DREAMS, PROPHECY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS By D.P. Curtin *** The Montréal Review, July 2026 |
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Long before the birth of psychoanalysis, the ancient world regarded dreams as encounters with realities beyond ordinary mortal perceptions of reality. Dreaming was not taken as a form of hallucination during sleep, or as a trivial collection of cognitions and memories. To dream was to enter a strange liminal state in which the boundaries between mortals and the divine are blurred, where psychological space and otherness became uncertain, immersed in a sui generous world of dream logic. The ancient, and to a certain degree, medieval understanding of dreams reveals something fundamental about premodern conceptions of the human person and of anthropology. What our contemporary parlance calls the unconscious was not understood as a kind of psychological basement, hidden beneath everyday consciousness, but as an otherwise mysterious and porous frontier where memory, spirit, gods, and moral confusion converged. Famously, the concept of the unconscious gained popular notoriety within an alleged scientific and therapeutic framework, initially by Jean-Martin Charcot, but later popularized by figures like Freud and Jung. They attempted to internalize psychical phenomena that were once interpreted cosmologically or spiritually. Among the various critiques of Freud is his attempt to secularize Jewish mysticism, rendering the interpretation of dreams as a materialist school of hermeneutics, detached from the various traditions of the Jewish people. Yet, the experiences that gave rise to the concept of the unconscious, namely: involuntary thoughts, irrational desires, symbolic dreams, irresistible compulsions, and hidden motivations are as old as recorded history. Ancient peoples recognized with extraordinary clarity that the human mind was not fully transparent, and therefore could be speculated upon. The difference was not the recognition of hidden psychic forces, but in how those forces should be interpreted given the context of the individual. Among the earliest literary works of the canon of Western civilization, dreams already occupied a unique and unsettling place. In Homer’s Iliad, we find that Zeus has sent a deceptive dream to Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, in order to manipulate the course of the Trojan war. Psychical space exists in a cybernetic relationship with other unknown and irrational forces within the material world. That is to say, the mind was directly subject to the will of the gods, and mortal thoughts can be manipulated by divine intent. Dreams emerge externally, almost physically, entering the sleeper as agents with independent intentions of their own. Curiously, Homer offers some caution to simple interpretations, distinguishing between true and false dreams. His consciousness of the etiology of dreams presents its own neuroticism. How do we discern where a dream originates? While psychoanalysis might address this through sundry explanations involving wish fulfillment or repressed memories, ancient peoples posited that interpretation involved discernment between the prospect of divine revelation, demonic deception, bodily disturbance, or personal fantasy. The Greeks never arrived at a single answer because dreams occupied an undefinable position, not fully a function of the religious realm, but not properly within the realm of scientific inquiry. While figures like Hippocrates, the father of Medicine, utilized dreams for diagnostics, he believed that it was a creation of the soul acting on behalf of the body. In the great healing temples of Asclepius, patients underwent ritual incubation, sleeping within sacred precincts of the temple complex in hopes that the god would speak and reveal cures to them by means of dreams. Surviving inscriptions from the city of Epidaurus preserve accounts of miraculous nighttime visions wherein the god performed surgical interventions upon the sleeping pilgrim, or prescribed remedies for those in waiting at the shrine of the god. In this sense, the dream functioned simultaneously as divine revelation and a form of medicinal intervention. The dreaming mind became uniquely receptive to latent truths inaccessible during the mortal’s waking state. In time, the emergence of Greek philosophy complicated these older religious assumptions about our psychological interiority. For his part, Plato treated dreams ambivalently, if not with outright suspicion. In the Republic, he famously argued that during sleep the irrational portions of the soul emerge with greater license than in a waking state. He noted that various desires, normally restrained by conscious reason, reveal themselves in mysterious and sometimes grotesque symbolic forms. The dreaming mind exposed otherwise unknown appetites buried beneath civic and moral discipline, and for practical reasons, should be distrusted. Here the Greeks world offers a precocious theory which stands in anticipation of later psychoanalytic themes. The soul possesses obscured impulses that remain partially concealed from the waking self. Aristotle, by contrast, sought to place dreams within the observable world without entirely dismissing their potential significance. In his short works on sleep and divination, he offers a position akin to modern cognitive theorists. Aristotle argued that dreams arise from residual sensory impressions persisting after waking perception has ceased. The sleeper’s diminished rational control allows subtle bodily motions and affective impressions to become magnified into a series of random symbolic images. While Aristotle is clearly skeptical of prophetic dreams in the strictest sense, he nevertheless acknowledged that dreams sometimes revealed truths inaccessible to our ordinary conscious attention. This is perhaps murky given the reductionist style of Aristotle. In his imagining, a physician might unconsciously perceive the earliest symptoms of disease during waking life, which then emerge symbolically during sleep before the illness fully becomes evident. To this end, he is echoing some of the older beliefs of Hippocrates, who made a similar proposition a few decades prior. For Aristotle, the unconscious possessed observational powers that were otherwise unavailable to conscious rationality. This tension between supernatural revelation and what might be called ‘natural psychology’ remained unresolved throughout antiquity. Dreams often seemed distinctively meaningful because they arose outside of any personal volition. They appeared to come from nowhere. The biblical tradition of dreams is the single largest dream tradition to enter into our contemporary world. Like the Greek and their near-eastern neighbors, they believed that the dream was an oracle, a messenger sent to direct the mortal observer to the will of God. This is particularly salient in the Book of Genesis through persons like the patriarch Jacob, who dreams of the movements of celestial beings, and with Joseph, who is given portents into his own destiny through dreams and dream interpretation. The Mosaic tradition makes this explicit, where the Lord says “When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams.” (Num. 12:6). That is to say, dreams are the vehicle of divine revelation to mortals. This appears in similar traditions in deep antiquity. The analog to such a pronouncement can also be found in the Dream Stele of Pharaoh Thutmose IV, wherein the god reveals his purposes to the king, so that the king might fulfill the will of the god. This tradition posits that dreams are command-based. That they are the god’s directives to mortals, revelation given so that something material might take place in terms of mortal action. Roman authors of classical antiquity inherited these structural ambiguities in interpreting dreams and frequently expanded upon them. Cicero’s work De Divinatione presents a double, and at times contradictory, thesis. While Cicero offered one of antiquity’s most sophisticated skeptical critiques of prophetic dreaming, he simultaneously preserved numerous examples of dreams that appeared uncannily predictive in their scope. Especially during the zenith of the empire, the Roman imagination remained deeply haunted by the proposition of dreams because political life itself often seemed vulnerable to strange, irrational forces. Suetonius and Plutarch recount ominous dreams surrounding the deaths of various emperors and generals, all of which are given as a moral caution. Famously, Calpurnia dreams of Caesar’s assassination before the infamous Ides of March. Augustus reportedly experienced recurring nocturnal visions warning him of potential dangers. The Roman political order itself appeared to be built on a foundation of divine prognostication, permeable to signs emerging from the unconscious or divine realms. Despite the changing political and cultural mores, the world of late antiquity intensified these anxieties further. As a diminished paganism, Christianity, and Neoplatonic philosophy competed for intellectual authority within the Roman world, dreams became increasingly associated with the questions of spiritual warfare. Properly understanding their meaning was the challenge that serious intellectual discourse would be immersed in during the late empire. The Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus postulated that the soul was participating in multiple layers of reality simultaneously, which caused confabulation in mortal minds. Dreams could therefore reflect the soul’s ascent toward higher intellectual truths, or conversely, in its descent into fleshpot passions and illusion. For the first time, the inner life of man became cosmological. Not subject to the will of a god, but a participant in the strange hidden psychical reality of our world. Here human consciousness mirrored the structure of the universe itself and was able to comprehend it through the dreamwork. Christianity, while drawing upon the foundation of Jewish beliefs, introduced a profound suspicion toward the inner life alongside this openness to personal revelation in dreams. For the early church, the problem was no longer whether dreams were true or false, but whether unseen spiritual agencies might manipulate the imagination itself, and thus the interiority of the believer. It would be a continually debated moral question, if the dreamer was responsible for the content of their dreams, and thus was indulging in some illicit phantasy. No writer explored this complexity more profoundly than the great scholar, St. Augustine. In his work the Confessions, Augustine repeatedly confronts the disturbing persistence of his own involuntary desire within dreams. Even after his conversion to Christianity and embrace of the life of celibacy, erotic fantasies continue to appear during his sleep, bypassing conscious moral intention. St. Augustine was horrified, not only because the dreams occur, but because they reveal divisions within the will he cannot fully control or account for. St. Augustine realized within himself that the will is fractured. One part of his own soul desires holiness while another remains entangled in memory, appetite, and the comfort of habit. St. Augustine’s psychological introspection represents one of the great turning points in Western thought because he locates moral conflict within interior consciousness, and not the impulse of an external agent like a god. Sin is a disordered desire operating beneath our rational awareness. Modern psychodynamic theories of ego defense, repression of desires, and unconscious motivation owe more to St. Augustine than is often acknowledged. In his Victorian salon in Vienna some fifteen centuries later, Freud would secularize many of the psychical dilemmas St. Augustine had already articulated in theological form. The medieval world would inherit St. Augustine’s psychological realism while at the same time preserving older traditions of symbolic dream interpretation. Medieval literature frequently treats dreams as spaces where moral and spiritual truths become psychically manifest through the allegory of the individual dreamwork. In the Dream of the Rood, one of the great poems of Old English literature, the dreamer encounters the Cross (rood) itself speaking as a wounded participant in the triumph of Christ’s crucifixion. The dream becomes a medium through which cosmic history enters the subjective experience of the dreamer. Likewise, medieval visionary literature of the period often blurred the distinction between dream, prophecy, and mystical revelation. Writers like St. Bridget of Sweden offers a sweeping vision of interiority through her writings of Christian revelation. Just the same, Hildegard of Bingen described luminous visions she experienced from her own childhood onward, insisting they differed from the prosaic world of dreams because they occurred in states of inner spiritual clarity rather than during sleep. Her writings combined theology, cosmology, medieval medicine, and symbolic imagery into vast visionary syntheses. As a rule, medieval readers did not sharply distinguish psychology from metaphysics because the human soul itself was understood as the subject of experience for both fields of study. What distinguishes the ancient and medieval understanding of dreams from our modern psychology is not the absence of psychological insight, but the refusal to isolate the psyche from the metaphysical realm. Premodern thinkers generally assumed that the hidden regions of the self opened outward toward larger spiritual and cosmic structures. Dreams revealed not only private neuroses but participation in broader psychical realities beyond the isolated individual. Modernity gradually internalized all of these experiences, detaching them from any and all philosophical underpinning. Freud, using the veneer of science, reinterpreted dreams exclusively as expressions of repressed wish fulfillment. Jung transformed them further into manifestations of collective archetypes emerging from a mysterious shared unconscious structure present across humanity. Both preserved the ancient intuition that dreams disclose truths inaccessible to our ordinary rational consciousness. Yet the gods, angels, and demons that were once the catalyst for such truth disappeared into a vast wilderness of multi-layered symbolism. There was something gained through this transformation. Modern psychology developed more sophisticated methods for understanding clinical presentations, namely things like trauma, repression, and unconscious motivation. It also gave modern psychological practice its own disciplinary space, independent from religious or philosophical speculation. However, something was also lost. Ancient and medieval cultures approached dreams with existential seriousness because they assumed human beings were not fully self-contained creatures, that their conscious awareness was a function of a broader ecological universe. The state of their unconscious pointed beyond the self towards a broader mystery that reason alone could not master. Even now, despite our contemporary sophistication, dreams still retain something of their ancient ambiguity. They remain among the few universal human experiences that have resisted the reductionist attitudes commonplace in modernity, as they are impervious to rational domestication. Even with our neurological insight into REM sleep, and our theoretical clinical underpinning, a dream can still feel like revelation even within the context of a dogmatically secular age. Our world may no longer interpret dreams as messages from Apollo, or as spiritual assaults by some archdemon, but the underlying experience remains strangely consistent. We still awaken with the unsettling proposition that part of the mind lives beyond the reach of our own conscious control.
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Art Note: The Shepherd's Dream (1793). A sleeper slumbers in shadow while ethereal, unbidden entities swirl across his field of sleep — an image that captures an older human architecture, where the mind is not a sealed vault of private neuroses, but a porous frontier open to the unsettling intrusions of the cosmos. Henry Fuseli. Oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London. Public domain. View at Tate.
