11.21.24 | Guest Speaker Sheri D. Kling, Ph.D. | Lecture: The Dreaming Body and Religious Experience

If imagination can assist in healing, how might the images in our dreams be part of the journey toward psycho-spiritual wholeness and transformation? Rather than perpetuating the chasm between dreams-as-solely-brain-generated or dreams-as-supernatural-divine-messages, in this session Sheri D. Kling will show how the bold claims of Alfred North Whitehead about perception and internal relations alongside C.G. Jung can expand our discussion of dreaming to include brain, body, world, and that transpersonal reality that some call “God.”

Neither current scientific nor religious approaches to dreams seem able to provide an integrated theory to explain how dreams can be understood as embodied while still somehow capable of being perceived as guiding and healing encounters with a transpersonal reality. Bridging the chasm with Whitehead’s ideas allows us to accept Kelly Bulkeley’s claim that “dreaming is a primal wellspring of religious experience,” while rejecting both the view that dreams are somehow “delivered” into a sleeping person through supernatural agents and the notion that God must relate to us supernaturally.
We’ll touch on the ways in which dreaming can be understood as a natural function of a perceiving body-mind that 1) perceives the entire actual world and the transpersonal reality that some call “God,” and 2) combines emotion-heavy perceptions with images generated through the influence of that reality. We’ll also raise the possibility that the vagus nerve may be a connecting pathway between perception, feeling, and image. In this way, dreams can be understood as both embodied and as the kind of religious experience that can transform our lives.

Sheri D. Kling, Ph.D.
Sheri D. Kling, Ph.D., is the director of Process & Faith with the Center for Process Studies and interim minister of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Bradenton, FL. Sheri earned her Ph.D. in Religion: Process Studies from Claremont School of Theology and her MATS from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. She is a theologian, songwriter, and spiritual teacher who draws from wisdom and mystical traditions, relational worldviews, depth psychology, and the intersection of spirituality and science to help people find meaning, belonging, and transformation. Sheri is a faculty member of the Haden Institute, adjunct faculty with Claremont School of Theology, and the author of A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources for Transformation as well as a contributor to several other books. She regularly delivers dynamic “Music & Message” presentations to groups, and offers courses, concerts, and spiritual retreats. Sheri may be found online at sherikling.com.