With Halloween on its way, it’s high time to take a look at visitation dreams, or dreams we have of the departed. For hundreds of years, early November (conveniently poised between the Fall Equinox and the Winter Solstice) has been celebrated as a time of harvest and plenty, and also a time when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thin. Is it the death of summer, the lengthening nights, or the dark knowledge that some won’t make it through the hard winter to follow? Who can say, but the metaphor connecting the harvest and the dead is part of the myth of agricultural societies around the world, as disparate as the ancient Celtic cultures with their celebration of Samhain and the Mexican celebrations of the Day of the Dead. Spirits and Dreams Go Way Back It’s no secret that a preferred method of contact with the departed in these bridging times is through dreams and hypnagogic visions. As writer Robert Moss has noted, the dead come calling for different reasons, and not all of them seem to be about satisfying the grief process, as some psychologists have wanly suggested. In fact, dreams of the dead can differ wildly in content, emotional embrace, and timing. Perhaps something else — something a little more ancient – is at work. Historically-speaking, dreams of the dead are some of the earliest transcribed accounts of dream life. Aristotle mentioned them, as did Lucretius, in part to comment on the widespread folk psychology that the characters in people’s dreams actually seem to be the spirits of the departed. Don’t forget that in the ancient world Thanatos (God of the Dead) and Hypnos (God of Dreams) are brothers. I could go on to cite ancient China and Egypt, as well as hundreds of contemporary indigenous cultures, who also have made the link between dreams and ancestors, but suffice to say that dreams have always been noted as a natural place for the deceased to mingle with us. - article by ryan hurd dreamstudies.org/2009/10/29/visitation-dreams-when-the-veil-between-worlds-is-thin/
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 14:40:02 +0000
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