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.

 

 

 

The voiceover in dreams and ancient habits of reading

The voiceover in dreams, especially when we are reading text, suggests oneiric reversion to the habits of our literate early ancestors, who typically read aloud rather than silently. In his Confessions, Augustine describes the remarkable sight of Ambrose (who was also made a saint) reading silently.  Vox autem et lingua quiescebant, “His voice and tongue maintained silence.” Augustine conjectured that he read in this unusual way because he often had other people coming and going around him and wanted to discourage them from interrupting his studies with questions and comments. [Confessions 6.3]
    Speaking the words aloud while you had your head in a scroll or codex was the default mode of reading in the ancient world. It seems this was still the case when Augustine wrote his Confessions around 400. In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel maintains that St.Augustine’s description of St. Ambrose’s reading habit is the first definite instance of silent reading recorded in western literature.
     Paul Saenger an expert on medieval manuscripts and a curator of rare books at Chicago's Newberry Library, believes that reading aloud was a practical necessity, given the form of early manuscripts. In his recent book Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading Saenger contends that the practice of transcribing Greek and Latin manuscripts without spaces, in scriptio continua, made reading silently a wearisome and excruciatingly difficult task. "It wasn't literally impossible to read silently, but the notation system was so awkward that the vast majority of readers would have needed to sound out the syllables, if only in a muffled voice."  Scriptio continua looks like this:

    It was only at the end of the seventh century, when Irish monks introduced regular word separation into medieval manuscripts, that quick and silent reading became easy and agreeable. A celebrated example is the Book of Kells.    

    I notice that when I read text in dreams – which I do very frequently, as in waking life – the words are often spoken out loud, in my mind. Sometimes the narrator seems to speak in a different voice. More often, I hear my own voice, as if I am reading aloud. This makes it much easier for me to follow and retain text than it might be if the lines were passing only in front of my dreaming eyes. When other dream researchers report that it is supposedly difficult to read and remember written material in dreams, I am incredulous, since I manage to understand and bring back so much text from my own dreams. But maybe this is easier for those of us who maintain, in dreams, the ancient default habit of reading aloud, creating the right spaces and rhythms for understanding and remembering.

Above: St. Ambrose reading silently
Below: word separation in the Book of Kells

Dreaming Is a Contact Sport

Many of my dreams are workaday in the sense that I am doing quotidian things: reading. writing and editing, giving lectures and workshops. Just now, in a sleep dream, that became lucid, I was selecting and posting excerpts from Chinese texts that described social interaction by dreamers traveling in their astral bodies, with distinctive terminology. I pictured bustling scenes of many soul travelers coming and going, meeting and parting in astral realities.

My first action, on getting out of bed, was to reopen relevant books from the current piles on my desk, At the top of the heap, Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China 300 BCE-800 CE by Robert Campany, a professor of Asian and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt. The book fell open at a page I had marked up heavily in pencil in a previous reading. The passage was on my oneiric theme: how people meet up and

make trouble in dreams.

"To dream is to contact or be contacted...This notion, often implicit, occasionally emerges into clear view, as in a passage in the Qiwu lun chapter of the Zhuangzi (ca. 300-150 bce):

"While it [the heart-mind, xin 心] sleeps, the cloudsouls contact [things]
When it wakes, the bodily form opens up [to sensory contact]
Whatever we come in contact with entangles it
Each day we use that heart-mind of ours for strife.

"The view of dreaming implied here is that dreaming occurs when one of our multiple souls - cloudsouls (hun 魂 ) whitesouls (po 魄 ) or simply the dreamer's spirit (shen 神 ) - wanders outside the body during sleep. But it is specifically the souls' contacts with other beings that constitute dreaming and therein lies the risk."

Campany notes that jiao, one of the verbs used for oneiric contact, means more: it implies touching with the senses of the dreambody; it may suggest "intertwine" or "intercourse". There is a note of caution here: watch who you are with when your body is sleeping. Those multiple souls get around. In the Later Han period, Daoist sages fixed the number of hun souls at three and the number of po souls at seven. We are many, and we can be in two or more places at once.

Winging It from a Land of Seers

We have personal styles of dreaming, and content - like the content of any day - will reflect our interests and desires. Because I love reading and research, I do a lot of it in my dreams, as in regular life. I'm posting this "old" report as an example, and also because I've been playing around with illustrations.

December 2, 2021

Dream

Winging It from Molossian Country

I am boning up on Molossian divination from a bulky typescript that contains fragments of an epic, trying to get a clear picture before I go to a dinner where this information will be greatly valued. There were many oracles in ancient Epirus, including the sacred oak at Dodona. I am intrigued by an account of how crucial messages traveled rapidly to and from the East, as far as Asia Minor. Seers could accomplish this mind to mind. I suspect that oracles also used carrier pigeons.

Dreaming inside the dream, I fly like a bird, over wild, windy country, East towards Attica. When I land I find a silver tetradrachm with the owl of Athena. I bite into it, testing the purity of the metal.

Feelings: Enjoyment. Certainty that this is a real experience. Been there, done that.

Reality check: My dream activity here is very similar to my ordinary days, in the combination of literary research and shamanic lucid dreaming that I call dream archaeology. The document I am reading resembles academic papers on divination at Dodona and other sites in Molossia/Epirus I studied when preparing a new class on Greek oracles.

I read in dreams very much as I do in ordinary life. My attention wobbled a bit with the dream typescript not because the text broke up (as some dream researchers say happens with reading material in dreams) but because of the difficulty of digesting a lot of academic writing at high speed.

Journal drawing by RM with digital effects

News from the Time of Queen Anne: In Dreams the Soul Plays Freely Beyond the Body

The great English essayist Joseph Addison, co-founder of The Spectator, published a 1,500 word piece on dreams in issue number 482 of his magazine in September 18, 1712. It remains one of the cleverest - and liveliest - accounts of what goes on in dreaming that you are likely to find. 

He starts with a Latin tag from Petronius, suggesting that when the body is prostrate in sleep "the mind plays with no weight upon it". Then he breezily observes that most authors who have written on dreams "have generally considered them only as Revelations of what has already happened in distant parts of the World, or as Presages of what is to happen in future Periods of time". The last bit might startle modern readers since our psychology fairly consistently ignores how dreams routinely show us the future. Addison makes it clear later on that he does not dismiss the divinatory aspect of dreaming, far from it. He wants to waste no time impressing on his readers some things he considers even more important.

Dreams, he tells us, demonstrate "the great Excellency of an Human Soul" and give "some Intimation of its Independency on Matter". 

Dreams Are Relaxations and Amusements of the Soul

"In the First Place, our Dreams are great Instances of that Activity which is natural to the human Soul, and which it is not in the power of Sleep to deaden or abate. When the Man appears tired and worn out with the Labours of the Day, this active part in his Composition is still busied and unwearied.

"When the Organs of Sense want their due Repose and necessary Reparations, and the Body is no longer able to keep pace with that spiritual Substance to which it is united, the Soul exerts her self in her several Faculties, and continues in Action till her Partner is again qualified to bear her Company. In this case Dreams look like the Relaxations and Amusements of the Soul, when she is disencumbered of her Machine, her Sports and Recreations, when she has laid her Charge asleep...

"In the Second Place, Dreams are an Instance of that Agility and Perfection which is natural to the Faculties of the Mind, when they are disengaged from the Body. The Soul is clogged and retarded in her Operations, when she acts in Conjunction with a Companion that is so heavy and unwieldy in its Motions. 

"But in Dreams it is wonderful to observe with what a Sprightliness and Alacrity she exerts her self. The slow of Speech make unpremeditated Harangues, or converse readily in Languages that they are but little acquainted with. The Grave abound in Pleasantries, the Dull in Repartees and Points of Wit. There is not a more painful Action of the Mind, than Invention; yet in Dreams it works with that Ease and Activity, that we are not sensible when the Faculty is employed. For instance, I believe every one, some time or other, dreams that he is reading Papers, Books, or Letters; in which case the Invention prompts so readily, that the Mind is imposed upon, and mistakes its own Suggestions for the Compositions of another."

Portrait of Joseph Addison by Sir Godfrey Kneller c.1712

I'll read it in my dreams

 I am always surprised when people tell me that they cannot read in dreams. They may look at text or inscriptions, but then find that they cannot stabilize or recall what they were viewing. There are research studies supporting the notion that reading is not an oneiric ability.

    Such reports and studies bemuse me, because I read even more in dreams than in regular life, and often manage to bring back a good deal. Sometimes I am assisted by an inner voice that speaks the words as I read them. To recover more than a few scraps of a text, I am often required to go back inside a dream and re-read the whole thing. I typically do this in a state of relaxed attention, lying on the bed with a pad and pencil in hand, jotting down what I read as I go through the pages or panels in a state of conscious or lucid dreaming.
    I have difficulty with languages that I do not know, or do not know well, but again that inner voice is there to assist me. Once I read a ribbon-like scroll in Hebrew and was given the inner translation:

Fear is falling down, awe is standing up, in the presence of the powers.

I read this dream text in the midst of one of my shamanic retreats. A member of the gathering, who is both a physician and a Kabbalist, explained to me, when he heard my report, that in Hebrew the word yira [יראה] can mean either "fear" or "awe".
    Similarly, an inner voice will translate walls of hieroglyphs, tablets in cuneiform, parchments in Latin or Old English.
   The most profound spiritual dialogue of my life began when I re-entered a dream from which I had awakened, in cool moonlight, in a cabin by a lake in Vermont. In the dream, I had been lunching with a mysterious and elegant couple. As I left the scene, an old friend rushed up to remind me that I needed to record everything, and should look inside a large manila envelope for instructions.
   Lying on my bed, I sent my second self back into the restaurant. I opened the envelope and read a newsapaper cutting that announced that "The Prince and Princess of Fars Are Traveling Abroad". With the clipping was a list of 20 questions I was supposed to put to these visitors from the land of Rumi and Suhrawardi.
   I sat my second self down at the table and read the questions one by one. They were all about soul and its peregrinations. "What is the nature of exile?" I read. Next question: "What are the conditions for return?" The answers fill many pages of my journal.
    On another occasion, I dreamed I had received a telegram from my favorite dead professor. I brought back a couple of sentences. These were enough to take me back inside the dream, in my dream reentry, to capture the rest. The full contents of the telegram gave me beautiful postmortem reflections in a familiar voice on afterlife possibilities and the connections between personalities living in different times.
    Sometimes, in dreams, I read books by authors I know. Some of these are books that have been published in the regular world; others appear to be books that exist in another reality. I especially enjoy reading books of my own that I have not yet completed, or even embarked on, in ordinary reality. It's a grand trick for a writer, to be able to bring through pages of a book that already exists, in the Dream Library, and turn it into something that others can read, in the ordinary world.

Digital art: "Dream Library" by RM

In My Forgotten Library

It happens every few months. I pull aside a screen, or open a curtain, or reach into an obscure corner of a room, and open the door to a library wing of my house that is not so much secret as forgotten. This library is immense, with bookcases that rise to the ceiling, suffused with light that seems natural, though I see no windows. The nearest bookshelves at my left hand are filled with European history. I recall that last time I was here, I dipped into some books about John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough.

In the early hours this morning, I step into the library room again. It is as I remember it. However, the room from which I enter is different. With its deep green wallpaper, I think it belongs to my next residence, which we are currently renovating, rather than my present house. Lucid inside the dream, it strikes me that I have not gone to the far end of the library wing and should explore what is there. I am surprised to find several people working at a large table.

When one of them turns, I see he is my favorite dead professor. I had many encounters with him over the years since his death, often in a very special research institution. I am skeptical about whether he is really here now, in this time and place. He laughs and peels off a mask. As the goatee and bald pate and glinting spectacles are removed, I see that my helper has been wearing a familiar face. I’m not sure, but I suspect he is the young historian inside my own psyche. A large, comfy lady at the table seems quite solid. In her shapeless print dress, she’s not putting on any façade. Her name is Maureen, and she is available for research assignments. The third figure, male, is not introduced.

“What are you working on?”

“Parallel lives.”

Of course. A perennial theme. When I met my dead professor at a research institute twenty years ago, he showed me this was his main work. Not simply Parallel Lives as Plutarch wrote them, coupling biographies of prominent Greeks and Romans, but a branch of Metahistory: the study of how the dramas or people living in different times and places can turn on each other, shifting each other’s lives. Back them, my dead professor was studying the interaction between the lives of Lenin and an ancient tyrant. Dionysius of Syracuse. I wonder who will most reward my study now? Maybe Maureen can tell me.

- Unedited journal report, June 8, 2022

 

 

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 Trail of My Bookish Dream Double

I am constantly tryng to keep up with my traveling dream self. A friend in Europe recently reported a dream in which he visited a Paris bookshop and leafed through an interesting novel about dreams and reality titled L'agent de change. He left the bookstore without purchasing the book. When he mentioned this to my double, in his dream, Dream Robert reprimanded him for not buying the book.

After waking, he went online and discovered that there is a novel called L'agent de change with similar content to the one he looked over in his dream. The author is a veteran French writer with an interesting name, Jacques Bellefroid ("Beautiful Cold").

Well, of course I could not refuse a book recommendation from my dream self. I ordered the novel and it arrived today. There is a mystery involving a tiny picture of a schooner (goélette) on a postage stamp that starts sailing on a lively sea when the narrator looks at it. The writing is spare and crisp and doesn't make me go to the dictionary often. So I'll add it to my current reading. I smiled when I came to these lines:

On me dit que les écrivains ont peur de la page blanche. Grâce à Dieu, je ne suis pas écrivain

"I am told that writers are scared of the blank page. Thank God I am not a writer."

Agent de change means "stockbroker" in French, and that is the narrator's profession. He thinks his job requires him to "trust in only quantifiable things that keep him at a distance from dreams and surprises ". We can be sure the author was conscious of the double entendre in his title.

Everything changes in the stockbroker's perception of reality when he sees and feels the spray bursting over the stem of the two-masted schooner in the ocean of a postage stamp he was given by his wife, who sees nothing except a pretty picture.

Reading in Dreams: Don't trust any of those dream researchers who tell you that you can't read in dreams. Nonsense. I read as much in my dreams as in regular life, that is to say, enormously. While I may sometimes bring back only a few lines or just a title (of books that may or may not exist in regular life) I can sometimes bring through several pages. My friend was reading, too, in that Paris bookshop,and brought back a title and a summary of content.

The Rawi and the Evil Queen

 October 11, 2020

dream

The Rawi and the Evil Queen

In the dream from which I returned at 3:30 a.m., I am in the body and situation of a scholarly prince in a Muslim country. I am working on a new version of a text and tear up several drafts before I have the following:

The rawi came to the sultan with a composition he had forged. His recitation was false but once heard it became true.

In my dream, I do not get further because I have to deal with a plot being hatched by the evil queen, who wants to hold me captive. I need to reclaim a key from her. She has really scary war paint. The whorls of color around her dark eyes in her whitened face give the impression that you could fall into a black hole. I feel no fear in her presence. My dark-skinned, black-bearded cousins are on my side in this palace intrigue.

~

I come back from my dream excursion excited and intrigued. Good story, this one! No analysis required or appropriate. As is my habit, I write and email my full report to myself on my phone before getting out of bed.

Then I look for the meaning of rawi. I discover that in Arabic a rawi is a "reciter"or "announcer'. The rawis preserved great pre-Islamic literature through oral transmission. They might have the ear of sultans or of large audiences. They were often accused of fabrication.

I so love my dream-directed research assignments!

A Note on Practice: The Stories from Second Sleep

Much of my best night dreaming. as in this example, is done in or around a second phase of sleep, which used to be called simply, "second sleep". When I lie down at night, I am usually ready to have some industrial sleep for a couple of hours, with or without significant recall. Then, after waking and maybe reading for a couple of hours, I am ready for the adventures to begin.

My discipline is to record as much as possible when I return to where I parked my body, whether that is at 3:30 a.m. or 5:00 a.m., or whenever. I may linger in the dream locale for quite a while in the fertile hypnopompic state. I want a fresh story to write in my essential book, my journal. I agree with the ancient dreamer, Aelius Aristides, when he says in his Sacred Tales, “Each of our days, as well as our nights, has a story.”

Illustrations for Firdausi's Shahnama (Book of Kings) by Muhammad Zaman (top) and Mu'in Muhsavvir (bottom). What is going on around the eyes of the div (demon) in Muhsavvir's picture from the story of Rustam somewhat resembles the getup of the evil queen in my dream.

Dreaming with footnotes

Where we go in dreams, as in life, has a great deal to do with our desires, our calling and our curiosity. In this time of pandemic, I am spending more time than ever in orgies of reading in the middle of the night, jumping from one partner to another; last night from Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's study of what we learn from Other People's Myths to Jeffrey Kripal's book on Authors of the Impossible to a biography of Victor Hugo.
      I turned in a round 4:00 a.m., curious to see what might be waiting for me in the twilight state of hypnagogia. I set no agenda. I simply lay on my back, in horizontal meditation, ready to allow images to rise and fall. Here's what I recorded in my journal:

My inner screen is blank. No, that’s not quite true. It is illuminated by a dim light. It is the color of old parchment, quite flat, until a small grey shape appears near the top, It flutters and falls back, stirs a little, rises into the shape of a wing. A butterfly wing, drawn in pencil or with a fine brush. I think of Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly and of how it is depicted in paintings of the sage dreaming the butterfly or the butterfly dreaming the man.

     Count your breaths, I tell myself. Just watch what rises and falls. Notice when you lose count.
     The shape stirs again. Beyond it, still only a silhouette, I see a great bird with spread wings.
     There is the irruption of color. A blonde woman’s large rosy face and blue eyes, peering into mine. Who is she? She is gone before I can identify her.
     I picture myself landing at a European airport, riding to the hotel, wearing a face mask as I check in. This is fairly vivid, but seems like a set of updated memories. It lacks the spontaneity of the butterfly trying to take wing from the brush, or the blonde peeper
     Fifty breaths. I have already stumbled in my count a couple of times, switching from inbreath to outbreath. I have the impression of lots of shadow play, of figures and images flitting by too quickly for me to make an inventory. No big visitation tonight, it seems. No repeat of what unfolded around this time, in this room, ten days ago:

A Woman with a Face Like the Sun

She took form as soon as I lay down and closed my eyes: a tall, statuesque female figure wearing a long shimmering blue robe with a golden nimbus about her head.. She held a long golden staff that rises to head height. It was capped by a pair of birds, possibly doves, that came alive in a glory of fluttering wings.
     I thought of Brigid, and Mary, but did not need to settle on any single name. The Lady’s  face became a golden disc. It shone as bright as any sun except that I could contemplate it without turning away.
     I knew this was an epiphany and felt blessed.

However, I don't think this is the lady who looked in on me just now. Well,the body deserves some industrial rest.

     I roll on my left side ready for sleep.
     My inner screen lights up.
     I see letters and numerals in a broken column, printed on the left side of a page or screen. They look like academic citations, with many abbreviations. References to learned journals and books published by Brill in Leiden.
     There is an Arabic word, helpfully transliterated. Al-ruya. The true dream. And something in the non-Roman characters of another language. Amharic? Maybe this:

ሕልም

hlm, pronounced ḥilimi. Amharic for "dream". (I looked it up later.)
     With this, I have the vision of an elderly king. Dark-skinned, bearded, gaunt, with voluminous robes, a scepter and a high boxy crown. His vestments and his crown seem too big for him, or maybe he has shrunk since her first put them on. He reminds me of photos of Haile Selassie,the last emperor of Ethiopia..
      An inner voice tells me

     The king appears when you are able to step back into the dream

Later, in a sleep dream, I found myself as participant and observer in an exciting thriller plot. The action started to unfold on a pleasant urban street that may have been in Little Venice in London. The dream was so vividly real that I nearly failed to record it on waking. It felt just-so; been there, done that.

On the other hand, my more bookish adventures in hypnagogia have set me research assignments. Why Haile Selassie?  How are dreams approached in Ethiopian culture and how are they represented in Amharic literature? Can I follow that list of citations? What more do I need to learn about رؤيا , the true dream, in Islamic tradition?

A dream word puzzle on New Year's morning

I find that odd words and phrases in my dreams are often clues to fascinating things if I take time to do the puzzles (and this may take quite a while). In my early morning dreams on New Year's day, I was excited to discover an English translation of a story by a favorite author (Mircea Eliade), typeset but not yet published. Now lucid, I leaned into the dream, trying to retrieve some of the text. I got this:

His colleague had the voracity of a threshing sheave.

I understood that this was reference to a character's sexual appetites. The wording is doubly odd, in English. "Voracity"is an actual English word. Your spellcheck demons will try to substitute "veracity" but that is a different creature entirely. "Voracity" is rarely heard in English, but - as the quality of being voracious - it fits the context beautifully. But "threshing sheave"can't be right, surely. There is a threshing flail. And there are the sheaves of grain that are produced after the threshing is done. Has the translator conjoined two words that aren't meant to be spooning each other? Hmmm. I have learned never to step away from the first version of a word or phrase a dream gives me, however unlikely or resistant to translation it may seem to be. Time to go to the dictionary. I am now reminded that "sheave" (singular) is another good English word. A sheave is a pulley with a grooved wheel for holding a cable or rope (see photo above). The grooved wheel spins inside the frame of the sheave, allowing the rope or cable to move freely and smoothly. A sheave can be used to redirect a cable or rope, lift loads, and transmit power. Not hard to see a potential metaphor here, involving the sexual act, a grade above "screw". Was the author striving for some fresh metaphor here that has not quite managed to make itself at home in English? I may ask Mircea, if he is available..

A book-lover in dreams as well

One of the games I play with dreams is to compare the character and behavior of the dream self with that of the waking self. In at least one respect, I find that my dream and waking personalities are identical; they are both passionate book-lovers.
     I am forever handling, appreciating and reading books in my dreams. Sometimes these are books I have not yet written, and when I am fortunate I am able to bring back a few paragraphs I can turn into a draft. More often, I am inspecting and reading books from a universal library, of authors I know well and those I have not yet discovered in regular life. To those dream researchers who claim (as several have done) that it is not possible to read in dreams and hold a clear impression of text, I say: look again. Some of us do it nightly.
    In one of my dreams last night, I pulled a selection of books from my shelves that included Tolkien's The Silmarillion and several of Michael Grant's histories of Rome. I became tremendously excited by what I re-discovered in these books, especially by Grant's limpid overview of the rise and fall of the Roman empire, and its myths and customs. I resolved, in the dream, to seek out more. I learned that there is a sequel or successor to The Silmarillion I had not yet read, and of course there is always more of Michael Grant to read; this British classicist was immensely prolific, to the chagrin of the plodding pedants in his field.
    I don't know what triggered my dream self's book selections overnight, though I am wondering now whether he was influenced in part by my late-night reading, an excellent historical mystery by Joseph Kanon (Istanbul Passage) set in Turkey right after World War II. Michael Grant was fluent in Turkish, and was in Turkey for part of World War II, and was no doubt involved in secret operations.
    I want simply to note the sheer enjoyment of my dream self as he perused his books. As I stirred into waking consciousness in the golden light of early morning, filtered by the drapes, I stayed with him, in his dream library, relishing this gentle literary recreation.
    Oh yes. I'll see if there is more of Tolkien, published after The Silmarillion (a posthumous collection of his mythopoeic works edited by his son Christopher) that I need to explore; and I have already placed some of Michael Grant's books about Rome at my left hand on my desk. Dreams set assignments.