A world-city that rose from a dream

After he made himself master of the Roman world, the emperor Constantine traveled to the site of Troy, in Asia Minor. He had decided to found a new capital for the eastern empire, and thought that Troy - the legendary origin of the first Romans - would have the required mythic cachet. Inside the ruined walls of the city, however, he heard a voice telling him, "The city of Priam belongs to the past. Leave it in the past."

Afterwards, he crossed the Bosporus to the small Greek city of Byzantion, founded in the 7th century BCE by one Byzes, and initially settled by colonists from Athens and Megara. Here Constantine spent the night and dreamed, of a very old woman who became young again. On waking, he concluded that this would be the site of Nova Roma (New Rome), the place where a decrepit, elderly and dissipated world-city could rise again from its ruinous past. In 330 CE, following the dream, Constantine laid out the new city that would be known to the world, after him, as Constantinople, or, in its heyday, as simply The City.

After the Ottomans under the young Sultan Mehmed II broke down the previously impregnable walls of Constantinople in 1453, they renamed it Istanbul.

The story of the voice and the dream is less solidly evidenced than that of an earlier vision, followed by a dream, that led Constantine to march into battle under a Christian cross (the chi-ro symbol rather than the cross of Calvary) to victory over a rival emperor at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, before Rome, in 312 CE. I have discussed that sequence, which arguably led Rome (and thereby the West) to choose Christianity its established religion, in my Secret History of Dreaming. Maybe Constantine and his advisors simply had the smarts to appreciate the high strategic value of the site of the old Greek town commanding the trade routes between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and the crossings between Europe and Asia.

     I am tickled by the legend that Constantinople became a world city because of a dream. Se non è vero, è ben trovato; "if it's not true, it's well found."  The Ottoman empire, according to another (Turkish) legend also owed its origin to a dream, the dream of Osman, but this is a story for another time.

Graphic: Constantine's Dream by Piero della Francesca (1466)
    

The science of mirrors

Mirrors are talismans, soul catchers, psychic shields, places of encounter with beings from other worlds, and sometimes portals for crossings between the worlds.
    The great Turkish poet Asaf Halet Çelebi (1907-1958), who was at home in the mirror worlds, gives us a shiverish lesson in how this works. What follows is my own free translation; Çelebi awaits an adequate translator and little of his work is available in any version in English.

Mirror

by Asaf Halet Çelebi.

An image rose before me in a mirror
something other than myself
I don’t know where she came from
this beautiful stranger,
maybe from China or beyond

I asked her, “Who are you?”

and she laughed at me.
“I am the daughter
of the Emperor of China
and I have loved you for a long time.”

I said, “Come, come from the mirror
beautiful thief of my reflection.
I don’t care if I have no image
as long as my hands can touch you
and prove you are real.”

The Emperor’s daughter said,
“I can’t come. But one day
I will swim your image
into the depths of this mirror
and we will vanish together.”

-          - Free translation by Robert Moss

     Ottoman intarsia hand mirror 17th century

Ottoman dreaming and synchronicity magnets

A friend in Turkey reports a dream from last night in which we are both inspecting a book written in Ottoman Turkish, in the old Arabic script. She is surprised that I can read this text with ease.
     I am glad to confess that in waking life I could not read Ottoman Turkish without an interpreter! Yet I am put in mind of dreams of my own, over decades, in which I discover and am helped to decipher previously unknown or undervalued texts in Ottoman Turkish, Farsi, Egyptian and other languages.
     And I am reminded that help in such studies sometimes becomes available in interesting ways. I find that when I am giving focused attention to a certain line of study, or a creative project, coincidence comes to support me, sometimes through the agency of that benign spirit Arthur Koestler called the Library Angel, a shelf elf who makes books and documents turn up (or disappear) in highly unlikely ways. This works through the internet too.

      Two summers ago, in 2010, I was trying to document a story about shared dreaming and war magic from the time of Suleiman the Magnificent. The story involves a “dream master” who supposedly had twelve people enter lucid dreaming together on a huge round bed to provide energy for an astral operation in which he entered the mind of a European prince and altered the fortunes of a battle.

      I first came upon this intriguing account in The Understanding of Dreams, an old anthology of cross-cultural dream narratives, edited by Raymond de Becker, an elusive and somewhat murky character. He gave his source as an earlier book by one N. de Helva titled La Science impériale des songes, published in Paris in 1935. After much hunting, I was unable to locate a copy of this book anywhere, or even identify the publisher. When I compared the de Becker version with the historical records of the campaigns and household of Suleiman, I became more and more suspicious that someone had constructed a tall tale. But I realized that my investigation would not be complete until I had probed documentary sources available only in Ottoman Turkish.

     I said out loud, around midnight, "I need a Turk."
     The next instant, an email arrived in my inbox from a Turkish doctor, wanting to know about a retreat I was leading that fall. She had attended a conference where I had spoken 18 months earlier; we had had no contact since. I now seized the opportunity to ask her whether she could check out the story of the Ottoman “dream master” for me. Within hours, she started sending me documents and original translations from Turkish sources that not only confirmed my suspicions about de Becker’s cavalier use of materials but vastly expanded my understanding of the practice of dreaming and imagination in the Ottoman empire.
     Even if the story of Suleiman and the dream master was a tall tale, there is no doubt that dreaming was of great interest to the Ottomans, who traced the origin of their dynasty to a dream of Osman, the founder. Now I am going to Istanbul, perhaps I will find myself on the trail of a literary thriller. What if the "Registre des songes à la Cour ottomane", cited by the mysterious and untraceable "N.Helva" as his source, really exists?

      

People ask why some of us seem to have more frequent and more exciting experiences of synchronicity than others. I think there are periods when any of us can become a synchronicity magnet, attracting events and encounters in rich profusion according to the energy and intentions that travel with us.

      We observe synchronicity at work in the world more often when we are open to seeing it, and ready to play with the signs and symbolic pop-ups of everyday life.
       But there is more to it than just our willingness to pay attention. Like calls to like, and the call is stronger when our passions or curiosity are most actively engaged in a life passage or a course of study or exploration. Yeats spoke, with poetic clarity, about the “mingling of minds” that can take place when we are giving our best to a certain line of study; he noted that we draw the support of like minds, including intelligences from beyond our ken and beyond our world, who share our interests.

       Oh yes, the Turkish doctor traveled to the United States that fall for my retreat.

I recount the story of Suleiman and the Dream Master in The Three “Only” Things. Though I now believe the story is not historical, one may say of it, with the Italians, “If it’s not true, it’s well found”.

Graphic: Jean-Baptiste van Mour, Grand Vizier in audience in Topkapi palace