In the dream the string had broken
and I was trying to
pick out its beads among all others.

The large coral beads,
the beads of turquoise and ivory--
these were not mine.
Carved and ridged with color, burnished, weighty--
my hands passed over them without regret or pause.

The tiny ones,
of glass,
almost invisible against the white cotton bedspread--
these were mine.

The hole in the center
scarcely discernible as different from the bead itself,
the bead around it
scarcely discernible as different from the bed or floor or air--

with trembling fingers
I lifted them
into the jar my other hand cupped closely to one breast.

Not precious, merely glass, almost invisible.
How terrified I was at the thought of missing even one.

While I live, I thought, they are mine to care for.

Then wakened heavy with what I recognized at once
as an entirely warranted grief,

frantic for something plain and clear
and almost without substance,
that I myself had scattered, that I myself must find.

In Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2002

Epiphany or epiphaneia,  ἐπιφάνεια, means  "manifestation."  William Harrison argues that epiphany dreams among the Greeks and Romans consist of "the appearance to the dreamer of an authoritative personage who may be divine or represent a god, and this figure conveys instructions or information." (4)  Since I am interested in epiphany dreams,  I turn to the prolific ancient and contemporary scholars of Greco-Roman Antiquity. I start with Homer in 500 BCE to Late Antiquity in 600 C.E..  Greeks spoke of "seeing" their dreams  (Dodds, 105), and those they saw were often gods.

I risk a leap here,  connecting dream statues in Cambodia with dream statues at such a disparate time-space, but Greco-Roman dreaming  reflects on the mimesis of dreams, god-visits and their dream statues. Who can resist a quaff of its ambrosia αμβροσία?  (In time, we return to the devas and asuras churning the sea of milk for the amrit of immortality, and thus the Indic/Buddhist dream stories of Angkor Wat.) 

The Greek genealogy of sleep starts with Hypnos, son of Nyx (goddess of night) and Erebus (ruler of dark regions of underworld). Hypno's twin brother is Thanatos, god of death. Hypnos  fathers the Oneiroi:  Morpheus, Phobetor (known as Icelus to the gods) and Phantasos. These oneiroi by various accounts, are dark winged daemons, perhaps bats who fly through the gates of horn or ivory to unwary sleepers. 

Patricia Cox in Dreams of Late Antiquity  reflects on the recursive nature of dreams -- images inside images.  In order to understand later Greek analysis of dreams, you must know the Hellenic texts from which they are derived. Dreams inside dreams inside dreams.  

Through Homer's Odyssey we learn of  the ancient Greek dream territory, the demos oneiron that borders the land of the dead.  To get to this imaginal space you must first cross the Okeanos (Oceanus) river that encircles the "real."  This river (not unlike the Jordan), is the boundary of cosmic space. Beyond is a fantastical place, offers Brelick, the reversal of cosmic order that mirrors the other (p 298, cited in Cox, p 15).  This demos oneiron, a third space between the living and the dead,  is translated as both the "village" or the "people" of dreams.  As a territory,  the demos oneiron has two gates.  Homer sets them in Penelope's interpretation of her own dream that Odysseus was finally returning home. 

This distinction between  ivory and horn is commonly interpreted as a Greek play on words  in which the word for ivory is similar to deception and horn, fulfill. Later, Virgil will return to the gates of ivory and horn, distinguishing them as false and true more forcefully than Homer intended, and thus, according to Cox, laying the groundwork for the future of oneirokritica from Artemidorus forward. (Cox, p 26). 
 
For later Roman authors  - Ovid and Virgil - this insubstantial dream territory is even more chthonic and malevolent - a dark earthen underworld veiled in mist and fog, webbed with langorous phantasms.  Virgil sets the dreamworld with a great tree draped with "unsolid dreams" like bats beneath the foliage.  

Ultimately Cox chooses "people," and certainly, oneiroi have been characterized as sons of dark mothers - Nyx (night), or Gaia (earth) and black-winged themselves.  Thus, they are divine images, always disguised,  and as Penelope says, insubstantial, fleeting, that yet leave an emotional tangle. (See Kessel on this.)

In Ovid's Metamorphosis  myths entangle with dreams and we are struck by the ways god's appear as not-themselves.  Thus, through Morpheus (a form-being),  the god of dreams, son of Hypnos, a message is sent about the death of a loved one, in which truth and half-truth are blurred.  And now,  Morpheus = Morphine, the anti-dote to pain; he is the anti-king of the Matrix a computer-generated dream-space.  Fishburn-Morpheus is immortalized by his wry greeting to Neo, "welcome to the desert of the real," which Zizek applies to post-911 America.  This desert of the real is  populated by somnambulent half-persons living in a Meta-morph-psychosis. 

For a longer depiction of sleep, dreams, and its 'space of appearance',  we drop in on Iris, rainbow messenger of Hera-June (wisdom), as she visits Somnus, Roman god of sleep to "bid him send a dream of Ceyx drowned to break the tidings to Alcyone." Somnus sends out Morpheus.

This thoughtful blog on Ovid's Metamorphosis depicts and then reflects on Iris' visit to Somnus.  Iris is visual relief to the thanatos of sleep, and the half-truths of the dream. 

There are a plenitude of epiphany dreams.  In more famous cases,   Heroditus refers to the dreams of King Xerxes who was visited by a tall, fine-looking visitor who told him to reverse his policy and invade Greece.  Or consider Socrates' dream of a "fine and beautiful women" who told him which day he would be executed (Harrison 25).We have many questions here. First, were the plenitude of epiphanies "true"? (Did the gods appear?)   Or was there a conventional narrative? How does one determine the true epiphanies from conventional forms?  How can we detect the gate of ivory from the gate of horn?

  And finally we investigate the particular nature of statue-epiphanies.  In what forms do the gods appear? How do the Greeks and Romans distinguish between form and representation? How does one sacralize that which humans have made? How does it take on life? This is also a question posed about other religious relics- Buddha statues, Chinese relics -- and so we will move slowly East towards that other Orient. 

We will tarry on these questions in the next post. 

Brelich, "The Place of Dreams in the Religious World Concept of the Greeks," In The Dream and Human Society, 293-401, Eds G.E. Von Greunbaum and R. Caillois, Berkeley: U of California Press, 1966
Cox Miller, Patricia Dreams in Late Antiquity. Studies in the Imagination of a Culture, Princeton University Press, 1994
Crites, Stephen, Angels we have heard, In Religion as Story,  Ed James B. Wiggins, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, 137-47. 
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951 
Graf, F, Epiphany, in H. Cancit, and H, Schneider (eds) Brill's New Pauly, Encyclopedia of the Ancient World, Vol IV. Leiden: 1122-3, 2010 
Harris, William V. Dreams and Experience Classical Antiquity, Harvard University Press, 2009
Kessels, A.H.M, Studies on the Dreams in Greek Literature, Utrecht: HES Publication, 1978
Lane Fox, R. Pagans and Christians, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
Pfister, F. Epiphanie, in RE supp IV (1924) cols 277-323
Platt, Verity Facing the Gods. Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion,  Cambridge University Press,  

Dreamed the thong of my sandal broke.
Nothing to hold it to my foot.
How shall I walk?
                                    Barefoot?
The sharp stones, the dirt. I would
Hobble.
And--
Where was I going?
Where was I going I can’t
go now, unless hurting?
Where am I standing, if I’m
to stand still now?

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know gone long and far,
and yet he is the same 
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How have you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I have been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."

In A Part, 1980

Now, this person has just two places—this world and the other world. And there is a third, the place of dream where the two meet. Standing there in the place where the two meet, he sees both those places—this world and the other world.

—Brhadåranyaka Upanisad 4.3.9 

I first became interested in the Muslim dreamers through Amira Mittermaier's Dreams that Matter, a rich ethnography of visionary dreams in contemporary Egypt.  She offers a mixture of responses to this particular form of  visionary dreaming. Her first chapter begins with a dream interpreted on an Egyptian TV show. The caller referred to a moon nursing a boy and the shaykh on the show declared that the madhi had been born, a claim that took the show off the air.  (I wonder if, in 2011, that claim circulated again on the streets of Cairo.)  Mittermaier lets us know that dream work is complicated in Egypt and we should refrain from post-9/11 inclinations to a political-Islam-form of Orientalism.  She meets with Egyptian Freudians and rationalist reformers,  but lingers among Sufi devotees of several shaykhs who claim that their dreams arrive from the Prophet or elsewhere. As dream interpretation is common in Islam, this is not unusual, but Mittermaier's interlocutors mix-match religious & Westerner psychological approaches so that the dreaming self occupies a permeable body.

Mittermaier refers to her work as an "anthropology of the imagination" and she considers the imagination in this case from a Islamic perspective.  She relies on a Muslim genealogy of the imagination from medieval Sufi scholars al-Ghazali and  Ibn al-'Arabi in particular who consider the imagination (al-khayal) a realm between the spiritual and material, the visible and invisible, God and humans.

This intermediate space is often called the barzakh, literally,  isthmus.  It is most often considered the space in which those who have died wait for the resurrection, a sort of purgatory. But Sufi mystics such as Ibn 'Arabi have given it a less literal meaning.  For a lyrical depiction of the barzakh and dream life, I'd refer anyone to the Stefania Pandofo's phenomenal Moroccan ethnography,  Impasse of the Angels.  One can easily become lost in her labyrinthine language, but step out and return.  She counterposes Qur'anic scholar and dream interpreter Si Lhassan's theory of dreaming with Freud, Lacan and Ibn-'Arabi.  For Si Lhassan, says Pandolfo, dreaming is an "'exit', an otherworldly journey, an encounter, and of knowledge passed on, between the wandering ruh of the dreamer and other errant souls, of the living and the dead" (Pandolfo, 1997, 9).  

Egyptian Nobel Prize novelist Naguib Mahfouz traversed a kind of barzakh before his death in 2006.   When he was already suffering from blinding diabetes at 80,  he was stabbed in the neck in a religiously motivated assassination attempt. He recovered without full use of his right hand.  Stricken by this incident, he published over 300 of his dreams following a Muslim interest in dream life, and submitted  Dreams of Convalescence to a Cario magazine.  The dreams are short, usually one paragraph depictions of his nightly travels. These  were translated and published as The Dreams  (2004) and Dreams of Departure (2006).  Some dreams rehearse or reverse his experience, many are about women he had known, most occur in the quotidian of his life.  

What was Mahfouz's intent in publishing them?  Dream work is the only authentic form of divination in Islam.  Who is Mahfouz to his dreams and what intermediate space might we find there?  Mahfouz's Book Of Dreams was reviewed on NPR

What draws us to other's raw psychic material, dreams untapped and only slightly interpreted? There is a genre of this work, often of saints (Don Bosco has a book of dreams) and writers such as Georges Perec's La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams.   There is also a trend of the dreams of scientists that lead to discovery, but this does not constitute a corpus. 

On this dreams of "elsewhere" - I'll be taking up  Obeyeskere's The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience.  Obeyeskere, a Sri Lankan, and emeritus anthropologist at Princeton, uses psychoanalysis  to investigate the relationship between cultural and personal symbolism and religious experience.  In this latest work, which meanders over 400 pages, he considers nonrational visionary experience, comparing Buddha's enlightenment experience to Western Christian mystics and spiritualists.  What is this "dream ego" he offers up to us? How does Nietzsche's epistemology inflect his notions of nonrational knowing?  Why does this matter?

Create your own creation. 


First Myth: Arop arrive
 At the start of our earth before the Nothing is the Kwan (which means "nameless').  And Kwan is before the Nothing and now and when the Nothing returns.

But in the time between the Nothing and now, Kwan spit out a seed from their mouth. And it fell to the ground and grew into a living thing that could question.  Kwan, in whimsy, named it fut, meaning "Kwan's question."   

Now fut, being one, had no other one.  So Kwan spit out another seed  and from the ground grew a new fut.  The fut, being separate, fought.  So the second fut asked to return to the earth. Kwan struck the second down and the fut returned to the ground.

So the first fut asked Kwan, "What am I to do now that you have spit me?"  Kwan replied  "Two futs fight!"  And fut replied, "There is a way.  Give me spit and seed and place.  And I will seed my own ground. We fut will be of the same earth. And may the eyes of our dreams behold you, our Becomer and the Answer of our questions." Kwan, pleased at fut's words,  hollowed the belly of the fut as a hiding place.  It spit out its own seed. The second fut sprang from the mouth of the first fut.  

Kwan was satisfied. But the first fut asked Kwan, "Kwan, can it be good, but still sad?"  "Good yet sad?"  Fut replied, "Do not be mad with me, but how is next the seed to come, and the one after that? Our seeds are self sown.  What if you get bored with us (and we with ourselves) and go to another sky.  We will reproduce the same forever (for there was no death on the earth).  We have talked together and this is our story:  Give us both part of the seed and one of us the hiding place to hold it until it is ready.  Dig a channel so that the new fut will fall from our earth to the arms of the ground that first held us.  And may the eyes of our dreams behold you, our Becomer and the Answer of our questions." 

Kwan laughed. It was the First Laugh.  But they thought, "we have grown  from ourselves a creature that will not need us."  Kwan took the second fut and made a sac for half the seeds and a finger to plant them. In the first fut, Kwan hid the other seeds and dug  a channel towards earth.  But Kwan also hid a fear of the first fut in the heart of the second.  The fut joined and grew from themselves a great harvest.  And  they called the earth their Holder and named Kwan, their Becomer, and called themselves Arop, people arriving for the harvest.   But fear took root and the Arop soon called Kwan Protector and Judge.

Second Myth:  What We Have Forgotten
Now, there were beings in the sky, but they were kept by the dream of Kwan  ("the nameless").  They did not know anything but Kwan, so they knew everything at once. Kwan called them "the dreamed". There were three, suuk the seer, kultu the holder, and koan the asker, who woke first.  This is how it happened.

Now, Kwan told all the dreamed  that the yellow stones by the river of life were not to be taken.  As long as  the beings in the sky were dreaming, they  were fed by the river of life and did not crave the yellow stones.  But occasionally,  Kwan blinked, and for a short time the dreamed awakened. 

 Everyone knows that once you say "no" there will be one to say "yes."  And this one was suuk the seer.  Suuk was the first to awaken with a craving for the yellow stones.   So suuk went to the river and took one and sucked it.  The dream broke, and suuk  began to see.  She noticed her own form.  She thought, "We are Kwan's dream but not Kwan's form.  I do not want to be endlessly outside my own form.  In my own form, I know only one thing at a time, but this is good. I can suck and savor it."  She stayed by the river for a long time.  She grew lonely, and then thirsty, so she drank from the river of life.  Her form fell to the earth and  she rejoined her people for a while. 

She searched and found kultu the holder.  When Kwan blinked a second time, she held kultu with her and gave kultu a stone to suck.  Then kultu also became form.  They heard a voice and Kwan was over them.

"Why have you cut yourself off from me?" Kwan sighed, "your choice will be your sorrow."  But suuk replied, "I have known only you as me, and now I see myself and you.  I know times of dream and times of not dream.  Your dream will continue in me because you dreamed me, but now I must dream for myself."  And kultu said, "I am still new, but I am one and many.  This is an empty feeling. It s is good." 

Kwan sighed, "You have sucked of the stone of separation.  Surely sorrow will knock together like pebbles at your dancing, bruise you at your falling, stop you from your going, and interrupt your toil.  I will be to you something far up.  You will see my size and be afraid.  You will hear my sound  and hide.  You will curse me, you will cut me down.  You will follow any dream that calls to you.  And the ones who come after you will do this to you.  You will all suck the hardest stone, the stone of forgetting."

"But we are of the same dream, you and I.  We cannot separate completely. You will travel this time of separation hard, but it will bring you new understanding.  I will carry you in my dream until no rock will separate us, till all the seeds of our words are fertile and the soil is black.

"Now, turn to each other and look, because the light of the dream is failing.  It will be many generations before you will know that you came from the same place."

 Kwan left with a mighty silence.  And suuk called herself a moving thing.  She slept in the day and woke at night.  Kultu became grass  and held on to a small part of the dream.  When koan appeared on the earth they walked upright and did not know what had gone before.  That is why they are called "the one who asks."

for Victoria

I. Let’s say you are 60
And you don’t see how
You will stop working, teaching
As an adjunct in a state university.
And you used to make
Theater but there is no time.
Suppose you have a dream
In which there is a mountain
And companions,
You, your young self and your friend Andres
On a path up the mountain.
It’s stony and hard,
And midway, Andres offers you
shoes. Magic shoes, red,
(He owns a pair),
Because  it’s hard to hike at your age
(and you wonder why he tells 
you what you know).

Each day we touch the unformed
Lives of those the fairytales are meant for –
Rose Red, Cordelia, the prince who finds Rapunzel.
After the glass shoes fits, fairy godmother retreats
Til the firstborn needs a blessing. 
Every graduation, it repeats.

We are halfway down the mountain.
In my case, a plateau. Rest,
The tender grass tells us.
No, stay awake, wake up.
A perigree moon ices the wild trees as 
We hike like the magi till we reach
Not where we’re supposed to be, but down past to
The path I’m looking for
into the valley. An old white horse 
gallops up from the meadow.  
We arrive to
find the place (you may say) satisfactory.

II. Come in, she says.
Old enough to be our mother, at a
Wood house on mud path, as it rains
Velvet, wet
Through the bamboo.
We share bread and soup
And once the clouds move,
Prepare to leave as the dream instructs us.
Take something, she opens a closet full
Of closet things – tupperware, old files,
Flannel jacket, red shoes,
frog legs,  baseball cap, old black umbrella. 
That, I say.
She smiles. Belonged to
a Miss Poppins, once.
Open it.