A Cairn of Cries Upon You
While dreams are seen as deeply internal, they have also served as powerful inspiration as forces of change in the waking world. Dreams provide one of the most important sites for people to imagine new, inhabitable futures and to work out otherwise insoluble conflicts, even on a national or global scale. According to the Neoplatonist Synesius, one of the chief benefits of oneiromancy over other forms of magic is that it is free from oppression, in the sense that no tyrant can control a people’s dreams. But tyrants must dream too, and when shared a peoples’ dreams serve as a powerful force of energy that can haunt those who attempt to control them. The following poem is an oneiromantic attempt to respond to current events. One of the earliest dream rituals from ancient Mesopotamia was to whisper your nightmares to a handful of stones thrown at the crossroads, where the cairn god Anzagar would carry them back to the gods. Likewise, many ancient oneiromantic spells, found from the Rigveda...
