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Dreams: the teachers of our lives
By Gianfranco Casalis
Dreams have been known for some time as being a phenomenon that is produced spontaneously during sleep, characterised at the presence of fantastic thoughts, rich in images that they reproduce, often deformed and in illogical sequences, events that can be related to real life.
In ancient times, in the Greek religion, they were called Oneíroi and they were considered to be inferior divinities.
At the root of the mythological genealogy of the Greeks is the god Chaos. The son of Chaos, Erebo, had a son from the Night, and from this union two Gemini were born: Thanatos (god of death) and Hypnos (god of sleep). From the Hypnos union with the Night two children were born: Morfeo (the one who sends dreams with human figures) and Icelo (or Ikelo, the one who sends dreams of fear and terror). In Rome the Somnia were children of Sleep and there were so many that nobody could count them.
In antiquity there was incubation that was a divinatory rite that basically meant lying in a sanctuary, or in any case a sacred place, before falling asleep and before dreaming. Such dreams, were be believed to be sent by an extra-human entity of the sanctuary in answer to the questions of the follower, were then interpreted by prophets. The objective was that of obtaining healing.
The practice is documented in Egypt, Greece, with the Germans, pre-Columbian Perú and the populations of the subarctic area. In Greece sick pilgrims went to the temples of Pulpit, Epidauro, where in a contiguous cell to the sanctuary they received the "therapeutic" dream or incubation. Asclepio, the god of the medicine, or his wife Igea would appear in the dreams. The god used his hand to indicate the ill part of the body after which the patient would wake up completely cured.
Dreams not only reveal quick visions our archaic origins to us, to which Jung has called our attention and not only satisfy our unsatisfied wishes, as it has been taught to us by Freud, but hidden under these fantastic visions, they are also full of acute common sense even in the practical matters of the daily life.
The dreams contain flashes of intuition able to help us solve our problems more effectively even in regard to our slow and lazy reasoning, and reveal some of our characteristics to us that surprise us and sometimes disturb us.
We discover in fact that our dreams, unknown to us, have the whole night elaborate those problems of our life that in day we find we exaggerate and they help us to find solutions to these problems, recapitulating the events of the day.
Correctly interpreted dreams can be used by us as a guide when we find ourselves dispersed in the woods of our imagination and to help us to exceed our difficulties even when we have given up on them, believing them to be insurmountable.
Dreams guides us in the world of our imagination and our task is that of looking for the sense that lies hidden in this apparent inconsistency.
In the classic epoch dreams were the means with which the gods communicated to men. When the Greek army under the walls of Troy was struck by the plague, Achille suggests of taking advice from dreams, “because dreams come from Zeus”.
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