But these researchers, who generally come from fields like depth psychology, cognitive psychology, and neurology, have no always had the conceptual resources needed to examine adequately the spiritual dimensions of dreams. Here is where religious studies must be brought into the dialogue, for the religious studies can provide the vocabularies, methods, and models we need to understand fully this important aspect of human experience. We must begin by attempting to clarify the relationship between dreams and myths. There are several good reasons. On a continuum of narrative forms, myth mediates between the entirely personal and solipsistic, of which the dream is the quintessential example, and the entirely general and abstract, of which a logical syllogism is the quintessential example.
People possess myths, but dreams possess people.
All these techniques which succeed in interpreting dreams in literature, at least to the analyst's satisfaction, simply do not succeed with the Indian dreams. From the psychological viewpoint, they are not dreams but imaginative creations, conceits in the service of the metaphysical narrative . . . But a myth has a latent cultural meaning which the culture as a whole may mask. The hermeneutics of suspicion prevents us, however, from simply asking the culture what it thinks the symbol means. We must also find other, more indirect cultural contexts, such as the patterns formed by other myths, or the rituals associated with the myth, or other evidence of how the myth is used in society.