In the Biblical story of Jacob told in Genesis 28, Jacob settled down for the night when trekking through the deserts of Canaan and fell asleep:

“And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves.”

Jacob thought he received a message from God, but most modern cognitive scientists would say that's unlikely. Instead, they would proffer that his mind had manufactured vivid images, emotions, ideas, and sensations. Jacob's apparent theophany was a dream, nothing more.

In Ancient Greece and Rome, people believed that dreams were direct messages from deities. While the precise mechanism for dreams remains unknown, scientists have narrowed down their origin to somewhere in the brain, not the beyond.

Sleep is divided into four distinct stages. In the final stage, called rapid-eye movement (REM), the brain lights up with electrical activity, almost as if awake. REM sleep is when most dreaming occurs, and when they are most vivid. During this phase, in our sleeping minds, we are transported. We see, hear, and feel. We experience things we would never experience in real life. We face the otherworldly and the supernatural.

It is no wonder then that dreams have played a major role in the historical evolution of religions, says Patrick Mcnamara, a neurologist at Boston University, and Kelly Bulkeley, a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in a new paper published to Frontiers in Psychology.

Researchers working in many different parts of the world have found that people in traditional societies treat dreams as the sources of their religious ideas, including their concepts of their gods and other supernatural beings. It is likely that ancestral populations also treated them as such. Dreams were considered proof of the gods and a spirit realm since dreams were involuntary and emotionally vivid experiences that involved the dreamer’s soul encountering other beings including long deceased relatives and so on.

Why do people occasionally prescribe sacred status to figures in our dreams? One theory from evolutionary psychology holds that humans are inclined to presume intelligence or agency in unlikely places, as doing so might help recognize patterns that might have been missed, thus granting a better chance of survival. As the intuitive argument goes, it's better to assume the sound of a snapping twig was caused by a bear or a tiger, rather than just a falling branch. And so in dreams, we might be more likely to assume that advice or warning from a talking tree or a burning bush comes from a higher being who's looking out for us -- it's not merely meaningless drivel.

Dreams offer, perhaps, the perfect setting to "converse" with a deity, Bulkeley and Mcnamara say, for three major reasons. First, dreams bring forth "mental stimulations of alternate realities." Second, they are replete with theory of mind attributions, in which we attribute mental states to other beings or entities. And third, they allow us to give value or significance to our experiences. "The neurobiology of... sleep states is now understood to involve forebrain mesocortical dopaminergic systems that directly compute value and dis-value," Bulkeley and Mcnamara write.

Considering these factors, Bulkeley and Mcnamara reach an intriguing conclusion.

"All humans are endowed with brains innately primed to daily generate god concepts in dreaming."

Source: Mcnamara P and Bulkeley K (2015). Dreams as a source of supernatural agent concepts. Front. Psychol. 6:283. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00283

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