An Ottoman Voice in My Committee of Sleep

 

Once again in a dream I am playing scholar and scribe, working with a team to collate, translate and edit several versions of an Ottoman Turkish text that may be derived from Old Anatolian. A female philologist is working on this. We compare several words for dream in Turkish – rüya, hayal, düş – and older terms from the Turkic language group and the different states and qualities each implies.  

I smile, on waking, at this new evidence that specialists in my Committee of Sleep, monitoring my research into different dreaming cultures and dreaming minds, are trying to nudge me in their preferred directions.
    These are a few of the subjects my dreams have prompted me to research over the past year.

The biography of Yeshe Sogyel
The city of Ugarit and the Library of Ashurbanipal
Irish and Scots folklore of the Cailleach
The life and music of Nina Simone
The cult of Cybele
telestike or statue-animation in late antiquity
The life of Pemalingpa and other tertöns or “treasure revealers”
Aerial tollhouses on Eastern Orthodox road maps to the afterlife
The genre in Chinese poetry known as Youxian or “Wandering as an Immortal”
The burial rites of the Toraja of south Sulawesi
Dion Fortune’s approach to “intermediate beings”
shamanic dream practices of the Passamaquoddy

Almost every night brings another research assignment delivered in a dream. Sometimes it is just a postcard or a mysterious word (“Phthonios”), sometimes an immense cinematic drama, maybe playing on several screens.
     Thankfully, I sometimes find that the dream is a prompt to recover work I have already done – including essays and draft chapters – that I had forgotten. This may be, in part, the case with my Ottoman prompt. Under the Ottoman empire dreams were valued highly, and even a Sultan kept a dream journal. When I try to marshal what I have learned about Ottoman dreams, I think of the brilliant Turkish scholar Asli Niyazioğlu, who has made a most rewarding study of the role of dreams in Ottoman biographies. I posted an article based on one of her books here.
     Accepting that the Turkish lady in my dreams was pushing me to go further I found a scholarly essay by Asli on the influence of dream interpreters of the Halveti (Khalvati) Sufi order over Ottoman sultans. In the late sixteenth century, the Sultan himself had his dreams recorded and sent to the Halveti şeyh for interpretation. The Sultan’s senior architect, successor to the famous Sinan, took up his profession because of a dream interpreted by the sheikh in this way. [1]
     Asli explains in this interview how in Ottomoan biographical dictionaries, dreams are often presented as keys to career decisions. She explains that a common Ottoman term for dream was "mirror"; dreams were seen as mirrors in which divine intention was reflected. 

 

 1. Asli Niyazioğlu, “Dreams, Ottoman Biography, Writing and the Halveti Sunbuli Sheikhs of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul" in  Ralph von Elger and Yavuz Kose (eds) Many Ways of Speaking about the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-Documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (14th-20th Century) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010, pp. 171-184.

Art (Top) Ottoman woman enjoying coffee,early 18th century, unknown artist. In Pera Palace Museum, Istanbul. (Bottom) Miniatutre of Ashab-i Kehf (Sleepers of Ephesus) in Topkapi Palace museum, Istanbul.

 

 

 

Dream Brownies May be Authors...or Engineers

The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) described dreams as occurring in "that small theater of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long."
    Stevenson said of his now classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was "conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks" in 1886. The conception came in a dream:

"For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers."

His wife related picturesquely how one night Louis cried out horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, "Why did you waken me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!" She also related how he appeared the next morning excitedly exclaiming, "I have got my schilling-shocker -- I have got my schilling-shocker!"
    Stevenson wrote extensively about how his passion for writing interacted with his remarkable dreams and said that, from an early age, his dreams were so vivid and moving that they were more entertaining to him personally than any literature. He learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books.
    Stevenson described the central role of dreaming and dreamlike states in his creative process in “A Chapter on Dreams”. During his sickly childhood, he was often oppressed by night terrors and the “night hag”.  But as he grew older, he found that his dreams often became welcome adventures, in which he would travel to far-off places or engage in costume dramas among the Jacobites.
    He often read stories in his dreams, and as he developed the ambition to become a writer, it dawned on him that a clever way to get his material would be to transcribe what he was reading in his sleep. “When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales.” And his dream producers accommodated him. He noticed they became especially industrious when he was under a tight deadline. When “the bank begins to send letters” his “sleepless Brownies” work overtime, turning out marketable stories.
    In his “Chapter on Dreams” (written in his house on Saranac Lake in upstate New York and published in Across the Plains) RLS gave a vivid depiction of his dream helpers.

“Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim…
“And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.”

He observed that  “my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the supernatural.” – and have no morals at all.”

 A Railroad Baron’s Brownies

We may nod our heads over this and say, Well, there you go – that’s a writer’s imagination. Yet similar sources of inspiration are at work in the lives of innovators who might seem far removed from literature. 

    A case in point is one of the great financiers and railroad barons of nineteenth century America, one Arthur Stilwell. He made a fortune and lost it, but his name – as in Stilwell Financial - is still associated with Janus Mutual funds and the Kansas City Southern Railroad. And with a city he founded in Texas, Port Arthur, as a result of dream encounters with beings that, like Stevenson, he called Brownies. It took the city fathers of Port Arthur well over a century from incorporation (1898) to admit its origins. At the time of writing, the official city website contained the following statement:

The inspiration for Port Arthur's founding was novel; railroad pioneer Arthur E. Stilwell, who established the town, later wrote that the ideas for his railways and the location of his namesake city came from "brownies" who spoke to him.

   Stilwell himself kept quiet about these things until the end of his business career, concerned that his respectable investors would consider him a “nut” if he revealed that he was laying railroad track according to plans that were being given to him in his dreams.
   In 1921, Stilwell confessed that he had been visited in his sleep throughout his heyday by guides that (like Stevenson) he called Brownies. In dreams these beings gave him the plans for his railroads, the location and layout of the city of Port Arthur, and the spur to embark on many other business ventures, as well as ideas for books. Stilwell wrote: “There is no doubt in my mind that these messages come from the spirit world, and that this circle of spirits that communicates with me by this rare method is comprised of engineers, poets, and authors.”

    There’s that “committee of sleep” that Steinbeck invoked. In any life, we are likely to find it most lively when we are engaged in a creative task that fresh and risky, especially when that task is all but impossible. Greater challenges draw greater helpers, in and out of the dreamworlds.

The note on Arthur Stilwell is adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.