eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783088904 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE ANCIENT WORLD
Skepticism about dream interpretation and the divinatory power of dreams is hardly a modern innovation, although few ancients were as outspokenly contemptuous as Diogenes the Cynic in the fourth century bce. He is said to have remarked that when he saw dream interpreters, prophets and those who attend to them, he thought there was nothing more foolish than man (Diogenes Laertius 6.24), and is said to have told those who got worked up about their dreams that they did not pay attention to what they did while awake but were very curious about what they imagined while asleep (6.43). Since many contemporary academics share Diogenes's skepticism (and perhaps his contempt), it may be difficult today to grasp just how seriously dreams could be taken in antiquity. Countless devotees of Asclepius followed the god's dream prescriptions to cure their maladies; a dream led Galen's father to direct his son to study medicine; and several authors, including Pliny the elder, Cassius Dio, Artemidorus and Synesius, were inspired to write by dreams. And one dream may have played an important part in a pivotal moment of ancient history.
It would be overdramatic to claim that Constantine's dream before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, October 28, 312, was responsible for his conversion to Christianity and thus for the eventual establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of the Roman empire. Nevertheless, if Constantine really did have this dream, it surely did contribute to his belief in the power of the Christian god and might be the most consequential dream in Western history. Even if one regards the dream as a fiction, however, it attests to the pervasive ancient belief in godsent dreams that foretell momentous events. Constantine's is an example of a type that goes back to Homer: dreams that promise victory to generals. Constantine may not have had this dream but decided to encourage his troops before the battle by declaring that he had (W. V. Harris 2005a).
Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, who wrote his Life of Constantine toward the end of his own life (d. 339), asserted that Constantine had told him about a vision and dream long after their occurrence and had confirmed his account with an oath (1.28). In a campaign before crossing the Alps in 312 to battle Maxentius for control of the western half of the Roman Empire, Constantine and his soldiers saw, about noon, over the sun, a trophy of the cross made out of light and an attached inscription, "Conquer by this." At a loss what the vision might mean, Constantine pondered on it until night came upon him: "Then, the Christ of God with the sign which had appeared in the sky was seen by him while he was sleeping and exhorted him to make a likeness of the sign which had been seen in the sky and to use it as a safeguard against the attacks of enemies" (1.29–30). After waking, Constantine told the dream to his friends and told workers in gold and costly stones how to reproduce the sign. Constantine also decided to worship no god other than the one who had appeared in it and summoned those initiated in his words. He asked who the god was and what the sign meant, and the answers led Constantine to study the Christian scriptures and to worship God. Strengthened by good hopes in Him, Constantine began his campaign against Maxentius, which culminated in the victory at the Milvian Bridge. Consequently, the fulfillment of a dream promising victory may have given Constantine greater faith in the might of the god of the Christians. In any event, despite all of the controversy surrounding Constantine's vision, dream and conversion, it is clear that after 312 he took numerous steps to support Christianity.
Messenger Dreams
Although unfamiliar to many people today, Constantine's dream is an example of a distinctive type widely attested in all periods of Greco-Roman antiquity. The most prominent type in Homer, it is recognized in classifications and found in philosophy, history, dedicatory inscriptions and medical texts as well as in literature. In this type of dream, to put it as simply as possible, someone appears to the dreamer and delivers a message usually relating to the future. In his classification in the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (1.3.8), Macrobius calls this type of dream an "oracle" and spells out the main relations to the future: "and it is an oracle when in dreams a parent, another holy or venerable person, a priest, or even a god announces openly what will or will not occur or what ought to be done or avoided." Ordinarily in messenger dreams nothing happens but the delivery of the message. Sometimes the messenger stands by or over the dreamer, or the dreamer converses with the messenger, but that is the extent of the action. Ordinarily the message is clear: it requires no interpretation. I will call this type of dream a "messenger dream."
Trying to find a completely satisfactory designation for "messenger dreams" is difficult because they take different forms. "Chrematistical dream" or "oracular dream," although closer to the terminology of Artemidorus and Macrobius and indicative of the ancient belief that the dream is a form of divination, obscures the presence of a figure delivering a message. Oppenheim's (1956) popular "message dream" is slightly misleading, since allegorical dreams are also usually interpreted as "messages." Hundt's (1935) influential Außentraum (external dream) and Schwabl's (1983) Epiphanietraum (epiphany dream) point to the belief that the dream originates outside of the dreamer but do not refer to the message. "Messenger dream" is particularly appropriate for Homer. Destructive dream announces to Agamemnon that he is a messenger from Zeus (Iliad 2.26), and there are similarities between the divine messengers, Iris and Hermes, and dreams. But when the dream figure, for example someone who has died, delivers its own message, "messenger dream" misleadingly implies that someone has sent the messenger.
Moreover, sometimes one cannot be sure whether a "messenger dream" is, from a modern point of view, a dream at all, that is, a mental activity occurring in sleep. After Priam ransoms Hector's body from Achilles, Hermes scares the sleeping Priam into returning immediately to Troy (Iliad 24.677–89). Scholars disagree whether Priam is dreaming. The famous scene in which the Muses appear to Hesiod in Theogony 22–34 does not appear to occur in a dream, although it was sometimes taken that way later in antiquity. The classification of dreams by the late-antique author Calcidius explicitly includes the "spectaculum," a waking messenger dream (see p. 66, n. 164). As far as divination is concerned, the messenger and the message are more important than whether the recipient is dreaming or awake. The epiphany — the real, external presence of divinity — makes the psychological state a secondary matter. The messenger dream is an event, not a subjective experience.
The messenger dream is by no means restricted to Greco-Roman antiquity. Several have been recorded in the ancient Near East, including two from Sumer ca. 2450 and ca. 2125 bce and another from Egypt at the end of the fifteenth century bce. Several appear in the Old and New Testaments (e.g., Gen. 31:24, 46:2–4; Matt. 1:20–3, 2:13; Acts 16:9). And they did not disappear with antiquity. Many of what Cardano calls "idola" ("images" or "appearances") are messenger dreams; he recounts 31 examples (1562, 4.2: pp. 231–7), of which four (nos. 16, 21, 25, 28) are contemporary or relatively recent. Cardano also recounts a messenger dream of his own (4.4: no. 9). Scherner (1861, 341) reported that a good friend dreamed that a woman came to his door and told him that his father was very ill, had a stabbing pain on his left side and would die. Another messenger dream was reported by someone who, unlike Scherner, denied that dreams could predict the future — Sigmund Freud. A father, who has fallen asleep near the room in which the body of his dead child is surrounded by candles, dreams that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully, 'Father, don't you see that I am burning?'" (Freud 1900b, 330; emphasis in original). This message explicitly concerns the present — the candles had fallen, and the corpse was burning — but implicitly contains the command to put out the fire, and the dream includes a detail that occurs in many ancient messenger dreams — the dream figure stands over the dreamer. Finally, people continue to dream today that, like Patroklos's ghost (Iliad 23.69–92), the dead deliver messages; Barrett (1992) found that 23 percent of the 77 dreams in her study were "advice dreams."
Messenger dreams may appear to be no more than literary fabrications because of their stylized simplicity (Oppenheim 1956, 185; Kessels 1978, 2; Bremmer 1983, 19; Latacz 1994, 205). Surely on occasion people did fabricate them. When discussing the "talk," Menander Rhetor (Russell and Wilson 1981, 116) advises the speaker to invent dreams and gives an example of Hermes standing beside the dreamer and bidding him pronounce his subject the best of governors. In the most famous messenger dreams from the Iliad and the Odyssey, the setting is very simple — wherever the dreamer is sleeping — and nothing extraordinary happens. One might say that messenger dreams seem too mundane and coherent to be real. If one came upon them without any indication that they were dreams, one would not be able to distinguish them from normal speeches that predict the future, give an order or offer comfort. In fact, as we have seen, scholars disagree whether Hermes's speech to Priam does occur in a dream.
Although Homer composed dreams for poetic purposes and the prestige of the Iliad and the Odyssey influenced later representations of dreams, especially in the epic, one need not dismiss Homeric and other messenger dreams as fictions that reveal little about ancient dreaming. Sleep studies may help dispel some of the skepticism arising from unfamiliarity. To judge from reports of subjects awakened during REM sleep, we dream much more frequently — perhaps four times a night — than most of us ever realize, and many of our dreams are mundane. We tend to remember the wild, improbable ones, which are more likely to awaken and impress us (Foulkes 1999, 28–31; Domhoff 2003, 19; 2005, 2007). Moreover, people have to rely on after-the-fact reports to study even their own dreams, and it is difficult not to impose narrative consistency as one recounts the images and feelings. When subjects in sleep laboratories recall dreams in the morning, their second reports are typically more organized than the initial ones given after awakenings from REM sleep; details not relevant to the narrative tend to disappear (Strauch and Meier 1996, 67–73). Furthermore, one must remember that Homer had not been instructed by Freud to refrain from judging what is important about a dream and to relate every one of its particulars. The message is of predominant importance to Homer, and he focuses on it. His messenger dreams might omit details irrelevant to the message, but that does not mean that he and his contemporaries did not have dreams in which figures spoke to them about the future.
A comparison with the person who, as far as we know, narrated his dreams more extensively — and perhaps more reliably — than anyone in antiquity is instructive. In the Sacred Discourses, the chronically ill, second-century CE orator Publius Aelius Aristides relates over one hundred dreams. Many of them are as wild, incoherent and improbable as one could wish — evidence that they were dreamed and not fabricated in the eyes of some scholars. But there are a number of messenger dreams which, if not as stylized as Homer's, stay close to the Homeric pattern.
In fact, Aristides decided to keep a record of his dreams because Asclepius commanded him to do so — presumably in a messenger dream: "Right away from the beginning the god ordered me to copy out my dreams. And this was the first of his commands" (47.2). Although Aristides does refer to the god's commands in nonmessenger dreams, it is likely that Asclepius did voice this one because Aristides was not yet in the habit of taking all of his dreams as messages from the god, whether or not he appeared in them. For the same reason, when at the warm springs near Smyrna around December 144 (Behr 1968, 25), apparently the same time as the former dream, Aristides began to receive dream revelations from Asclepius, the command to go forth without shoes was probably a messenger dream (48.7).
A skeptic might argue that these are not messenger dreams, since Aristides does not explicitly mention the appearance of Asclepius. But figures definitely appear in other dreams. I will give two examples. Rhosander, a philosopher and fellow devotee of Asclepius, came from a lecture held by another philosopher and stood before Aristides's bed, inspired and serious. Rhosander spoke of the improvement in Aristides's speeches and concluded that he had surpassed Demosthenes in honor so that not even philosophers would look down on him (50.19). Although Rhosander's remarks do not relate explicitly to the future, his position at Aristides's bedside is a common feature of messenger dreams, and Aristides takes the remark as an exhortation. His ambition is kindled, and he feels that anything he might accomplish in speaking would be less than he should.
The other messenger dream is more complicated.
He was at the same time Asclepius, and Apollo, both the Clarian and he who is called the Callitecnus in Pergamum and whose is the first of the three temples. Standing before my bed in this form, when he had extended his fingers and calculated the time, he said, "You have ten years from me and three from Sarapis," and at the same time the three and the ten appeared by the position of the fingers as seventeen. He said that "this was not a dream, but a waking state," and that I would also know it. And at the same time he commanded that I go down to the river, which flows before the city, and bathe. He said that a young boy would lead the way. And he pointed out the boy. (1981, 2.295 (48.18))
Once again the figure stands before the dreamer's bed, but this time there are two odd details of the sort usually absent from messenger dreams. First, his figure is a composite of Asclepius and his father, Apollo, both as the god of the important oracle near Colophon and as the father of the beautiful child ("Callitecnus"), namely Asclepius. Second, the confusion of the numbers can be explained — both 13 and 17 can be indicated by three fingers of one hand and two of the other — but the confusion itself is one of those oddities that most of us experience in dreams (Behr 1968, 71–2). Despite the bizarreness, the message itself is straightforward: bathe in the river. Aristides wishes that he could record all of the details of this dream. If other writers had been as interested in details, I suspect that most messenger dreams would not seem so stylized. But the importance of the message itself probably led other dreamers to neglect other aspects of their dreams.
Homeric Messenger Dreams
Any account of Homer's conception of dreams must begin by acknowledging that nothing certain is known about him. Although almost everyone in antiquity attributed the Iliad and the Odyssey to him, many modern scholars follow the ancient "separators" in positing different authors for each epic. General acceptance of Milman Parry's thesis (1928; 1971, 1–190) that the epics come at the end of a long tradition of oral composition and transmission has tempered the excesses of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century "analysts," who pruned away various parts of each epic in order to reveal their original form. Nevertheless, there appears to be, at present, a consensus that Iliad 10 is a post-Homeric addition (Danek 1988), and there is still controversy about the end of the Odyssey (Russo, Fernandez-Galiano and Heubeck 1995, 342–5), as well as the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9 (Griffin 1995, 51–3). Furthermore, critics since the third century BCE have suspected that numerous shorter passages are post- Homeric interpolations.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800"
by .
Copyright © 2019 G. W. Pigman III.
Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction The Period of the Admonitory Dream, 1,
Chapter One The Ancient World, 15,
Messenger Dreams, 16,
Homeric Messenger Dreams, 21,
Journeys of the Soul, 28,
Psychology and Allegory to the Late Fifth Century, 32,
Dream Interpretation and Medicine, 36,
Plato, Wish Fulfillment and the Soul, 45,
Aristotle: Naturalism and Illusion, 48,
Epicurean and Ciceronian Skepticism: Pursuits of the Day, 54,
Systems of Classification, 58,
Imagination and Memory in Late Antiquity, 67,
Character, Morality, Wet Dreams and Nocturnal Emissions, 74,
The Purpose of Dreams, 84,
Chapter Two The Middle Ages, 85,
Demonic Dreams, 86,
Classifications: Gregory I and Beyond, 92,
Aristotle Arabicus: The Symbolizing Imagination, 103,
The Synthesis of Albertus Magnus, 113,
Witchcraft: Transvection and Incubi, 127,
Chapter Three The Early Modern Period, 137,
Early Modern Aristotelianism, 137,
Wolff's Innovations, 168,
The Embarrassment of Supernatural Dreams, 179,
Beyond Admonition: "From Particular Facts to General Laws", 188,
Epilogue Freud and De Sanctis, 205,
Freud: The Essential Nature of the Dream, 208,
De Sanctis: Methods, Facts and Theory, 224,
Bibliography, 237,
Index, 277,
What People are Saying About This
“This shining example of Geistesgeschichte is a treasury of all the conceptions of dreams coming down to us from Antiquity to the end of the Enlightenment. It supersedes a whole library on the topic and will be an indispensable resource for further cultural dream studies.”
—Stefan Goldmann, Senior Research Fellow, Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany