A Dreamer's Notes: Sleep Fell Upon Me

 

Sleep Fell Upon Me

When my schedule is entirely my own, as it mostly is when I am at home, I do whatever I feel like at any time. I don't think about sleep until it falls upon me. When that happens, I let my body fall into bed. Very frequently, I then find myself engaged in a marvelous adventure in another reality, where other players are waiting for me.

In the Hittite language, you don't say "I fell asleep". You say, "sleep fell upon me" or even "sleep seized me." My relationship with sleep is sometimes like that. And I notice that when sleep falls upon me like a lion on a goat, what follows is often a powerful and numinous experience, sometimes an encounter with a greater being.

What was that instrument I was playing after sleep fell on me and obliged me to take an early evening nap? It looked a bit like a set of pan pipes, but I strummed it with my fingers. It seemed to be organic, vegetal, like a dried gourd with multiple tubes, orange and yellow in color. The music it made was enchanting. I was playing it in a jungle setting, near where a river joined the sea, maybe somewhere along the coast of Brazil.

Illustration: "Strumming with Lion". Digital play by RM.

Where Gods Speak and Listen

“The gods know what comes out of your mouth so don't bad-mouth anyone intentionally."
- My free version of lines from a dream report from a Hittite queen (probably Puduhepa) more than 3,000 years ago, cataloged as KUB 31.71 iii. The speaker appears to be a deity, perhaps the Sun Goddess of Arinna. I am playing with the French translations of 133 Hittite dream texts in Alice Mouton's Rêves hittites. Mouton writes that "the dream represented one of only two ways in which the gods could address all humans, without exception. The only other divine medium that did not require any 'professional' go-between was visual or oral prophecy."

Telling the Sheep from the Goats

I don't know whether counting sheep has ever worked as a way to bring on sleep, but checking on your goats is an important theme in dreaming and divination in ancient Mesopotomia. As explained by A. Leo Oppenheim in his classic monograph The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, the Sumerian word for "dream" was MÁŠ.GE.

It combines two words. GE means "night", pretty straightforward. MÁŠ means "goat" with a special spin - the goat as an animal used for extispicy, divination by reading the entrails. Built into the language was the idea that a dream is a source of divination in the night, invoked as an oracle or uninvoked, as an omen.

Illustration: "Dream Goat". Digital play by RM

"We create ourselves continuously"

Nous nous créons continuellement nous-mêmes...Pour un être conscient, exister consiste à changer, changer à se mûrir, se mûrir à se créer indéfiniment soi-même.
"We create ourselves continuously. For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."
- Henri-Louis Bergson, L'Evolution créatrice

Illustration: "Henri Bergson" drawing by RM

Following a Word Magician

Re-reading Ian McDonald's novel The Dervish House. This amazingly gifted novelist who far transcends the scifi genre in which he has won awards. If you had told me that it is possible to include the fine-fine details of nanotechnology, cultural geography, hedge fund trading, the social behavior of crows, Bosporus navigation and the history and practice of Sufi lodges in a single novel without losing the reader's rapt attention on a single page, I would have been incredulous -before McDonald.

How does he manage to sprinkle Turkish words and names everywhere, with the correct diacritical marks, but no translation - so you are on your own when it comes to figuring out what is a çayhane or a tekke - and get that through the copy editors and make you stay with him all the way? This is a word magician of the highest order.

Forgetting and Remembering

It's a rare day when I fail to notice I have forgotten far more than I know. I see the wisdom of the invisible companion of my boyhood who taught me that all really important knowledge comes to us through anamnesis, "remembering".

I just rediscovered this (in my own Secret History of Dreaming): A Mesopotamian term for an obscure or mysterious dream is “a closed archive basket of the gods”  A great image.