On Mar. 14, 44 B.C.E., Julius Caesar dreamed of flying up through the clouds, until being warmly received by Jupiter. His wife, Calpurnia, however, had a nightmare in which he got stabbed. The following morning, she urged him not to leave home, but he ignored her warning and was slaughtered. Both dreams were precognitive: while the ascent into heaven to be with the king of gods was a metaphor of Caesar’s death and subsequent divinization, the concrete images of his wife’s dream predicted the future in detail.
The notion that dreams could foretell the future was widely accepted in antiquity. Some of the earliest written records from Mesopotamia include dreams, such as the magical vision reported by the High Priestess Enheduanna, in which she was raised up through a celestial gate as she praised the goddess of love. Several hundred years later, in the Assyrian Empire, dream omens were collected to associate events with their potential consequences. The infant Jesus wouldn’t have survived if Joseph had not obeyed dream commands from the Lord’s angels. The Nordic sagas are ridden with prophetic dreams. In the 19th century, the Lakota chiefs Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse relied on dreams to resist the invasion of U.S. miners and soldiers. Nowadays, among the Yanomami people in the Amazon, shaman Davi Kopenawa uses dreams to lead his people against the attacks, fires and river poisoning promoted by invading miners.
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Most if not all religions consider dreaming a gateway for divine revelation. What psychological journey must our ancestors have taken to justify such fantastical beliefs? Can we reconcile them with a materialist worldview? And if so, why would it matter? To answer these questions, we must understand the biological functions of sleep, reconstitute the evolution of dreaming, and survey the significance of dreaming from prehistory to history. In the end, this investigation suggests that dreams are more important now…
Source : time
