Dreams

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Dreams

The moon had two hands, one holding a bow and arrows and the other a burden strap of a woman. The moon then offered to the dreamer to make choice, but would often try to confuse him by crossing its hands. If he became the possessor of the burden strap, he would be condemned to live as a woman for the remainder of his life. He would be required to dress as a woman, marry another man, and undertake woman’s work. Such people were known as a bedache in the Oglala Sioux and suicide was the only way to escape this fate.
This is a description of a puberty dream in the Oglala Sioux tribe, this was a very popular ritual that consisted of a young man sleeping in a special place in the wilderness and hoping for a dream that would tell him his role in the tribe. Such dream interpretations were very popular among ancient civilizations and have always held value. However ancient interpretations were based on religious beliefs and cultural adaptations and aren’t as nearly as revealing as the modernist interpretation theories of Freud and Jung that are based on life experiences, personality traits and psychological condition.
As man developed logic he inquired into the meaning of his dreams. The first developing societies believed that the dreamer enters another real world, the world of power and spirit. This world was seen as real or more real then the waking world, but certainly a more powerful world. The dreamer would then call on tribal elders, matriarchs, patriarchs, priests and shamans to interpret his dreams. Other societies believed that dreams were divine messages from god or could show them how to lead their lives.
Among such societies were the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. The Egyptians believed that some of the dreams were omens from the spirit world, but they did not seem to believe that the soul could leave the body and go to a higher level while the person slept. (Delaney 15) They were the first to establish a book of dreams that had many interpretations of dreams and their conclusions. The Greeks respected dreams believing that “they were messages from gods, that they foretell the future, that they are a means of curing illness and that they enable one to speak with the dead and witness events taking place at great distances”(Delaney, 33.) The Romans inherited most of their views about dreams from the Greeks. Artemidorus, a roman philosopher developed a five volume elaborate collection about dreams, called Oneirocriticon, in which he arg...

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