Dreams are a stage for history: wisdom from a medieval Muslim historian

One of the history books that draws me back every few years is Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah - or "Introduction" - to world history. Writing in the 14th century, in the midst of constant war and turmoil between the rival Muslim dynasties of the Maghreb, he brought modern principles of evidence to the grand ambition of writing a universal history. Many scholars of historiography see him as the first true world historian.
     He was an evolutionist, in his way. He observed that every order of creation may evolve into one above it. For humanity, this would mean evolving to the condition of the angels – “angelity”. For now, only the prophets are at home in that realm.
     Ibn Khaldun wanted to understand the reasons for the rise and fall of different cultures, and identified cycles - or "returns" - throughout history.
      I see I am engaged in one of the "returns" of my own life. In 1967-1968, I considered writing my MA dissertation on the Muqaddimah, partly influenced by a Pakistani scholar of Ibn Khaldun who was at the School of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. He thought I would find the Maghreb historian's approach refreshing. I even embarked on studying Arabic in this cause - but my wife of that era complained that I kept sounding like I was gargling or throwing up, so I switched my thesis topic to West African history.
    Though Ibn Khaldun’s project was often delayed or interrupted by needs of state (he was a minister and ambassador and occasionally a general for the dynasties of Tunis, Fez, and Andalusia) his Introduction is extraordinary, and an extraordinarily good read today. He begins with six essays defining the stage on which history is played out, covering (for example) the influence of climate and geographical features in human affairs, the human need for community, and the nature of group consciousness.
     His sixth essay is the most arresting and arousing. He explains how knowledge of the future, the realm of angels, and the Divine purpose become available through dreams and visions. He distinguishes the "true dream" (which requires no interpretation) from lesser dreams. Ibn Khaldun describes how in dreams the soul travels outside the body, remaining connected by a "thin vapor" whose seat is in the heart. He is very interesting on the theme of how dream experiences are reshaped into more conventional or familiar - and sometimes deceptive - imagery (in ordinary or "confused" dreams) as the dreamer returns.
     He defines the nature of the prophet, making it clear there have been many, though Muhammad is unique because he received and retained the vast and unique revelation that is the Koran. Ibn Khaldun reports that prophets, in the grip of revelation, can appear to lose control of their senses and feel overwhelmed - sometimes "choked", as Muhammad complained to Gabriel - by what is upon them. But unlike mediums or victims of possession, they retain their knowledge and bring it back with clarity, and that knowledge serves and sustains humanity and furthers its evolution.
     All this in laying the foundation for writing history! Today's historians should take note. I was partly inspired by this approach to write my own  Secret History of Dreaming,which reveals how dreams and visions have been a secret engine of history and evolution throughout the whole human odyssey on the planet.

Photo: Doors in Sarajevo by Robert Moss

Truth comes with goosebumps from Delphi to the next street corner

It's a rule of skin, for me, that truth comes with goosebumps (or chicken skin, if you like). There is a science of shivers, which involves learning to recognize and respect what is going on when something exceptional is in the air and your body responds even before your mind can make sense of it.
    For the ancients, and in shamanic traditions, trembling for reasons other than cold or external danger has always been regarded as a sign of the advent of the numinous, the coming of gods or spirits. A dream seemed to take me deep into this realm:

How to Know When the God is Present

I am explaining to a large group of students how to read the signs that announce the advent of the god Apollo at his oracle, and confirm that true messages will be delivered by his priestess. The sacrificial goat starts shaking from the hooves up when the holy water is poured over it. Everything in the environment begins to tremble as if stirred by an unseen wind. The priestess called Pythia, who has been drinking from the sacred spring, sees movement in the bowl of spring water she holds in her lap as she sits on the tripod. The laurel leaves on the branch in her other hand are shaking and murmuring.
    Inside the dream, I felt educated pleasure in being able to explain these things clearly. I woke with a mild shiver of recognition, and a deep sense of satisfaction.

Dreams set us research assignments, and this one sent me back to the books, to refresh my memory on the practice of divination in the ancient world, especially at the famous Greek oracle of Delphi, where the priestess known as the Pythia, or Pythoness, was consulted by the rulers of cities and nations.
    Through the surviving sources, starting with Aeschylus' play The Eumenides, I confirmed my dream self's version of the operations of the Pythia. In preparing to become the oracle, she bathes in the sacred spring and invokes all the deities associated with Delphi by name, starting with Themis and Phoebe, daughters of the Earth goddess Gaia, and continuing through Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus and Apollo, who she hopes will speak through her in the presence of a client. She makes burned offering of laurel leaves and barley meal on an altar of the temple. She enters the adyton(sacred chamber) and mounts the golden tripod chair.
    In one hand she holds a laurel branch, in the other a shallow bowl. She sits quietly until the laurel leaves start to quiver. The trembling seizes her hand, moves up her arm to her shoulders and chest. Her whole body starts shaking violently as it has been seized by giant hands. This is confirmation that the god is present and that his speaker is in the necessary state of enthousiasmos to deliver true messages.

The bit about the goats fascinated me. In Diodorus of Sicily's World History, I reviewed again the legend of the foundation of the oracle of Delphi. Long before the great temple was built, when the area was wilderness, a goat herder noticed that some of his animals were behaving strangely. They were shaking and throwing their heads back, croaking and bleating.
    The herder approached them and saw they were at a crack in the rock from which vapors were rising. When he peered down, a strange exaltation seized him. He started shaking too. Knowledge of many things streamed through him. His family, alarmed by his long absence, searched for him and found him under a tree. He began to tell people their secrets without being asked. He had become clairvoyant. News of the chasm and the power of the vapors spread far and wide, until those in authority determined that things should be put on a orderly business footing. A priestess of blameless life would be chosen as speaker for the oracle, and access to the adyton would be banned to everyone except her attendants.
    It would probably be mistaken to attribute the Pythia's powers of truth-seeing to sulphurous vapors from the earth, or chewing laurel leaves, or any other chemical assistance. For one thing, recent archaeology summarized in Robert Temple’s Oracles of the Dead suggests the historical oracle of Delphi operated at a different site from the place - called Likoreia - where the goats were set trembling by whatever was rising from a fissure in the earth.

But there was something else to be learned and remembered about quivering goats. Ah yes, it has to do with divination by animal sacrifice, indirectly referred to my dream-lecturer self. Goats and sheep were the preferred animals used in haruspicy, divination by the entrails, a practice common throughout the ancient world and held to be of high importance in establishing the divine will in relation to human decisions. The Mesopotamian baru, a specialist in these matters, held high rank. So did the Etruscan haruspex counselor to Greeks and Romans, under both the Republic and the Empire. The liver was the preferred organ for divination, because it was thought to be a vital seat of an aspect of soul, and a kind of anchor between the spiritual world and the world of the body.
     For the haruspex, the best liver for divination was one that had been just carved from the animal victim, still warm and quivering in the diviner's hand. The Hittites liked to observe the spasms of the dying animal as its organs were removed.

These tales of savage times say it again: truth comes with goosebumps. Personally, I can do without looking at animal livers. It's enough to notice those little - or large - shivers that come when something is going on beyond the range of ordinary perception. They are a part of what the bleep we know that we (often) don't know that we know.

Art: "Priestess of Delphi" by John Collier (1891)

Dream sharing in Auschwitz

Sharing dreams was a vital community ritual for Polish prisoners at the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, originally designed for Poles, later expanded to facilitate the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Gypsies and nationals of other countries. In 1973, under communism, an attempt was made to interview Polish survivors and collect accounts of their dreams during their time in the camp. A questionnaire was sent to former inmates and 147 responded.
   One of the fascinating things to emerge from this research was that dream sharing - and the effort to interpret each other's dreams - was central to the life of many Polish inmates, providing a precious sense of community, hope of survival and other therapeutic benefits under terrifying conditions.
    One survivor reported, "Every morning we would start the day by sharing and interpreting the dreams we had during the night." Another former inmate said that "Dreams and fortunes were an inexhaustible source of daily conversation" - reflecting how dreams were examined for clues to an otherwise unknown future.
    This important material has taken a long time to seep out, finally in English translation, to the world community. We now have an important summary by Polish scholar Wojciech Owczarski in the latest issue of Dreaming, the magazine of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
   Owczarski contends that in general Polish society undervalues dreams. "Polish people hardly pay attention to dreams and and hardly pay attention to dreams and hardly believe in their diagnostic, healing, or problem-solving powers." I am sorry he has not met some of the wonderful Polish dreamers, including two who are now teachers of Active Dreaming, who have come to my workshops. However, if Owczarski is nonetheless substantially correct about a prevailing social attitude across many generations, the phenomenon of enthusiastic dream sharing in the concentration camp becomes even more fascinating.
    It seems there was no agreed method of interpretation of dreams among the Auschwitz inmates. You told a dream to your fellows and they came up with whatever occurred to them, which might be influenced by a folk belief, a half-remembered dictionary of dreams, or gut feelings and personal associations. Some individuals who proved to be good at dream reading received favors from the others. A survivor reported that "Those who believed in their powers were willing to part with their last slice of bread just to hear a prophecy."
     However in his book Sny obozowe w pamięci ocalałych z Auschwitz,  published in Poland in 2016, another scholar, Piotr M. A. Cywiński, suggests that the inmates did approach an informal consensus on the meaning of a long list of dream symbols, in effect an oral "dream book" of the camp. The list of symbols and their interpretation included these:

To put on shoes = to be moved for interrogation or another holding area
To look into a mirror = to be interrogated
To cook meat = to be beaten under interrogation
To smoke a cigarette = to be released from prison
To hear a shot = a letter from home

     It was agreed among survivors that one of the benefits of dream sharing was hope that they would make it through. Though not all the dreams shared received positive feedback, there was a bias towards hope and as one inmate recalled, the dream readers "lit flickers of hope in the hopeless spiritual desert, in our dying hearts." Good predictions, said another, "distracted the prisoner's imagination away from the camp" and seeded hope of a happy outcome after all the pain and fear.
     Dream sharing in the camp gave inmates a way to be heard, and to hear each other, building bonds of sympathy - and also a little fairly benign competition, to tell the most entertaining story or offer the most accurate interpretation. Being present to each other in these exchanges may have been more important than the content of specific reports. "Being emotionally engaged in dream sharing," Owczarski concludes, "the inmates built a community based on close relationships."
    Sadly, it seems that habits of regular dream recall and dream sharing did not survive the camps, at least as far as former inmates were willing to admit in response to questions put to them under the aegis of a totalitarian government. One female survivor said, "Fortune telling and dream interpretations were the most important aspect of our camp lives." However, "I have stopped interpreting dreams after my return because I no longer have any."
    Despite this disappointing sequel, we find confirmation in the story of the sharing that went on at Auschwitz that dreamwork, as a social as well as individual activity, is crucial to our human ability to survive and to thrive. This is an important chapter in the history of dreaming.

Source: Wojciech Owczarski, "The Ritual of Dream Interpretation in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp" in Dreaming volume 27, number 4 (December 2017)

Of related interest: Growing a Dream of a Better World, Even in Auschwitz.