Spiritualism And The American Dream Vision

For several decades in the nineteenth century, large numbers of Americans held that the dead could communicate with the living. Dreams occupied a specific and contested place in that belief system.

What Spiritualism claimed

The movement held that consciousness survived death and that the dead could be reached, most often through a medium acting as intermediary during a sitting.

It spread rapidly through the northeastern states and then across the country, carried by public demonstrations, periodicals and lecture tours.

Unusually for its period, the movement gave women prominent public roles, since mediumship offered an authority that other institutions did not extend to them.

Where dreams fitted

Spiritualist writing treated ordinary sleep as a state in which the mind was already partly free of the body, which made dreams a natural channel for contact.

Dreams of the recently dead, which are among the most commonly reported dreams in any population, were read within this framework as visits rather than as grief.

This gave a widespread and painful experience an interpretation that felt explanatory, which goes some way toward accounting for the movement's reach.

The war and the scale of loss

The movement's greatest expansion followed a period in which an enormous number of American families lost young men whose bodies were often never returned home.

Bereavement without a body or a grave leaves the ordinary rituals of mourning incomplete, and Spiritualism offered a substitute point of contact.

Historians generally treat this as the central factor in the movement's growth, and the pattern of belief expanding after mass bereavement recurs in other places and periods.

Investigation and exposure

Committees of scientists and stage magicians examined mediums throughout the period, and physical phenomena produced in sittings were repeatedly shown to rely on conjuring technique.

Several prominent mediums acknowledged the methods they had used, though acknowledgment rarely persuaded committed believers, who read confession as pressure or apostasy.

Dream experiences were harder to test than table-rapping, since a dream leaves no room to search for hidden apparatus, and they persisted in the literature after physical mediumship declined.

The legacy in how dreams are described

The idea that a dream of a dead relative constitutes a visit rather than a memory remains widespread in American speech, well outside any organized movement.

Bereavement researchers describe such dreams as common, frequently comforting, and part of ordinary grief, which is a description of their occurrence rather than a claim about their source.

What the Spiritualist period supplied was a vocabulary, and vocabularies outlast the movements that produce them.