Dreams

Every night, when we go to sleep, and whether we want to or not, we wander into a mysterious world – the inexplicable world of dreams.

Throughout history, men and women of different civilizations and religions have been trying to figure out what dreams actually mean. Written records have been found, dating back to more than 3800 years, that tell us of this search for divine or hidden messages in dreams. The Old and the New Testament are filled with examples of dreams through which God spoke to individuals to warn, teach or prophesize.

In Mesopotamia, the Babylonians even had a goddess assigned to the world of dreams, Mamu, and they believed that there were good dreams created by the gods, and evil dreams that were induced by demons.

The Assyrians understood dreams to be conduits through which they could receive other-worldly messages. One of the oldest dream interpretations (dating back to approximately 2700 years ago) was found in Nineveh, and it revealed that if a person repeatedly dreamt about being able to fly, it meant that this individual was about to lose everything he or she owned. They believed dreams contained warnings, and that it was of utmost importance for these to be heeded.

Dreams were also considered by the Egyptians to be the way that the gods were able to communicate with humans, to demand a particular action, to warn or to reveal something. Four thousand years ago, the Egyptians wrote down their dreams on papyrus; today, we are told that it is important to write our dreams down and to use this as a tool to get to know ourselves better. Evidently, there is nothing new under the sun…

Artemidoro of Daldis, a famous interpreter of dreams, lived in ancient Greece during the 2nd century AD. He wrote extensively about this subject and today we do have some of his books, which include 95 cases of prophetic dreams that actually came true. His work records more than 3000 dreams that he interpreted, including his annotations on the dreams and on the psychological traits of those who consulted him.  Artemidoro insisted that in order to understand dreams, one needed to know the symbolism they contained, way ahead of today’s psychoanalytic ideas.  Once again, there is nothing new under the sun.

And thus, we reach our modern age with Sigmund Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams. Freud believed that dreams were a way for individuals to express their subconscious. Many and varied methodologies originate from this idea, with Carl Gustav Jung placing the greater importance on the interpretation of dreams.  This trend of thought considers dreams to be the result of a creative force of nature, infused with intrinsic and symbolic knowledge, that draws from memories of our experiences to create images and stories in our dreams. Jung was a believer of what he termed the collective unconscious as a common creative source, for he realized that many dreams, dreamt by different people, included themes, stories and characters that were similar to the mythological narratives that have been with us throughout time and various civilizations.

Finally, I believe that we have all occasionally had dreams that seem to be so real that when we wake up, we’re not exactly sure if what we experienced had only been a dream. Sometimes we have dreams where we can have long and meaningful conversations with someone else, and they are so real that we can almost feel the other person’s breath! Then, when we wake up, we have the feeling of having been able to travel to another dimension, through time and space, to live that encounter. Dreams where we laugh, cry and live a parallel life for a few minutes (for although dreams can seem to be long, they rarely last more than a short lapse of time). And usually, as the day unfolds, the memory of the dream begins to dissipate and fade away like a light mist until all we have left is a persisting sensation.

So I’ll leave it at that, with the words of A.A. Milne, in Winnie-the-Pooh: “I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”