Paracelsus and the True Dream Alchemy

There are many books and pricey online seminars that offer to teach “Dream Alchemy.” However, what they all have in common is they have nothing to do with actual alchemy, let alone the real approaches to dreamwork that were discussed by alchemists like Paracelsus. Even Carl Jung, who studied the works of Paracelsus and helped reconsider the medieval chemical arts as a metaphor for psychological processes, primarily discussed the role of alchemical symbolism in dreams as metaphors for his patients’ individuation processes.
    
Dreams, however, were used in the actual work of alchemy. Dream visions are described in a wide number of alchemical texts, including those by Giovanni Battista Nazari, Ostanes, the Visions of Zosimos, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the Visio Arislei, William Bloomfield’s Bloomfield’s Blossoms or The Campe of Philosophy, John Dastin’s Visio Ioannis Dastin, Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, the fourth part of the anonymous Le Texte d'Alchymie et le Songe-Verd, John Fountain’s The Fountain of the Lovers of the Science, Adrian von Mynsicht’s Aureum Saeculum Redivivum, the Enigma of the Sages in Michael Sendivogius’s Tractatus de Lapide Philosophorum, and Jodocus Greverus’s Secretum nobilissimum et verissimum. While many of these dream narratives read as literary frame stories to couch spiritual revelations, dreams were also seen as a medium through which the true nature of alchemical substances could be revealed. But, if taken as actual dream reports, they suggest that the dreams of alchemists, like for anyone else, naturally reflected and potentially resolved the issues they were concerned with in their waking lives.

But it is in the works of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, that we find the fullest discussion of how to alchemically work with dreams. De occulta philosophia, translated by Robert Turner in 1656 in Of the Supreme Mysteries, contains a fairly typical Renaissance approach to dreaming, including that dreams reflect waking concerns; can provide artistic inspiration, divine messages, and prophecy future events; that dreams allow us to see the spirits of the dead; and, in a section not included in Turner’s addition, that dreams can be incubated in ourselves and sent to others through subpulvinar or under-the-pillow magic. While De occulta philosophia was most likely not written by the real Paracelsus, Paracelsus himself discusses a very different and far more fascinating approach to dreaming in his untranslated masterwork on astrology and magic, the Astronomia magna.

In the Astronomia, Paracelsus discusses dreams as one of the main branches of divination, which have the same kind of participatory, revelatory function as the vera imaginatio, or ‘true imagination’ of the alchemists, in mediating between the heavens and their microcosmic representation within humans. In the section titled Von dem dono aegrorum (‘From the Gift of the Sick,’ found in Sudhoff’s edition of the Complete Works, Vol. 12, 255-62), Paracelsus expands on this mediating power of dreams and how it can be used prognostically: just as sick people more acutely feel the effects of the weather so that their aching joints tell them when it is going to rain, so too do the stars affect our sidereal bodies through the imagination so that the images of our dreams tell us what has happened, is happening, and is going to happen in the heavens and in the effects of the heavens on the material world. So, although dreams can be interpreted as reflections of our personalities or emotions, they can also be interpreted spiritually, as reflections and forewarnings of the spiritual processes occurring in the universe. What makes Paracelsus’s idea of alchemical dreamwork so useful is that he then gives explicit examples of how this spiritual interpretation works, which is through attention to the specific imagery of the four classical elements and their material, alchemical processes.


Dreaming the Elements

While current occult discussions of the elements see them as substances, states of matter, and symbolic of the alchemical stages, for Paracelsus, the four elements were more complex and dynamic. Rather than being the irreducible, physical building blocks of reality, Paracelsus saw the elements as the mediums or ‘matrices’ through which the generative power of the stars works in a dynamic and living way in order to give rise to the diversity of things in the world, each element in its own distinct manner. Because the human corporeal body is made of the four elements, the star works through us in similar elemental processes, and what each element produces physically in the material world is produced spiritually in our sidereal body or imagination, with all of the “different kinds, forms, shapes, beings” that are produced by that particular element. Thus, when we perceive an elemental process in our dreams, that tells us about the ongoing operations of that element in the external world, because it is a “special proclamation” to us from that element, the way we overhear its powers through the imaginatio.

Classically, the four elements were correlated with the four humors, and as such, elemental dreams were often believed to tell about the dreamer’s physical and emotional disposition, similar to how in the modern world elemental dreams featuring forces of nature might be seen to symbolize one’s psychological ‘weather.’ For Paracelsus, however these same elemental images can also be interpreted spiritually, as indications of the movement of the elements in the stars and their sidereal effects on us and the material world. The elemental images that occur in a dream can tell us about the state of various ongoing processes, not just in relation to psychology, but for inspiration, knowledge, healing, divination, alchemical transmutation, or any other magical concern we have incubated or actively imagined. Paracelsus gives the example of a dream of water, which might occur during the solutio stage of alchemy in which matter is submerged and enlivened: if one successfully catches a fish this indicates the completion of the operation, whereas if the fish escapes or is misshapen “the opus is not a success, it is a misstep and nothing comes of it.”

Paracelsus’s theory of elemental dreaming depends on a key insight about the way we imagine material reality as representing more than itself, which is richly explored in philosopher of imagination Gaston Bachelard’s studies of the poetics of matter and the elemental imagination: dreams and imagination have particular styles or genres that are expressed through the elements and the specific ways that we experience the materiality and processes of those elements. As Bachelard says, when dreams “participate in the…life of an element…all its images will be based on it.” Bachelard’s series of books on the specific elements—The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Air and Dreams, Water and Dreams, Earth and Reveries of Will, and Earth and Reveries of Repose—are predominately aimed at tracing this oneiric elemental imagination into its expression in poetic literature; however, archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s Alchemical Psychology takes up Bachelard’s method and returns it directly to alchemy, through an examination of the various substances, tools, and processes of alchemical work, in a manner that approaches Paracelsus’s method.
    
For Bachelard, the human imagination is structured by the four classical elements, which provide rules for how images work, or which act as the “hormones” for how images develop, both individually and particularly when images form a series, as they do in both dreams and literature. Because of the way we experience the elements as fundamental archetypes of material reality, their appearance in the imagination carries certain associated values that are derived from the materiality and processes of the actual elemental substance. This structural function of the elemental imagination helps explain why the four elements have become a central organizing principle across various philosophical and spiritual schools of thought, from alchemy and the occult to literary poetics: the ways we imagine the processes of the material world serve as metaphors for other archetypal processes, whether psychological, spiritual, linguistic, etc.


Elemental Alchemy as Oneiric Epiphany

Both Bachelard and Hillman discuss key aspects of the way we experience the elemental imagination that are found in the imagery and processes of alchemy—and also in our experience of poetic metaphor as a kind of transformative epiphany. First is that the elements appear in specific forms, with specific behaviors. As Hillman discusses, through dreams the psyche speaks or presents itself in very specific images, and it is through this imagistic specificity that we are able to understand the details and cure of neurosis and other mental illnesses. Specificity was also a major concern of Paracelsus and his approach to the elements: each element presents a specific power or force in the world that is distinct from the others, and through which the power of the stars work in order to express “the sum total of specific actions possible and realisable in nature.” The application of fire to matter will result in radically different outcomes than will water. The epiphanic metaphors we experience in poetry and in dreams are also highly specific, and what allows them to sum up a situation is that they are precise, created from the material of the events, and could not appear in any other way.
    
For Paracelsus, the elements are the medium through which the active and generative power of the stars operates. As such, one of the essential qualities of elemental images in dreams is that they are dynamic and transformative: they are processes that move and change and accomplish results through their specific forms. For instance, in dreams, “if the earth now gives a revelation, a gift from itself…then the same vision will not be otherwise; it does something.” This dynamic, transformative power of the elemental imagination is central to Bachelard’s discussion of how elemental images work in both dreams and poetry. Not only does each element have its own “particular dynamism,” but the material imagination “gives life back to forms by transforming them.” Epiphanic metaphors likewise have the ability to transform us through animating or making dynamic an entire situation in the psyche.
    
Finally, as Hillman points out, the material imagery of alchemy is inherently metaphorical: “I know I am not composed of sulfur and salt, buried in horse dung, putrefying or congealing, turning white or green or yellow, encircled by a tail-biting serpent, rising on wings. And yet I am!” Alchemists like Benedictus Figulus or the anonymous author of The Open Entrance stressed the importance of taking their words as “Luna Metaphorica” rather than literal descriptions of chemical processes. And these specific but non-literal images, this “language of substance which cannot be taken substantively,” spiritualizes or makes subtle the material world of the elemental minerals, giving matter a psychic depth by bringing together radically distinct perspectives into a greater whole that transforms them. In other words, just as in poetic epiphany where metaphors unite an experience in us, in alchemy the metaphoricity of material images enables the conjunctio. The alchemical goal is achieved whenever, through a spontaneous creative event, “a mental image compels with the force of a natural phenomenon.” Just as dreams utilize bizarreness as a way of articulating the profound ambiguity of their metaphors, a lot of the alchemical imagery surrounding the conjunctio is often strange or astonishing in a manner that provokes transformation.
    
Elemental imagery in dreams not only informs us about the ongoing psychological and spiritual processes in us and the world, similar to the summarizing effect of epiphanic metaphors, but the specific elemental processes inform us how to work on and change the imagery in order to achieve transformative effects. As Paracelsus states, dreams of the elements show us how to fulfill that element or bring it to its fruition. In Paracelsus’s alchemical approach to medicine, cures needed to be specific to the disease and its material cause, or require a substance equal to it, which Hillman extrapolates into “an axiom of psychic change…like cures like.” As Jung noted, dreams speak poetically, for instance by describing a “diseased body as a man’s earthly house, and the fever as the heat of a conflagration that is destroying the house and its inhabitant.” Taking this up through Paracelsus’s method of alchemical dreamwork, what the dream is telling us then is that a cure for the disease would require putting out the fire, whether through applying cooling or liquid means in the external, material world, but also through the participatory application of watery images in a dream or active imagination.