The Dream and The Dreamer: A Brief History of Significance

We are still being affected by ancient Biblical dreams, an excellent example being that of the Apostle John in the book of Revelation when he describes the “end times” and the tragedy and terror which will accompany it. This apocalyptic vision by a sick and possibly delusional old man culminating in the Battle of Armageddon and the destruction of the earth and its inhabitants has had vast effects, from the early Christian days to Hollywood to the churches of today. So in this manner dreams can be considered quite significant and as real as anything else. My grandmother is a strict interpreter of the Bible, there is no telling her that it is highly unlikely Jesus is going to come down from the sky with an army from heaven and fight the enemies of Israel in a final battle. John’s dream is as real to her and as sure to happen as the sun rising in the East in the morning.

Finding meaning and direction from dreams is not limited to ancient and Biblical peoples however. Paul McCartney received the inspiration for his song Yesterday in a dream. This song became so renowned that it remains the most covered song ever written. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also inspired by a dream. Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his assassination just a few nights before he was so tragically shot. Had he put more emphasis and importance on the dream, we may have had a very different outcome. Madame C.J. Walker, the first in her family born free, became the first female African-American self-made millionaire because of a dream in which she was given a secret formula to manage black hair. She decided to try it, it worked, and she built an international cosmetics empire off of it. Elias Howe dreamed up the workings of the sewing machine in 1845 (see figure 2). Many of Stephen King’s novels come to him in dreams, like his famous novel turned into a movie: Misery. “I’ve always used dreams the way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back. To me that’s what dreams are supposed to do. I think that dreams are a way that people’s minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the answers to their problems in symbolic language.”

Figure 2



Image source.

This is a picture of Elias Howe’s original sewing machine.

Through the limited examples shown above, we can see the effects dreams have had on human history and thought have been quite significant. We can see that our waking life and dream consciousness are intricately intertwined, with few clues as to where one begins and the other ends. They complement and supplement each other, each playing a role in the human experience equally important to the survival of the other. In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter if the dream spawns the reality or if reality reflects itself in one’s dreams. Freud’s successor, Karl Jung, among others, had the idea that there is a collective consciousness. That there are these ideas “out there” and one can just pull on this collective knowledge when needed. Dreams, according to Jung, were a great medium through which one could accomplish this feat. I would have to agree and I think history testifies to this.

Reference

www.jstor.org.libweb.lib.utsa.edu

www.brilliantdreams.com/product/famous-dreams.htm