Dreams have been an important part of our living lives, for as far back as history has been recorded. During these multi-part articles, we'll take a look at how meaningful dreams are to the human spirit and body.
This is a continuation of: The Waking Dream, Through History- Part 1.
Dreams were understood in terms of meaningful opposites: thus, apparently happy dreams presaged disaster, while the worst nightmare could stand for better times to come. By ingesting herbal potions or reciting spells, a dreamer would attempt to induce the good spirits and deter the bad. The subject would sleep in the temple and on awakening would submit his or her dreams to the temple priest for interpretation.
Plato believed the liver to be the seat of dreams. Even though he did attribute some dreams to the Gods, he called others, "lawless wild beast nature, which peers out in sleep", even in the sleep of the virtuous. Plato's pupil, Aristotle foreshadowed 20th Century scientific rationalism by arguing that dreams were triggered by purely sensory causes.
Oriental dream traditions also offer many rewarding perspectives. They are generally more philosophical and contemplative than Western traditions, and lay more emphasis on the dreamer's state of mind, than upon the predictive power of the dream itself. Chinese sages recognized that consciousness has different levels, and when interpreting dreams they took account of the physical condition and horoscope of the dreamer, as well as the time of year. They believed that consciousness actually leaves the body during sleep, and travels in various, other worldly realms, to arouse the dreamer abruptly, before mind and body are reunited, could be highly dangerous.
Indian "seers" also believed in multi-layered nature of consciousness, recognizing the discrete states of waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and samadhi- the bliss that follows enlightenment.
A philosophical text, Atharva Veda, from c. 1,500 - 1,000 BC, teaches that in a series of dreams, only the last is important: the suggestion is that dreams work progressively in solving problems or revealing wisdom.
In the West, little progress was made in the study of dreams in the centuries after Artemidorous, as it was thought that he had made their mysteries plain. However, the Arabs, influenced by Eastern wisdom, continued to explore the dream world, producing dream dictionaries and a wealth of interpretations.
Muhammed rose from obscurity to found Islam after a dream in which he received his prophetic call, and dreams afterwards came to the forefront of religious orthodoxy.
In the 14th Century AD- Church fathers, such as, St. John Chrysastom, St. Augustine and St. Jerome, taught that dreams were divinely inspired. However, Christian orthodoxy was moving away from the dream interpretation and prophesies. The dreams of the New Testament were seen as straightforward messages from God to the disciples and other founders of Christianity. Prediction was also redundant, because the future was believed to be in God's hands.
By the middle Ages the Church even discounted the possibility of divine messages to the average believer, because God's revelation was only in and through the Church itself.
The Dominican Theologian, Thomas Aquinas, of the 13th Century, even went as far as saying dreams should be ignored altogether. Martin Luther, who broke from Roman Catholic Church to initiate the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century, taught that dreams, at most, simply showed us our sins. However, dream interpretation was too strongly rooted in popular consciousness to be so readily dismissed.
In Part 3, we'll continue to look at some of the paths our thoughts and beliefs on the mystical world of dreaming, determine on how we perceive dreams in modern society.
Information was taken from: The Secret Language of Dreams, By: David Fontana
A Waking Dream, Through History - Part 4
A continuation of an in-depth look into dreams and their meaning.
A Waking Dream, Through History - Part 3
A look into the study of dreaming throughout history.
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