You Can't Understand a Dream Without the Dreamer

 

Listen to Jung on this theme: “No interpretation can be undertaken without the dreamer. The words composing a dream narrative have not just one meaning, but many meanings. If, for instance, someone dreams of a table, we are still far from understanding what the ‘table’ of the dreamer signifies, although the word ‘table’ sounds unambiguous enough. For the thing we do not know is that this ‘table’ is the very one at which his father sat when he refused the dreamer all further financial help and threw him out of the house as a good-for-nothing. That is what our dreamer understand by ‘table’. Therefore we need the dreamer’s help in order to limit the multiple meanings of words to those that are essential and convincing [for the dreamer]." [*] 

In our Active Dreaming approach, we respect this cardinal rule through the first questions we put to a dreamer about their dream. The very first question is, “How die you feel on first leaving the dream?” This provides immediate – and often the best – guidance to the basic character of the dream, whether it is negative or positive, urgent and personal or something else. If a bear turns up in your dream house and you wake up feeling cheerful, your bear is clearly very different from the kind people flee from, at least in your perception and availability for interaction. If you are at work in a humdrum situation but wake with feelings of crawling dread, there is something in that scene – perhaps something that will unfold in the future – you need to understand and be ready to contain or head off.

The next question we ask is the reality check. It has two aspects:

What do you recognize from this dream in the rest of your life, including the life of your imagination; and

Could any part of this dream play out in the future, literally or symbolically?

The question about the future is vitally important because dreams often rehearse us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and sometimes give us very clear precognition (a phenomenon that Jung, for all his brilliance on many fronts, was slow to accept).

The first part of our reality check answers Jung’s concern by taking the elements of the dream straight to the dreamer and locating them in the context of thir outer and inner life. I will never forget listening, in a dream sharing circle, to a dream of bats. Everyone there had strong feelings and associations with bats, across a wide spectrum from bats in the belfry to witches, from speleology to being able to navigate in the dark.  Some were quivering with eagerness to offer feedback on the dream. “If it were my dream, the bats would mean…”
     But wait. First we do the feelings: cheerful, confident. Then we do the reality check. “Have you encountered bats in your life?”
    “Oh yeah,” the dreamer said nonchalantly.”I kept bats as a pet when I was a kid.”
     I don’t think we had ever met someone who kept bats as pets and regarded them as delightful childhood playmates. This took our dreamwork in an entirely different direction from where it might otherwise have gone

*  C.G. Jung, “On the Nature of Dreams” in Collected Works vol 8, p 539

Photo: Australian flyig fox (a fruit bat)

 

 

The state of our soles

In dreams, the state of our footwear often suggests the state of our souls. You can hear the echo of "soul" in "sole". A dream of lost shoes may invite us to think about where on the roads of life we may have lost or misplaced soul. Sometimes you can reach back into that kind of dream in order to look for lost shoes, and that search may take you back to a place in your life where you lost something more important - vital energy and identity - that you can now reclaim.  

    Shoes not only have soles. They have ties, and the state of your laces or straps in a dream may say something about connections - "old ties" or new ones. A woman getting ready to attend a high school reunion in Manhattan dreamed she was urgently seeking shoes that would be comfortable for walking yet smart enough to suit her taste. A salesman in a fancy store persuaded her to purchase a pair of sneakers with laces made of genuine, but flexible, gold. She smiled at the thought that after all the years since graduation, her ties to her classmates were "golden", and that she would be comfortable with them in the big city. 

     A Freudian psychiatrist I know dreamed that her shoes were far too tight; they were torturing her feet and making it nearly impossible for her to walk. When she reflected on this, she realized that her Freudian approach was cramping her ability to do her job. She expanded her studies, embracing Jung and other approaches to the psyche and its healing. Now, in her dreams, her shoes usually fit just right. 

     In some dreams, we find ourselves wearing shoes that would be highly unlikely in regular life, except at a costume party. We seem to be cross-dressing, or wearing the footwear of a different historical period, or dispensing with shoes altogether in a primal landscape. When we inspect the bodies we inhabit in dreams of this kind, we sometimes discover that our dream self slipped into someone else's situation, in a different place or a different era. The state of our shoes in such dreams (and other details) may be a clue to connections within a soul family that includes personalities in different times.  

      That thought has been of great interest to me since I dreamed that I visited my favorite professor at a research institution where he was doing some remarkable work that involved pairs of shoes. The professor is Manning Clark, the famous Australian historian, who was a great friend and mentor to me when I was a student and a precocious lecturer at the Australian National University. Manning died in 1991, but I have had many intriguing encounters with him since.
     In the dream involving shoes, Manning showed me that he is now busily engaged in studying "parallel lives". This meta-historical approach seems to involve tracking how choices made and actions taken by two people living in different times impact each other's fortunes, by a process of causation that you can only grasp if you can step outside linear chronology. One of the pairs Manning had selected for study was Lenin and Dionysius of Syracuse (a tyrant of ancient Greece). Each time the professor finished work on one set of parallel lives, he moved a pair of shoes to a different position on the far side of his desk. This was evidently a kind of tally, but I felt the shoes signified something more. 

    There is an angel of shoes, or more especially sandals, the most common footwear when his name was most commonly invoked. He is Sandalphon, and his name is still important in the pathworking and astral travel protocols of certain Mystery and kabbalistic orders. He wears sandals in the presence of his Maker, and leather footgear in the presence of Shekinah, the Divine Feminine. Some say he was once the prophet Elijah, or Elias. He presides over the astral body and the soul journeys we make in this vehicle. Some believe he watches over the big journeys that precede birth and follow death, which involve putting on and discarding "garments", like soft shoes. 

     In the Terry Gilliam movie "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", a well-heeled lady is whisked away to a paradise of shoe-lovers, and stilleto heels by top designer Jerome C. Rousseau dance along the seabed. 

     Common expressions involving footwear may provide clues to where your dream is walking. A few that jump to mind:

- Goody two-shoes
- if the shoe fits...

- well-heeled
- given the boot
- pulled himself up by his own bootstraps
- to know someone, you must walk in his shoes (or moccasins)
- if you were in my shoes...

- those are big shoes to fill

- get your skates on

- put on your dancing shoes

So - what's in your shoe closet, in your dreams?

For more on dreams that show the state of our soul - and can provide portals for soul recovery healing - please see my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

The passions of the soul work magic

 

The passions of the soul work magic. This observation, attributed to Albertus Magnus (and loved by Jung) is practical counsel for living fully and creatively.

Our passions can lead us into madness. They can also give us the creative edge to do our best and most original work and the magnetism that generates extraordinary opportunities and serendipity.

The stronger the emotion, the stronger the effect on our psychic and physical environment. This may reach much further, in our nonlocal universe, that we can initially understand. It can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change everything in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.

The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who knew a great deal about these things, write that  “ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.”

There are two conditions for working positive magic with the passions of the soul.

The first is that we must choose to take the primal, pulsing energy of our strongest passions and direct it towards a creative goal. The passion that is throbbing and surging inside us may be love or lust (or both), the fierce desire to give birth or the desperate wish to end it all. The passion may be wild rage or terrible grief. Whatever its origin, the strongest passions of the soul produce the energy to remake our world – if we choose to direct that energy. Imagine a vast body of pent-up water, engorged by a pounding thunderstorm, that is going to burst through a dam with irresistible power. We can choose to harness that force, turning into hydroelectric power that can light our city and warm our homes. Or we can let it swamp everyone and everything in its path, bringing misery and devastation.

The second requirement for letting the passions of the soul work magic is that we must seize the moment when they are running strongest and give ourselves completely to acting in the power of that moment. The time is always Now; but when the passions of the soul are at work the time is also GO. 

I know this as a writer. Often my best work is done when I am in a state of great turmoil, when my passions are running strong but my heart and mind are also conflicted. Such moments give us an edge. I know, from experience, that my best and most original work can come through now – if I use that edge and make myself available to the work any time it is coming through. In these states, like Balzac, I often write for fifteen hours a day, fueled only by coffee, and sleep only a couple of hours out of the 24 – and stream into joy, the joy we all know when we are in the zone whatever our field of endeavor, and are giving our best.

Balzac was a master in his literary depiction of the workings of passion and desire. He understood the fundamental unity of mind and matter, and that there is a law of spiritual gravitation as well as a law of physical gravitation. His view of reality - and his prodigious literary production - were driven by a vitalist belief in the power of will and imagination. His early novel Louis Lambert is a tale of the strange life of a young explorer in consciousness who is awakened by a precognitive dream to the fact that the world is much deeper than can be explained by the reason and Newtonian physics. He comes to believe that man can become a creator by concentrating a whole reality - even an entire world - inside himself, re-visioning it, and then projecting the new image to fill his environment. But he comes unstuck and unhinged because he can’t ground his understanding in the physical world.

   The Balzacian hero is a man of desire and imagination who must also ground his passions in the body, in healthy sex, in social engagement with the world - or else  go mad.

    Balzac's version of what becomes possible through exercising the passions of the soul is wonderful. Acts of mind, fueled by passion, abolish time and space. “To desire is immediately to be where one desires to be, instantaneously to be what one desires to be." Time is devoured by the moment; space is absorbed by the point. “For the man in such a state, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life within us.”

     What kind of desire makes these things possible? “A desire is a fact entirely accomplished in our will before being accomplished externally.”

     The passion that works magic is "the will gathered to one point" so that "man can bring to bear his whole vitality."

     The man who carries a great desire is surrounded by a certain “atmosphere”, a “magnetic fluid” that moves in waves, like sound and light, and touches others. He produces “a contagion of feelings”.

    Passion of this kind magnifies sensory abilities; we can see and hear and sense things vividly across distance. Women, says Balzac, are especially good at this. Watch out for a woman whose passions are high, because she can see and sense things at a distance very clearly.

     Coincidences multiply around such a person, because things now happen through “sympathies which do not recognize the laws of space”.

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things by Robert Moss. Puiblished by New World Library.

Photo: RM with Balzac's doppelganger at MOMA in New York City

 

What Wolfgang Pauli Read in His Dreams

 

I am always astonished when people tell me they don't read in their dreams or find that if they try to dream the text blurs and they can't follow it. I read even more in dreams than in regular life, and often surface from a dream with the text - and sometimes a voiceover,often my own - still streaming. I have been able to catch whole pages from these experiences. Last night, in the library of a French chateau, I was reading and singing with a group from the libretto of an operetta with dual texts in English and neo-medieval French.

Revisting Wolfgang Pauli's correspondence in preparation for a new course, I was delighted to recognize a kindred spirit, a fellow dream reader. Pauli was a Nobel laureate, pioneer of quantum mechanics, and creative colleague of Carl Jung in the development of the theory of synchronicity and the effort to understand the interweave of mind and matter in the universe. He once declared that dreams were his "secret laboratory".

Again and again, he receives and reads letters in his dreams. Sometimes in dreams he reads and signs documents. He dreams that he is in Copenhagen and Niels Bohr tells him that three popes have given him a new house. He signs a document and Bohr gives him a train ticket so he can ride to the new house. He wakes but sleeps again and the dream continues. A Catholic uncle tells him the house is for him and his family. He comments that "my dreams make no actual distinction between laboratory and church so the new house could be both."[1] 

He is told in a letter that there "with me there is something essentially different from C.G.Jung." His number has changed from 206 to 306, not so with Jung. The letter is signed Aucker, a mystery name to him. [2] 

He takes a tram to a large house that is the new building of ETH, the top science and technology university in Zurich where he found an academic home. In his new office are two letters, one very long signed by his boss; it says "ferry dues settlement". The other, in an envelope that says "philosophical chorus society", contains beautiful red cherries, some of which he eats." [3] A voice says: "At the place where Wallenstein atoned for his sins with his death a new religion shall arise." [4]

These two dreams, he tells Jung, are fundamental for him. They speak of the need to move beyond "the nonfunctioning of the religious tradition that strikes me as the distinctive characteristic of the West in the Christian era" towards "a chthonic, instinctive wisdom" and a religion that "attaches more value to the transformation of man through immediate experience than to an old book." [5]

His dream language substitutes scientific terms for Jungian psychology whose terminology is "less differentiated." [6] His dreams inspire him to tussle with Jung over the vocabulary the pyschologist developed to describe meaningful coincidence. A mathematician tells Pauli in a dream, "Cathedrals will be built for isomorphy"[7] and he wakes in high excitement. He proposes to Jung that he should substitute the term "isomorphy" - which means identity or close similarity of forms - for the word "synchronicity" which Jung had invented. [8] 

He has his own math-derived dream language of which "isomorphy" is a prime example. He has a symbolic language he tries to decode according to ancient myths and Gnostic legend like Jung, as with his dream of being at a house in the tropics where one cobra rises from the floor and a second from the earth. He dreams word codes involving foreign languages. In one of these dreams, Bohr tells him that the difference between V and W corresponds to the difference between Danish and English. As he wakes the word vindue enters his mind and he counts it part of the dream. He realizes that in Danish the letter W does not exist. He hasn't grasped what is going on until he nearly collides in the dark, after a meeting, with an Anglicist  named Straumann, a philologist who specializes in early English. Strausmann explains how the W vanished from Germanic languages. Next morning Pauli finds himself sitting opposite Strausmann on the tram , a phenomenon he calls "doubling".They discuss their previous night's speculation that vindue originally means "wind eye". In refelecting in the meaning of this episode, Pauli writes "The dreams and their images are 'Windaugen' for me." [9]  The wind is spirit (pneuma) producing dreams through a visual faculty.

Sometimes, in dreams, Pauli reads formulas on a blackboard. [10]

Two elements in his dreams that may speak to many of us: his dream self is more fluent in foreign languages, especially French (11) and, again and again, he can't get through to someone (usually his wife) on the phone (12).

References

1. C.A.Meier (ed) Atom and Archetype: The Jung/Pauli Letters, 1932-1958 trans. David Roscoe (Princeton NJ: Pinceton University Press 2001) pp.135-6.

2. ibid p.137

3. ibid p. 138

4. ibid p.139

5. ibid p.140-1

6. ibid

7. ibid p.139

8. For a full account of Paui's dream life and dialogue with Jung, see my Secret History of Dreaming (Novato CA: New World Library, 2009) chapter 11.

9. ibid p.145

10. ibid p.150
11. ibid

12. ibid p136

On the road

What happens on the road in your dreams? Our dreams rehearse us for literal situations that may come up. I am quite certain that dreams saved me from possible death on the road three times by giving me previews of fatal accidents I was able to avoid by retaining, clarifying and applying the information. Our dreams give us gentler travel advisories: check your brakes, be prepared for a detour or heavy traffic.

Then there are all the dreams in which was is happening on the road may be a metaphor for life situations, past, present or future. In a dream last night I knew where I wanted to go, but it's by no means clear that I knew how to get there. I drove straight ahead, on a highway that dwindled to a country road that turned to dirt and then was just a trail that suddenly dropped in a near-vertical descent. I plugged on in the car - which may have been a Mini Cooper - despite the risk until the narrow walls of a gorge hemmed me in I got out of the car and tried to climb down, still headed in the same direction.

I came back from my dream excursion with no strong feelings and no sense of urgency. I was slightly disappointed, since the dream wasn't much fun. And a little frustrated, since it seemed unlikely that my dream self was going to make it to his objective. I doubted that the dream held hold a literal advisory since I rarely drive these days and don't have a Mini Cooper.

Instead of recording the details, as I normally do, I let the dream go until I had finished my coffee and checked the news about Hurricane Ida and Kabul.

With my memory of the dream narrowed to my effort to keep traveling in a straight line regardless of circumstances, I could recognize a recurring theme in my dreams and my life. I can think of past situations where I thought I knew where I wanted to go, and discovered that I did not actually know how to get there. Literally and symbolically, I've gone through life passages where I keep on keepin' on without checking the map or considering alternate routes or asking directions. Is there a chance I'll do that again? Well, of course. I don't see the possible circumstances this morning, but I'll keep the dream with me as a counselor.

To add to the likelihood I'll hear that counsel, I'll make upa bumper sticker. Not a major creative assignment on this occasion. I can borrow an oldie.

Remember a straight line is not always the shortest path.

There are dreams that hold up a magic mirror to our actions and attitudes, giving us the gift of seeing ourselves from a witness perspective. Sometimes they hold up a funhouse mirror in which our quirks and imperfections are so mocked and magnified we can hardly fail to pay attention. This gives us precious opportunities for course correction. Have you noticed?

What's happening on the road in your dreams?

Photo by RM

The real history of Lincoln's dream

Most of us know that Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his assassination a couple of weeks before he was shot. But the full story of that dream - of how it haunted Lincoln, and how he tried to get a second opinion on it, and finally failed, tragically, to heed the warning - is much more intriguing and instructive than the truncated version we are usually given.
    The original source is a memoir by Lincoln's friend and aide Colonel Ward Hill Lamon, who heard him tell the dream. In Recollections of Abraham Lincoln Lamon recalls that Lincoln was "haunted" by a sinister dream that seemed "amazingly real" but said nothing until confronted by his wife Mary to explain his melancholy and "want of spirit."
     Lincoln began by talking about the Bible. "It is strange how much there is in the Bible about dreams....If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that in the old days God and His angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known by dreams."
     Asked for his own views on dreams, Lincoln revealed that he was "haunted" by a dream from a few nights before - and that he had sought a second opinion on the dream, repeatedly, by opening his Bible at random and seeking a message in the text his eye fell upon. The first time he did this, he found himself in Genesis 28, reading the story of Jacob's Ladder, one of the great dream visions in the Bible. He tried again and again. "I turned to other passages and seemed to encounter a dream or vision wherever I looked.
     Clearly this gave him the sense that his own dream was a true dream, perhaps a prophetic one. This increased the grip of the dream on him, to the point where. Lincoln said, "the thing has got possession of me, and like Banquo's ghost, it will not down." 
    At Mary's prodding, he recounted the dream. There was first a deathly stillness around him. Then he heard the weeping of invisible mourners. He roamed the White House, trying to understand what was going on. The rooms were all brightly lit but he found no one until he entered the East Room and met with "a sickening surprise". Soldiers stood guard over a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments on a catafalque. When Lincoln demanded, "Who is dead in the White House?" one of the soldiers replied, "The President - he was killed by an assassin!" A great howl of grief rose from mourners in the room and waking, Lincoln was unable to sleep for the rest of the night. 
    Having told the dream, Lincoln announced that - despite his Bible discoveries and the depth of his feelings - it was "only a dream" and should be forgotten. But it stayed in his mind, and he tried to dismiss it by developing the idea that it could not be about his own assassination because - as he told Lamon - it was "some other fellow" that was killed.
    Lincoln understood dreaming. He regarded true dreams and presentiments as natural, not supernatural, and extraordinary visions as the workings of "The Almighty Intelligence that governs the universe." Yet he failed to act on the dream that could have saved his life.

ABRAHAM'S DREAM is a print produced by Currier & Ives in 1864. The artist depicts Lincoln as tormented by nightmares of defeat in the election of that year. In his supposed dream Liberty, brandishing the severed head of a black man, is at the door of the White House, driving Lincoln out with her foot. Lincoln is seen fleeing, wearing a a Scotsman's plaid cap and a cape. His dress is an allusion to an incident prior to his first inauguration in 1861. Informed that an attempt would be made to assassinate him during his trip to Washington, Lincoln took a night train and disguised himself. It was widely reported that he was spotted wearing a Scotch plaid cap and a long military cloak and his critics in the press had a field day poking fun at his alleged timidity. Tragically, this experience may have influenced Lincoln's failure to do more to change the future he previewed in the assassination dream.

When Dreams Speak in Riddles: Learning from an Ancient Dream Diviner

Artemidorus was the most famous dream interpreter in the Greco-Roman world. Operating in the second centuty, he was originally known as Artemidorus Daldianus, from his mother's city of Daldis in Lydia, but mostly practiced in the great temple city of Ephesus. He wrote many books, but only one survives: his five-volume Oneirocritica, "The Interprettion of Dreams",from which Freud borrowed the title but not the approach. 

Artemidorus states his general objective at the start of this book. He wants to make a rational and effective case for divination, based on his personal experience and the case studies he has collected.  Second, he wants to offer a practical and original guidebook that any intelligent reader can use. 

He gives his credentials in his opening pages: “I have not only taken special pains to procure every book on the interpretation of dreams, but have consorted for many years with the much-despised diviners of the marketplace…In the different cities of Greece and at the great religious gatherings of that country, in Asia, in Italy and in the largest and most populous of the islands, I have patiently listened to old dreams and their consequences.” [On 1: preface. White pp 21-22] His authority is based on experience: “Everything has been the result of personal experience, since I have always devoted myself, day and night, to the study of dream interpretation.” [On 2.70; White p.158]

Artemidorus proceeds to distinguish different types of dreams. A fundamental difference is between oneiros, which he defines as a dream that “indicates a future state of affairs” and enhypnion – stuff “in sleep” – that “indicates a present state of affairs”, ranging from the state of your digestion to your desire to be with your lover or the haunting images of things that you fear. People who lead “an upright life” try to discipline themselves to avoid being “muddled” by the fears and desires reflected in such sleep experiences, which are the stuff of much modern dream analysis [On 1.14]. In the Oneirocritica, Aretmidorus is interested only in dreams that reveal the future, and only in those that do this through allegory rather than by literal depiction of possible scenes and events. Allegorical dreams are “those which signify one thing by means of another.”

 “The mind predicts everything that will happen in the future.” [On 1.2, White p.24] Artemidorus gives several examples of precognitive dreams that presented future events in an entirely literal way. A man dreams of a shipwreck and then his boat is wrecked and he narrowly avoids drowning, as in the dream. Another dreams he is wounded in the shoulder by a friend in a hunting accident, and again the dream is played out exactly.

If it is possible to dream the future with this kind of clarity, why do we need allegories? Artemidorus gives two reasons. The first is that we may lack the experience to understand a future event perceived in a dream – for example, because we have not yet encountered a person or situation that features in the dream. By setting us a puzzle to figure out, the “allegorical” dream gives us a rational way to access what the larger mind knows about things to come. Second, the kind of dream dramas Artemidorus describes can bring an emotional charge that leads to action; “it is the nature of the oneiros to awaken and excite the soul by inducing active undertakings.” [On 1.2, White p. 23]  

 Artemidorus also notes that while the gods do not lie, they like to speak in riddles. This is because “they are wiser than we and do not wish us to accept anything without a thorough examination”. He gives the example of a man who dreamed the god Pan told him that his wife would poison him via his best friend. It was the relationship that was poisoned, when the wife proceeded to have an affair with the friend. [On 4.71, White p.224]

Thus Artemidorus sets very clear boundaries around the field of dreams he explores in the Oneirocritica. He is going to show us how to decode allegorical dreams in order to discern the future. He is well aware that other kinds of dreams require other kinds of dream work, and he wrote about other types of dreams in books that have not survived, as well as a book of augury – divination by bird-watching. [Price p.29] This approach is completely different from that of Freud, who postulated the equal status of all dreams, all formed by the same mechanisms.

Artemidorus recognized that every dream may be unique. The snake in your dream is not the same as the snake in mine. To read the meaning of a dream symbol correctly, you must know the dreamer’s identity, position in life, habits and medical condition. “You must examine closely the habits of men before the dream….you must inquire carefully into them.” [On 4.59, White pp 217-8 ] Suppose you dream you are made of silver or gold. If you are a slave, this means you’ll be sold; if you are poor, you’ll become rich; if you’re already rich, you’ll be the victim of plots because everyone will be out to get your money.. [On 1.50 White p.57] You must also question the dreamer’s feelings about a dream.

Artemidorus observes that we dream the future for others as well as ourselves. Sometimes we receive a dream message for someone else. “Many dreams come true for those whose characters are similar to the dreamer’s and for his relatives and namesakes.” Artemidorus gives the example of a woman who dreamed she was married to a man who was not her husband. He observed that work with this dream could proceed in several directions, including exploring the possibility that it warned of death; “marriage and death signify each other because the circumstances surrounding a marriage and a funeral are similar.” [On 4.30, White p.204] This association, it turned out, was on the right track, but it was the dreamer’s sister, not the dreamer herself, who “married death” after the dream.   

Artemidorus kept in touch with his clients after consultations, and apparently believed that divination through dreams is for the benefit of the whole community. This carries a burden: “If a man dreams that he has become a prophet and has been celebrated for his predictions, he…will take upon himself, in addition to his own anxieties, those of others.” [On 3.21, White p. 164]

 He wanted to raise dream divination to the level of an applied science. In the view of one modern scholar, Christine Walde, he succeeded. “The more complex aspects of divination – which is the attempt to investigate the connections underlying fate and the cosmos through natural and artificial means – constituted both an ancient mode for mastering life and a way of gaining knowledge or insight that, in the context of its time, can in no way be dismissed as irrational; at most, it might be considered extrarational.” Artemidorus devised a “demystified” approach to divination that “provides the standardized conditions that scientific distance requires” and “an imposing reservoir of knowledge about things in the world and their interdependence.” [Walde 126, 128] 

References

Artemidorus, Oneirocritica: The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Robert J. White. Torrance CA: Original Books, 1990, pp. 82-85. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Artemidorus are from this translation.

Price, S.R.F., “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus,” in Past and Present no.113 (November 1986).

Walde, Christine, “Dream Interpretation in a Prosperous Age? Artemidorus, the Greek Interpreter of Dreams” in David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds) Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss.Published by New World Library.

 

 Photo of cat at Ephesus by RM