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217 17 Dreams of Muslim and Christian Children K ATE ADAMS The richness of dreams in Christianity and Islam continues to inspire many believers in the contemporary world. As this collection and other works demonstrate , this richness is reflected in the considerable literature on dreams in these religious traditions.1 In addition to studies of dreams throughout history and in scripture, research has explored the dreams of contemporary believers, usually adults.2 While Judeo-Christian scripture does not attribute dreams to young children, contemporary research has revealed that some children report dreams to which they assign a divine connection. Robert Coles shows that some Muslim children have dreams that they believe came from Allah, while in an earlier study I explored Christian and secular children ’s dreams about God.3 While the realm of children’s religious experience has been investigated, little has been done to explore children’s dreams that have a religious, or perceived religious, connection. Yet dream research shows that many significant and memorable dreams which adults report occurred in childhood. Further, children can offer interesting insights into their dreams and how they make meaning from them, including those with a perceived divine connection. To investigate further children’s dreaming and understanding of their dreaming, with a specific focus on divine dreams, I undertook a qualitative study of children aged nine to twelve. The data described in this chapter came from the Muslim and Christian samples that were drawn from a larger study. The chapter offers a comparative study of the dreams of thirty-seven Christian and twenty-nine Muslim children living in the United Kingdom that they defined as having a link to the divine. This chapter explores the points of convergence and divergence of these sixty-six children’s dreams by comparing the themes in the dream  218 K AT E A DA MS content. It also describes why the children understood their dream to have a divine link: what is it that makes a dream a “divine dream”? Aspects of these dreams and children’s understanding of them are considered in a way that gives voice to the children’s own narratives. It is through giving voice to children that we as adults can better understand children’s experience of, and responses to, their dreams. Dream Content Do Christian and Muslim children’s divine dreams reflect any similarities or marked differences? To answer this question, the dreams were coded for themes, with most dreams containing two or three major themes. These were drawn from the data itself in addition to themes recorded in psychological studies of dreams, particularly in studies of children’s dreams, and in the dream narratives of scripture. Religious Imagery Approximately half the Christian and Muslim children’s dreams contained explicitly religious themes. These included religious figures, sacred buildings , scripture, and festivals. The primary difference was that the Christian sample contained a large proportion of dreams in which God appeared, spoke, or both, accounting for approximately one-third of all the themes in that group. In contrast, only two Muslim children (6.9 percent) reported being aware of Allah’s presence in their dreams. This difference in dream content between the two samples is not surprising given that Islam has a strong tradition of not visualizing Allah. While Christians do not necessarily encourage the visualization of God, the Christian world has readily available images that anthropomorphize God. Examples include the portrayal of God as an old, bearded man in Michelangelo’s painting of The Creation of Adam. Maare Tamm found that anthropomorphic images of God predominated the thinking of children nine to thirteen.5 This may be influenced by children in Christian communities hearing biblical stories in which words appear to present God as having human emotions such as compassion and vengeance, and human abilities such as speech. Other biblical passages such as “God created man in his own image” (Gen. 1:27) can imply to children that God is a man. Their understanding of who God is and what God is like—of whether he has physical characteristics—may be reflected in their dream image. One example of a Christian child’s dream about God was that of David, which took place just after an argument with his best friend. In the dream David was floating up through the clouds and saw a concrete path. On the [3.144.84.155] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 03:20...

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