A Study of Swedenborg’s Theological Writings for the Theistic Psychology Study Group
Abstract
This paper examines what Emanuel Swedenborg actually teaches about dreams. It proceeds in six movements: (1) dreams as a form of Divine revelation, especially in Scripture and among the prophets; (2) the taxonomy of dream sources Swedenborg provides in Arcana Coelestia 1976; (3) the historical arc from the Most Ancient Church’s celestial perception to the New Church’s restored interior perception; (4) Swedenborg’s crucial distinction between dreams and the state of full spiritual wakefulness in which his mature revelatory experiences occurred; (5) the continuity Swedenborg observed between human dreams and the interior states of spirits; and (6) the role dreams may play in the life of regeneration today. A summary draws together the doctrinal findings. This foundation is intended to serve a future comparative study involving Jung and Dr. Leon James’s theistic psychology.
I. Dreams as Divine Revelation: The Evidence of Scripture
Any serious engagement with Swedenborg on the subject of dreams must begin with a straightforward observation: he takes dreams seriously as a mode of Divine communication. This is not a peripheral matter for him. It is grounded in his reading of Scripture, where prophetic dreams appear from Genesis through the prophetic books as genuine vehicles of heavenly influx.
In Arcana Coelestia 1975, Swedenborg writes:
As for dreams, it is well known that the Lord revealed the arcana of heaven to the prophets not only by means of visions but also by means of dreams, and that dreams were just as much representative and carried a spiritual meaning as visions, being almost all of the same type. It is also well known that things to come were disclosed by means of dreams to others besides the prophets, for example, by means of the dreams which Joseph had, by means of the dreams of those who were in prison with Joseph, by means of the dreams which Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and others had. From these considerations it becomes clear that dreams of that kind, just as much as visions, flow in from heaven, the difference being that dreams take place when the body is asleep but visions when it is not.
— Arcana Coelestia 1975
Several doctrinal points emerge from this passage. First, Swedenborg places dreams and visions in the same category of spiritual significance: both are “representative” and carry “spiritual meaning.” The only distinction is the condition of the body — asleep for dreams, awake for visions. Second, the biblical range of dreamers he cites is notably broad: not only the prophets but Joseph, Pharaoh, and Nebuchadnezzar — figures whose dreams disclosed future events of enormous consequence. Third, his language is explicit: dreams of this kind “flow in from heaven.”
Swedenborg does not, however, treat all prophetic dreams as equally trustworthy. In Arcana Coelestia 3698, he addresses the phenomenon of false prophets and lying dreams, drawing on Deuteronomy 13 and Jeremiah 23:
Even the foretellings of events which did take place may have been made by evil people and worshippers of another god… If a prophet or the dreamer of a dream arises… and the sign or wonder he has told you comes to pass… you shall not obey the words of that prophet or the dreamer of that dream; for Jehovah your God is testing you.
— Arcana Coelestia 3698
This is an important qualification. The fact that a dream appears to come true does not guarantee its Divine origin. Swedenborg’s framework requires discernment: the content and direction of the dream — whether it leads toward the Lord or away from Him — is the decisive test. Accuracy of prediction is not enough.
II. A Taxonomy of Dream Sources
In Arcana Coelestia 1976, immediately following his initial statement on prophetic dreams, Swedenborg provides the most systematic classification of dreams found anywhere in his writings. It is a passage of unusual precision, and worth quoting in full:
There are three types of dreams. The first type comes from the Lord mediately by way of heaven; such were the prophetical dreams spoken of in the Word. The second type comes by way of angelic spirits, especially those who are situated in front and above, over towards the right where the paradise gardens are. This was the source of the dreams that members of the Most Ancient Church had, dreams that were instructive. The third type comes by way of the spirits who are close to a person when he is asleep. These too carry spiritual meanings. Delusory dreams however come from a different source.
— Arcana Coelestia 1976
This taxonomy is fourfold in practice, though Swedenborg names only three legitimate types plus a fourth category of delusory dreams:
The first type — dreams from the Lord, flowing through heaven — corresponds to the prophetic dreams of Scripture. These are the highest category, carrying Divine authority and genuine foresight.
The second type — dreams from angelic spirits near the paradisiacal regions to the right — is specifically associated with the Most Ancient Church. Swedenborg calls these dreams “instructive,” suggesting their purpose was not primarily prophetic but formative: they taught the celestial human beings of that era about good and truth in a direct, living way. This type will be explored further in Section III.
The third type — dreams from spirits close to a sleeping person — is the most common and most relevant to ordinary human experience. Swedenborg affirms that even these carry spiritual meanings, though he does not elaborate here on how they are to be interpreted.
The fourth category — delusory dreams — comes from a different source entirely. Swedenborg does not specify that source in this passage, but his broader teaching on the hells and on spirits who seek to mislead implies that delusory dreams arise from infernal or merely natural influences rather than from heaven.
What is theologically significant about this taxonomy is what it establishes by implication: there is no such thing, in Swedenborg’s framework, as a dream that has no spiritual dimension. Even ordinary dreams from nearby spirits carry meaning. The question is always one of source and direction, not whether the dream matters.
III. The Most Ancient Church: Dreams in Their Fullest Power
The Most Ancient Church occupies a unique position in Swedenborg’s theology of human history. It represents the first and highest form of human spiritual community — a celestial age in which humanity’s interior faculties were directly open to heaven. In Arcana Coelestia 597, Swedenborg describes its mode of knowing:
The Most Ancient Church possessed immediate revelation through direct contact with spirits and angels, and also through visions and dreams from the Lord. These experiences enabled them to know in a general way what good and truth were, and once they knew them in this general way their general or so to speak primary matters of knowledge were confirmed by means of countless details acquired through perceptions.
— Arcana Coelestia 597
Several features of this passage deserve attention. First, dreams appear here alongside direct contact with spirits, angelic communication, and visions as part of a unified mode of celestial perception. They are not an inferior substitute for waking revelation; they belong to the same continuum of influx that characterized the Most Ancient Church’s extraordinary interior openness.
Second, the purpose of this influx — including dreams — was not primarily to convey information but to confirm and deepen perception. The Most Ancient people already knew good and truth in a general way through their immediate spiritual perception (what Swedenborg calls “celestial perception”); the dreams, visions, and angelic contacts served to fill that general knowledge with living particulars. This is a fundamentally different relationship to knowledge than that of later, more rational ages.
Third — and this is the point made explicit in AC 597’s broader context — with the decline of the Most Ancient Church, this mode of knowing declined as well. The later Ancient Church operated not through perception but through conscience. Subsequent generations lost even that, requiring external laws, rituals, and eventually the written Word to mediate what the Most Ancient Church received directly. Dreams of the instructive second type (AC 1976) belong to a now-past mode of celestial humanity.
This historical arc is important for any comparative reading of Swedenborg with modern psychology. When contemporary thinkers, including Jung and those who follow him, speak of recovering wisdom through dreams, they are working within a very different anthropological and historical framework than Swedenborg’s. For Swedenborg, the Most Ancient Church’s mode of dream-reception was inseparable from its celestial state — a state of innocence that preceded rather than followed rational understanding. It cannot be recovered by the same means by which it was originally possessed.
Yet this is not the end of the story. Swedenborg teaches that the New Church — the New Jerusalem — marks a restoration of interior perception, but now of a different and in certain respects higher kind. The Most Ancient Church had what Swedenborg calls “the innocence of infancy”; the New Church aims at “the innocence of wisdom” (Heaven and Hell 279). The celestial qualities are not simply lost; they are being recovered through rational understanding rather than beneath it. In True Christian Religion 571, Swedenborg describes the regenerating person developing “a sense of the goodness that comes from goodwill and a perception of the truth that is related to faith” — an interior enlightenment that is conscious and rational, not pre-rational.
Arcana Coelestia 495 is clear that the Most Ancient Church’s direct perception “does not exist nowadays,” and AC 607 carefully distinguishes celestial perception from the conscience that characterized later spiritual churches. But A Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment 12 establishes that after the Last Judgment, the obstacles to spiritual perception and influx have been removed, making it possible for people to be “enlightened and reformed” in a way not accessible for many centuries. The trajectory of Swedenborg’s teaching is not simply one of decline; it is a spiral — descending through loss of celestial innocence, then ascending again through regeneration toward what Heaven and Hell 279 calls a more mature, wisdom-integrated perception of good and truth.
This has direct implications for how we read Swedenborg’s doctrine of dreams in relation to ongoing spiritual life — a question we will take up explicitly in Section VI.
IV. The Crucial Distinction: Dreams and Spiritual Wakefulness
The most important doctrinal point Swedenborg makes about dreams may be what he says about their limits. Across multiple works, he takes care to distinguish ordinary dream experience — even divinely-influxed prophetic dreams — from the state of full spiritual wakefulness in which his own mature revelatory experiences occurred.
In Heaven and Hell 442, he writes:
These two states, though, which are states we have when we are awake to our deeper nature or (which is the same thing) our spirit, are out of the ordinary. They were shown me simply to teach me what they were like because they are known in the church. But talking with spirits, being with them as one of them — this is something I have been granted when I was fully awake physically, and it has been going on now for years.
— Heaven and Hell 442
The repeated emphasis on “fully awake physically” is striking. Swedenborg is not simply saying that his experiences were vivid or memorable. He is making a categorial claim: his encounters with the spiritual world did not occur in dream, trance, or altered state, but while his bodily faculties were fully active and conscious.
He returns to this point with even greater solemnity in the preface to Conjugial Love:
I anticipate that many who read the following descriptions and the accounts at the ends of the succeeding chapters will believe they are figments of my imagination. I swear in truth, however, that they are not inventions, but actual occurrences to which I was witness. Nor were they witnessed in any condition of unconsciousness but in a state of full wakefulness. For it has pleased the Lord to manifest Himself to me and send me to teach the doctrines that will be doctrines of the New Church, the church meant by the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation. To this end He has opened the inner faculties of my mind and spirit.
— Conjugial Love 1
Here the stakes become clear. Swedenborg’s insistence on full wakefulness is not merely biographical self-defense — it is theologically necessary. The Lord’s commission to him as a revelator required that his experiences be of a different order than dreams or visions, however genuine those might be. Dreams, even prophetic ones, belong to the Lord’s provisional and preparatory modes of communication. The mature revelatory encounter — the kind that grounds doctrinal teaching — required Swedenborg’s rational and volitional faculties to be fully engaged, not suspended.
This has direct implications for how we read Swedenborg’s dream taxonomy. He affirms dreams as genuine modes of Divine influx — capable of flowing from heaven, carrying spiritual meaning, reflecting angelic influence, and participating in the larger work of regeneration. Yet they are distinct from the state of full spiritual wakefulness that Swedenborg associates with his revelatory commission. The distinction is one of function rather than insignificance. Dreams may instruct, represent, correspond, and reflect spiritual influences; spiritual wakefulness serves a different role in the reception and confirmation of doctrine. Each occupies its own place within the larger ecology of how the Lord leads people.
V. Spirits in Dreams: A Bridge Between Worlds
One of the most unusual passages in Swedenborg’s accounts of spiritual experience concerns not human dreaming but the dream-like states of spirits themselves. In Spiritual Experiences 664, he records a direct observation:
I awoke in a dream, and there appeared to me one spirit who kept on with the dream. From this I was able to learn the state of spirits in dreams, which is not really different from man’s, for the still remaining outward and bodily elements in a spirit quiet down like the bodily elements in us do in sleep. I saw this plainly, for he could not fix his attention upon anything except what was going on at the time in his mind. He was speaking, as though not knowing that he spoke. His outer elements were sleeping, his inner ones thus [active] in the dream.
— Spiritual Experiences 664 (entry dated February 7, 1748)
This passage is remarkable for several reasons. First, it establishes a structural continuity between the sleeping human and the spirit: in both cases, the exterior faculties are quieted while the interior ones remain active. The dream-state is not exclusively a human phenomenon; it is a general feature of minds — whether embodied or not — in which the outer is suspended and the inner is freed.
Second, it implies that some spirits exist in a condition analogous to human sleep — not fully awake to their own spiritual reality, their consciousness absorbed in an interior world they may not even recognize as such. The spirit Swedenborg observes “was speaking, as though not knowing that he spoke.” This is a haunting image: a consciousness active but unaware, talking without knowing it is talking.
Third, this observation deepens the significance of Swedenborg’s emphasis on full wakefulness in his own case. The contrast is now not simply between dream and waking human experience, but between dream-like interiority and the kind of fully conscious, dual-world presence that Swedenborg claims as the mode of genuine revelation. To be fully spiritually awake — present in both worlds simultaneously, with rational and volitional faculties intact — is the rarest and highest condition.
VI. Dreams in the Life of Regeneration
Having established what Swedenborg teaches about the sources and categories of dreams, and having traced the arc from the Most Ancient Church’s celestial perception toward the New Church’s wisdom-integrated restoration, we can now ask the question that connects doctrine to lived experience: what role do dreams play in the spiritual life of a person undergoing regeneration today?
Swedenborg does not teach that the prophetic and instructive dreams of the biblical era are regularly restored in the New Church. His emphasis — particularly in Heaven and Hell 442 and Conjugial Love 1 — falls on the spiritual wakefulness that characterizes genuine regenerative encounter with the Lord. Nevertheless, he does not teach that dreams have become spiritually inert.
In Spiritual Experiences 4404, Swedenborg gives a precise account of how ordinary dreams continue to function as correspondences shaped by angelic influx:
When angels are with man, everything they speak about is represented in various ways, and also, not only in visual images but also in dreams, therefore dreams are produced in accordance with the things spoken about by angels, and are correspondences. But they are not prophecies, except with those with whom the Lord is to speak by means of them. With others they are only representatives, not significant in themselves, but varied according to man’s state and according to the spirits with him.
— Spiritual Experiences 4404
This passage draws a careful and important distinction. Ordinary dreams are not prophecies — Swedenborg is explicit about that. But they are correspondences: they take their shape from the angelic speech and spiritual influences surrounding the sleeper, and they vary according to the person’s interior state and the quality of the spirits present with them. A dream, in this framework, is not self-generated. It is a kind of mirror — reflecting, in representative images, the spiritual environment the dreamer inhabits. That is not a small claim.
Arcana Coelestia 6611 adds a further dimension by connecting regeneration directly to the expansion of perceptive capacity:
The more a person is being regenerated the more the sphere of his life extends into the communities of angels, primarily by means of temptations in which he overcomes. By means of such extension his ability to perceive becomes broader and loftier.
— Arcana Coelestia 6611
If regeneration expands a person’s sphere of life into ever higher angelic communities, and if dreams are shaped by the spirits present with that person (SE 4404), then it follows — though Swedenborg does not state this explicitly — that the quality of a regenerating person’s inner life, including in sleep, may itself shift as regeneration deepens. The dream is not the instrument of regeneration; but it may be a register of it.
The destination toward which this process moves is described in True Christian Religion 571, where Swedenborg portrays what the restored interior life of the regenerating person actually looks like:
We become spiritual and are a new creation. Then our actions come from goodwill and our words come from faith; we develop a sense of the goodness that comes from goodwill and a perception of the truth that is related to faith.
— True Christian Religion 571
This restored perception — a living sense of goodness, a perception of truth — is not the pre-rational immediacy of the Most Ancient Church. It is perception that has passed through understanding and been transformed by it: the innocence of wisdom rather than the innocence of infancy. It is the kind of interior sight toward which regeneration moves.
Most striking of all is a passage in True Christian Religion 606, where Swedenborg uses the language of dreams and wakefulness as a direct metaphor for the unregenerate and regenerate states: “People who have not been regenerated are dreaming; people who have been regenerated are awake.” This is not a statement about literal sleep, but it reveals how deeply Swedenborg associated the dream-state with an interior condition — a consciousness absorbed in appearances, unable to perceive spiritual reality clearly. Regeneration, in this metaphor, is precisely the movement from dreaming to wakefulness: from interior confusion to interior clarity, from self-generated images to perception of what is genuinely real.
This metaphorical use of dreams does not diminish their literal significance. It deepens it. If to be unregenerate is in some sense to be dreaming, and if regeneration is a movement toward wakefulness, then how a person relates to their dreams — whether they remain absorbed in them or begin to perceive through them toward something higher — may itself be a register of their interior state. This is a question worthy of further investigation, and one that will become directly relevant when the comparative study of Swedenborg, Jung, and Dr. Leon James takes up the question of what dreams are for.
VII. Summary: What Swedenborg’s Dream Doctrine Establishes
Drawing together the verified passages, we can now state what Swedenborg’s doctrine of dreams actually affirms:
First: Swedenborg clearly taught that some dreams originate from heaven. AC 1975 is unambiguous. Dreams of the prophetic type are genuine Divine influx, differing from visions only in the condition of the body.
Second: Swedenborg provided a fourfold taxonomy of dream sources — from the Lord through heaven; from angelic spirits in the paradisiacal regions; from spirits near the sleeper; and delusory dreams from a different source entirely. All three legitimate types carry spiritual meaning.
Third: The richest and most instructive dreams belonged to the Most Ancient Church, whose celestial perception made it uniquely receptive to the second type of dream. That original mode of reception declined with the decline of celestial humanity, though the New Church points toward a restored form of interior perception united with rational understanding — not the innocence of infancy, but the innocence of wisdom (HH 279).
Fourth: Dreams are not the category upon which Swedenborg grounds doctrine or revelatory authority. His own mature revelatory encounters — the ones that confirm doctrinal teaching — occurred in a state of full physical and spiritual wakefulness. Nevertheless, dreams remain genuine modes of influx and representation within spiritual life, serving functions distinct from those of spiritual wakefulness. The distinction is one of purpose, not of dismissal.
Fifth: The dream-state is not exclusive to embodied humans. Spirits too can exist in a condition in which their exterior faculties are quieted and their interior ones active — a state structurally continuous with human dreaming. This gives the category of “dream” a wider cosmological significance than most modern dream theories contemplate.
Sixth: Dreams remain permeable to spiritual influx in the present era of regeneration, even if the prophetic and instructive dreams of earlier dispensations are not regularly restored. Ordinary dreams may function as correspondences of interior states (SE 4404). Regeneration itself expands a person’s perceptive capacity (AC 6611). And Swedenborg uses the dream/wakefulness contrast as a direct metaphor for the unregenerate and regenerate conditions (TCR 606) — suggesting that how a person relates to the dream-state is itself a spiritual question, not merely a psychological one.
What this doctrine does not establish — and what remains an open question for the comparative study to follow — is whether Swedenborg’s account of dreams resembles Jung’s theory of the unconscious, whether dream symbols in Swedenborg function like Jungian archetypes, or whether the purpose of dreams in Swedenborg’s framework is analogous to what Jung calls individuation. Those questions require a separate investigation, one that can now proceed on a much more solid doctrinal foundation.
Primary Sources Consulted
Arcana Coelestia (AC) — passages 495, 597, 607, 979, 1975, 1976, 3698, 6611
Heaven and Hell (HH) — passages 279, 442
Conjugial Love (CL) — passage 1 (Preface)
True Christian Religion (TCR) — passages 344, 571, 606
Spiritual Experiences (SE) — passages 664, 4404
A Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment (CLJ) — passage 12
All citations verified via the New Christian Bible Study AI chatbot, June 2026.
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