Dreams as Sunshine in the Night

 

The word dMamud, which signifies “Dream (deity)”, is listed in the divine genealogies as the daughter of the Sun God. Since dreams usually occur at night, the close genealogical connection between the god of dreams and the Sun God may seem puzzling. The riddle may be solved, however, by considering that dreamers see a world which is just as bright as the day. [1]

I am a wild cross-reader, forever with my nose in a dozen books in as many genres at the same time. One of the pleasures is to notice things that resemble each other over great distances. A recent example. I have long been strongly drawn to ancient Mesopotamia, so when a Sumerian goddess (Mamu) associated with dreams popped up in a scholarly essay by a German Assyriologist online I paid attention. Mamu [2] is depicted as the daughter of the sun god Utu. The author noted that the family connection between a dream goddess and a sun god may seem puzzling and suggested a plausible and rather charming explanation, that dreamers enter a world as bright as day.

I am often reading and dreaming into the world of the Victorian ghost hunters and psychic researchers. The question from Sumer jogged my memory of a passage I read in a wonderful little book by the Victorian radical reformer and Theosophist Anna Bonus Kingsford:

"The priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of life which might have otherwise remained dark to me, and to throw upon the events and vicissitudes of a career filled with bewildering situations, a light which, like sunshine, has penetrated to the very causes and springs of circumstance." [3]

A solution from Victorian England to a Sumerian mystery: Dreams are sunshine in the night.

[1] Annette Zgoll, “Dreams as Gods and Gods in Dreams. Dream-Realities in Ancient Mesopotamia from the 3rd to the 1st Millennium B.C.” Leonhard Sassmannshausen (ed) He Has Opened Nisaba’s House of Learning Studies in Honor of Åke Waldemar Sjöberg (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014) p.305

[2] Mamu for short. Ancient Mesopotamia has many dream gods and goddesses. The Sumerian lady mentioned here is called dMamud by the scholarly translators. This means, “Dream (deity)”. Sumerian has two words for “dream”: ma-mu.d and maš-ĝi6.k. Only the first term, transcribed as ma-mu.d can be written with the divine determinative diĝir (d). A word tagged with this sign is the name of a deity. The word ma-mu.d also denotes a meaningful dream which has the power to influence the future. By contrast,  maš-ĝi6.k, refers to all types of dreams, including confused and deceptive ones. Thanks to all the spadework of cuneiformists in decoding the ancient texts, we see that a connection between dreams and the gods is built into what may be the earliest of all written languages. See S.A.L. Butler, Mesopotamian Conceptions of Dreams and Dream Rituals (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1998)  pp.73-77

[3] Anna Bonus Kingsford, Preface to Dreams and Dream-Stories (New York: Scribner & Welford ,1889).  Interesting that a reprint has been published by Nabu Press. Nabu was an ancient Mesopotamian god of writing and flow. I have a figurine of Nabu, a copy of a statue in the Oriental Institute (as it used to be called) in Chicago on my desk.

Borges, Broken Elevators and Spine Licking

 

in the category of: There Are Things That Like to Happen Together

This morning I read an article by an American journalist about a visit she made to Jorge Luis Borges at his Buenos Aires apartment two years before his death. The building elevator was broken, so she had to walk up six flights of stairs to his apartment.

Six floors is better than nine, I thought, as I left my ninth-floor apartment headed for the gym (which consists of one stationary bike I set up in the basement of the building). I got in the elevator and pushed the button marked B. The elevator's only response was to rock a little. None of the buttons worked. I thought I was trapped until I pushed 9 (my floor) and the door opened, letting me return to where I started. I could take another - working - elevator down to my gym.

I have noticed the play of coincidence around my literary encounters with Borges on numerous occasions. The most amazing example was facilitated by Lucy, my literary cat. I was reading Borges and Me, a delightful memoir by Jay Parini of his travels in Scotland as a minder for the blind Argentine writer. When I put the book down on the ottoman for a moment Lucy jumped up, sniffed it, and then licked the spine, which I took as a sign of approval. I have never seen her do that before or since. .

I returned to my reading. A few pages on in the book, Parini describes his visit with Borges to the rare book room of the Carnegie Library in Dumferline. Borges took a first edition of a novel by Sir Walter Scott off the shelves, sniffed it and - to the horror of the librarian - licked the spine.

Life rhymes. In experiences of lit sync, sometimes what is first seen on paper spills into the world. Sometimes it's the other way round.

Perhaps life is even more likely to rhyme when we are dealing with poets. I spent half an hour earlier in the day translating and reflecting on the oneiric delivery of a poem by Borges.

Where Did the White Doe Come From?

It's the question with which Jorge Luis Borges opens his poem "La Cierva Blanca" ("The White Doe"). He explained elsewhere that the poem came to him. fully formed, in a dream:

“I don’t feel that I wrote that poem...The poem was given to me, in a dream, some minutes before dawn. At times dreams are painful and tedious, and I object to their outrage and say, enough, this is only a dream, stop. But this time it was an oral picture that I saw and heard. I simply copied it, exactly as it was given to me.” [*]

from La Cierva Blanca

tal vez en un recodo del porvenir profundo

te encontraré de nuevo, cierva blanca de un sueño.

Yo también soy un sueño fugitivo que dura

unos días más que el sueño del prado y la blancura.

Perhaps in a corner of the far future

I will meet you again, white doe of my dream.

I, too, am a dream that will not last much longer

than the dream of whiteness in the meadow.

[*] Willis Barnstone, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992) p. 30.