime blend of art and mania—“an insane rhapsody.” Some Popes have abandoned the book altogether, and yet visual artists and writers seem to be endlessly enthralled. D. H. Lawrence found it to be a “grandiose scheme…of flamboyant hate and simple lust…for the end of the world.” Nevertheless, Lawrence was inspired to write Apocalypse, often called his last great work, a book-length commentary on the book of Revelation. Perhaps most noteworthy of Revelation is this perennial ability to equally fascinate and offend.
Indeed, apocalyptic texts such as Revelation have had tremendous appeal since their original inception in the third century BCE. And Revelation is no exception. In fact, Revelation has virtually become the rule. As Kirsch notes, though Revelation is “only one of many apocalypses,” it has “become known as the Apocalypse.”
For the uninitiated, Revelation can simply be described as the final chapter of history’s greatest selling book, the Bible. And it is a most climactic one—virtually orgiastic in its depiction of an end-times scenario. “Revelation can be literally crazy-making,” quips Jonathan Kirsch, in his enormously illuminating and entertaining compendium on Revelation, A History of the End of the World. “For anyone who reads the book of Revelation,” he continues, "…the experience resembles a fever-dream or a nightmare: strange figures and objects appear and disappear and reappear, and the author himself flashes back and forth in time and place, sometimes finding himself in heaven and sometimes on earth, sometimes here in the now and sometimes in the end-times, sometimes watching from afar and sometimes caught up in the events he describes. …All the while, the characters and incidents, the words and phrases, even the letters and numbers of Revelation seem to shimmer with symbolic meaning that always float just out of reach."
Kirsch’s language and the language of Revelation, as he points out, are extraordinarily reminiscent of dream-language and of dreams themselves. Thus far, however, Revelation scholarship has broadly ignored the presence of dream-language within the text. Within the genre of apocalyptic literature, dreams “become the primary literary vehicle for communicating divine revelation,” states Biblical historian David Aune. Seminal apocalyptic texts invariably hinge on a dream. As is the case of the canonical text of Daniel, and the non-canonical text of Enoch. Both texts offer vivid and detailed accounts of dreaming—both of the dreamer and of the dream. Revelation, however, does not. In fact, the Revelation text itself has no direct mention of dreaming. Rather it is, what may be called, the representation of a dream. A dream so convincingly rendered that readers continue to speak of “John’s vision” or “John’s dream.”
Comparison with texts such as Daniel and Enoch reveal that Revelation’s author was likely an avid reader of both, and faithfully adhered to the apocalyptic genre guidelines. At times Revelation actually borders on plagiarism. Suspiciously, however, one key ingredient has been omitted—the dream-framework. Though, current dream theory, classic Freudian theory and, notably, popular opinion consistently point toward the dream itself. How does one account for such disparity? Does this tension have any effect on the reader?
Might the study of Revelation's embedded, indirect dream-imagery and language shed some light on the book's unfailing ability to capture the attention of each succesive generation since its composition?
*Upper left: Revelation, King James Bible
*Lower right: The Whore of Babylon, William Blake, 1809
Read more:
The Borrowed Dream
The Apocalypse: Defining a Genre
The Book of Revelation: Historical Context
Prophet or Plagiarist?
A Freudian Reading
Revelation: An Illustrative Timeline, Part I
Revelation: An Illustrative Timeline, Part 2
Suggested Readings
About the Author