You know how when someone tries to explain their crazy dream to you, and it's always extremely boring? I sure do. Unless, that is, I was part of the dream. And even then, it's pretty excruciating to listen to somebody vaguely formulate what happened in their sleep, putting into words what were only strange images and sensations, even to the dreamer. It may be exciting to tell someone your dream, but it's rarely fun to listen.

Same goes with people's conception of God. I'm simply not interested. Unless, like with dreams, I fit in there somewhere. But that's pretty rare. Alas, I'm not often mistaken for somebody's God.

The problem with both dreams and God is that they are essentially too private. And so it should be. Dreams happen to the individual, and in so unique a way that even the dreamer, like all the king's horses and all the king's men, has trouble putting the thing back together again. The description of a dream is thrice-removed from the dream itself: imperfect words explaining the incomplete memory of the half-remembered dream. God, too, is subject to so much personal interpretation that no two people's "God"s are likely to be the same.

When describing dreams we often say things like, "I was at my Grandparents' house, but it wasn't my Grandparents' house, you know?" No, actually, I don't know. How would I be able to make sense out of that. I might as well try to interpret a painting by a monkey or baby.

For these general reasons, I think both dream analysis and a science of religion - or more specifically, of mysticism - are somewhat fruitless ventures. Or, to put it more mildly, the fruit it yields doesn't taste that great; neither is it very nutritious. That said, science - neuroscience especially - does have a lot to say about the chemical basis of profound religious experiences. The famous and brilliant neurologist, Vilayanur Ramachandran, has done some very interesting work on this.

Dream analysis, though, is even more elusive than mystical experience. That's because there isn't a totally universal set of symbols and archetypes that we could reference to decode every dream. Every individual has their own set of symbols, memories and associations that makes sense to them, which in turn make their dream make sense, but only to them. There may be, obviously, some symbols that mean approximately the same thing for everybody, but just as people interpret and use the same words in the same language slightly differently, what happens in dreams is not likely at all to mean the same thing to different people. That's why it's so hard to relate to someone explaining their dream to you.

Now, don't misinterpret me. I'm neither for or against mysticism or religion - or people having dreams. I'm only against a misunderstanding of it. Over the centuries, the most violent opposition to personal religious experience and mystical religion has been organized, orthodox religion. And that's because you can't control or make into orthodoxy the kind of religious experience that mystics have.

Public religion - centralized, politicized religion - is always potentially totalitarian. And the first task of totalitarianism is to destroy any possibility of individualized experience. The control of words, ideas, historical interpretation, morality, etc., is a totalitarian's business. Mysticism is the most individualized form of religion - and therefore the most difficult to control - and that's why totalitarian religion tries to stomp it out wherever it is, like everything else individual.

Totalitarian religion tries to push an "objective", "authoritative" conception of God on its followers. The "subjective" God of mysticism, by definition, cannot be pushed on others. Only the effort, the introspection, the individual searching can be encouraged.

Your own private, mystical God may not be fully communicable to other people, but it isn't supposed to be. The kind of inward searching that a mystic does is a deeply personal thing. A mystic doesn't just cling to some externally defined God, given to them by the local preacher or a televangelist. They define God for themselves. They take the active initiative. The passive believer is the one that accepts just what the Bible, or some other religious text, tells them. For this reason, the mystic shouldn't bother other people with their version of God.

Not incidentally, Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. Quite a famous one. He was also a devout theist. But his "dream" wasn't an idiosyncratic subconscious sleep-experience, it was a progressive social vision, just as his God wasn't something he was pushing on anybody else. King's dream, and God, led him to social activism, showing that a healthy separation of the inward and personal from the public and political is a fine but important line to keep in mind. King may have been a preacher, but he wasn't preachy. Not about forcing any conception of God on anyone.

Whether God "exists" or not isn't the question. The main issue is that I'm bored by people's description of God. Some believe in a pantheistic God, like that of Einstein and Spinoza, where God is basically synonymous with the universe and identified with its intricate (and some say beautiful and awe inspiring) physical laws. Others contend, vaguely, that "there must be something out there", without going into detail about what "something" and "out there" mean. So, again, how am I to make sense of that. Quite simply, I can't. Just like with other people's dreams.

So, to you annoying dream-explicators out there, take a tip from the mystics and keep it to yourself. Only you know what you're talking about. You, and God.