Visions, Dreams and the Spaces in Between

Visions temporarily flung back the curtain of mundanity that shrouded the human senses and allowed the visionary to perceive the usually imperceptible, including the saints and Christ himself. Unlike other, everyday experiences of the sacred in Latin Christendom, such as the elevation of the Eucharist during Mass, visionary experiences and their interpretation were free from the intermediary and regulatory influence of the Church. They offered unmediated access to the divine. Consequently, visionaries had the potential to garner significant popular influence. In much the same way as the ascetic holy man of the late antique Byzantine Empire, the visionary Latin Christian of the Middle Ages derived power from this proximity. The Latin Church of medieval Europe jealously guarded its monopoly on access to, and interpretation of, the divine, and recognised the importance of being able to distinguish the truly revelatory from the falsified or misconstrued. This was a particular concern for the Latin Church because of the ubiquity of the vision's typically mundane, yet experientially analogous, cousin: the dream. Dreams, phenomena also believed to offer an opportunity to perceive the sacred or uncanny, shared many characteristics with visions. Further, most people would have been able to recollect something of their sleeping sensory experiences on a daily basis regardless of status or learning. The problem with the resulting blurring between the two phenomena lay in the potential for the mundane to be credited with revelatory significance.

In addition to the problematic ubiquity of dreams was the idea that dreams were themselves capable of being deceptive or of demonic forces wielding them deliberately on account of their ability to mimic the revelatory. Thus, Chapter 34 of Ecclesiasticus notes how ‘dreams lift up fools’, and have ‘deceived many’, explicitly identifying dreams (somnia) as an untrustworthy category of experience. It was not sufficient to conclude, however, that all dreams were insignificant or deceptive, and that all one needed to do to ascertain authenticity was to determine whether the individual had been asleep at the time of the experience.

This is because there was undeniable scriptural precedent indicating that dreams could themselves be revelatory.