Paper I submitted for my Atlantic University TP6000 Course – January 17, 2020.
After reading how earlier cultures handled the dreaming state, I was struck not by their archaic approach but by the consistency of understanding and closeness to what many of us believe today. The modern materialistic world dismisses the dreaming practices of “primitive” cultures, and there isn’t a respect for sharing dreams as there was in the past. However, many of their core characteristics remain intact. I will examine three aspects of dreams that have withstood the test of time include the divine nature of dreams, the symbology of dreams, and the notion that the dream state serves as a door or portal to other dimensions.
Anyone raised Christian is familiar with the famous passages of both the Old and New Testaments, where dreams play a significant role in how the story of salvation unfolds. In the Old Testament, Joseph rightly interprets Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows emerging from the Nile, followed by seven skinny cows as seven years of bountiful harvest followed by seven years of famine (Gn. 41:1-2). In the New Testament, dreams assure another Joseph that the Child carried by Mary was conceived by the Holy Spirit (Mt. 1:20), and later, warns him to take his young family to Egypt to prevent Herod from finding and killing Jesus (Mt. 2:13).
In nearly all of the cultures that Van de Castle examined, dreams have some connection with the divine. For example, he notes that a “close affinity existed between the Mesopotamian dream and the realm of the divine” (1994, p. 49). He adds that in ancient Egypt, Serapis was the “god” of dreams, and “several temples were devoted to his worship” (1994, p. 55). Dreams for the Greeks, as witnessed by Homer’s poems, “usually have a divine origin and are sent the dreamer” (1994, p. 60). Van de Castle also notes that Aristotle rejected the idea that dreams were of a divine source (1994, p. 64). Thousands of years later, this led the Catholic Church to distance itself from dreams once St. Thomas of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica predicated extensively on the philosophy of Aristotle emerged as a hugely influential document in the Catholic Counter-Reformation (1994 p. 80).
Long before the Swedish psychologist Carl Jung gave us his famous works on the “symbolic” langue of dreams, ancient cultures have understood this concept for thousands of years. Van de Castle describes tablets discovered in the ancient city of Nineveh, which include dreams of a 7th Century B.C. Assyrian King. He notes that the most “salient aspect” of the dream story presented on the tablets “is the sophistication it demonstrates concerning the symbolic and metaphorical nature of dream imagery” (1994, p. 49). He points out the ancient Chinese had seven categories of dreams contained in their T’ung Shu, where an orchard heavy with ripe fruit, for example, is said to be an indication that the dreamer will have numerous children and grandchildren (1994, p. 57).
In 1814 during the Romantic Era, with an emerging more accepting Western culture, Gotthilf von Schubert published an extensive treatise, The Symbolism of Dreams. Van de Castle notes that von Schubert found that dreams “could combine many images or concepts into one picture,” and he “likened the picture language…to hieroglyphics such as those used by the ancient Egyptians and Chinese” (1994, p. 89). The work was published nearly a century before Jung’s famous works on dreams, and as Van de Castle says, much of it was an “antecedent” to “concepts later developed by Freud or Jung” (1994, p. 89).
The final idea to remain intact, for the purposes of this paper, is that during the dream state, the soul or consciousness separates from the body and freely operates in a realm entirely outside of the earth plane. Ancient cultures did not view this state as imaginary or limited to just the human brain’s processing of memories, as many scientists posit today. Instead, they saw this as a separate dimension only accessible in a state without the physical body where they could encounter deceased loved-ones, “gods,” animals, angels, and even demons.
For example, according to Van de Castle, the Indians in a document written between 900 and 500 B.C., described the process where the soul “leaves the body during sleep and wanders to distant locations where it encounters the horses and roads, which exist externally.” Interestingly, the book adds a concern that if the dreaming person is awoken too soon, the soul may not have time to return to the body (1994, p. 59-60).
In today’s terms, a soul or spirit’s departure from the body is known as an Out of Body Experiences or OBE’s, which don’t necessarily have to occur in a dream state. In describing the “imagination” or “dream state,’ a YouTube video by Magenta Pixie says that in one way, it’s like a portal or “gateway within.” It’s a place where a person can step through and transport themselves to “other realms” (Magenta Pixie, 1996).
There is an old expression that the more things change, the more they stay the same. After reviewing this week’s reading assignments, the core and most important elements of dreams, including an access to the divine, their symbology, and portal to other dimensions, is as relevant today as it was for the Ancient Mesopotamians. Even all the “groundbreaking” work done by the great psychologists over the past century or so is simply a rehashing of old material handed down to us by our ancestors. Quoting Robert White, Van de Castle writes: “Freud, Jung, and others were not so much innovators as restorers, since they were reassigning to dreams and dream-readings the importance that they had held in antiquity” (1994, p. 69).
Jeremy Taylor believes that the reason we are still dreaming and analyzing this fertile state the same way as our ancestors did is because our evolution as individuals and as a species is not yet compete. “One of the more dramatic proofs of this ongoing evolution process is the continuing archetypal drama of our dream lives,” Taylor adds (2009, p. 39). So, as we undertake our own dream analysis and dream group as part of this course, we can be assured that we are confidently plowing the same ground as our ancestors, knowing that the material will provide us with similar invaluable information about ourselves and our journey.
References
Magenta Pixie. (2016, April 26). Portal to source, non-physical relationships (twin flame, soul mate, extra terrestrial) [Video]. Megentapixie.com. https://youtu.be/MA8CG1Qjb5E
Taylor, J. (2009). The wisdom of your dreams. New York, NY: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Van de Castle, R. (1994). Our dreaming mind. New York NY: Ballantine Books.