Dream Books

 

 

 

                                                                                      The Policy Player's Dream Book

            While on a recent Gothic streak I briefly revisited Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  It was published when I was two, but has aged a great deal better than I.  What a story!  And what a great opening line: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Perhaps it is because my own dreams are so infrequent, so paltry, and so seldom remembered that I have made a subspecialty of literary dreams, in particular the medieval genre of the dream vision.  I was already thinking about dreams when the latest number of Cabinet: A Magazine of Arts and Culture arrived at our house.  Should this journal by some oversight not regularly grace your own coffee table, you should know that it is highly hip.  Though I try to stick to the pre-Copernican scene, it is hard to preserve one’s old-fogey credentials unsullied if young people play any significant role in your life, as is likely to happen with college professors and grandfathers.  The brilliant editor of Cabinet, Sina Najafi, was a college friend of my son Richard.  Later I met his likewise brilliant spouse, the artist Nina Katchadourian.  Cabinet has some other Princeton connections.  One of its principal editors is a brilliant historian of science here.  So, you grasp the recurrent leitmotiv: brilliance, if sometimes rather quirky brilliance.

                                                                                        Fat cows and thin cows?  Too simple!

            Each number of Cabinet includes several short essays devoted to a common theme.  For issue number sixty-seven it is “Dreams”.  Of several interesting articles, one devoted to the prominence of dream books and soothsaying in African-American popular culture captured my attention.*  The author has uncovered a small library of cheap dream manuals popular among a black readership in the nineteenth century.  I was struck by the essentially medieval character of the books described.  Dream “theory” underwent a huge paradigm shift with Freud and other modern psychoanalysts.  Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899) tries to explain the dreaming process in terms of the oblique expressions of a unique and individual subconscious as experienced by a unique individual consciousness.  Dreams are deeply personal.  This is very different from pre-modern dreams, regarded as objective external communications not generated by the dreamer, though frequently requiring decryption.  They were messages from the gods or the God. In ancient Greek religions, people would sometimes sleep in temples, hoping thereby to “incubate” revelatory dreams. The Bible offers various examples of revelatory dreams, particularly with regard to the two Josephs: the vizier of Egypt (Genesis 41) and the husband of Jesus’s mother (Matthew 1 and 2).  As we shall see, Egypt was especially important for dream lore.

The Aesculapion of Pergamum in Anatolia, where ill patients tried to dream of cures

           

                     The great classical work on the subject is the huge Dream Book (Oneirokritikon) of Artemidorus of Ephesus, who lived in the second century.  Perhaps you can find a casual way to drop the word oneirocriticism, dream interpretation-- from Greek roots meaning “dream” and “judgment”-- into your next conversation with a work mate.  Artemidorus’s book is actually a kind of encyclopedic compilation, running to five volumes in its modern edition, of the earlier works, otherwise all lost,  by many experts in what was a popular genre.  Ancient dream books were generally practical reference works to be used for purposes of decoding.  What did it mean to dream of an eagle, gold ducats, or a meal of fermented barley?  The dream books could tell you—in a rather mechanical and brain-dead fashion.   A considerable increment of subtlety was added to the field of dreams a couple of centuries after Artemidorus by a Neoplatonist scholar named Macrobius, who wrote one of the more surprising perennial best sellers in European cultural history: A Commentary on the Dream of Scipio.  Macrobius’s great contribution was to draw distinctions and to provide categories.  To begin with, not all dreams were significant.  Many were nightmares sent not from the gods but (as Ebenezer Scrooge would have it) from “a bit of undigested  beef, a blob of mustard, a crumb of cheese.”  Of significant dreams there were several kinds, and they required learned distinctions.  Macrobius disdained the simplism of the old dream book.  Dream interpretation required learning, wisdom, and great skill.  Hence, in the high culture, the frequent connection of oneirocriticism with cutting-edge astrology and mathematics.  One thinks of Dr. Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s resident astrologer.   But there was always also a popular or folk level, usually associated with wizened crones or “witches”.  These are the distant posterity of Ovid’s vetulae (little old ladies), women of sinister fascination, go-betweens and abortionists.

             If dreams can be interpreted, they can be misinterpreted, with possibly fatal results.  We have, for example, the dream of the tyrant Croesus.  He dreamed that the god Jupiter washed him and that the god Apollo dried him off.  He thought this a wonderful harbinger of a well-deserved visit to the Turkish baths on Mount Olympus.  But his daughter Fanny, the local Cassandra, had a sounder if sadder interpretation.  Croesus was hanged from a gibbet.  Jupiter Pluvius drenched the dangling corpse with rain, and the scorching rays of Apollo the Sun dried it out.  The requirement of an expert exegesis, when a mistaken interpretation could have such dramatic real-world consequences, is what makes much medieval dream vision so interesting.  Misinterpretation can also be comic, as it is in Chaucer’s epic of chicken sex, the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”

            The popular “dream books” of which Vandegrift writes in so illuminating a fashion actually have very little to do with the tradition of Artemidorus and practically nothing at all with that of Macrobius.  They don’t even have all that much to do with dreams.  Nor, actually, am I convinced of any peculiar African-Americanness to be found in them.  Apart from their  obvious target audience, one of several non-traditional readerships of their time, they fit comfortably into a familiar category already well established in the eighteenth century.  Dream-interpretation very early became conjoined with various kinds of divination and soothsaying, especially when related to financial fortune: coming into or finding, money, lost objects, buried treasure, divining lottery numbers and winning horses or the like.  In America, especially, a lottery game called Policy commanded something of the huge number of habitual, addicted players  who today follow Power Ball.  The “dream manuals” combine folk superstition with the incipient format of family board games or fortune cookie slips in providing a diverting procedure for arriving at comforting “news”.  The mother lode of nineteenth-century folk divination was the hugely popular Oracle of Napoleon, the magic manual supposedly found by the Emperor in a pyramid—Egypt being since time immemorial the source of esoteric wisdom for European crackpots.  For Napoleon the Oracle was apparently indispensable for conquering the world.  It continued to provide lesser mortals (for only a dime!) with an ingenious way to tell their own fortunes by making recourse to its interrogatories, charts, and tables.  (You can find an amusing introduction to it here).  And since it was plagiarized from a learned Renaissance humanist steeped in the Egyptomania of his age, it still has the faintest whiff of an ancient bitter perfume.  I have written a little about this in The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.

 

One of dozens of cheap editions of Napoleon's Oraculum

            Seeking to ascertain knowledge of future events in the hopes of financial profit or other personal benefit—insider trading at the supernatural level, so to speak—has always been considered dubious from the moral point of view.  In his epic poem on the Civil Wars, Lucan presents his great Stoic hero Cato with a temptation.  An opportunity presents itself for Cato, while marching through the African wilderness,  to consult the oracle of Jupiter Ammon.  He could thus find out whether he will have success in battle.  But Cato is not concerned with whether he is on the winning side; he is content to be on the right side.  So he declines to visit the oracle.  Dante describes diviners as those who “would attempt to constrain the Divine will.”  But high mindedness from the high culture was entirely foreign to these proletarian pamphlets which, in feeding fantasies of the lucky strike and the big payout, served a purpose and met a demand.  Like blues songs or work shanties, they might serve to amuse, distract, or give transitory hope to some humble folk whose daily lives were filled mainly with hard labor, material difficulty, and limited horizons.   And after all we all do have to dream, and we all do dream.  Should you happen to dream that you went to Manderley again, I do have some practical advice.  Write that down, and then just keep on writing.  You may end up with a real dream book.

 

*Christopher W. Vandegrift, “Oneirocritica Afro-Americana,” Cabinet 67, pp. 77-86.

Dreams

 King Croesus of Lydia, faulty interpreter

               I had a vivid and disturbing dream last night.  It was of the kind I call “episodic”, as it was punctuated by a brief period of urological wakefulness, put on pause, so to speak, until I should fall back asleep. This is a not uncommon experience for me, and the pattern is invariable.  During the wakeful “intermission” the dream’s details seem to me so vivid, so important, so clearly delineated in all their minute variety that I shall surely remember them clearly in the morning.  Then morning comes and—nothing, or so close to nothing as to make little difference.  Of this particular dream I retain only one feature beyond a general feeling of its menace: it had within it some important element of the tripartite.  I have a vague sense of three “bullet points”, three neutral graphic marks out of a typecase, but without the explication of intelligible language.

          Great poets have often compared the insubstantiality, no less than the brevity, of dreams with human mortality itself.   “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” says Prospero in a speech justly famous; “and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”  This same thought finds a more explicitly Christian expression in a well-known hymn of Isaac Watts:

                         Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

                             Bears all its sons away;

                         They fly forgotten, as a dream

                             Dies at the opening day.

                   The subject of my doctoral dissertation was the huge thirteenth-century French poem called the Romance of the Rose, a poem that has a claim to be called the most popular work of secular poetry to be produced in the European Middle Ages.  It is a “dream vision”, that is a fiction pretending to be the account of the poet’s dream.  It was neither the first nor the last of its genre, but it was undoubtedly one of the most influential, and the circumstances of its composition made it also a literary critic’s dream.  It has two authors.  The first of them, Guillaume de Lorris, was probably working in the 1230s or 1240s—if he ever existed, that is.  For absolutely everything we “know” about him comes from a man named Jean de Meun, who continued and vastly enlarged Guillaume’s work “forty years” after he died, leaving his fragmentary vision unfinished.  Concerning Jean de Meun, a solidly historical figure who was in effect the writer in residence at the court of Phillip the Fair, we know a good deal.  He was for his day a major humanist scholar, the translator of several important Latin works.

                Guillaume himself was no slouch when it came to dream-lore, the problematical nature of which is summarized in the opening lines of his poem, beginning thus: “Some people say that in dreams there is nothing but fables and lies…”  The suspicion is underscored in the French by the power of rhyme.  The word for dreams is songes, that for lies, mensonges: two concepts similar to eye and ear and, by implication, in their essence.   This negative view of dreams, however, is not uncontested, and in the following lines Guillaume cites a learned Latin authority, Macrobius, the author of a book called a Commentary on [Cicero’s] “Dream of Scipio”, who maintains that dreams can be reliable conveyors of truth.  In fact the most important part of his widely read Commentary is a system of classification distinguishing between significant and insignificant dreams.

            Modern dream-lore—such as that in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and to a large extent also in Jung—is based in a modernist concept of the individual personality unknown in classical and medieval times.  That is, the old dream theory held that dreams communicated through a socially shared and objective vocabulary of images rather than by the operations of a unique personal psychology.  There is a pretty large “dream literature” in ancient Greek and Latin, typified by the popular Onirocriticon or Dream Interpretation of Artemidorus in the second century.  This is mainly a catalogue or dictionary of the meaning of various dream images—an eagle, an arrow, a snowfall, and so forth.

            Macrobius inherited and refined a substantial “scientific” tradition.  He admitted that many dreams were philosophically meaningless manifestations of gross passion, bad digestion, or other moral or physical disturbances.  But other dreams were literally or allegorically significant.  When the god Mercury appears in a dream of the hero Aeneas, instructing him that he must sail from Carthage forthwith, the command is to be taken as a literal oracle.  Far more interesting and difficult are symbolic or allegorical dreams, since the correct understanding of allegory requires not merely interpretation but morally sound interpretation.

            There is a famous literary dream in the Romance of the Rose that exemplifies the difficulty.  Jean de Meun—and following Jean, Geoffrey Chaucer—used it as an admonition to their readers.  The dream was one experienced by Croesus, King of Lydia.  He was a man of enormous wealth—hence the phrase “rich as Croesus”—but crucially lacking in hermeneutical self-knowledge.  He dreamed that the god Jupiter Pluvius bathed him and the god Phoebus Apollo dried him.  To be waited upon so intimately by such Olympians seemed to the king a positive portent of the most unequivocal sort.  But the explication of his daughter Phania, a more profound if unwelcome interpreter of the school of Cassandra, rather rained on his parade.   The meaning of the dream was as follows.  Croesus would be hanged upon a gibbet.  The rain would pelt down upon his dangling corpse.  Then the blazing sun would desiccate it.  Unfortunately it was Phania’s interpretation that proved true.  Perhaps I am fortunate that the only dreams I can remember are those I read about in old books.

The American Dream

Variations on a dream

The fancy word for today—for surely every blog post must have at least one--will be oneirocriticism, which means the evaluation or interpretation of dreams. Dreams are on my mind for a couple of reasons. Last week I had the rare experience of seeing a current movie--Inception. It's all about dreams--I think. I didn't like it very much, but that is probably because I didn't understand it. Had I understood it, I'm sure I would have hated it. The other reason is the very particular dream I have in mind: viz., the American Dream. For of late the American Dream seems to have been everywhere in the news and the columns of pundits, and usually in a pessimistic context. “The American Dream has soured,” writes one eminent pundit. When compared with his political ideas, his apparent belief that the verb to sour is an acceptable predicate for a sentence in which the subject is the noun “dream” seems nearly plausible. Dreams would seem also to be mobile. “The American Dream is increasingly moving out of reach for most Americans,” writes another. Finally a third says that “for people like these [unemployed citizens and real estate bankrupts] the American Dream has become a nightmare.” There is a minority report from an optimist. “Obama Care extends the American Dream for millions.”

From all this it is obvious at least that few agree as to what the American Dream is (or was), presenting us with a most difficult problem of oneirocriticism. In my work as a medievalist I soon discovered that the old ways of thinking about dreams were very different from those of Freud or Jung. To the ancients, including the biblical writers, dreams had a definite, concrete, objective meaning independent of the dreamer and decipherable by the wise, the inspired, or simply the properly educated. It was probably toward the end of the second century of the Christian era that the Greek Atemidorus of Daldis published his famous Oneirocritica, a hefty encyclopedia of dream meanings that drew on an already rich literature and wielded a large influence on dream experts well into the Renaissance. In the Latin sphere the great expert was the grammarian Macrobius whose commentary on the Dream of Scipio (a part of Cicero’s lost “version” of Plato’s Republic) was still regarded as authoritative in the eighteenth century. Macrobius had a much subtler sense of taxonomy than did Artemidorus, but the two were in basic agreement that to dream of an eagle meant one thing, to dream of blood another. The meanings were part of a sign system, like conventional language, not the manifestations of the unique psychology of an individual dreamer.

As Freudians or post-Freudians, we no longer believe that. Seven fat cows are a good sign, and seven skinny ones a bad sign (Genesis 41:17)? That primitive level of oneirocriticism wouldn’t get you a B in a freshman literature class, but in the Bible it’s enough to make you vizier of Egypt. And if dreams are as cut-and-dried as the folks who write about the American Dream seem to believe, why not? One pundit tells me that the 1950s “were the heyday of the American Dream.” If so, I must be one of the original American dreamers, as I graduated from high school in 1954 and from college in 1958. Among the meanings of the American Dream at that time were the following: (1) a detached house with a garage, with a Chevrolet car therein; (2) an abstract confidence that each new generation of Americans would have a “better life” than their parents, particularly with regard to detached houses and Chevrolet cars.

Here the wisdom of our founders once again shines through. They created a Constitution designed to give concrete expression to the abstractions of the Declaration of Independence. The “inalienable rights” specifically enumerated in that document are only three: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That last phrase, the “pursuit of happiness”, was a last-minute substitution for another more frequently used by the enlightened politicians of the eighteenth century: “the possession of property”. But though Jefferson and his friends knew that a citizen had a right to possess property, that was different from a guarantee that a citizen would have property. Actually owning property depended upon many variables, such as individual initiative, labor, thrift, and so forth—variables within the realm of what was called “moral philosophy” rather than the realm of governmental arrangement.

You have no right to happiness, but you do have a right to pursue happiness. That, in my view, is the “American Dream,” and it is just as real (or unreal) as it ever was. I know for a fact that my father never had an annual income in excess of $10,000. I am far less confident in claiming that I have had a “better life” than he. The American Dream has more to do with the quality of aspiration than the fact of achievement. The concept seems to hover between the subjectivity of suggestion and the objectivity of definition, which is to say between the Freudian and the Artemidorian. Nor does it have all that much to do with American exceptionalism. “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” Robert Browning, a Victorian Englishman, wrote that in the voice of an imagined Renaissance Italian. In the more modern idiom Oscar Hammerstein came pretty close in South Pacific (1949):

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk,
Talk about things you'd like to do.
You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?

But Bloody Mary’s prerequisite for that is “No think about Philadelphia—it’s no good.”

In the political commentary of the moment I find a disturbing suggestion that the American Dream can be or should be guaranteed by acts of our Congress. Yes, the United States Congress, with its approval rating hovering around seventeen percent! It can’t even effect a self-respecting nightmare. But if the reality cannot achieve the dream, let the dream be defined in terms of the reality.

There is an anecdote about a Communist organizer orating to a group of exploited garment workers on the lower East Side in the early Thirties. “Come the revolution,” he said, “you will all be eating chocolate cake!”

“But what if you don’t happen to like chocolate cake?” asked a contrarian from the shop floor.

“Come the revolution,” said the organizer, “you will like chocolate cake.”