Death is coming for him, and his only hope lies in the love and feminine wisdom of his younger sister, Geshtin-anna. She is a reader, “a tablet-knowing scribe”, who knows the meaning of words and of dreams.
She helps him to hide, but in the end he cannot escape his own demons. He is overpowered by galla demons and carried down to the realm of Inanna’s dark double, the Queen of the Underworld, into his own cycle of death and rebirth.. Grieving, both Inanna and his constant sister will seek him in the lower world, using drumming, like shamans. And they will make a deal by which Geshtin-anna will take her brother’s place in the Underworld for half the year, giving him time up top with the goddess in her sunnier disposition. But that is a later story in the cycle of Inanna.
The Dream of Dumuzi is the oldest recorded dream. It was written in Sumer nearly five thousand years ago, scored with marks on baked clay that look like the tracks of a very thoughtful sandpiper. Almost certainly, it was written by a woman. We can’t miss the fact that the first dream interpreter on record is a woman who can read and write, the “tablet-knowing scribe.”
Geshtin-anna becomes the goddess of dream divination (and of wine).
The Dream of Dumuzi, unclothed in its beauty and terror in a modern translation by Diane Wolkstein, is great writing, and takes us where great writers do not fear to go: into the inner chambers of the heart, into the demon-haunted mind, into the mysteries of death and rebirth. Thanks to its survival, we can say without hesitation that one of the first uses of writing – which was invented in
States suggests that storytelling springs from the same “skill” that allows us to produce dream narrativesand compares the mental state of the creative writer to that of a lucid dreamer: “Just as the lucid dreamer is slightly awake, slightly outside the dream, while being largely inside it, so the waking author is slightly asleep, or slightly inside the fiction while being largely outside it.” [3] Many fiction writers (including me) would attest to the accuracy of this description. It probably applies to creative minds from many fields operating in a flow state of relaxed attention or attentive relaxation. In this state, as Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust, the writer may also be, for the moment, “an extratemporal being” [4]
Dreams provided both energy and inspiration for literary creation. As a boy, Aeschylus (born 525 BCE) was sent to watch over ripening grapes in a vineyard. When he dozed off, Dionysus, god of wine and drama, appeared to him and gave him instructions for a new kind of theatre. Prior to this, ancient Greek drama was rather static ritual, with a single actor on stage, and a chorus that did not interact directly with him. Aeschylus was inspired in his dream to introduce a second actor; this was the birth of Western theatre. He went on to write ninety plays, although only seven are extant.
“Poetry is always
the result of flooding”, a young poet told Stefania Pandolfo as she journeyed
among rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally
important, and always interweaving. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is
inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release. [5]
The most
respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he
dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was
close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow
off his right hand in a gun accident. He dreamed the river was coming down in
flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its
path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the
dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the
flood and everything borne along by it. He recounted the dream to his mother
and she told him that he had become a poet. This became his life’s
calling.[6]
From the priestess-scribe who
wrote Dumuzi’s story to the latest novels by Stephen King and Neil Gaiman,
dreams have provided wonderful material for stories and novels, scripts and
poems. The dream may provide the rough first sketch of a theme or a plot or a
character, with everything still to be worked out and delivered – perhaps with
the help of subsequent dreams – over a considerable period of time. The dream
may have the structure and detail required for a finished story or poem (but is
unlikely to be “finished” in the sense that it will be truly good writing until
the raw report has been shaped and polished). The dream may be inserted in a
narrative and attributed to one of the characters as Graham Greene did for Querry in A Burnt-Out Case). The dream may be delivered as a story without a
frame, as Franz Kafka delivered a nightmare in Metamorphosis while insisting, in the tale, that the man turned
into a giant bug was not dreaming.
The literary dream has been used
as a plot device in many ways. It may be used to take the reader into the inner
life of a character. It may be used to set up critical narrative tension, for
example between a character’s desires and his conscience, a central theme in
Dostoyevsky’s use of dreams.
The dream can be
used as an architectural device, to open and frame a story that may be anything
but a dream; the medieval Roman de la
Rose is a classical example, from an age when dreams were greatly
respected. In the classic Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber novel
opens with a goddess creating a mountain from 36,501 pieces of stone, one of
which - rejected - is a speaking rock whose complaint is heard by two immortals
and is gifted with a very mobile life, in different forms, in the mortal world
– known to gods and immortals as the Red Dust - and elsewhere.[7]
The Lion all began with a
picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture
had been in my head since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about
forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’
At first I had little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly
Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about
lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from
or why he came. But once he was there He pulled the whole story together, and
soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him. [9]]
Finally, it is in dreams and flow states
that writers come into contact with inner helpers. Robert Louis Stevenson
communed with his “Brownies” in states of reverie, and gave them the credit for
doing better than half his literary work. Yeats spoke of the “mingling of
minds” that can bring assistance, in a creative venture, from intelligences
that seem to belong to other times or other dimensions.
....my celestial
patroness, who deigns
Her nightly
visitation unimplored,
And dictates to
me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my
unpremeditated prose []
Notes and References
3. Bert O. States, Bert O., “Authorship in Dreams and Fictions” in Dreaming vol.4 no.4 (December, 1994) pp. 239-240
4. Samuel Beckett, Proust.
5.Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory.
6. ibid p. 265
7. Tsao Hsueh-chin, Dream of the Red Chamber (1754). Trans. and adapted by Chichen Wang.
8. Charles Dickens letter to Dr Stone.
9. Lewis, C.S., “It All Began with a Picture”, Junior Radio Times, vol. 68 (
10. Paradise Lost IX. 21-4
Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.
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