Why does Defoe situate Crusoe’s conversion experience in a dream? On the one hand, Western traditions stemming from the ancient Near East to Defoe’s day considered dreams to be a potential conduit between divine beings and humans. This is a direct pathway, and for a Puritan or Dissenter like Defoe this unmediated relationship would have seemed attractive. On the other hand, relations with God are rare, abnormal occurrences. Such relations are not part of daily life. In daily life people are governed by two basic impulses: the needs of the body and the mind. Bodily needs are at their heart mundane, ungodly. The body, in Christian thought, is the source of man’s sinfulness. The mind exists on a higher spiritual level than the body but, for Puritans, is still straight-jacketed by rational thoughts about the material world. Reason seeks useful solutions to everyday problems, solutions that do not involve contemplation of deeper divine causes or God’s grace (as we see in Dürer’s Melencholia I). The dream-space, on the other hand, frees Crusoe from his body and his rational mind. It becomes the ideal space for God’s direct intervention.

Robinson Crusoe, however, is not like the Apostle Paul – who after his famous conversion from Judaism to faith in Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus never again waivers in matters of faith. Paul’s conversion is absolute. Crusoe cannot sustain his post-dream pledge to dedicate his life to faith. He is far too concerned with the material world and material prosperity for that. Crusoe’s main drive is toward autonomy and material success. As his story progresses, the powerful dream conversion seems to fade. For sure, Crusoe remains Christian and of a Puritan type, but the dream is better seen as an interlude and a stage in the story of the growth of an autonomous individual than as the key dramatic moment in the novel. The lessening significance of Crusoe’s conversion to the overall story of the book suggests that Defoe is no longer locked in a medieval state of mind for which the conversion – the finding of God – is the principle event in the life of a great man or saint. As such, Defoe’s novel does not fit the genre of the spiritual biography – the journey of a person’s life from sin to salvation. Here, for perhaps the first time, we see a new type of novel about personal growth – the self-education of a “perfect” individual, able to transform an uninhabited island into a personal paradise by dint of rational problem solving and hard labor. Robinson Crusoe reveals himself to be more a modern character than a medieval one; the conversion narrative must take a back seat to the story of individual perseverance and ingenuity—the glorification of the middle-class, scientific mind.