Understanding Dreams: What they are and how to interpret them. Nerys Dee
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Название: Understanding Dreams: What they are and how to interpret them
Автор: Nerys Dee
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Эзотерика
isbn: 9780007388394
isbn:
It is well known that certain knowledge is acquired during sleep, but not in the way thought up by pragmatic educationalists. Many inventors, writers, statesmen, philosophers and musicians have their dreams to thank for the solution to a problem, the plot of a book or a concerto, but this information did not arrive as the result of sleep learning. It came to them spontaneously in dreams.
Professor Kekule
One inspirational dream that revolutionised the world was that of Fredrich August von Kekule, a professor of chemistry in Ghent a hundred years ago. He was having difficulty understanding the molecular structure of a certain substance when, one day, he dozed and had a dream. In this he saw atoms gambolling before his eyes. There were smaller groups which kept in the background, and in the foreground, with the acute vision peculiar to dreams, he distinguished larger structures forming strange configurations. These were in long chains, twisting and turning in snake-like fashion. Suddenly, he was astounded to see one ‘snake seize its own tail and mockingly form a circle. On waking it dawned on him that the circle formed by the snake symbolised the missing link in his researches. By transforming this scene into logic, he discovered it represented the ring theory underlying the constitution of benzene. In essence, he had discovered the complex mixture of hydrocarbons underlying the synthesis of petrol from oil.
Julius Caesar
It is said that Julius Caesar, a prolific dreamer, was guided by his dreams. On the strength of a dream, in which he violated his own mother, he decided to take his army across the Rubicon, a small river running along the Cisalpine border. The result of this was that he had in fact invaded his own motherland, an action that led to war between Caesar and the Senate.
He may well have acted upon his own dreams, but he disregarded those of others, in particular one his wife Calpurnia had. According to Shakespeare, her dream warned Caesar of ‘the Ides of March’. If he had heeded this murderous portent, the tragedy would have been averted, and Calpurnia’s dream would have remained a warning and not progressed into a prophecy.
William Shakespeare
Throughout the bard’s work there are references to dreams and sleep and it has been said that, unless his works are viewed as if they were dreams, they make little sense.
The Tempest, set in that state between reality and illusion, is an example of this. Caliban dreams that ‘the isle is full of noises and sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’, and he cries to dream again. And the wise character of Prospero suggests that maybe life is but a dream anyway. ‘We are’, he says, ‘such stuff as dreams are made of and our life is rounded with a little sleep’. The tragedy of Macbeth is a nightmare in itself and the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth re-enacts her crimes, agonising in her guilt. From Hamlet, the now famous line, ‘To sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream’, gave rise to a musical play, while the remainder of that quotation, ‘For in that sleep of death what dream may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil’, offers an enlightened view of life after death. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is but a dream inhabited by timeless images from real life, shadowy figures and figments from another dimension. In this we can identify with either and both worlds, but usually it is the symbolic one that wins.
Experiences in sleep are many and varied. We know that certain physiological changes are often incorporated into a dream and that false awakenings are difficult to distinguish from the true awake state. Flying and travelling in sleep may not be dreams at all, but a form of astral projection, just as inspirations which come in the dead of night are messages from a source beyond our reach in the harsh light of day. We do not know if dreams are a cause in themselves, or if they are reflections from outer consciousness, but either way, experiences in sleep cast a new light on our very existence.
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