Internal Vs External Sources for Dreams

Do dreams come from within the person or do they come from some place outside of the person? There are many different ways to answer this question, either inside, outside, or a combination of the two. For ancient Near East peoples, some of the Greeks, and early Muslims the answer is a combination of the two. For Aristotle and Freud the answer is that dreams come from inside the person. Despite different causes for dreams, both camps arrive at similar conclusions about the nature of dreams and some of their meanings.

In the ancient Near East dreams were said to be sealed baskets of legal contracts from the gods, but it is clear that not every dream was something from the gods because the emphasis placed on reoccurring dreams. It was custom of the day to report reoccurring dreams to priest or kings because they were likely to be significant. Here it is evident that people like priest and kings were better able to interpret dreams and it is likely they were more apt to have more significant dreams. Dreams were of a high importance to ancient Near East peoples as one can tell from the pressure one may of felt to relay a potentially significant dream to the priest.

Kings and priest were much more likely to have significant dreams than regular people. This, in and of itself, is evidence that significant dreams came from outside the person, mainly from the Gods. Significant dreams come from outside the body and as such are somewhat mysterious and need special interpretation. In the ancient Near East there was much need and appreciation for dream interpreters. Dreams interpreters worked off of puns, they would rearrange the letters in a word to come up with a new word, or they would relate words to rhyming words or a word with a similar root, etc. It was rare that a dream meant what it appeared to mean and often dreams would have nearly the opposite meaning of what a face value reading would of resulted in. It is also said that figuring out the meaning of a dream may there by nullify the dream, an idea that echoes in Freudian thought.

For ancient Hebrews dreams had a similar function but the two most famous examples of dream interprets in the Hebrew Bible, Joseph and Daniel, were both working in foreign countries. Other keys from the text may lead one to believe that dream interpretation was natural and easy among the Hebrews. For example Joseph’s brothers did not have any trouble interpreting Joseph’s dream of the sheaves. Other themes from the ancient Near East are also present in the Joseph story such as Pharaoh having two dreams that were a message for the same thing (the wheat and the cows). By the time of the prophet Isaiah there seems to have been some controversy over people lying about their dreams and then dream interpretation became less popular.

Ancient Greek writers like Artemidorus and Aristotle because they wrote specifically about dreams, and their writings aren’t in the context of a larger story so they say things more directly about dreams. For Artemidorus dreams can either come from the self or come from the gods. Dreams that came from within were generally considered to be gibberish and were called enhypnia while dreams from the gods were called oneiroi. Oneiroi were subdivided into two types; those that can be directly interpreted and are plainly obvious, theorematikoi, and those that need interpretation, allegorikoi. To interpret the allegorikoi Artemidorus would of used word play, the principle of opposites, and visual free association, and numerology.

Another important issue Artemidorus took up was that different dreams mean different things to different people. Artemidorus looked at the person that was having the dream to try to figure out what that dream meant. An identical dream from a priestess and the dream of a prostitute would of meant something different. Artemidorus’ notion that not only the dream but the dreamer mattered echoes later in Freudian theory.

Another thing that makes Artemidorus’ theories different from the ancient Near Eastern traditions is that to Artemidorus a dream being reoccurring did not make it special. In fact he says that a reoccurring dream will mean different things at different times and gives the example of somebody that dreams they lost their nose. The first dream means the dreamers perfume business will go under, the second dreams means that he will lose face and be degraded.

Unlike Artemidorus or the peoples of the ancient Near East, Aristotle believed that dreams arose internally. The Aristotelian soul was made up of perception, judgment, and imagination. Perception accounted for sensory input, judgment was able to make rational decisions based on that input, and imagination was part of the mind that made wild associations and was a source of creativity and spontaneity. When one falls asleep one’s judgment becomes dormant and the perceptions fade. While faded the perceptions do not disappear and also there are some residue perceptions still in the organs that will take some time to dissipate. While sleeping, the imagination is dominant part of the brain that is still awake. It uses the residue of the perceptions as well as some random memories to make dreams. The value of dreams in the Aristotelian system is that dreams allow you to explore a part of your mind that you usually don’t have much access to.

For medieval Muslims dreams played a huge role in their religious practice. John C. Lamoreaux argues that dreams played a central role in the early Islamic communities by way of the charisma of early dream interpreter. And now dreams exist in many strings of Islamic scholarship and culture such as Sufism, high culture, sharia, and the non-Muslim Islamicate. Puns play a large role in Islamic dream interpretation as it does in Arab poetry. Also popular in the Islamic world are dream manuals like the kind Artemidorus made. These dream manuals.

For Freud dreams are internal wish fulfillment. Somewhat similar to Aristotle’s imagination Freud believes that the mind can be divided into conscious and unconscious parts. The unconscious part of our brains is where a lot of our thoughts actually happen but a lot of these thoughts would be unacceptable to our conscious mind because they are crass, sexual, and violent. It is when we sleep that our unconscious mind takes control; Freud uses the analogy of an invading army. Our mind is taken over by the unconscious and things do not work the same as they do when we are asleep. The unconscious, again like Aristotle’s imagination, makes wild and free associations between things observed in waking life. Because of these wild associations often what we see in our dream does not really mean what it seems to mean, a theme that is echoed in all the traditions mentioned so far.

Many of the things we see in our dreams are symbolic of other things, but it is a hard to know exactly what they are symbolic of because of the nature of the unconscious. A vision seen in a dream may be representative of something it is very different from or it may even be it’s direct opposite. To Freud everything in our dreams matters and has great significance. There is nothing in our dreams that does not come from inside of us and there is nothing in our dreams that does not have some kind of greater meaning. In the Freudian system, like the ancient Near Eastern traditions, once you figure out why a symbol is in your dream you gain control over it and it will not bother you any more, provided of course you found the real cause and not an imaginary one.

This idea of conquering our dreams may be at the root of all of these traditions but nonetheless there are similarities in these theories even if they don’t agree on where dreams come from. The notion that dream images are representative of something other than what they are appears in all these ideas about dreaming and beyond that one may wonder if it is not self evident and intuitive that our dreams are rarely to be taken at face value.

Dreams in the Sefer Hasidim - an incomplete thought

Monford Harris explores how the Ashkenaz Pietists viewed dreams in his article “Dreams in the Sefer Hasidim”. Harris begins by briefly exploring Rabbi Moses ben Jacob of Coucy’s halachic work the “SeMag”. Although that work primarily deals with non-dream issues it does eventually deal with dreams. The one question that R. Jacob was never able to satisfactorily answer is why dreams flow from the mouth from the interpreter and why is it said that people should only ask for dream interpretation from somebody that will be favorable to the dreamer.

The answer that R. Jacob found was that some people are predestined, by luck, to be dream interpreters and it is only those predestined people that the Berakhoth 55b refers to and the reason you should only go to a dream interpreter that’s likely to be favorable to you is that the dream interpreter has an angel on either side of him and if he says a good interpretation the good angel will take the good interpretation and make it so and the same is true for the bad interpretation.

The thirteenth century Ashkenaz Pietiest also addressed the issue of dream interpretation as well as other aspects of dreams and visions in the Sefer Hasidim. For the Pietiest there was a distintion between dreams and visions. Visions were seen while awake and dreams were seen while asleep. Dreams were always talked about in terms of “seeing” the dream.

The answer the Pietiest find to what Berakhoth 55b means is different from what R. Jacob found. The Pietiest said that nothing happens to a man that doesn’t first reveal itself in a dream, however nobody is pious enough to receive direct revelation so the symbols in our dreams are vague an allegorical. Also the dreams of regular people intermingle with the words of demons, the body and desires also influences dreams, so the interpretation of dreams is very important to try to figure out the meaning of dreams. Therefore not all dreams about God are said to be purely prophetic or angelic because if somebody spends their days being pious its only natural that they will have a dream about God that comes from their desire and not from angels.

This dichotomy of internal verses external dreams is important in the Sefer Hasidim for figuring out the meaning and source of a dream. Internal dreams, those influenced by the body, desire, and the mind, will be of things that person has been thinking about recently. If you dream about something that’s been on your mind lately then it is safe to assume that this dream is an internal dream without much meaning.

Dreams are not ruled by reason, it is said that in Psalms 16:7 that at night during a dream the reins instruct, therefore a man’s reason is not turned on during dreaming. Most though, be they good, bad, true, or false are not intended. They just kind of happen. The chaotic thoughts we have while dreaming have their own momentum and sometimes dreams are random and akin to when somebody throws a ball and it rolls where you didn’t expect it to roll.

Besides reason, our sense of self is distorted in dreams as is evident by the fact that people can do lewd thing in our dreams and not feel embarrassment. However a pious person can maintain their sense of embarrassment in dreams.

External dreams are usually about thing that are alien to the dreamer. External dreams can have three sources: angels, demons, and the ba’al halom. External dreams are recognizable as external because they will contain themes, images, teachings, etc that are completely alien or beyond the capabilities of the dreamer.

Dreams from demons are said to happen when one is not quite asleep, but only kind of asleep. The demon whispers into your ear and influences what you think. The demon does now, however, control you or directly give you a bad dream. Another external figure that gives dreams is the ba’al halom, Harris brings up scholarship about but remains neutrual about whether or not ba’al halmom is a crossover a Babylonian god that made into the Babylonian Talmud. To me it seems likely.

Harris comments that Gershon Scholem and himself agree that the Sefer Hasidim has many original ideas that it proposes, such as the idea of dream images having their own momentum, but it never develops the ideas much. The criticism is that it says what it says and then moves on even though the reader may want more about a certain insight.

Harris comments that the he thinks one of the most unique and interesting approaches to dreams the Sefer Hasidim offers is its interpretation of Berakhoth 55b. How is it that dreams flow from the mouth of the interpreter and yet different people can find different interpretations to dreams? Unlike R. Jacob the Pietist don’t postulate that some people are predestined to be dream interpreters and that their interpretations will be carried out by angels. The Pietist propose that like the Torah, dreams can interpreted multiple ways and multiple times, as long as the interpretation holds true to the contents of the dream, without all of their meaning being extracted.

Dreams and scripture are truly multilevel and need to be interpreted in terms of Oral Torah and Torah. Harris makes the claim that because both scripture and dreams are divinely inspired and flow from the mouth of the interpreter that dreams are a kind of scripture (63). However I don’t think he provides enough evidence to make his case convincing because I could imagine somebody arguing that dreams and scripture are similar but not the same thing.

Because of the emphasis placed on dream interpretation and the multilevel meaning of dreams, Harris argues that it would be logical to assume that dream interpretation and the meaning of symbols would of played a large part in lives of Pietist but Harris says that the Sefer Hasidim is surprisingly quiet on cases of dream interpretation and has very few symbols in it except for an ark representing death. Harris argues that a reason for this may be that the Pietist would have been so steeped in Biblical and Talmudic lure and associations that symbolic interpretations would of been clear and uncomplicated.

So then whose dreams need to be interpreted? Harris says the the only two real examples of somebody going to get their dreams interpreted in the Sefer Hasidim is when gentiles go to get their dreams interpreted. Harris argues that while this may seem unusual it fits in surprisingly well the Biblical precedents of Joseph and Daniel who were both strangers in a foreign land interpreting the dreams on foreigners.

To “interpret” a dream to the Pietist meant more than to simply give an analytical reading of the dream. The interpretation of dreams was said to have a therapeutic effect on the dreamer. Similar to ancient Near Eastern ideas about dreams the Pietiest thought dreams came with secret messages that needed to be decoded and that decoding the dream was very important. For the Pietist decoding a dream was even more important than whether the dream was true or not. Sometimes somebody is shown a harsh dream so that he may investigate his conduct (69). If somebody receives such a dream fasting may be done in the stead of animal sacrifice. Figuring a dream out or “solving it” cancels out any bad effects the dream has.

Harris relies heavily on a Hebrew copy of the Sefer Hasidim and also draws in some modern work took. He cited Leo Oppenheim’s “The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East” and argues that there are enough parallels between thirteenth century German Jewish ideas about dreams and ancient Near Eastern ideas to make the comparison valuable.

The rest of this paper has been lost and for the time being I'm not terribly interested in going out of my way to either find the finished version of this paper or try to redo it. Although one day I do hope to revisit this subject.

Vision and Language in Dreams

Dreams consist of both visual images and languages and language. One tool used by Near Eastern Writers, ancient Greek, writers, medieval Muslims writers, and Freud was to examine what the possible meanings of dream images were, but another tool known to all of these groups would of been to specifically look for puns and metaphors in the dreams. Another interpretation used was that some

dreams meant their exact opposite, in fact Freud goes so far as to cite examples of how ancient languages often used the same root word for two opposite things. And lastly another tool would have been to try to focus on the visual images of a dream, an approached used by Artemidorus and favored by Aristotle.

The idea that dreams contain puns wherein the words used for images one sees in a dream can be studied and inferences can be made about what those puns mean is a practice found in all of the aforementioned oneirocritic traditions. In the ancient Near East there was an idea that dreams were a kind of secret legal contract between humans and the gods, but because of their secret nature one needed to visit a powerful dream interpreter to find out what one’s dream meant because they were not always self evident. For example there’s a point in the Epic Gilgamesh when Ea warns Utnapishtim to “spurn property” which we later learn sounds very similar to and actually means “construct boat”. Another example from the same story is when Ea tells Utnapishtim that she dreamt that the people would receive an abundance of wheat cakes, which Utnapishtim takes as meaning that there will be a heavy dark storm, notice how in this last example the interpretation of the dream not only plays off of puns in the dream but the ultimate meaning is actually counterintuitive and opposite of what it originally said. The notion of the polarity of dreams and their meanings is another important theme of dream interpretation related to visual input verses the language used in dreams. A link between ancient Near East and Freudian interpretation of dreams can be made because it was said that the very act of interpreting a dream and “solving” its word mysteries could dissolve its harmful consequence, a notion that Freud would later support fully albeit for different reasons.

Puns of this kind as well as the polarity of dreams and their meanings can be both in all levels of dream literature of the Jews. The two most prominent figures related to dreams in the Hebrew Bible are Joseph and Daniel both of whom became foreigners in other lands. The use of word play and puns is quite evident when one looks at Joseph’s interpretations of the cupbearer, the baker, and the Pharaoh’s dreams. In the cupbearer’s dream grapes can be equated to people, budded can also mean prosperity so Joseph interprets his dream as meaning that soon he will be exonerated. However the baker’s dream is more grim because the word used for food in the basket on his head is a word that’s normally used to talk about a carcass left for birds to eat, and the mention of white bread is equated to Pharaoh’s heated anger, so the dreams ultimate means that the baker will receive a harsh punishment. Joseph uses similar means to interpret Pharaoh’s dream, reckoning abundance to seven years.

Another issue that would of been important to ancient Near Eastern people, Biblical era Hebrews, and Freud alike would of been the issue of reoccurring dreams. For the Near Eastern and Biblical people the repeat of a dream obviously meant that it was of some significance because it was being sent to the person for another go at interpretation. For Freud it would of meant that the dream represented something unresolved in the unconscious and one needed to find the meaning in it.

Ancient Greeks also had many similar ideas on oneirocritic traditions. An example of somebody with similar ideas on dream interpretation is Artemidorus. Artemidorus had two practices related to the visualization of dreams that were not as popular in Near Eastern culture but has Freudian echoes. Artemidorus made a case for dream images as being symbolic and similar to something else, for example he likens a crucifix to a sailing mast when interpreting a sailor’s dream. Notice too that that Artemidorus takes into consideration details about the person interpreting a dream, ancient Near Easterners would of done this too but mainly in the context of whether that person was pious and ritually clean enough to receive dreams, not so much relating their particular life circumstances, such as being a sailor, as being a critical part of the person’s dream interpretation. This notion that different people’s dreams can mean different things gave Artemidorus much more leeway when interpreting dreams images and puns.

Another ancient Greek interested in dreams was Aristotle, although Aristotle did not necessarily believe that one could gain any daemonic knowledge from dreams, he believed they were value to interpret because they could put one in touch with their imagination and give one introspective knowledge about one’s self. For Aristotle the important thing in dreams would have been apparitions and the conversations one has with them. Because the imagination is the part of one’s mind that can make radical associations and isn’t limited by things like reason and memory it can the source of some unique knowledge. Because the nature of imagination the notion that dream images are representative of something else similar would not of been lost on Aristotle.

Aristotle’s imagination is somewhat similar to Freud’s unconscious because it makes unusual associations, isn’t hampered by reason, and is the dominant force at work in one’s dreams. There too is a need for an interpreter in the Aristotelian system of dreams and a dream interpreter is said to be in touch with and have great understanding of the imagination. The interpreter would of looked at things such as the images and conversations in the dreams and then try to figure out what other things those images are related to. As a sort of proof for his methods Aristotle cited the occurrence of how in dreams you will see a figure in a distance and it will look one way, perhaps like a horse, and when you get closer to it will look another way, perhaps like a man. So the idea goes that your imagination made these kinds of associations but it isn’t until you’re asleep that your imagination, working off of the residue of your senses, plays with these associations.

Medieval Muslims would of been aware of all of these traditions and here are elements of each in the Islamic dream interpretation tradition. There is some conflict in the Islamic world about whether dreams had any value at all. John C. Lamoreaux argues that even from the early stages of Islam dreams played a paramount and central role in orthodoxy. Puns were a popular form of interpretation in the early Islamic world, and puns were also popular in Islamic poetry. Images were important in Muslims dreams, especially the image of the prophet, because it was said that Satan could not take the form of Muhammad and any dream that Muhammad appeared in was a true dream. Dream visions as being representative of something else by way of the Artemidorian system would of been known to early Muslims also by way of many popular dream manuals and the notion that the individual circumstances of the person having a dream were of supreme importance would of been known to Muslims as well.

Another important issue, present in all the traditions talked about so far with the exception possibly of Freud, is the idea of a junk dream. Not every single dream had profound meaning. Also it said that a dream from an impious or ungifted person probably did not hold much weight. The notable exception to this idea is of course Freud, who held that all images in dreams are important and represent some facet of the unconscious.

Dreams played a critical role in all of these traditions and continue to do so until this day. One can speculate endlessly about why dreams meant so much in these traditions, one possible answer is that the attempt to try to understand dreams is an attempt to try to subdue them there by conquering them. It is an attempt to try to apply things from the waking world, like reason, cause and effect, unto our dreams that do not apparently seem to follow these kinds of rules.