The Significance of Dreams – A Travel Through Time and Occult Mysteries
Dreams – the land of our secret fantasies and endless possibilities – the mysterious kingdom of the surreal and nightmarish where feverish spectres and vast paradise gardens collide.
In his novella “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” from 1926, H. P. Lovecraft describes the adventures of Randolph Carter, a man who leads a double life in the realms of his fantastic nightmares. Obsessed by the beautiful city of his childhood memories, Carter sets out to find a place that seems more promising than the drab realities of his mortal life.
While most people have a hard time remembering their dreams on a regular basis, every once in a while they might be able to grasp the piece of something significant, a bright gleam of wonder touching their innermost core, or maybe even a darkly brooding premonition.
Dreams seem as evanescent as a dancing bubble, airy froth from the entrails of our hallucinating brains, and yet, past cultures used to take the messages from the land of sleep very seriously. Today, dreams are the field where the questions of materialism and mysticism collide.
So let us take a closer look at their strange phenomenon.
Etymology
The English word “dream”, as well as the Dutch “droom” and the Old Norse “draumr” might stem from the Proto Germanic “draugmas ", which means "deception”, “illusion” or “phantasm". Similar to that meaning, the Old Norse “draugr” describes a ghost or apparition in the form of an undead person, whereas “druh” in Sanskrit stands for the wish to harm or injure someone. Here the dangerous aspects of nightly dreams shimmer through these ominous words.
The Old English meaning of “dream”, on the other hand, is connected to "joy”, “mirth” and "music". It is thus referring to the pleasures of daydreaming. The facets of dreams seem to be as numerous as they are enigmatic.
When looking at the word “sleep”, it is tied to the Greek god Hypnos, who has two brothers. One is Eros, or Love, while the other embodies Thanatos, also known as death.
It is no coincidence that the ideas of sleep and death are closely connected. Death itself could be seen as some sort of prolonged sleep, whereas sleep is like a temporary death. It is when we slumber that we resemble the dead the most.
In this sense, an ancient German legend tells of two mice crawling out of the mouths of people. The red one embodies sleep and will return once the person wakes up. The white one is a symbol of death and won’t come back again after it has escaped into the ether.
Similar to these narrations, many different cultures across the world believe in the ability of the soul or spirit to leave its earthly shell during sleep or trance to travel across space and time. What we nowadays would call OBEs, or out-of-body experiences, can be found in manifold accounts and fairytales.
While witches in Europe were believed to use magical ointments to be able to fly, the shamans in Lapland, Siberia and Mongolia, to this day, eat dried amanita to reach ecstasy and leave their bodies for mystical adventures.
In the nineteenth century, Lappmarken was notorious for its longstanding tradition of sorcery and, in the eyes of the church, ungodly practices. The archbishop of Uppsala finally was sent out together with a physician and a higher official to put an end to the blasphemous witchery. One night, on their long journey, they had no choice but to seek accommodation at Peter Lärdal’s house. The Lapplander was rich and infamous for his magical abilities. When being met with the archbishop and his skeptical academic companions, Lärdal wanted to teach them better.
When the Swedish commission asked him about his sorcery, he answered that he could send out his spirit as he pleased and wanted to prove them his words. Under the condition that no one should touch his left-behind body, Peter Lärdal got to work and burned a kind of incense in a coal pan. After having inhaled its narcotic fumes, he fell into a trance-like, cataleptic state. His task was to visit the archbishop’s wife. When Lärdal came back to consciousness after an hour, he was able to describe the bishop's dwelling in full detail. According to him, the archbishop’s wife had been busy preparing something in the kitchen and thus had taken off her wedding ring. Lärdal then went on to tell the bishop that he had grasped the ring to hide it behind a coal basket. Not long after that incident, the archbishop wrote his wife a letter and had it confirmed that her wedding ring had gotten lost on the same day Lärdal had performed his ritual. She even mentioned a man clad in Lappish garments that had quickly appeared in her kitchen, only to vanish when he was asked about his whereabouts.
Dreams and initiation
This bizarre account is only one from many tales about people willfully leaving their mortal shells in a trance-like state.
For centuries, sleep was an important key to the supernatural world. Since it was deemed closely connected to death itself, people understood dreams as a gateway to the secrets of existence. When the soul detached itself from the physical body during sleep, it freed itself from the prison of its material shackles and ascended into spiritual worlds.
Therefore, many ancient cultures used sleep as a form of initiation. Diving into the deep, dark pond of dreams and consciously coming back with otherworldly wisdom often was a dangerous quest.
In Ancient Egypt, aspiring priests had to pass various tests before they would be welcomed into the caste of the clergy. One of these exams was to be laid to rest in a sarcophagus deep down in the labyrinthine belly of a pyramid. They then fell into a corpse-like state of slumber and had to prove their courage, as well as their will power, in the otherworldly realms of dreams. Once the trialled succeeded in the demanding tasks, they woke up again from their death-like slumber and were able to consciously take with them the precious knowledge they had acquired in the sphere of dreams.
More often than not, space and time could be stretched or compressed during sleep. Thus, it was possible to gain an enormous wealth of experiences and impressions solely in a few hours of slumber. Even a whole life could be dreamt in the course of a few nights. Dream visions could emerge from the future as well as the past. One Islamic legend of Mohammed tells us about an incident when the prophet was lying on his bed to be visited by an angel. In his wonder Mohammed moved and tipped over the flower vase on his table. But before he knew what was happening, the prophet drifted down into his vision and was guided through the kingdoms of heaven. Having experienced as many marvels as Dante in his Divine Comedy, Mohammed finally woke up when the vase was still tumbling. Not even a second had passed in the real world, while he had spent half of an eternity travelling the spheres of heaven. This made it possible for Mohammed to save the flower from its fall just in time.
As we have seen so far, sleep as a form of stillness seems to leave people more receptive to all kinds of images and mystical visions.
In his lecture “Self-instruction through dreams” Manly Hall, an 20th-century author, astrologer and mystic, states that one may even obtain a certain clairvoyance, or telepathy, with other people while sleeping. Although most would see slumber as something that is clouding the senses, Hall stresses its ability to heighten awareness, leading to the reception of things from the outside one otherwise would not have received in the awakened state.
These signs, however, are more subtle than the cues in the conscious waking state. A person may only get an intuitive grasp of the thoughts and temperaments from the people around them. Then there is also the possibility to receive telepathic fragments from various other lives and entities – transcending space and time – that may or may not have a certain meaning. Hall tells us that these small pieces of information can even reach prophetic proportions under certain circumstances. In this sense, as if one were to listen to a radio, the dreamer can make use of the invisible frequencies surrounding him.
Hall explains:
“It becomes quite conceivable that man can attune himself to some kind of record or recording that remains in space around him at all time. We are not sure that space is non-intellectual. We are not sure that the air around us is not a mental atmosphere. We cannot be certain that nature itself does not have its own thinking, and that, in a receptive mood, we may tune in these larger thoughts – thoughts that perhaps we can later incorporate in genius and great artistry.”
Dreams in History
The study and interpretation of dream messages and their symbolism has been existing since the dawn of humanity.
Marquis D'Hervey de Saint-Denys was a French sinologist and dream researcher from the 19th century. He originally coined the term “lucid dreams” and wrote one of the first modern books on that subject. In his study “Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them” he notes:
“Already at the time of Joseph, the pharaoh of Egypt consulted all the soothsayers of his realm in order to obtain the explanation of the famous dream which troubled him so much.”
But not only the Ancient Egyptians, also the Persians, Greeks, Indians and many more cultures made use of interpreting dream messages. Their symbols were believed to be a form of language through which one’s body, mind and soul, as well as demons, spirits and gods could speak.
But not all dreams were deemed equally important. Artemidorus, a professional diviner and dream interpreter who lived in the 2nd century, distinguished dreams as speculative and allegorical. While the first category stood for simple and direct images, the other one only could be described as a misty and symbolic image which had to be interpreted.
Many different meanings of dream symbols already were known two thousand years ago. Dragons and snakes for example, could mean kinship or disease. A dream that returned several nights in a row, had, according to Artemidorus, to be taken very seriously, as it was trying to warn about something important.
In Ancient Egypt, dreams on their own would be used to cure diseases – a practice which then was bequeathed to the Greeks. Diodorus, an ancient Greek historian, describes people who went to sleep in the temple of Isis. Under the guidance of a priest, they then were able to gain the secrets for restoring their health in their dream.
According to Hippocrates, the soul is able to give us an idea of the bodily functions through its dreams. Therefore, each disorder of the human organism shows itself by means of an image or dream symbol.
Meanings derived from sleep reached from everyday questions and answers up to big prophetic revelations about the fates of whole states. To the people many centuries ago, dreams had the power to connect the mundane world with the invisible universe. Thus, the mystics all around the globe sought to liberate their souls from their body through the means of sleep or trance.
Oftentimes people induced artificial sleep to leave their normal consciousness. This could be done in the form of drugging or weakening the body. In Ancient Greece, the Pythias, or oracles of Delphi, inhaled the vapours from a vent deep down in the earth under their temple. Intoxicated by the sweetish-smelling fumes, they then passed into a sleep-like state and were able to receive divine messages.
It was not always easy for the priests to interpret their oracles, as most of them seemed to hover beyond the wisdom of the world. Even though the revelations of the Pythias might have been ambiguous, they were often filled with rich and intriguing details. Every class of life consulted them, also because they enjoyed the reputation to be very accurate. Whole states depended on their guidance derived from their ecstatic visions. Oftentimes, the Pyhias’ promises of fortune and their warnings of ill fate proved to be true in the end.
Socrates even went so far as to see them as the sources of the deepest knowledge. The ancient Greek oracles informed about a wide range of topics such as science, religions, art, philosophy. They could even instruct on the preservation of crops or warn of storms.
One made sure to select the priestesses of Delphi with great care. They were often young and had no training in worldly pursuits. One requirement originally was that a Pythia had to be a virgin and to live alone.
Interestingly, the truth they received from the gods depended on their moral purity and integrity.
In a time when people could not always hope for legal or medical help, visions or the mysteries of a soul departing in sleep were seen as an important source of knowledge.
From the 11th to the 13th century, the Assassins, a Shiite Muslim sect in the Middle East, purportedly used hashish to be granted visions of paradise in the face of martyrdom, while Chrisitian sects made use of fasting to reach a state of religious ecstasy and trance. To receive divine visions, people ate only certain foods or engaged in musical trances being performed in old theatres.
In the Medieval Ages, the Church fathers oftentimes showed their disdain towards dream interpretation and referred to it as tainted by paganism. However, they were also confronted with the prophetic dreams of the Bible and their authoritativeness embodied by figures such as Jacob, Solomon or Daniel. Therefore, mainly secular visions were seen with suspicion.
Among the mysticist, Cardinal Bona, an ascetic writer from the 17th century, divides dreams into 3 categories:
divine visions
diabolical visions
and natural visions
Over two hundred years later, Frederik Van Eeden, a Dutch writer and psychiatrist made a similar distinction in his groundbreaking paper "A Study of Dreams": He summarised the dreams he had been noting down and categorised them into 9 distinct classes of dreams: among them some symbolic, lucid, mocking and demonical dreams. While the first categories offer valuable insights and allow the dreamer two dwell in beautiful sensations, the latter are distressful and mean to deceive the dreamer. In his paper, Eden writes:
“Now in the demon-dreams – which are always very near, before or after, the lucid dreams – I undergo similar attacks, but I see the form, the figures, the personalities of strange non-human beings, who are doing it. One night, for instance, I saw such a being, going before me and soiling everything it touched, such as door-handles and chairs. These beings are always obscene and lascivious, and try to draw me into their acts and doings. They have no sex and appear alternatively as a man, or a woman. Their aspect is very various and variable, changing every moment, taking all the fantastic form that the old painters of the Middle Ages tried to reproduce, but with a certain weird plasticity and variability, that no painting can express.”
Apart from Eden’s study, many books about dreams were written in the past. Among them “L’ Art de se Rendre Heureux par les Songes” – ”The Art of How to Make Yourself Happy Through Dreams” from the 18th century can be found, in which the unknown author describes a collection of pharmaceuticals he gained from a witch doctor from Illinois. Once again potion-like narcotics are used to receive pleasant dreams in which beautiful palaces, superb dresses and lavish servants are conjured up.
Dreams in Modern Times
Far away from such fantastical notions, skepticism today has led us to ask whether dreams are just a product of our brain activity or meaningful messages from our innermost selves. While, on the one hand, they may help us to consolidate memories, dreams might, on the other hand, also be a sign of suppressed desires, as Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, has suggested.
Hall himself splits dreams into two categories:
the environmental ones that arise from daily impressions an individual person processes in their sleep. These dreams often can be traced back to a series of urgent circumstances.
The second category of dreams, however, is detached from the mundane life and instead embodies the essential nature of a human being. It is a form of explaining or interpreting the inner self.
In the 20th century, psychoanalysis and introspection once again emphasised the importance of dream symbols. Carl Gustav Jung, a close colleague of Freud, saw dreams as the intermediaries of our subconscious. Similar to the ancient notions of an oracle, they could communicate with us through the means of symbols.
In his “The Symbolic Life”, Jung writes:
“As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process.”
Symbolic archetypes, as Jung liked to call the images of our subconscious, stood above time and all cultures. They could be found anywhere and at any time in ever-repeating patterns.
Especially in difficult situations, archetypal dreams showed up to offer solutions and possibilities for personal progress. Therefore, Jung used the interpretation of dreams as a therapeutic method to improve the well-being of his patients. Just as the people in ancient times, dreams were holding the remedy for ailments of all kinds. According to him, they also helped to develop one’s personality and to reach a psychological wholeness.
According to Jung, big, important dreams hold the power to free oneself from constricting ideas and perceptions. They also alter the paths of one’s life by showing us the unfiltered reality.
One day in a session, a young patient of Jung told about a dream in which she had received a golden scarab. Jung was sitting with his back to the window while listening to the story of the women. Suddenly, he heard a noise in the background that was quietly knocking against the window. When he turned around, he saw a flying insect trying to get into the room. Jung described the incident as follows:
“I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer, which, contrary to its usual habits, had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.”
But not only could dream symbols show a mysterious overlap with reality, a lot of great artists and scientists also received their groundbreaking ideas in dream visions.
One example is Tartini’s famous “Devil’s Trill Sonata”. In 1713, the Italian composer had a most peculiar dream in which he sold his soul to the devil. In return, he was granted many wonderful wishes. When Tartini finally gave the appearance in front of him his violin, the spirit began to play a sonata that seemed unearthly delightful. But before Tartini could fully comprehend the miracle, he was dragged back into reality and woke up from his feverish dream. He tried to salvage the magnificence he had just heard by playing its fleeting remains on his violin. Alas, nothing could come close to the beauty in his vision. Tartini nevertheless managed to write down his impression and concluded:
“The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.[4]
When looking back at history, plentiful examples of dream suggestions can be found. Russian Dimitry Mendeleyev found his order of the chemical elements while sleeping, and Horace Walpole’s glorious gothic novel “The Castle of Otranto” started off as a dream about a monstrous knight’s hand in an old medieval castle.
Jung himself called these unique, highly significant and memorable apparitions big dreams.
As Marie Louise von Franz, a psychologist and scholar working together with Jung, states:
“Occasionally, one has a dream that is so remote from one’s life, so numinous, and so strange and uncanny that it does not seem to belong to the dreamer. It is like a visitation from another world, which in truth it is, the other world being the subterranean one of the unconscious. In ancient times, and even today among some people, such dreams are regarded as messages from the gods or ancestral figures.”
Conclusion
In summary, dreams are a fascinating field that has been captivating humanity for thousands of years. Whether one is striving for lucid dreaming or the interpretation of our collective inner symbols, sleep is a sure escape from the mundane and oftentimes deeply disenchanted daily life. When used with care, it can be a refreshing well of never-ending inspiration and reblooming childhood reveries. As H. P. Lovecraft has remarked:
“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”
If you liked this blog post, make sure to stay tuned for the upcoming episode of my channel. Next time, we are going to venture down into the age-old crypts of undying vampirism. Until then, have a magical time and thank you so much for watching.