Dreams in history, Part 1

Whether or not modern civilization as a whole gives a flying flip about dreams or their possible role in human development, it is evident that dreams have held a high place in the cultures of our ancient past. Let’s take a look at some of these early people groups and their attitude toward dreams.

Sumer (3000 BCE)

Click for larger view

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the greatest extant literature of ancient Mesopotamia, is laden with several dream sequences of a prophetic nature. In the first tablet, for instance, Gilgamesh tells his mother of a dream:

“Stars of the sky appeared,
and some kind of meteorite …fell next to me…
I loved it and embraced it as a wife.”

His wise mother gave an interpretation:

 “There will come to you a mighty man, a comrade who saves his friend…
You loved him and embraced him as a wife;
and it is he who will repeatedly save you.
Your dream is good and propitious!”

Other dreams in this great poem reveal that, at the least, dreams were vehicles to see future events and should be carefully considered when planning to take action.

Egypt (1500 BCE)

The ancient Egyptians were perhaps the first lucid dreamers in recorded history, nay, soul travelers. They used dreams as vehicles to jettison the physical body and seek the deeper wisdom, advice, and solutions of the spirit world. They even built temples solely dedicated to “dream incubation”. Having marital woes? Sleep in a temple and consult the priest in the morning. This “Master of the Secret Things” would interpret your dreams.

Their word for “dream” is “rswt” and translates to “awakening” and is symbolized by an open eye. Working with dream recall, they believed one would sharpen their memory. Dreams helped them tap into ancient knowledge and to bring guidance and healing.

Although difficult for our modern Western minds to conceive, the ancient Egyptians were said to have had developed advanced conscious dream travel. Even military strategies would be influenced by these master telepaths and remote viewers.

For non-lucid and practical purposes, the Egyptians had published dream books. In one hieratic papyrus, we read the following: “If a man sees himself in a dream…” Below this are several examples separated in a “good column” and a “bad column”. For instance, if a man sees himself in a dream looking out a window, his voice is being heard (good). If a man sees himself in a dream with his bed on fire, he is driving away his wife (bad). This papyrus dates between 1300 and 1200.

Greece

Enter Hypnos and Morpheus. For the ancient Greeks, dream were a way to connect to the gods. Hypnos was the god of sleep, and Morpheus, the god of dreams. They built hundreds of shrines for them, and used them as dream temples, essentially hospitals, like the Egyptians. Here, physical, emotional, and spiritual healing would take place.

Socrates studied music and art because of instruction from a dream.

Plato suggested that in dreams the hideous beast in even the most respectable persons is revealed.

Heraclitus disturbed the status quo, which stated that dreams came from the gods. He, on the other hand, suggested that they came from the dreamer’s mind.

Aristotle, who is the first person to mention lucid dreams was also one to conclude that dreams hold no real purpose. For him, dreams were simply a recollection of the days events.

Similar to the dream books of Egypt, Artemidorus wrote his five-volume Oneircritica, an exploration and interpretation of certain dream symbols.

Hippocrates supported Aristotle’s notion that a person’s dream could be instrumental in knowing the bodily health.

Lucid dreams for knowledge, improvement, and expression

Lucid dreaming can be a pleasurable pastime or escape from the mundane world of waking, but I’m not interested primarily in trivialities. If I hadn’t experienced such potent and blissful lucid dreams as an 8-year-old child, I probably wouldn’t even bother looking further into it. As stated in an earlier blog, I dismissed my early experiences as something natural that a child “grows out of”. Until recently, I never considered it as a possible means of benefiting the health and/or well-being of the individual.

Now at age 40, I have re-opened the box.

Click photo to read more about “How-To”

The opening chapters of LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and Tuccillo’s A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming, both include practical benefits of lucid dreaming. LaBerge’s list includes: adventure, practicing for real life, problem solving, facing nightmares, health, and understanding. Tuccillo’s list is similar: adventure, facing nightmares, creativity and inspiration, problem solving, healing, and self-knowledge. Worded and ordered slightly differently, both lists can be boiled down to essentially 3 things: self knowledge, self improvement, self expression.

Self knowledge

First, can lucid dreaming bring us to a greater awareness of who we really are? I would like to investigate this on 3 levels.

1. Who do I think I am? Can lucid dreams help reveal my self-image in different, more illuminating terms? I am somewhat of a mystery to myself, perhaps from neglect, perhaps from laziness, perhaps from fear. But if lucid dreams can show me, through content, landscape, characters, situations, who I think I am, could they also reveal my deeper self to me?
2. In my investigation is the search for and pursuit of who I really am. By manipulating my fantasy worlds, can I come into contact with a braver, more virtuous and creative being? Are there higher guides who use dreams as a meduim of revelation? Can such transformations come to bear in my waking life whereby I behave differently and get a different outcome?
3. I would like to document some measurable distinctions between the old and new. In short, can lucid dreams be a useful vehicle for the purpose of metamorphosis?

Self improvement

Properly applied knowledge leads to improvement. Can my quest as an oneironaut lead me to a more healthy, productive, and joy-filled waking life?

1. Can my nightly lucid dreaming cause physiological changes that carry over into my waking state? Or can my lucid dreams simply be a spark that lights the fuse toward improvement?
2. Can my explorations reveal hidden wisdom that can be applied to my professional life? Can these applications make a marked difference in my income? Thomas Edison would take cat naps in order to get answers to puzzling dilemmas during his work.
3. And lastly, what do lucid dreams have to offer in the way of lasting happiness? Tuccillo says, “Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, even Adolf Hitler, were all influences by dream events.” What did they find? How were they enriched or inspired?

Self expression

What does lucid dreaming have to offer me in the way of adventure, enhancement, and advancement?

1. This is probably the most trivial aspects of lucid dreaming. Or is it? Can these escapades to far off and strange dimensions show me how to be a more creative and inspired being? Tuccillo writes about how Paul McCartney found the melody to his song “Yesterday” and the title to “Let It Be” both in dreams.

2. Can these lucid adventures open up opportunities to pick the brains of the likes of Newtons and Einsteins? Can my inner world offer real and life-changing insight? Can this wisdom be applied in my wake life through music, writing, and other creative outlets? For example, where did Carl Jung get the idea during his dream that he should interpret his theories to the lay public? After waking, he wrote Approaching the Unconscious.

3. The bottom line is this: Should lucid dreaming be pursued as a method to grow as a human personality? Will I benefit sufficiently from my pursuits as a fledgling oneironaut (for I have certainly not earned my wings yet!) that my time and energy is well-spent? This is perhaps a question that can only be answered on the other side of the question. Since Lucid dreaming is scientific in principle but subjective in nature, I will have to make a choice to pursue or not to pursue, and live with the consequences either way.

I’m taking Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. I hope to sprout some wings and fly.

With all of our advances in this age in technology and knowledge, no one really understands the full purpose of dreams. But if Freud is correct, and the goal of dreaming is wish fulfillment or conflict resolution, then what would happen if all the accumulated problems of our waking life truly are sent through the filter of our dream state, and instead of dreaming and forgetting, we were to get lucid and resolve them? What would happen then?

This is the key thesis of my inquiry.

Lucid flight school

After reading LaBerge last night, I resolved to dream lucid. I committed to it. I set my intention on it. I accomplished it.

The setting is futuristic, and I am a female trainee at a “wing camp”. There are several people with me, none of whom I recognize. We have been assigned to complete a jumper course, which is a matrix of 3X3 square trampoline-type mats, stacked at multiple levels. Rather than a standard flat survace, however, these mats are simply a rank and file of two-digit numbers that seem to be free floating. 20, 60, or 80 designate the number of feet you would launch when you land on it.

I am a small framed woman and decide to jump in some of the tight fitting areas to master the skill of maneuvering on air.

Although the details are hazy, I am inside an indoor recreation room, now a male. I am looking out into a larger rec area through a huge plate glass window, and I see several women playing Ping-Pong in stripper clothes. One of the “strippers” is doing something provocative with the corner of the table, and I realize that I am in a dream. Lucidity at last!

I take a few steps and launch into flight.

[One of the tasks I had assigned myself while in waking life was to focus on the vividness of the dream. Lately, every source I read about lucid dreaming talks about how a lucid dream can be as vivid as waking life.]

To my great pleasure and satisfaction, the color and clarity of the floor tiles are astonishing. But I want more proof. Taste!

I am flying now between buildings in a futuristic complex of town homes. They look more like the face of an oversized mausoleum, with rows of rectangular sections stacked upon one another in stone. The size is immense, like two huge, intricately carved cliff faces, each overlooking the other. I choose one home, which, although similarly flat at the entrance, has some pleasing porch décor, giving it some charm. I fly in and down into a small kitchen.

There on my right is a shelf full of dry food items, and I see what I’m looking for. Peanut butter Ritz crackers. I taste one, and realize that, yes, in my lucid dream state, I can taste the salt, butter, and peanut butter flavors. Interestingly, while I am chewing, I can’t launch. I have the inner realization, “Of course, I can’t eat and fly at the same time. Everyone knows that.”

After more flying and a few more brief experiences, I lose lucidity. What a ride!

Dreamsign Catalogue:

1. Inner awareness (1/4)

• I have the inner realization, “Of course, I can’t eat and fly at the same time. Everyone knows that.”

2. Action (1/9)

• I am a small framed woman and decide to jump in some of the tight fitting areas to master the skill of maneuvering on air.

3. Form (3/10)

• I am a female trainee at a “wing camp”.
• …a jumper course, … a matrix of 3X3 square trampoline-type mats, stacked at multiple levels, … a rank and file of two-digit numbers that seem to be free floating… 20, 60, or 80 designate the number of feet you would launch when you land on it.
• I am flying now between buildings in a futuristic complex of town homes.

4. Context (2/9)

• I see several women playing Ping-Pong in stripper clothes.
• One of the “strippers” is doing something provocative with the corner of the table, and I realize that I am in a dream.

Intuition and lucid dreaming

What is intuition?

According to Google, intuition is a noun that means the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. The origin of the word is Latin, denoting spiritual insight or immediate inner seeing.

For those of us on a quest into the inner world of the self, this is a concept worth exploring. Intuition belongs to the subconscious, like a knowing or truthful belief. Lucid dreaming is the ability to consciously interact with this inner world, and perhaps to access hidden treasures that for most people, through cultural conditioning or ignorance, is unattainable.

Paul McCartney hears the melody of “Yesterday” in a dream.

I prefer to believe that all things are within the realm of the possible, and that lucid dreaming is a way to explore the reservoir of genius, wisdom, and even perennial truth. After all, where did Galileo, Bach, Mozart, Edison, and McCartney achieve greatness? Were they just lucky? Or did they tap into something accessible to us all?

They tapped into themselves first, and shared their discoveries with the rest of the world in the form of self-expression.

Who is to say what you can or cannot do? Who is to determine the length and breadth of your accomplishments while in this brief life of waking and sleeping? What authority is to proclaim that these two modes of experience are mutually exclusive? As a dreamer in life, should you not live in such a way as to enhance your dreams? And what should come of riches inside your the dream world? Should they not also expand your waking life?

Our world is a mystery. Life is a mystery. And dreams have been far too important, revered, studied, worshiped, and interpreted for them to be of no good use. They are not meaningless, as Aristotle first proposed, or the ancients wouldn’t have used them to predict possible outcomes, heal the sick, and communicate with the gods. Dreams are not the simple effects of random neural firings, as suggested by Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley in 1977, or their contents would be devoid of artistic richness and logic, as in the example of the musician from Liverpool, who first heard the melody of “Yesterday” in a dream.

Dreams are a way to approach your hidden genius. So convinced that he had subconsciously plagiarized the melody of “Yesterday” before dreaming it in its entirety, Paul McCartney played it for friends and associates for about a month, asking if they had heard it anywhere. “Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it” (Paul McCartney quote from Wikipedia).

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” – John Lennon

Spilled hashbrowns, a hero, and Etch-O-Google

The first of two dream sequences took place just before 3am last night.

Two lines of people trailed off through the entrance doors. Thankfully I had made it to the front where the cook prepared my plate. Oddly, my hashbrowns were served in a small rectangular tin, typically used for baking corn bread. The cook no more than placed the tin on my plate when my “hashbrown loaf” toppled over and landed in a steaming mess on the floor.

In full view of a gawking audience, I approached the cook and signaled for another order of potatoes. The cook looked at me like I purposefully maneuvered my plate in an unsafe manner, whereby forcing his precious spud cargo to take a mortal cliff dive. Once again, he replenished my plate with the same precariously packaged hashbrowns, and once again, they fell headlong onto the floor.

I made one final appeal to the cook, whereas he verbally smote my already bruised ego, saying, “Most people would have given up and walked away by now.”

I had a brief conversation with the restaurant owner, who was busy preparing loaves of bread in what looked to me like a wood chipper.

The next thing I remember was looking at a computer screen with groups of words and concepts clumped together. Each grouping were obvious contradictions, such as “bacon & eggs” might have been lumped together with “turpentine”. The obvious meaning of this was a premise I would like to consider further in my waking life: Don’t try to synthesize seeming contradictions in your life. Rather, hold each mutually exclusive notion and apply them in their proper place.

In other words, it is of no use to do away with either bacon & eggs or turpentine, but rather, employ them as they are relevant in your life. An applicable example would be pro-choice vs. pro-life. Rather than trying to synthesize the two concepts, which would be ludicrous, or attempting to eliminate one in favor of the other once and for all time, it is better to choose each according to context.

After jotting down my hashbrown tragedy (or comedy), I went back to sleep. The following sequence occurred after 3am.

I’m sitting in the front passenger side of a car with some other occupants. From my right side, I see a familiar face, a sportscaster in waking life. But in my dream he was a badass cop who plays by his own rules, a cross between Magnum P.I. and Caine from Kung Fu. He is talking to a group of thugs. I hear one of the them threatening to use a gun. Magnum Caine laughs and pulls out a Smith & Wesson military revolver with a two-inch barrel. I catch a glimpse of a cylinder full of bullets as he gives it a spin, flips the gun in his hand, and catches it by the barrel, handing it to the gang leader.

Magnum Caine then inexplicably turns and walks away. The next thing I see is that he is falling to the ground in slow motion. Although I hear no gunfire, he has been shot. As he is dropping to the ground, he is now dropping a boom stand with fuzzy microphone, which is attached to a small sound mixer attached to his belt. My 80s TV hero has just transformed into a media journalist. WTF?

Magnum Caine, my chameleon hero-turned-talking-head, gets up from the ground and limps to the front door to his house and hobbles in. Two bodyguards(?) pull up in an inconspicuous SUV, open the back passenger door, and Magnum Headroom runs from the house into the back seat.

I get a good look at the injured man through the window of the SUV. I ask my friends, “Is that Ben Larken [popular sportscaster in our waking life town]?” A friend answers, “No. That’s his brother.”

Next, I am holding a box about the size of Gump’s box of chocolates. Only it is pristine white and works like a cross between an Etch-O-Sketch and Google. I scribble a simple drawing on the face, turn it over, give it a little shake, and flip it back around to find that my simple shape has turned into a photograph and explanation. For instance, if I drew a triangle, I would shake it to get a Giza pyramid with a descriptive caption.

I drew several things, the last of which was a penis and balls.

The next dream I remember is my fiancé, Teresa, and I were at Kirk’s house. Kirk is an 84-year-old friend of ours in waking life. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and I was watching some TV before going back to bed. Something interesting would be coming on later in the day, and I wanted to record it. The volume wouldn’t work properly and neither did the recording features. [In waking life, Kirk does not have recording capabilities.]

In my attempts at making the technology on the TV work, I knocked over a pile of garbage on Kirk’s shelf. A sundry of cigarette wrappers and trash dumped all over the top of the TV stand. I was just about to retire to the bedroom when, perhaps from the commotion, Teresa walked in. She went to the kitchen and grabbed a bag of Fritos.

Unraveling the already open bag, she took out a chip. She smelled it, then tasted it, and gave me a satisfied look. Game on. Then Kirk came in. I apologized for the noise and for the mess, and he dismissed it as no problem.

The next thing I remember is riding in my mom’s car with her and my step dad. My older brother, Daniel, was with us as well. We were having a pleasant conversation, when my step dad interrupted, turned to my mom and said, “It just dawned on me that you are partial to Daniel and I because we are conquerors. Healer and Donn [my younger brother] are …” I couldn’t make out the noun he chose to employ, but I have a feeling that it may have been an antonym of conqueror. “Loser” comes to mind.

My mother pulled up to the front entrance to Furr’s Cafeteria. She and my step dad got out and walked in. I deduced that that was my cue to park the car and join them, so I did. Once inside, I went to find a place to sit. Daniel took a seat at a table with three other people having lunch. A fourth plate of food was at Daniel’s place setting, so I assume that the person had gotten up to go to the bathroom. Daniel proceeded to take and eat onion rings off of the plate while chiding the others of the table, telling them to get their food and move to another area.

He gestured, saying, “Look how spread out your party is. Go sit with the rest of your friends.” And they did so, just as my conqueror brother demanded. What a dick, I thought. I went and sat with the offended party, and next to me was a baby girl. Across from me sat some kids of different races. They were orphans. I turned to the baby next to me, and we made funny faces at each other.

DREAMSIGN CATALOGUE:

1. Inner awareness (0/2)

2. Action (5/7)

• I had a brief conversation with the restaurant owner, who was busy preparing loaves of bread in what looked to me like a wood chipper.
• The next thing I see is that he is falling to the ground in slow motion.
• Although I hear no gunfire, he has been shot.
• …if I drew a triangle, I would shake it to get a Giza pyramid with a descriptive caption.
• The volume wouldn’t work properly and neither did the recording features.

3. Form (2/4)

• As he is dropping to the ground, he is now dropping a boom stand with fuzzy microphone, which is attached to a small sound mixer attached to his belt. My 80s TV hero has just transformed into a media journalist.
• Only it is pristine white and works like a cross between an Etch-O-Sketch and Google.

4. Context (1/6)

• But in my dream he was a badass cop who plays by his own rules, a cross between Magnum P.I. and Caine from Kung Fu.

OTHER NOTES:

My fiancé read this blog this afternoon. Unbeknownst to me, she ate the last of a bag of stale Frito’s with lunch (after I dreamed that she ate Frito’s, and check them for freshness). I wasn’t even consciously aware that we had Frito’s in the pantry.  This is either simple coincidence or an odd prediction of the future.