The earliest recorded dreams show that they were seen as part of a religious worldview, either as messages from the gods or as visitations by spirits and the gods themselves. The ancients made sense of dreams not as indicators of the dreamer's psychological state, but as real encounters with the spirit world and the sacred realm. In this article I examine how both of these perspectives on dreams, the ancient religious view and the more recent psychological view, have been treated in the psychology of religion, based on a review of the major English-language texts in the psychology of religion since 1970 and developments in dream research during the last 25 years.
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