ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a dream by quite an ordinary man, a very poor cleric in fourteenth-century England. In revelation and through the dream, the Sacred becomes less mysterious; its secrets are revealed to the individual imagination. In the early Christian world the power of public dreaming fell to the Apostles and their saintly successors. Unauthorized accounts of dreams were especially suspect, and only those accounts that typically fit Biblical imagery and example were regarded with a minimum of suspicion. Not all the dangerous sources of dreams and their interpretation could be found in the pagan world outside the Church. The recovery of the depths of the psyche may be difficult precisely because they tend to be excluded from the normal processes of communities and institutions. Sociologically speaking, the Sacred is always a threat to what a particular society or its major institutions like to hold sacred.
