Historical Oneiromancy

Dreams have been used in magical and ritual contexts since the dawn of human history. What may be the earliest record of a dream, carved into the Stele of Vultures, a heavily damaged stone relief dating from c. 2450 BCE, records how the Sumerian king, Eanatum I of the city-state of Lagash, dreamed that the god Ningirsu prophesied his success in an upcoming battle. Three-hundred years later, Ningirsu again appeared to a Sumerian ruler in a dream, along with other cultural and personal deities, to command that King Gudea rebuild the god’s temple. According to the cuneiform cylinders excavated at Lagash, Gudea found this dream so puzzling that he traveled to the temple of Nanshe—Ningirsu’s sister and the goddess who interpreted dreams for the divine kings—where he made offerings, fell asleep, and in a dream related his confusing dream to the goddess for interpretation.

The incubation of dreams, evocation of deities, prophetic divination, symbolic interpretation, and production of cultural artifacts were all common, historical forms of magical dreaming, which, along with soul travel, healing, and protection from and sending of dreams, were found in many of the world's ancient cultures, whether classical civilizations or indigenous tribal societies. These dreams of Ningirsu likewise display one of the core features of magical dreams, which is that their content is taken as an objective spiritual reality rather than only a reflection of psychological concerns, and this objectivity persists even when, as with Gudea’s dream, its symbolic imagery requires interpretation.

Dream Incubation

Dream incubation was the most widespread method for inducing magical dreams in the ancient world, and was utilized in classical civilizations and religions such as Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Celtic Ireland and Scotland, Judaism, Islam, China, Japan, and Tibet, as well as in some indigenous shamanic cultures in the Americas, Hawaii, Africa, and Australia. Called egkoimesis in Greek, incubatio in Latin, qi-meng in China, and istikhara in Islam, incubation is the practice of intending to have true or ‘veridical’ dreams, for purposes such as communicating with the gods; asking for career advice, healing, and spiritual revelation; resolving legal disputes, successions, and marriage arrangements; or for success in hunting and warfare. Incubation was practiced by sleeping at a sacred site related to a particular god or spirit. Before incubating a dream, the dreamer would perform ritual actions such as fasting, prayer, offering incense or an animal sacrifice, or ingesting dream-inducing drugs; then they would lie down on a sheepskin or sanctified mat, lie in specific postures, or even descend feet-first into a tight cave. Incubated dreams could contain clear communications and cures but frequently required interpretation, often by the temple priest or officiant. According to the Grecian dream interpreter Artemidorus, who called these type of dreams “solicited dreams,” it was important to “not put impertinently precise questions to the gods. It would be ridiculous if gods responded to brazen requests,” and even more important was to not demand that the gods show you a particular image or sign as an answer or proof of your questions.

Soul Travel 

Besides incubation, the other main method historically used for magical dreaming was soul travel, which is often equated with modern concepts of astral projection and shamanic journeying. Many traditional indigenous cultures believed that dreams were the wandering of the soul outside the body during sleep, which could be performed as an intentional journey or vision quest, either in sleep or through shamanic ritual in waking trance states. Belief in oneiric soul travel also appears in Babylonian dream records, the Greek magical tradition, and in Hindu, Sufi, Judaic, and Daoist ritual texts. For instance, in the Lishi zhenxian tidao tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror Through the Ages of Perfected Immortals and Those Who Embody the Dao) the Daoist master Chen Tuan sends his spirit out of his body in sleep to “frolic in Heaven.” The wandering soul could explore distant places in this world—whether to learn of other people or track animals to hunt—but could also travel to different times and to supernatural realities to meet with divine beings and ancestors.

Communication with the Gods 

In the ancient and indigenous worlds, there was a clear connection between dreams and the realm of the gods. According to the Neoplatonist Synesius, whose De insomniis (On Dreams) offers the fullest and last major classical text on oneiromancy, dreams are the most effective magical method through which gods and spirits can appear to humankind. While these divine “message” dreams were often clear, they could sometimes be confusing and symbolic, as with King Gudea’s dream; if so, the deity might send the dream multiple times with increasing urgency and substitution of symbols. While many cultures had a deity or deities specifically associated with dreams, such as the Babylonian Mamu and Zaqīqu, or the Greco-Roman Morpheus, a plethora of gods could be called on in dreams. The Papyri Graecae Magicae, or Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of Hellenic and Egyptian spells recorded between 100 BCE and 400 CE, contains over thirty invocations requesting dreams from the gods, if not their oneiric appearance, directed to Apollo, Helios, Hermes, Selene, Eros, Hekate, Zeus, Bes, Thoth, Osiris, Anubis, Sekhmet-Bastet, Aktiophis-Ereschigal, the Hebraic angels Sabaoth, Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, as well as a number of personal angels, daemons, deceased spirits, and the souls of lovers. And like in Gudea’s dream, multiple deities could appear at once, along with the dreamer’s personal deity or daemon. Gods were not the only supernatural beings to appear in dreams: in Daoist and Buddhist practices one might communicate with celestial immortals or protective spirits, while in indigenous cultures this could be an animal totem or ancestor. As for many indigenous communities, the religious life of the Ingessana of East-Central Africa was a constant negotiation with spiritual powers such as the malevolent nengk, which manifested in dreams to kill livestock and required waking, ritual action to appease. Across the world, nightmares ran rampant, and dreams were frequently a method of communicating with and propitiating the souls of the dead.

Divination 

If incubation and soul travel were used to receive visits from or visit supernatural beings in dreams, what was this magic used for? One of the most universal beliefs was that dreams can provide prediction or prophecy about future events and the possibility of intervening in fate through the enactment of actions shown in the dream. The importance of dream divination in the ancient world is attested to by its centrality in many foundational religious and cultural texts: the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Grecian Illiad and Odyssey, Roman Aeneid, Vedic Upanishads, Chinese Zuo-zhuan, Judaic Torah, Christian Bible, and Islamic Qur’an all feature episodes of prophetic dreaming, as do countless personal and literary dream reports throughout history. Oneiromantic texts, such as the Satkarmani or Six Rites, from Mahidhara’s Mantramahodadhi, a Tantric treatise on magic, contained prayers to Shiva for truth in dreams as well as lists of dream omens that could determine the success of magic rituals. Rituals to ask for answers in dreams, such as the Jewish she’elat chalom, were popular enough that hundreds of recipes existed for their performance. In Islam, the power of prophecy in dreams was held in such high regard that, according to Ḥadīth (number 119 in the Sahih Bukhari, Book 87), with the passing of the age of revelations, “nothing is left of the prophetism except…the true good dreams (that convey glad tidings).” In many Indigenous Amerindian cultures, such as the Brazilian Xavante, revelatory dreams were not just the privilege of shamans but could be accessed by anyone at times of significant life change and could have lasting importance. Other tribes, such as the Iroquois, believed that by communally enacting the events of a prophetic dream it was possible to alter the outcome.

Healing Dreams

Divination and divine guidance were not the only form of knowledge to be magically gained from dreams. As was described as early as c. 1300 BCE in the Akkadian Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, or “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” dreams could provide a source of physical healing, as when Marduk sends a procession of healers to cure prince Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan in his dreams. The Daoist practice of “Ecstatic Sleep,” or Shui Gong (sleep meditation), popular since the Song Dynasty in China, was used to circulate energy in the body as a part of the practice of Neidan or inner alchemy. Even contemporary ethnographic reports of indigenous dreaming practices show the importance of medical dreams in which shamans diagnose and treat physical as well as spiritual illness. One of the most widespread practices of oneiric healing was the ancient Greco-Roman cult of Asclepius, the god of medicine, who would appear in incubated dreams along with his daughters Hygeia and Panacea to either directly cure ailments through touch or oneiric surgeries, or symbolically suggest a cure that was interpreted by the temple priests. The cult of Asclepius—and dream incubation in general—were so popular that his temples (along with those of Isis and Serapis) were some of the last pagan practices eliminated during the Christianization of Rome, and Asclepius’s serpent-entwined staff is still revered as the emblem of the medical profession. Dream healing cults were not exclusive to the Mediterranean: in medieval Japan, Buddhist temples to the bodhisattva Kannon were popular sites for incubatory healing dreams, as recorded in the Hasedera Kannon Genki.

Protection From and Projection of Dreams 

In two of the earliest Sumerian myths involving dreams, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Dream of Dumuzid (or Tammuz, part of the mythic cycle of Innana’s Descent to the Underworld), characters have nightmares about their imminent deaths. Given the ubiquity of bad dreams, it is not surprising that in the ancient world magic was used to ward off and dispel the effects of nightmares. The first and last tablets of the Iškar Zaqīqu or Assyrian Dream-Book contain some of the earliest recorded oneiromantic spells, all of which serve this apotropaic function. Protective prayers and spells are also found in early Hindu Vedic texts like the Rig Veda and Atharva Veda, and in the Judaic Berachot. In Egypt, these prophylactic magics could involve the use of apotropaic headrests and bedposts carved with the image of the protective dwarf-god Bes, or by placing clay uraei (fire-spitting cobras) in the corners of the bedroom. If one still had a bad dream, this might require ritual action to ensure it did not come true: in Babylon one might tell the dream to a piece of clay which was then dissolved in water or to a protective spirit called a massar šulmi or “guardian of health,” or otherwise bury an apotropaic figurine under the floor of their bedroom; in Assyria the dream was told to a reed which was then burned; in Egypt the dreamer would take a piece of bread moistened with beer and myrrh (symbolic of Isis’s powers against evil) and smear it on their face while reciting spells to Isis. Talmudic tradition offered a number of actions for averting nightmares: selling the dream to transfer its effect, acting it out to destroy its significance, reciting Biblical verses that contain promises of good, and the two most popular methods of the Ta’anit Halom or “dream fast” and Hatavat Halom or transforming a dream into a favorable one.    

Besides protection from nightmares, magic could also be used to send dreams to others, both for positive and ill effects. The Rig Veda and Atharva Veda discuss rituals for redirecting nightmares toward one’s enemies, and many of the dream spells in the Papyri Graecae Magicae were also used for sending dreams, an art called in Greece oneiropompeia. These spells were used for revenge; to cause sickness, sleeplessness, or fear; to bend the will of others; to appear in the dreams of others in your own form or the form of a god; or to cause others to fall in love with you (a dream spell also found in the earlier Egyptian Demotic Magical Papyrus). In his classic book, Egyptian Magic, Egyptologist and member of the Order of the Golden Dawn E.A. Wallis Budge describes how in the Alexander Romance (Historia Alexandri Magni), the last native Pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II, used dream magic to charm Olympia, wife of Philip II of Macedonia, come to her in dreams in the form of the god Amen, impregnate her, and then cause Philip to dream that the child was divine. Thus was Alexander the Great conceived through oneiromancy.

Production of Ritual and Culture 

The last major historical use of oneiromancy can be seen in the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian erection of steles and the renovation of temples following a divine command in a dream. However, it was in indigenous tribal societies that the production of ritual and culture from dreams was most utilized. In many Amerindian cultures dreams could reveal songs, dances, patterns for handicrafts, and medicinal cures. This included Hawaiian hula dance movements taught by a dead relative or Ojibwa power songs received in initiatory puberty rites. And from the North American Iroquois to the South American Xavante, the songs and dances received in dreams were often ritually enacted by the whole community. This was especially the case for the dreams of medicine men or shamans: as reported to ethnographer John Neihardt by Black Elk, the famous Lakota wičháša wakȟáŋ or medicine man, “a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see,” stressing the importance of a waking component to dream magic practices.    

While dreams could inspire cultural artifacts, one thing they did not do in historical oneiromancy was cause direct manifestation. Tantalizingly, in her influential Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities, Indologist and religious scholar Wendy Doniger suggests that when Tibetan Dream Yoga practices spread to Kashmir they led “to a technique by which the dreamer could make the object of his dream materialize when he woke up.” Sadly, a newer, native-speaking translation of Vasugupta’s Spandakārikā-s commentary on the Shiva Sutras, suggests that aphorism 34 (which Doniger cited second-hand from an older, French translation) is ultimately an incubatory prayer to Shiva utilizing linguistic parallelism to contrast dreams to waking imagination. As those who practice magic understand, manifestation tends to happen indirectly, through natural channels and synchronicities, and the projection of beliefs that shape our behavior and attention. Despite this, direct manifestation has always been one of the great dreams of both dreaming and the occult, and the mystery of this interrelationship between dreams and reality, matter and imagination is one that magical dreaming practices allow us to more deeply explore.