A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Exploring the meaning and potential of dreams
Before you read further, I should be upfront with you about the inspiration of this brief piece and if that information makes you scoff, then you may as well stop after the next paragraph because this will not get any more materialist-friendly (i.e., banal and boring). I fully and unapologetically admit that this will probably only appeal to an audience with a high level of what some might call credulity, but I would name as openness.
Several nights ago, I was visited by a vision of my now-departed but forever-loved dog, Dash — a truly dapper and infinitely sweet gentleman. In that dream, we had a conversation, or rather, Dash relieved me of some of my ignorance and skepticism, while I mostly listened. I won’t relay here what all we discussed, but that nocturnal event put me instantly in an intentional-stance towards and made me infinitely more curious about dreams. Ergo, the following.
वह जो मन से नहीं समझा जाता है, लेकिन जिससे मन समझ लेता है — जानो कि…
“That which is not comprehended by the mind but by which the mind comprehends — know that…”
- Swami Prabhavananda, The Upanishads
It’s curious that only in the world of modernity have we humans so totally and carelessly segregated dreams out of our understanding of reality. Perhaps the one mainstream exception to this is certain types of psychotherapy, but even those (with the notable exception of Jungian schools of thought) reduce dreams to nothing more than personal subjective experiences.
Our boundary between the worlds of awaking and sleeping used to be so much more porous and fluid and the dreaming mind was largely seen as some sort of opened portal to utterances from other dimensions, other spheres of the universal mind. It was seen as perfectly rational to understand dreams — or at least, to be open to the possibility of understanding them — as objective transmissions from beyond the boundaries of mind put up by consciousness awake.
For example, Aristotle composed three separate treatises on sleeping, dreaming, and the prophecies that come from them (and it should be noted that he was unusually predisposed towards naturalistic explanations for most things). Cicero also wrote a treatise on divinization, in which he respectfully and profoundly conveyed the astronomer Posidonius’s three-tier classification of gods-inspired dreams:
- Dreams through which mind perceives truths via its intrinsic connection to the gods
- Dreams initiated by phenomenal contact with immortal spirits that naturally fill the air, who make manifest truths in symbolism that are normally hidden from us
- Last, dreams in which gods directly address the sleeping mind to communicate truth about the future
(This third type is, purportedly, most common among those near death — as Shakespeare wrote: “They say, the tongues of dying men enforce attention, like deep harmony: where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain…”)
Another well-known taxonomy of dreams was produced by Macrobius, who divided the oneiric into five distinct species:
- Insomnium (nightmares)
- Visum (apparitions)
- Oraculum are dreams sent from the gods in which the form of a god (or holy entity) clearly appears and explicitly tells of something yet to happen
- Visio dreams are prophetic and offer glimpses of events that will come to pass, both significant and insignificant
- Somnium is a sort of enigma, containing deep truths that are clouded in strangeness and ambiguity, and these always require interpretation
Nightmare and apparition are trivial, and should never be given prophetic meaning, according to Macrobius; they are simply the results of disturbances to the senses or a troubled imagination. The final three dream-forms, however, hold truth that should always be heeded.
The classical Chinese also had their own systems regarding dreams, as well as their own arts of dream interpretation — their zhān mèng shù (dream accounting). One of their most common systems was the three-tier shān méng (dream mountain), as described in the Zhoulì: (Rites of Zhōu):
- Zhī mèng (weaving dreams) are dreams that are caused by external forces or circumstances
- Jī méng (excited dreams) are those bizarre, meta instances where one dreams within a dream
- Xiànzhì (limitless dreams) occur when the dreaming mind truly communes with or is visited by gods, demons, ghosts, or any sort of spirit (this can also be seen as when the dreamer’s spirit wanders and does the visiting, rather than being visited)
There are numerous other Chinese classification systems: shì mèng (dreamlike), wú mèng (dreamless), jiùmèng (old dream), shí mèng (consuming dream), and many more. Each of these systems — Chinese, Hellenistic, Roman, and the countless others I didn’t cover — has unique implications for metaphysics, spirituality, psychology, and even bodily health.
Now, I’m not convinced that any particular model of the oneiric realm is especially more valuable or true than others — or that any of them are accurate, for that matter. That being said, I do find it incredible how much effort humanity has poured into seeing dreams as gateways to fuller — or at least, different — communion with reality. I find it equally pathetic how we moderns have reduced that perfectly sane notion, to the extent that almost all of us view dreams as irrelevant trivialities or, at most, psychologically manifested impressions.
As I said, people were never like this until the modern age. We know of Egyptian and Babylonian dream guides that are thousands of years old, and there were countless ancient oneirocritical theorists who devoted their lives to studying the mysterious depths of the dream world, the contours of that nocturnal realm — Antiphon, Demetrios of Phaleron, Philochoros, Chrysippus, Artemidorus, and Posidonius (again), just to name a few. Furthermore, just consider the various paragons of wisdom and intellect who were open enough to take seriously the cosmic communiques their minds received at night — Marcus Aurelius was given medical advice from the gods, Cassius Dio was ordained as a historian, Plutarch followed the advice of a dream’s omen to not eat eggs, Galen was instructed by gods how to perform surgeries, and one and on.
Again, I’m skeptical that indexes of these sorts can truly contain the plentiful ways that the veil covering reality’s other side can be lifted for the dreaming mind. I’m content to believe, as Porphyry said, that this veil responds to attention and wanes thinner and thinner for attentive minds, freely offering previews of what it hides. (Of course, Porphyry also clearly said that this veil most often obstructed vision and was as opaque as “ivory”.)
Porphyry is surely correct that all truth is, in one sense or another, a mystery, and a mystery in the full sense of the Greek word mustḗrion — it is something enclosed in transcendence, hidden from normal vision by that sacred veil. In sleep, the soul is able to extricate itself, for a time, from the bodily limits of flesh and blood, and by that extrication is able to see — or at least glimpse — those hidden things, though never fully unveiled discernment. There’s ever and always some level of dimness, a dull mirror between our mind and the truth it yearns for.
Still though, despite Paul’s ever-present dark glass, I think it’s prudent to give attention to dreams as one is able; otherwise, how will you know what nocturnal visions are genuinely foreshadowing and which are nothing more than the momentary, frivolous spasms of imagination. The ancient bishop of Ptolemais, Synesius of Cyrene, was not alone in his affirmation that dreams could truly be predictive of the future, deliver critical information, and reveal knowledge of ourselves we were unaware of.
Perhaps then, I should give special preference to one of the aforementioned oneirocritical models; or rather, special preference for any model of dreams which contains a classification for direct communion with the divine — Posidonius’s third tier, Macrobius’s oraculum, the xiànzhì
I believe those are the most ideal and meaningful descriptions of dreams, and they challenge us to see dreaming as the potential to wander (temporarily) from the flesh and actually go into whole other realms and spheres, rather than as mere psychological figments or even communications from those other realms. More adventurously, maybe reality as we think we know it is, in fact, nothing but the way our spirit wanders in the waking world as opposed to the worlds of dreams.
