The power of dreams
After Trisha Coburn’s doctor told her she was in good health, Coburn said she had a dream in which a disembodied voice told her to “look deeper.” Fearful, the 46-year-old Coburn returned to her doctor and asked him to look into the deepest part of her body: her colon. She said the skeptical doctor’s examination detected colon cancer, treatable only because it had been detected early. Kimberley C. Patton, professor of the comparative and historical study of religion at Harvard Divinity School, relayed that story to make a larger point. Patton describes dreams as “a language of enigmatic parable” that Western culture generally prefers to dismiss. “There’s a devaluation of dreams in the West,” said Patton, something the ancients would have found incomprehensible. Speaking at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography on April 5, she offered a wide-ranging, provocative, 75-minute talk, “Divination Through the History of Dreaming,” that moved from antiquity...