If you happen to be an occultist, as of course I am, one thing you’ll encounter fairly often is people asking you what their dreams mean. I’ve made a habit of shrugging, saying that I have no idea, and for good reason. Until quite recently, dreams weren’t something I’d studied; I had a long list of other branches of occultism I wanted to learn, and only so many hours in a day — or night.
I’d also discovered, on the past occasions when I’d kept a notebook by my bed and recorded my dreams, that the books on dream interpretation I’d found made zero sense out of them. Maybe I’m just weird — unsurprisingly that suggestion has been made tolerably often — but my dreams didn’t seem to fit into any of the usual patterns. I read Freud, of course, and Jung, and also some of the literature on dreams that came into fashion in the late 20th century. But I ended up wondering whether I was dreaming in Martian or something. So, I temporarily filed the whole thing away.
Recently, though, since the passing of my wife Sara, I’ve had more time to fill than usual. After a series of vivid dreams, I decided to give dreamwork another try. So I put a notepad and a pen on the nightstand, and started collecting my dreams. But they were just as odd as before, and the dream books just as unhelpful. Then — ah, then! — came a dream I could actually interpret.
No, it wasn’t one of those big life-changing dreams that Jungian theorists like to write about. I was sitting at a table with three women, two of them older and one young. They were talking about craft projects. One of the older women explained to the younger one that, if she wanted her project to succeed, she would have to be ready to give presentations to audiences on the ninth day of each month. The young woman replied that this meant she would have to start collecting information right away. The older woman smiled and said, yes, exactly.
That was the dream. The context was that, the day before, I’d agreed to give a presentation towards the end of June about Masonic history to a local group of Freemasons, who, one must add, like to refer to their organisation as “the Craft”. I realised as I reflected on the dream that it was offering specific advice about my project: I needed to have my presentation finished by the ninth of June, and that I’d better get busy collecting information for it.
That is to say, it was making a prediction. That was when doors started swinging open, because until the late 19th century dreams were understood as omens, predictions, and warnings. Whilst most cultures acknowledged that dreams sometimes gave false predictions (in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus deliberately sent the Greek king Agamemnon a “lying dream” to help the Trojans), oneiromancy, or divination through dreams, was shared by nearly all the world’s cultures, from Mesopotamia to mediaeval Japan. When the Egyptian pharaoh had a dream about seven plump and seven scrawny cows, Joseph didn’t interpret it psychologically as a reflection of the pharaoh’s relationship with his mother, or an effusion from the collective unconscious. He read it as a prediction — and, at least according to Genesis, he was right.
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