Ancient Conceptualization Of Dreams

One of the starting points for the study of the ancient conceptualization of dreams is an understanding of a duality that governed the theoretical, practical and poetic mechanisms by which the field of dream experience in antiquity was rendered meaningful. This duality is typically understood in terms of a “fundamental distinction” that splits the oneiric field into two, hierarchically ordered, modalities:

“significant and nonsignificant dreams,” but it also takes the analogous form of distinctions between true and false, and visionary and somatic dreams.2 Indeed, for the ancients the classification of dreams into two central modalities was intrinsic to the manner in which they articulated their oneiric experience. Dreams are at times

heavenly

The terminology for these distinctions establishes an opposition, between oneiros and enhypnion, indicating the higher and lower forms of dreams. The binary opposition between oneiros and enhypnion is clearest in the systematization of dreams attempted in the hermeneutic project of Artemidorus in the second century AD.

In this essay, I reexamine this dominant classification, which continues to govern the way contemporary scholarship thematizes the ancient experience of dreams. I argue that this ‘fundamental distinction’ covers up an internal ambiguity that was part of the ancient experience of dreams and that was in many ways blurred and transformed by its ancient systematization. The opposition between significant and nonsignificant dreams allowed ancient interpreters to map the oneiric field, but the process of rationalization came at the price of subjecting this field of experience to a reductive binary picture. I suggest that the fundamental distinction is not a given, but a conceptual construct that was developed in antiquity out of a prior experience that finds its expression in myth and literature. The process I would like to

My methodological framework takes the dialectical relationship between logos and mythos as a cue for studying the dream’s duality. In discussing the meaning of dream ambiguity in antiquity my starting point will be the dominant ancient position that articulates ambiguity as a hermeneutical problem requiring strategies of clarification.

The role of myth in shaping the logic of ambiguity will be studied in relation to

Artemidorus' dream hermeneutics whose primary motive is to demystify that logic.

Hence, the first part of this essay discusses the meaning of the terminological turn in the ancient history of dream interpretation. Pondering the significance of the theoretical insistence on differentiation, we will trace the ideological framework behind the attempt to ascribe an autonomous essence to “significant dreams”. The theoretical desire to overcome the dream’s intrinsic ambiguity is challenged, however, by poetic discourses that embrace dream ambiguity as their foundational form. The second part of the essay will therefore examine the mythical conceptualization of dream ambiguity. We will concentrate on three examples of Homeric dreams