For millennia, dreaming consciousness has attracted diverse scholarly and public interest, with theologians, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists emphasizing the significance of dreams to individuals and societies. Dreams that include spiritual content—including spiritual imagery, sacred locations, interactions, and spiritual healing—have influenced the history and traditions of the world’s major religions as well as many indigenous societies. On an individual level, spiritual dreams are theorized to lead to spiritual reflection and insights, emotional processing, and flourishing. Such theoretical possibilities are intriguing but have previously only been supported anecdotally. 

Today, advancements in dream incubation science and sleep physiology measurement present the novel opportunity for theologians, neuroscientists, and spiritual practitioners to collaborate in systematically studying the antecedents and outcomes of spiritual dreams. For this project, a cross-disciplinary team led by Michael  Scullin of Baylor’s Sleep Neuroscience & Cognition Laboratory  will recruit 110 young-adult Christians to participate in a 15-day study that includes two sleep laboratory visits for controlled dream observation and incubation, two weeks of at-home sleep tracking with dream diaries, and outcome measurements at multiple timepoints.

This research program will address: the development of reliable methods for prompting spiritual content into dreams; whether there are spirituality, flourishing, and religious cognition benefits to experiencing spiritually-themed dreams, either immediately or one week later; whether sleep-based mechanisms are predictive of spirituality, flourishing, and cognitive outcomes; and whether baseline characteristics or sleep-based factors moderate the likelihood of experiencing, and benefiting from, spiritually-themed dreams.

This investigation is primarily targeted at academics, with outputs including an openly shared research protocol, dataset, and peer-reviewed publications. In addition, the team will produce a co-developed report for practitioners and lay audiences. The team hopes this project will help to establish a new interdisciplinary field, lay the foundation for practical sleep-based spiritual exercises, and expand public understanding of the bidirectional relationship between sleep and spirituality.