Dreams: Meaningful Experiences from the Past for Our Future?
by Albrecht Classen
It would seem that modern people tend to interpret their dreams primarily as nightmares, or else follow the analytic precepts developed by Sigmund Freud and regard their dreams as expressions of unconscious desires, wishes, or feelings. We might say we are alienated from our dreams and cannot handle them any longer. It is dreadful to wake up in the middle of the night, frightened of what has happened to us in a dream. Why do we have dreams, who really is dreaming, and who is acting in the dream? Why are we dreaming in the first place, instead of resting peacefully in our sleep?
Raising such questions reveals that we no longer have any clear understanding of dreams. We are divorced from the active voice in the dream, a voice that might want to tell us something, assuming we accept dreams to be of some benefit to the dreamer. Even without engaging critically with modern dream theory by Freud, Adler, Jung, or Reich, it still seems pretty obvious that people today—as much as they may secretly hope to gain some insights about themselves, their past, and their future from dreams—are no longer able to regard dreams as meaningful and useful for their own development. Not even neurophysiology and neurobiology have been able to break the deadlock separating ourselves from the dream world. However, insofar as a vast majority of people all over the world is dreaming, the situation today proves to be rather frustrating and disappointing, especially considering that in the past dreams served like mirrors of ourselves and talked to us in an enigmatic language about things no one else could perceive or foretell.
In light of the images, movies, texts, sounds, and other external stimuli that regularly inundate us, our collective alienation from dreams comes as no surprise. We find ourselves remotely controlled by external sources, which in turn seem to trigger a flood of mostly innocuous, if not deeply disturbing, dream images. The internet, above all, increasingly commandeers our identity and swallows up any self-engendered images that might have once appeared to us in dreams. This can lead us to ask, are we enriched or impoverished by modern technology? If dreams have any meaning, as virtually all pre-modern cultures across the globe inform us, and connect us somehow with another world, then their seeming transformation into nightmares or imaginary traps from which we must desperately escape by way of waking up represents a major loss.
Modern media, medicine, psychology, and other disciplines appear to divorce us from our own dreams as if they were something bad, an expression of our repressed or distorted unconscious mind. We wake up and feel stressed, if not distraught, because our dreams seem to mirror deep-seated fears, anxieties, sentiments of inferiority or failure, etc. Dreams, we begin to reason, are terrifying negative experiences, dreadful, and best forgotten as quickly as possible. Why suffer from panting, screaming, crying, or feeling extreme horror about something over which we have no control? We should just dismiss dreams as foolish imagination – at least, so goes the reasoning about dreams today in Western civilization.
Despite our contemporary aversion to them, dreams have always been regarded with great respect in all world religions and literatures. We can find examples of momentous dreams in heroic epics as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh (3rd millennium B.C.E.), and in the Old and New Testament (Jacob’s Dream in Genesis 28:10-22; then in 1 Kings 3:5-15; Daniel 8:15–17; Matthew 1:20; 2:13,19; and Acts 10:9-16; 16:9). In Homer’s Iliad (8th century B.C.E.; book 2) we are told that Zeus sends a dream to Agamemnon to persuade him to fight the Trojans. The Roman poet Ovid naturally included a comment about dreams in his Metamorphosis (8 C.E., 262-63) through which the gods communicate with the earthlings. Most famously, Cicero drew on the genre of dream poetry when he composed his Dream of Scipio, the sixth book of his De re publica (54-51 B.C.E).
If we turn to medieval literature, we come across numerous cases of highly meaningful dreams, especially in the Old Norse sagas from the thirteenth century, which recorded much older, oral heroic poetry from the ninth and tenth centuries, such as the Njál’s Saga, Egil’s Saga, or the Laxdaela Saga. Each time an individual is privileged to foresee the future, the experience tends to be very troublesome, deeply impacting the protagonist and his people.
Later, in the thirteenth century, the famous French poet Guillaume de Lorris (ca. 1230/1240) composed Le roman de la rose, an allegorical verse romance based entirely on a dream sequence in which the lover comes to a wall encircling a delightful garden symbolizing his ultimate love. In this dream, his only desire is to enter that garden and acquire the rose, a metaphor of his love. Around forty years later, Guillaume’s successor, Jean de Meun, vastly expanded and completed the romance as satire, though the narrative abruptly concludes with the physical conquest of the rose, resulting in rape. Many other poets also used dreams to elaborate upon essential aspects of their works (especially Geoffrey Chaucer in his Parlement of Foules, ca. 1390), but hardly anyone worked with dreams in such an existential fashion as the anonymous poet of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200).
An epic poem, Nibelungenlied treats the lives of the Burgundian sibling-heroes Gunther and Kriemhild. Kriemhild is married to the Netherlandish prince Siegfried, who commands powers and strengths of a demi-god. This ultimately leads Gunther’s jealous vassal Hagen to murder Siegfried. After a long period of mourning, Kriemhild marries the Hunnish king Etzel with the intent to avenge her first husband’s death. She achieves that goal, but only after all of the warriors (with few exceptions) are killed, including her own child. After Kriemhild has decapitated her arch-enemy, another warrior, Hildebrand, cuts her to pieces as well, leaving behind a deserted court and a world of grief.
At the start of the epic, however, Kriemhild relates a dream to her mother in which she witnessed a falcon being killed by two eagles. She is deeply worried about the meaning of this image but her mother, Uote, dismisses the dream nonchalantly, urging her to move forward, to marry, and to be happy. Despite its strong warning, the dream has no bearing on the young woman’s subsequent decisions and, perhaps unsurprisingly, its prophetic message comes true: Hagen slays Siegfried, triggering a slew of violent acts that devour the entire people (and the Huns).
Tragically, Kriemhild might have prevented the development of things on two occasions. First, Hagen had tricked her into revealing the one vulnerable spot on Siegfried’s back (his Achilles’s heel) in order to allegedly protect the other man in a planned war, which then did not take place. Second, prior to Siegfried’s departure for a hunt that is to stand in for the planned war, Kriemhild relates a second dream in which she saw her husband pursued and killed by two ferocious boars, as the dream’s final image reveals “the flowers turned red” (stanza 918, 3). Kriemhild is clearly aware of the imminent danger, but she cannot convince Siegfried to stay home; he simply dismisses her fears as foolish in the naïve belief that he has no enemies at court. Thereupon Kriemhild reveals her third dream to him, this time of two mountains that came crashing down upon him, slaying him mercilessly (stanza 921). However, this bold warrior is not prepared to listen to a woman’s talk, especially about dreams. She explicitly tells him of her great fear never to see him again, but he only hugs and kisses her, and then departs, never to return to her alive (stanza 922).
Dreams, at least in the world of medieval heroic poetry, have a prophetic quality, yet no one in the Nibelungenlied heeds their warnings. The poet, however, underscores that the tragedy as it evolves here is unavoidable precisely because the dreams are disregarded. Yet, as the narrative also indicates, and as is typical of all prophetic dreams, the person experiencing the dream cannot change the course of his or her life, even despite the clairvoyance of their dreams.
This theme is also painfully expressed in a late thirteenth-century didactic text, Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener (ca. 1260/1270). In the desire to rise above his social class, Helmbrecht, the son of a wealthy farmer, leaves his family and joins a band of robber-knights, becoming a terrible criminal and persecutor of the peasantry. Before Helmbrecht departs from home, his father employs every rhetorical strategy to hold him back and relates several dreams that clearly predict the disaster waiting for young Helmbrecht—all to no avail.
Indeed, at the end, the robber-knights are apprehended and executed. Only the protagonist is spared his life. However, just as his father’s dreams had anticipated, he loses his left leg, his right arm, and both of his eyes, preventing him from ever riding a horse or wielding a sword again. A year later, having barely survived, an outlaw whom not even his family is allowed to support, Helmbrecht is hanged at the hands of his previous victims. Thus, the narrative not only serves as a reminder of the Fourth Commandment, but also signals people to listen to the messages contained in dreams. Just as in the Nibelungenlied, however, Helmbrecht’s destiny was doomed from the beginning.
To fully investigate the history of dreams in literature, we also would have to consider the large corpus of mystical texts, primarily composed by medieval women writers such as Hildegard of Bingen, Gertrud the Great, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite de Porète, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. These mystics had life-altering visions of the Godhead, saints, and other holy figures. While visions are not quite the same as dreams, both connect the individual with another world. In dreams, a chain of images is conveyed to the sleeping person; in visions, the receiver is awake and experiences the message personally. Both dreams and visions indicate that the individual is capable of communicating with another dimension, though this capacity depends on the receiver’s willingness, comprehension, and readiness to confront this dimension. Neither the dreamer nor the visionary has a choice in the matter; each is involuntarily exposed to the dream or the vision.
As the many different medieval voices confirm, to be graced with a dream or a vision was the privilege of a select few. Just as in ancient or biblical times, here we encounter a world in which higher entities, either God, saints, or some global sense of destiny, directly contact the human being. Dreams and visions indicate that the ordinary constraints of time and space are artificial constructs intended to be overcome—true, meaningful life rests in a different dimension. Nevertheless, not everyone has the privilege to be graced with such an experience, as frightful as that sometimes might be.
The modern western world seems to have lost the connection to that dimension, so our dreams tend to be mostly nightmares. Nevertheless, we remain deeply intrigued by the potentiality of reaching out to the other world, or of being touched by the divine forces, an experience commonly projected onto people in the pristine forests of the Amazon basin, in Africa, or in Asia. The movie The Emerald Forest (1985) was a remarkable representative of this concept, but we also find countless other examples of major dreams in world literature, such as in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/1596); Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (1634/1635); Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843); Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865); Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867); Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866); Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924); Arno Schmitt’s Zettel’s Traum (1970); or Mario Vargas Llosa’s El sueño del celta (2010).
Often, those who can dream or receive visions are not well regarded by others, are feared or even condemned because they have entered a new dimension. The Old Icelandic sagas commonly present highly-regarded individuals who can foresee the future in their dreams, which continues, in a way, the archetypal tradition as we find it in the Bible and elsewhere. However, for most people it is difficult, if not impossible, to accept dream messages, unless the dream serves an allegorical or religious purpose. If we are to learn to comprehend our dreams, our best bet is to start by taking a deeper look at the history—the literary, spiritual, scientific, and political history—of dreams; in doing so, we will be better equipped to respond to the dreams of our own times, and to engage in serious dialogue about what our dreams might mean.
Further Reading:
Jesse Keskiaho, Dreams and Visions in the Early Middle Ages (2015).
Dreams and Visions: An Interdisciplinary Enquiry, ed. Nancy van Deusen (2010).
Gabriela Cerghedean, Dreams in the Western Literary Tradition with Special Reference to Medieval Spain (2006).
Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (2005).
Classen, “Transpositions of Dreams to Reality in Middle High German Narratives,” in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narratives (1994).
Träume im Mittelalter: ikonologische Studien, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (1989).
