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“I Have a Dream”

These words of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), spoken some years before he was assassinated, come to my mind at this moment when I reach the age of eighty and have spent more than fifty years as a theologian. My eyes are fixed on my past, which I will be describing in this book, but my thoughts are directed at young people and my mind on eternity

The Importance of Dreams I attach great importance to dreams, those dreamed with closed eyes at night and with open eyes by day. The arguments of psychoanalysis, especially those of C. G. Jung, attach enormous importance to dreams, because they come from the deepest part of ourselves. A dream is the voice of the personal and collective unconscious, particularly the great dreams that have to do with our most radical identity and our life’s destiny. In the First and Second Testaments of the Bible, dreams are a way in which God communicates with his people, with the judges and the prophets. The patriarchs receive messages in dreams (Gen 15:12–21; 20:3–6; 28:11–22; 37:5–11; 46:4). The judges, who were popular leaders (Judg 2:16–19) and the kings (1 Kgs 3), and especially the prophets (1 Sam 3:2; 2 Sam 7:4–17; Zech 6:25; Dan 2:7; Joel 2:28), also received divine messages in dreams. I feel included in the words of the prophet Joel: “afterward your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:14–17). I hope very much that the young people who read this book will have hopeful visions for the future of life and of our Mother Earth, seriously threatened by aggression of all sorts caused by the irrationality of our civilization, which knows no limits and has no respect for any living creature.