Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?
What if you were unable to wake fromthat dream?
How would you know the difference between the dream world
and the real world?
Morpheus, in‘Matrix’
Ancient Egyptian terminology for dreams
Modern dictionaries of ancient Egyptian1 concur that the most commonly used word for dreams is rsw.t. The use of this word is attested as early as the First Intermediate Period in letters written to the dead and continues through ancient Egyptian history, even remaining in Coptic as pαcoɤ. Of the corpuspresented here, the genres in which rsw.t appears include letters, belles lettres, royal political texts, and practical texts, such asthose that involve spells, ritual, and medical instructions. In addition, rsw.t is also the preferred term used in oneiromantic texts, such as the Dream Book of P. Chester Beatty III and the later Demotic Dream Book.
As a first step towards understanding the Egyptian concept ofdreams we should note that rsw.t is always a nominal form, a substantive ‘dream’, and it does not have a corresponding verbal form in ancient Egyptian. In English, dreaming can be an activity; ‘I was dreaming’, or ‘I dreamt last night’, or it can be a substantive, as in ‘I had a good/bad dream’. This is not the case in ancient Egypt, however, where the activity of dreaming had to be indirectly indicated by a phrase such as m⫖⫖ m rsw.t, which can be translated literally as ‘to see in a dream’,2 or m⫖⫖ rsw.t ‘to see a dream’.The corpus of exemplars is as follows: m⫖(⫖) m rsw.t (‘to see in a dream’),3 m⫖⫖.nm rsw.t (’saw in a dream’),4 tm m⫖⫖(.w) rsw.t (‘not to see dreams’),5 sdr.w m⫖⫖ rsw.t (‘Only the sleeper sees the dream’),6 mjtt rsw.t (‘the likeness of a dream’),7 mj [...] n rsw.t (‘like a [...] of a dream’),8 mj sšm rsw.t (‘like the unfolding of a dream’),9 sswn rsw.tpw (‘it is the destruction of a dream’),10 jj.t m rsw.t (‘came in adream’),11 rsw.t (‘dreams’),12 rsw.t tn nfr.t (‘you good dream’),13 rsw.t d̲w.t (‘bad dreams’),14 rsw.t nb.t dw.t [m⫖⫖.n=f] (‘all the bad dreams that he has seen’),15 and sp pn nt rsw.t (‘it is the time of a dream’).16
The nominal form rsw.t derives from the root rs,17 which means to‘awaken’ in an intransitive sense. Thus, in ancient Egyptian, adream can be considered something one sees upon awakening during sleep, or is perhaps the very state of being aware, while asleep. The concept of a dream asan awakening is an unusual one by modern and anthropological standards, yet not entirely absent.18
The lack of a verbalconstruction of ‘dreaming’ is not unique to ancient Egypt.19 Neither Sumerian nor Akkadian developed a verb denoting a dreaming activity; in both these languages, as in ancient Egyptian, one would rather see a dream.20 In Akkadian, the most common way to express the word dream was šuttu – which happens to bederived from the same root as šittu’sleep’.21 In Egyptian, one word for sleep, qd, over time gradually assumed the meaning of ‘dream’. But the first appearance of qd denoting dream (nineteenth dynasty) is much later than the sixth-dynasty appearance of the term rsw.t, and qd lacks the long-term continuity of the more common word. While both words may appear in the same context, at other times each appears in a separate environment. TheWörterbuch assigns to qd only the meaning of ’sleep’,22 citing its apparent parallel appearance with rsw.t in the Berlin Execration Bowls published by Sethe.23 Hannig cites this particular orthography of qddw separately from the others and gives the meaning of qddw nbw d̲ww as ‘all the baddreams’.24 The precise phrase in question appears to be rsw.t nb.t d̲w.t qdd.w nb dw, and is translated by Sethe25 as’all bad dreams and all bad sleep’. However, a new interpretation of this lexeme has been suggested based on the more recent discovery of Middle Kingdom Execration Texts from Mirgissa.26 Posener points out that in these texts there is clearly an m‘ inserted between the two phrases,which Sethe could not have been aware of due to the fragmentary nature of the particular collection with which he was working, now at the Berlin Museum.27 Thus, the current understanding of this phrase should be’tout mauvais reve dans tous les mauvais sommeils’ (‘all bad dreams in all bad slumber’).28 It should be noted that in the case of Sethe’s examples the determinative is again D6, the open eye with make-up
indicating that the connotation of qd is not identical with the common word for sleep or lying down, sd̲r (which usually uses the determinative A55: a mummy on a bed
It is not until the late New Kingdom that we find firm evidence that qd can denote specifically the noun ‘dream’, as well as ‘slumber’.29 The meaning of qd as dream is further confirmed in the oracular amuletic decrees of theThird Intermediate Period, where we find no less than ten separate instances of qd referred to as having been seen.30 The primary meaning of qd as ‘sleep’ or ‘slumber’ is inappropriate in these cases. This is corroborated by the substitution of rsw.t for qd in otherwise identical phrases in two other oracular amuletic decrees of the same period.31 Finally, one of the decrees replaces the single term qd, with four separate lexemes: qd.t, rsw.t, qd̲m, and ᒼ ᒼ.wy.32 The appearance of these terms in conjunction with each other indicates that they are semantically closely related, but not necessarily identical.
The recognitionthat qd can mean ‘dream’ has direct consequences for the translation of two important New Kingdom biographies of non-royal citizens – Ipuy, and Djehutiemhab – as well as an intriguing but severely mutilated literary text.33 After the Second Intermediate Period adistributive pattern can be found between the uses of qd and rsw.t. The noun qd is used in documentary texts of non- royal individuals only: the oracular amuletic decrees, a letter, biographies of officials, and the Opening of the Mouth ritual. The use of qd instead ofrsw.t to mean ‘dream’ may reflect two distinct scribal traditions based on geography. It may be no coincidence that out of the fourteen texts that use qd, the majority originated in the Theban area. The examples coming from Thebes consist of the letter, an oracular ostrakon, two biographies, the early examples of the Opening of the Mouth ritual and sixoracular decrees (two are certainly from Thebes). Of the remaining oracular decrees, one probably originated in Middle Egypt, one in Sakkara, while the origins of three others remain unknown. In support of an argument for separate scholarly traditions, it can be noted that the two oracular decrees which use rsw.t in place of qd, are so strik- ingly similar (in contrast to theother decrees) that a common ancestor has been suggested for them.34 The entire issue of geographic diglossia requires further research, and it is mentioned here simply as a possibility that deserves consideration. In general, it is in the belles lettres, king’s- novels, and formulaic texts such as the dream books and medical texts, that the term rsw.t continues to be used. An exception is the Opening of the Mouth funerary ritual – a formulaic text in which one might expect to find rsw.t. but where qd appears instead. The meaning of qd in this context is ambiguous and unresolved, and will be considered later.
Finally, there are indirect references to dreams, where neither rsw.t nor qd is used, but an event is described as having been experienced during sleep. These include a heavily damaged and corrupt New Kingdom text, possibly a fictional work, which may describe a woman who appears to his Majesty who then abruptly wakes up,35 and the stela of Thutmosis IV, to whom god spoke while sleep and slumber (cc .wy nqdd) overcame him.36
These dreams should not necessarily be considered by default positive. Common American phrases such as ’dream car’,’dream job’, or ’it was like a dream come true’ all assume a positive connotation for the word ‘dream’. Similarly, when a native speaker of English says that ’it was like a dream’ or ’I saw it in a dream’ the listener may assume that the experience was quite unreal and untrue. However, this was likely not the case in ancient Egypt, nor for many other cultures.37 Careful readings ofthe texts suggest that the terms rsw.t and qd do not seem to have intrinsically carried positive or negative weight in ancient Egypt. Dreams could be qualified by adjectives such as good, nfr, or bad, d̲w, but are otherwise neutral. Nightmares are a separate category not indicated by eitherthe term rsw.t or qd, and will be examined separately.
The idea of the dream as vision or spectacle is lexically confirmed by the regular use of verbs denoting seeing, such asm⫖⫖, ptr, in Demotic prj,38 and in Coptic πωωрϵ,39 with sleep as the context and the dream as an object. As Goldwasser40 has shown, our understanding of the organization of knowledge and the ’deep structure of world classification of the Egyptian culture’41 is greatly facilitated by the Egyptians’ use of determinatives as an integral component of the graphemic system. The most common determinative used in ancient Egyptian with both qd (when it refers to a dream) as well as with rsw.t is the open eye with make-up (D6) .42 This strengthens the idea of the dream as related to a state of awareness, of being associated with the ability to see, and of being awake in the case of rsw.t.43 Following Winand,44 there are five common verbs expressing ’seeing’ whose precisenuances change through time. The verbs are m⫖⫖, ptr, dgj, gmh, and nw. Synchronically, these termsare not identical synonyms, while diachronically the meaning of an individualterm changes. The following analysis will help clarify the specific category of ’seeing’ to which the ancient authors were referring, and whether the sleeper was thought to consciously ’look at’ his dream or passively ‘see’ the dream unfolding before him. Most of the examples that date from prior to the Amarna Period employ some variation of m⫖⫖ (N m) rsw.t ‘see (something in) a dream’. In the oracular amuletic decrees of the Third Intermediate Period variations of ptr are normally used. While certain formulaic expressions in genres such as medical texts become frozen in time, examples from other genres display a variation according totheir temporal setting, allowing the inference that the selection of lexeme wasto some degree conscious and meaningful. Winand45 concludes that the dichotomy that exists between the involuntary act of seeing and the involuntary act of looking at, or watching, in our language was not in play in the ancient Egyptian language. He suggests that the Egyptians simply used the unmarked terms (m⫖⫖ in the Middle Kingdom, ptr in the New Kingdom) for both seeing and watching. The other related terms were selected to express a particular modality of action.
According to this model, when writing about dreams, the ancient authors selected the words expressing the involuntary act of seeing.The sleeper does not actively focus his attention and stare at a dream, nor does he discover the dream by looking.47 Rather, he is a passive viewer of the events unfolding in the dream, as if it were a spectacle or play. On initial perusal, it appears that this system is confirmed by the Egyptian corpus of dream texts. In particular, P. Chester Beatty III conveniently provides an example where both the marked and unmarked verbs appear. In r. 2.24, we find the phrase which forms the antecedent of every sentence in the text jr m⫖⫖ sw s m rsw.t ’if a man sees himself ina dream’, followed by hr nw m sšd ’looking through a windowc . The use of the term nw, rather than m⫖⫖ which appears frequently in this text, suggests that here an opposition mayindeed exist between the voluntary nw, and the involuntary m⫖⫖.48
Nevertheless, it is not in every instance that the dreamer is involuntarily seeing something in a dream. In the Letter to the Dead, Nag ed Deir 3737 we find a different interpretation. This First Intermediate Period letter is written in Old Egyptian where m⫖⫖ is typically the unmarked form of the verb for seeing. In this letter, the author Heni writes to his dead father because of what his father’s servant Seni is doing: he is causing Heni to see him (Seni) in a dream – ḥr nn jrr.w d̲t=k [Sn]j n rdj.t m⫖ sw b⫖k jm m rsw.t (ll. 2–3). Seni is causing Heni to see (m⫖)him against his will. Heni’s ultimate goal in writing the letter is to persuade his father to prevent Seni from doing this, butalso to guard Seni so that he (the dead servant) will no longer watch Heni:s⫖w.t(w)=f r tm.t=f m⫖⫖(.w) [b⫖]k jm r nhh(ll. 5–6). The lexeme used in both instances is the same m⫖(⫖), but clearly they are used with different connotations. In the second instance, Heni is asking that his father prevent Seni not from involuntarily seeing him, but to stop Seni from focusing his gaze, his wilful dangerous stare upon the anxious dreamer. The dreamer does not wish to be able to see the watcher, nor does he wish to be the object of scrutiny by the hostile being in a dream. In this case, the context must be taken into account when determining the aspectuality of a verbal expression, asit cannot necessarily be determined on the basis of the bare verb itself.
It appears that a dream in ancient Egypt is something seen, not done. A similar situation occurs in Mesopotamian texts where ’one said only to see a dream (Akkadian, amâru, and naṭâlu; sometimes naplusu and šubrû), and the dream was first of all a vision...a spectacle’.49 For theclassical Greeks as well, dreams were ‘autonomous; they were not conceptualized as products of a personal or sub- or unconscious but rather as visual images that present themselves to the dreamer. Thus Homeric dreamers spoke of seeing a dream, not of having one as modern dreamers do.’ 50 The dream in this sense is external to the dreamer, and out ofhis control. The ancient Egyptian saw (m⫖⫖) the dream in the same way he would see the world,51 so there was therefore no need of a special verbal construction to denote an activity of ‘dreaming’, or an exceptional verb for ‘seeing’. This is confirmed by textual evidence which offers no examples of a verb ’to dream’. Although the verb p(t)rj in Late Egyptian and Demotic may be used with dream as an object,52 on its own it still does not signify the activity of dreaming. Neither does the Coptic equivalent πωωрϵ which signifies ‘seeing’ whatever the object may be. P. Deir el-Medina 6 has been cited as the earliest usage of ptrj meaning’to dream’,53 but this is based on an inaccurate reading. The complete phrase has been translated in two ways. Černý and Wentetranslate the passage as wc qd ptr=s ’a dream that she had seen’ (P. Deir el-Medina 6, v. 3) with the ptr=s as a relative form.54 In this instance, the woman in this letter sees a dream. It is the wc qd, that indicates that she has seen a dream, not the ptrj. If we replace the direct object qd with another noun, let’s say ’dog’ (ṯsm), she still is talking about a dog that she has seen, not a dog that she has dreamt. The expression here is to see x, where x can be replaced by any noun as the direct object. This is confirmedin Coptic, by the examples in Crum, where πωωрϵ is followed by pαcoɤ as its object.
Sweeney’s recent analysis of P. Deir el Medina 6 makes the point more clearly. She has demonstrated that the ptr=s is better translated as ptr s(jj) ‘Look afterher’.55 In this interpretation it is even more certain thatit is the lexeme qd that means dream, and not ptr.
The ancient Egyptian dream is not an event arising from within the dreamer or an activity performed by an individual, but rather has an objective existence outside of the sleeper’s will. The use of the phrase ‘seeing in a dream’ also indicates that the dream is an alternate state or dimension in which the waking barriers to perception are temporarily withdrawn. In ancient Egypt the dream refers not to the act of perceiving, but sometimes to an alternate state of reality. This will be explored further in the following section.56
The dream zone
The use of another common phrase, m⫖⫖ m rsw.t, in the earliest known documentary evidence for a dream in ancient Egypt suggests that it was also perceived as a state or zone. The dream was an autonomous phenomenon, external to the dreamer, which existed as a spatial dimension. This is indicated by the use of locational prepositions as well as other linguistic devices.57 It was not unusual for the Egyptians to treat ‘states’ as physical locations complete with topographical features.58 This is most evident in their illustrations and representations of the farworld, early maps of which appear on Middle Kingdom coffins, and textual descriptions in the mortuary texts. As becomes clear in the Books of the Afterlife and religious texts of the New Kingdom, the night was inextricably bound with the concept of the after life. The sun journeys through the sky in this world during the day, then proceeds westward to continue its travels through the farworld at night. Many of the royal Books of the Afterlife describe the journey of the pharaoh with the sun-god through thetwelve divisions of the night – the realm on the other side of life. Thephysical condition of death itself was for ordinary mortals not always sogrand, however, and was often to be feared. In death, the body is immobile, apparently functionless – it becomes a static object.59 In life, this condition is mimicked by sleep, and indeed terms for sleep may beused to signify death. Zandee explains that in ancient Egypt
death tallies with sleep. Words for sleeping may be used as analogous terms for death. The rigidity of the stiffened body makes death to beconsidered as being bound. Resurrection from death is like awakening from sleep, like rising after lying down (sdr). In Pyr.721.d (qd) the aversion to death is expressed as ‘he detests sleep, hehates fatigue’. Also verbs of being tired (b⫖gj, nnj, wrd)are used as equivalents of being dead. About the resurrection of Osirisfrom death it is said: ‘A tired god is waking up.’ In CT I 306a nnj and sd̲r, being tired and sleeping are parallels. Both mean lying motionless in death. In BD 45, where wrd̲, being tired, comes nearto ḫw⫖, to waste away, death also must be meant.60
If sleep is analogous to death, and awakening to resurrection, then the question remains as to what exactly was this ‘awakening’ while asleep, known as the rsw.t or‘dream’.
We have already seen how the Egyptian states of sleeping and death were analogous concepts, with resurrection and waking often sharing the same terminology. The Egyptians did not believe in resurrection in the sense of a return to the land of the living,but the concept of rebirth, or reawakening in the afterlife, was central to their religious beliefs. In the first millennium of Egypt’s history, it was precisely those individuals who had awoken or were reborn in the afterlife who appeared in the dreams of the sleeper, while in the New Kingdom, the gods began to make their appearance.61 But Hornung proposes that death and sleep were bridges to the other world, and thus that that sphere was inhabited by not two, but three categories of beings: gods, dead, andsleepers.62 The assumption is that when the sleeper is temporarilyin the primeval ocean of Nun, and he awakens in a dream, he finds himself within the confines of the farworld, and able to interact with the other inhabitants.63 It is time to turn to the textual evidence to see if it supports this theory.
The first reference to dreams appears in the Letters to the Dead. These texts form a group of approximately twenty non-royal letters written by Egyptians to their deceased relatives or acquaintances.64 They have been found in sites throughout Egypt, and date from the Old to the New Kingdom (the majority date prior to the New Kingdom). Although the letters could be written on papyrus, they were often written on pottery vessels, and left in the tombs. The very fact that the Egyptians left these letters at all reveals their belief in the continuation of ordinary life in the next world,65 and the possibility of direct communication with the dead. Most of these letters, particularly the earliest ones, are written on offering bowls, suggesting that this communication was not necessarily desired by the deceased, who had to be coaxed into reading the missives after having been put in a receptive mood by means of tasty offerings.
These letters usually consist of requests to the dead for personal favours either in this world – such as the settling of household quarrels, or property disputes, or the defending of an inheritance,or perhaps the birth of a healthy child – or direct intercessions on the behalf of the living, within the farworld itself. At this early period these missives are addressed to the dead, and not to the gods. The dead themselves are in contact with gods as suggested by Hornung above, and the living offer hopes that the gods will take good care of them in that world. These divinities include ‘Ha, the Lord of the West’,66 ‘Anubis, Lord of Burial’,67 ‘Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners’,68 ‘Hathor, Lady of theHorizon’,69 local gods such as the ‘Lords of the Thinite Nome’,70 and all-encompassing gods such as ‘The Great One’, and ‘The Great God’.71 This direct contact with god was likely a benefit of resurrection in the farworld, and available to all the dead, even in the Old Kingdom.
This, then, is the context in which the first written reports of dreams can be found. Before we look closely at the nature of dreams as expressed in these texts, a short digression into the history of one of these letters will serve as a reminder of the often unsteady nature of so much of our evidence from ancient Egypt. A case in point is the text often referred to simply as ‘Letter on a Stela’ or ‘Misplaced Stela’.72 That we know anything at all about it is due to aquirk of fate that brought Edward Wente into contact with an antiquities dealerin Cairo, who was in the process of exporting a limestone stela to an unknown purchaser. Wente was allowed to transcribe the hieratic text, which he quickly recognized as one of the rare Letters to the Dead. The palaeography indicatesits origin was in the First Intermediate Period, possibly the eleventh dynasty,but its current location remains unidentified and its original findspot and history may remain forever unknown. Until it resurfaces from its current obscurity, the stela itself cannot be re-checked, and any assumptions derived solely on the basis of this text should be treated with due caution. The following analysis is therefore conservative and includes wherever possible corroborating evidence.
The first part of the letter is addressed from a husband to his dead wife, and the second is from her brother.We are here concerned only with the first portion, the section which explicitly mentions a dream.
A saying by Merirtifi to Nebetotef:
‘How are you?
Has she, the West, been taking care of you according to your desire?
See, I am your beloved upon earth,
Fight on my behalf and guard my name!
I did not muddle a spell before you,
while I was perpetuating your name upon earth.
Expel the pain of my body!
Please be beneficial to me in my presence,
while I see you fighting on my behalf in a dream.
I will lay down gifts before you
...when the sun rises I will set up offerings for you.’
This letter begins in typical fashion, with the author, Merirtifi, asking how his beloved Nebetotef is faring in the next world. His expressed hope that she is being treated well implies that this is by no means an automatic assumption. A reminder of their close relationship follows, and after this presentation of pleasantries Merirtifi slips in a request for her to fight on his behalf, in return for his having flawlessly performed funerary rituals on her behalf. The author then reveals the real reason for his going to the effort of writing to his beloved in the beyond: that she somehow cure his physical condition. He does not seem really to trust that she will do all that she can for him; he requests visual proof, which can apparently be had in a dream. In return, he will continue giving offerings tothe deceased, and will start immediately at the break of dawn after his nocturnal confirmation of her help.
The word used for dream in this text is the noun rsw.t73 ‘awakening’. Merirtifi does not ask to ‘dream of’ Nebetotef, but desires to ‘see her in a dream’. An Egyptian such as Merirtifi could hope to wake up in the night in this peculiar zone or state, where he could contact or at least view an individual who was living in the farworld, as if through the window of a waiting room. Unfortunately we do not have any evidence of whether or not Merirtifi ever didsucceed in seeing Nebetotef in the dream, as he hoped. Indeed, the only currently known report of contact between the living and the dead in a dream isfound in P. Nag ed-Deir 3737,74 and possibly during the Opening ofthe Mouth ritual, which will be examined below.
Another text providing more information on the concept of dreams in Egypt’s early history is the Letter to the Dead, Nag ed-Deir 3737.75 This letter was found by George Reisner while excavating the tomb of an overseer of priests named Meru in Naged-Deir, not far from Abydos. The folded papyrus,dated tentatively to the tenth dynasty, was found in the courtyard of Meru’s tomb, in a subsidiary burial of a relative, who would presumably have delivered the letter to Meru.76 Its findspot is revealing, in that the walls of the tomb actually depict the tomb-owner Meru, his son Heni, and his servant Seni in happier times.77 The author of the letter, Heni, also a priest, writes to his dead father for help, first reminding his father of the fact that it is he, Heni, who continues to provide offerings for his well-being in the beyond. It seems that Heni is being bothered in a dream by his father’s servant Seni, who is also dead. Heni, in what looks to be a case of a guilty conscience, denies responsibility for the beating of the servant Seni, and requests that his father prevent Senifrom watching him, presumably in dreams as well.
It is useful to pay attention to the one who provides for you, on account of the sethings which your servant Seni does: for causing me, your servant, to see him in a dream in the one Sole City with you.
Indeed, it is his own character that drives him away.Indeed, that which happened against him, did not happen by the hand of me, your servant. [Nor] was it an end of all that would happen. Indeed, it is not I who first caused wounds against him. Others acted before I, your servant, [did]. Please, may his lord be protective, and do not allow him to do harm. May he be guarded in order that he may be done with looking at me, your servant, forever.
Clearly, this is not a good dream. The writer, Heni, expresses guilt and anxiety concerning his relationship with the deceased Seni. Whether or not his guilt caused the dream,78 this is precisely the type of dream that is often recalled by the dreamer, and it certainly must have been quite compelling for Heni to have put it inwriting.
Again, we have no evidence as to whether Heni’s plea was heard, and whether his father successfully prevented Seni from further harming his son. It may be that the very act of putting his feelings in writing helped Heni. It has been noted that ‘on occasion a dream persecutes the dreamer until he has written it down or told it to somebody’.79 While Heni briefly complains of seeing Seni in adream, he offers no details of the circum- stances, and indeed the only indication that this is an unwelcome vision appears later in the letter in hisrequest that his father prevent Seni from harming him.80 Specifically, Heni wants Seni to be guarded to prevent him from looking at him[Heni], forever: s⫖w.t(w)=f tm.t=f m⫖⫖(.w) [b⫖]k jm r nhh (ll. 5–6). It appears that not only can Seni force the sleeper to see him, but worse yet, the dead man can watch the sleeper. The dream is not merely a window through which the dreamer can see a loved one in the beyond, but it is also a place where the dreamer himself is susceptible to being watched. Another Letter to the Dead from the same area and period pleads with the deceased to ‘hold fast this dead man or this dead woman. Let them not see a single fault of his’.81 The dream may be compared to a liminal zone, a transparent area between the walls of two worlds which allowed beings in separate spheres to see each other.
This very act of staring at someone could have harmful affects, and is sometimes termed the‘evil eye’. This concept of the evil eye reappears throughout Egyptian texts, most notably in the oracular amuletic decrees of the Third Intermediate Period. These are texts of varying lengths, purporting to contain the direct speech of a deity offering protection for the person in question, usually a child. These papyrus texts were then rolled up, placed in wooden containers, and worn like a necklace as a prophylactic charm. Among other negative influences, the texts mention dreams, as well as promises to keep away any evil eye, jr.t nb.t bjn.t, the eye of a dead person, jr.t mw.t, the eye of people, jr.t rmt̲.t, or any evil stare, qd̲m nbbjn.82 A note worthy discussion on the evil eye can be found in Borghouts’ ‘The Evil Eye of Apophis’.83 As part of his discussion, he documents a number of beings credited with the ability to cast the evil eye, including the serpent Apophis, snakes in general, gods,demons, living humans, the malevolent dead, and even the eye itself as an independent force. The idea of the piercing glance as being able to see or be seen from afar is also mentioned in BD 108 (CT 160) where Apophis‘turns his eye towards Re’, thus causing the Sacred Barque tohalt. Seth, as protector of the barque, speaks to a serpent ‘...you who see from afar, just close your eye!’84 Other examples of this text use slightly different constructions,85 which accounts for Faulkner’s translation: ‘I stand before you, navigating aright and seeing afar. Cover your face, for I ferry across... Cover your head...’86 In this version it is Seth who can see afar. Apophis’ casting his eye upon the sun god was seen by Seth from a distance,87 and he was commanded to cease his malign gawking. Similarly, in our earlier case, Heni may have felt himself the victim of the evil eye of Seni.88
Luckily for Heni, at this time direct physical contact does not seem to have been possible in the dream.De Buck proposes that the ability to see the dead during sleep led to the theory that the sleeper ‘dwells in the Jenseits. However, the reasoning of primitive men was not, as this theory supposes: “I see the dead,therefore they exist”, but: “I see the dead and the gods, therefore I am during my sleep in the invisible, eternal world where they are”.’89 But rather than the sleeper awakening in the farworld itself in direct proximity with the dead, it is more accurate to say that the sleeper awoke in a liminal landscape between the two worlds, whose boundaries and walls were transparent,90 and where he could see the dead, and the dead could watch him. Heni says specifically that he saw his dead father and the servant together in the njw.t wc ;.t, ’the one city‘, in a dream. While the phrase in the text is damaged, the useof a geographical term such as ‘city’, with reference to dreams and the land of the dead, has parallels in ancient and modern cultures.91 A similar example from the same genre and a slightly earlier period can be found inside the Kaw Bowl.92 A son complains to his deceased father regarding an inheritance dispute, which he believes can be better solved in the farworld:
Look, he [i.e. the writer’s dead brother] is with you [the dead father] in the one city!You should institute litigation against him since you have witnesses with you in the one city (ll. 8–9).
In both of these casesthe one city is called njw.t wc ;.t, an area which must belong in the realm of the dead, rather than an earthly town. This reference to a city appears in mortuary texts such as the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead and may indicate a specific locality where the newly deceased can hope to be reunited with relatives.93 Book of the Dead spell 110, for example, lists a number of specific towns or regions in the farworld. But neither the Coffin Texts, nor the Book of the Dead, nor the Royal Books of the Afterlife mention any area related to dreams. Indeed dreams are not mentioned in any of these texts. Sleepers are occasionally mentioned, (the Book of the Night is one such example), but these sleepers are already deceased; they will awaken when the sun-god goes by, and then go back to sleep again. It seems that Heni remains just outside the domain of the dead in a dream-state whence he can seehis dead father and servant, over there.
The concept of the dreamer being in one place, and able to see something distant continues tobe expressed in the New Kingdom in the ‘Invocation to Isis’ foundin P. Chester Beatty III. The spell is to be spoken by a man who has awakened after having a nightmare. The patient plays the role of Horus and asks that his mother Isis come to him (P. Chester Beatty III r. 10.10–11):
Come to me! Come to me <my> mother Isis!
Behold, I see something far away from me, as something that touches me.
In their descriptions of dreams, the Egyptians do not speak of the dreamer as physically journeying to another place, nor do they express the notion of the soul leaving the body during sleep, as do a number of other cultures.94 In the invocation above, the sleeper remains in his own familiar surroundings,but in a state where he can perceive things not normally within eyesight. A similar concept is expressed in an invocation to Thoth quoted by Griffiths:
Thou that takest water <from> a place afar off,
come that thou mayest rescue me, the silent one.95
Here again, the reference is to a place that is far away in terms of space as well as perception: in this case the abode of the gods. The possibility of a sleeper being able to see not only the distant dead, but living people as well, is expressed in the Dream Book in P. Chester Beatty III r. 9.4:
If a man sees himself in a dream, seeing people (rmt̲) far away (w⫖j); BAD; (it can mean) his death is approaching.
The use of the term rmt here indicates that it is indeed living people who are being referred to, and not the dead who in this text are usually referred to as n(⫖) nty-jmw, ‘the ones who are over there’.96 These people are specifically described here as far away w⫖j, not in the immediate physical presence of the sleeper, and not visible in the waking world. In the land of dreams sleepers can both see the dead (both friendly and hostile), and view the distant living, while they themselves are visible to hostile entities.In other words, dreams can offer visual access to realms normally hidden from view.
The external nature of a dream can also be inferred from its use in the Middle Kingdom tale of Sinuhe. The Egyptian explains to his pharaoh that his hasty departure from Egypt, was out of his control like a dream: jw mj sšm rsw.t (B.225). This phrase has been translated variously as ‘C’était comme un état de rêve‘97 (‘...after the manner of a dream’)98 ‘Es war ein Zustand desTraumes’99 (‘It was like the nature of adream’)100 or ‘It was like a dream’.101 Parant translates the phrase literally as ‘Ce fut comme le déroulement d‘un rêve’,102 and comments on the cause of dreams as an external reality to the Egyptians, asopposed to our internal psychological explanation, and on how the sleeper remains a passive spectator of the images which unfold before him in the dream.
The sleeper is powerless to manipulate the events transpiring before him, yet seems to be alert and conscious. He does not feel himself in a somnolent or unconscious state, yet he cannot affect the external plane presented to him. We might compare this experience to being a voyeur rather than a participant of a drama. The viewer can watch and can even become emotionally involved in the drama, but cannot interfere with its unfolding. However, Sinuhe goes on to describe the possible dream in more detail, saying that it was ‘like a man from the Delta seeing himself in Yebu, a man of the marshlands in Nubia’. In dreams, the sleeper can see a place far removed from his actual physical location. The author of this text stresses the improbable distances by using locations whichtradi- tionally constituted boundaries of Egypt. As Parkinson explains,Sinuhe’s flight is ‘an inexplicable, unconscious, confused event,like a dream of geographical confusion; the Delta marshes and thesouthern Elephantine are at the opposite ends of Egypt’. From thevantage point of a dream, one can see the furthest reaches of Egypt.
For further evidence of the ability to see earthly events we move forward to the Ramesside Period, where we find an ostrakon known as O.Colin Campbell 4. The text is a lyrical prayer to Amun, which will be revisited when we explore the issue of dreams as literary devices. Line 9 of the rectocontains a problematic yet intriguing line, ‘what we see in the dream isthat which is on earth’, or alternatively ‘may you see in the dream the one who is on earth’. However one translates this phrase, thepoint remains that in the dream one can see what is on earth. Thus from thevantage point of a dream one can look both ways – into the land of the living and into the realm that is normally only accessible after death. A search for a precise location of this dreamland on an ancient map is likely toprove futile, for it was not incorporated into the physical geography of either this world or the farworld.103 It is an immaterial state with fuzzy transparent boundaries which is bound neither to ‘here’ nor ‘there’.
The temporal setting of the dream
The issues here are twofold: first, whether there was significance in the time of day at which one saw a dream, and secondly, whether the Egyptians were concerned with the passage of time while dreaming. The majority of texts do not mention the particular time that the dream took place,suggesting that it was not necessarily deemed important. Occasionally, only thecontext sets the time of the dream. For example, in a letter to the dead, the author hopes to see his beloved fighting on his behalf in a dream, and in return promises to set up offerings for her ‘when the sunrises’.104 Amenhotep II is similarly vague in his dream report and says only that he had his dream while he rested, at which point Amun came to him in a dream to provide him with divine protection, and then‘His Majesty went forth by chariot at dawn’105 to continue fighting the Syrians. Both of these texts indirectly refer to the night as the time of their dreams, without placing any emphasis on the specific time.
One of the few exceptions is the text of the Ramesside official Djehutiemhab, who in his autobiography is quite specific as to the temporal setting of his divine dream. He states that he saw the goddess Hathor while he was in a dream ‘while the earth was in silence, in the deep of the night’ jw t⫖ msgr m nfrw grḥ106 His poetic description describes a scenario wherein the dream takes place in the dark of the night, while he is seemingly alone. In numerous ancient and modern cultures this isolation is used to stimulate a mental state conducive to visions, revelations, and dreams.107 According to the Egyptian theology of the New Kingdom, the sun-god journeyed on his bark through the farworld every night. But in Akhenaten’s version of solar theology, the night is characterized by the absence of the life-giving sun-god, and is described as a fearful time. In the aftermath of the Amarna Period, the darkness and silent night regain theirsacred significance in Ramesside texts.108 New Kingdom hymns proclaim that the god’s voice is heard when complete silence occurs. InP. Leiden I (IV 6–7)109 Amun himself emerges from the primeval silence as the great goose:
He commenced tospeak in the midst of silence.
He opened all eyes, and caused them to behold.
He began to cry aloud while the earth was dumbfounded.110
The image here is of a world of utter, complete stillness. The Great Cackler, Ngg-wr, breaks the silence for the first time, causing the newly created deities to open their eyes and begin to see, while the very earth was in silent astonishment at the sound of his voice. But it was precisely at this moment that one is able to see god, and it is at this time that Hathor appears to Djehutiemhab.
In another hymn,this one addressed to Ramesses VII, the text describes how the god Amun responds to the pharaoh’s call in the depth of the night.
When you call in the depth of the night
you find himstanding behind you.111
In the Ramesside Period, the depth of the night was a time when the barrier between this world and the next became transparent, and was thus conducive to effective rituals,as well as encounters with the divine. This liminal time is the setting for Djehutiemhab’s divine dream. That the writer describes his dream as taking place against the backdrop of the deep night both emphasizes the divine quality of his dream and is appropriate for hymns of the Ramesside age. To date, Djehutiemhab’s account is the sole instance of a text stressing a specific nocturnal setting for a dream. Otherwise, the ancient Egyptian sources indicate that dreams could be seen in the night or in the day as stated in the Invocation to Isis of P. Chester Beatty III (r. 10.14–15).
Hail, o you good dream,
which is seen <in> the night and in the day.
A text which confirms that dreams can also be seenin the day is the account of Ipuy. This man’s divine vision differs from that of Djehutiemhab in that it occurs in the day, at an unspecified time:
(It was) on the day that I saw <her> beauty
my heart was spending the day in festival thereof
that I saw the Lady of theTwo Lands in a dream
and she placed joy in my heart.
The general impression is that Ipuy was either thinking about a festival he had recently attended, or was perhaps still celebrating, when hefell asleep and saw the goddess Hathor in a dream. He leaves the precise time ambiguous and unimportant.
In contrast, the highly stylized dream of Thutmosis IV is quite definite as to the temporal setting ofthe pharaoh’s encounter with the god. He reports that after taking astroll at midday ḥr tr nj mtr.t, he rests in the shadow, šw.t, of the sphinx. Then ‘[sleep and] dream [took possession of him] at the moment the sun was at zenith’112 m ⫖.t r‘m wp.t. The precise timing of the event is stressed three times: the pharaoh rests at midday, because it is so hot at that time of day he seeks refuge in the shadow of the sphinx,113 and the dream takes place at the moment the sun was at zenith. This emphasis may not only stress the importance of the sun god atthis time114 but may be a recognition of noon as a time of transition. At that moment, the sun seems to cease temporarily its journeyacross the sky, and appears to stand still. In many cultures noon was perceived as a significant and a vulnerable time, as here discussed by Duerr:
Noon is ’between the times’, it is timeless.Ulysses had left the island of Circe in the morning, and by noon the windsubsided and the sun became so hot that the wax in the ears of his companions began to melt and they were in danger of hearing the song of the sirens, thedemons of noon.
The Arcadian herdsmen drove their goats to the spring during the hot hours of midday and then retired to the shady trees or coolgrottoes. In their half sleep, shaggy Pan then appeared bringing voluptuous dreams. This was the time for naked Artemis to descend into the pond like’Frau Hulli‘ did later into the waters of the Main, and the’noon wife‘ roamed the fields to tickle her victims to death ifthey could not answer her questions or at least to carry them away in a whirlwind. At noon, we said, time ‘stands still’ because one continuum is completed and the other has not started yet. Nothing was to ‘go about’, no carriage was allowed to move during the ‘twelve days’ when the sun died, during the ’time betweenthe times’; spinning had to stop, all differences vanished, and during the Middle Ages this was the preferred time for the festum stultorum, the Feast of Fools.115
As the diurnal counter part of the depth of the night, at noon the inhab- itants of the farworld could make contact with the living. Among other more innocent contexts, the time of midday plays a role in Ramesside magical texts,116 and in the later oracular amuletic decrees it is specified as a time during which an individual needs to be guarded.117 As a pharaoh, Thutmosis IV had no reason to fear demons at any time of day and on that particular day he found himself within the protective shadow of the god himself, who spoke to him in a divine revelation.
Thus far, except for the notable exceptions of Thutmosis IV, who stresses noon asthe occasion of his divine dream, and Djehutiemhab, who emphasizes the depth of the night as the setting for his own divine dream, the time of the dream occurrence is not noted, and was likely not considered important.
Summary
The choice ofnouns used to indicate dreams in ancient Egypt, rsw.t (literally ‘awakening’) and qd (literally ‘slumbering’), depended on textual genre and period. Other semantic indicators made clear that an event occurred during sleep, whereeither the sleeping itself is referred to, or the subsequent awakening. The ancient Egyptians had no verb for dreaming. A dream was a phenomenon largely associated with visual perception.
The exact time of the occurrence of a dream did not generally seem to hold any special significance for the ancient Egyptians. The two exceptions are the biography of the nobleman Djehutiemhab who made a point of emphasizing the depth of the night for his dream, and the dream of Thutmosis IV whose dream occurred at the pointof noon. Both of these times are associated with increased accessibility to the inhabitants of the farworld, and both dreams featured messages from thedivine.
All of the examples above have one thing in common: they reveal beings a living person can see in a dream. In these examples, the dream itself is not what one sees, but rather serves as a venue in which the dream images can be perceived. One aspect of the dream seems to have been that of a juncture between two worlds, similar to the Indian perception of dreams.O’Flaherty quotes the Indian Brhadāranyaka as explaining that ’a man has two conditions: in this world and in the world beyond. But there is also a twilight juncture: the condition of sleep [or dream, svapna]. In this twilight juncture one sees both of the other conditions, this world and the other world...‘118 This seemsto be remarkably similar to the ancient Egyptian view, where a condition may be described meta- phorically as a place, a spatial location. The Egyptian cosmosincluded a heavenly domain – wherein dwelt the gods, separate from the earthly domain – inhabited by the living. Meeks explains that these,however, ‘should not be understood to mean distinct territories, butrather zones belonging to different levels of perception. The gods were situated at a level that living creatures could not possibly frequent, even when both were in the same "p lace". The gods were at once very close and infinitely remote.’119 To the gods, I would also add the dead, who in later times are not only visible in dreams, but will be able to step through the window of the land of dreams, and terrorize the vulnerable sleeper. One aspect of the dream might then be considered as a distinct zone,belonging to a different level of perception than that of the earth and the farworld.120 While in the state of sleep, a state which is in manyaspects similar to that of death, the living awaken to find themselves in the twilight zone between this world and the next, but a part of neither. From thethreshold of the dream, one can view that which in a waking state is invisible: the dead, the gods, the living who are far away, and even oneself in a distant physical location. But the dream is not a place that can be reached with the aid of any map of this world or the farworld. Duerr suggests that the ‘ "dream place" is everywhere and nowhere, just like the "dream time" is always and never. You might say that the term "dream place" does not refer to any particular place and the way to get to it is to get nowhere.’121
Notes
1 Wb II 452; Faulkner 1981, 152; Hannig 1998, 389.
2 An alternative reading might be ‘to see as a dream’. This option, however, is rendered unlikely by examples such as the jr m⫖⫖ sw s m rsw.t which is repeated in P. Chester BeattyIII. The reading ‘if a man seeshimself as a dream’implies that the individual is looking at himself inadream. The locative m is also preferable in the Biography ofDjehutiemhab, where the nobleman says he saw the goddess jw=j m qdjw t⫖ m spr m nfr.w grḥ The author clearly did not mean‘while I was as a dream’.
3 See Letter to the Dead, Nag ‘ed Deir 3737 ll. 2–3 (‘causing me, your humble servant, to see him in a dream’); Letter on a Stela l. 4 (‘that I may see you fighting on my behalf in a dream’); O. Colin Campbell 4r. 9 (‘what we see in the dream, is that which is on earth’). This is also the term used repeatedly in P. ChesterBeatty III where every line begins jr m⫖⫖ sw s mrsw.t ‘if a man sees himself in a dream.’
4 Merneptah’s LibyanWar, Karnak Wall 53, 27–8 (‘Then his Majesty saw in adream’).
5 London Medical Papyrus [40] 13, 14 (a spell for a woman ‘not to see dreams’).
6 The 4th petition of the Eloquent Peasant (P. Berlin 3023, 217).
7 Maxim 18 of the Instructions of Ptahhotep(P. Prisse 9, 10–12; L.2 5, 8–9, Zaba, 287).
8 Maxim 23 of the Instructions of Ptahhote (⫖M 10371 + 10435, L.2 6, 3–4).
9 Sinuhe (P. Berlin 3022, ⫖225).
10 Maxim 23 of the Instructions of Ptahhote (P.Prisse 11, 8).
11 The MemphisStela of Amenhotep II where the pharaoh relates how Amun came before him in a dream (20–2).
12 P.Chester Beatty III (invocation, 11–13) which records the speech of Isis exhorting the sleeper’s dreams to retire; Oracular Amuletic Decree (Metropolitan Museum 10.53, r. 60–5) with the promise to ‘make her dreams good’.
13 P. Chester Beatty III (invocation, 14–15).
14 Execration Bowls of Berlin; Execration Texts of Mirgissa; P. Ramesseum XVI 21, 1.
15 P. Chester Beatty III (invocation,18–19) in the recipe for driving out all the bad dreams that the sleeper has seen.
16 In a comparisonof a lifetime spent on earth in the harper’s song of Neferhotep II (TT 50, 1–6) and the harper’s song of Djehutimes (TT21, 15–16).
17 Wb II449–52; Hannig 1995, 477.
18 Aninteresting exception are the Raramuri of northern Mexico, who place ahigh value on dreams. For them, sleeping and dreaming are mutuallyexclusive, and dreaming is the event that occurs when their largest soul wakes up. Further- more, the Raramuri consider dreaming always as something one does; they have no noun that expresses ‘adream’, only a verb (Merrill 1987, 194–219.)
19 Whether or not a culture has a verb for dreaming seems to reflect little in terms of the importance of dreams with in a culture. The Yansi of Zaire are a case in point, for their dream experiences are considered as important as those of the waking world, and they have developed at least nine distinct terms for typesof dreams and dream interpretation. Yet, they too have no equivalent verb of our ‘to dream’ –rather, their expressions of the activity are either ‘to divinea dream’, or ‘to sleep a dream’. See in particular Mpier 1992, 102–4.
20 Bottéro1987, 108.
21 Bottéro 1987, 108; Oppenheim 1978, #342MA-MÚ,written in the Gudea texts as MU.
22 Wb V 79, ‘Plural des vorstehenden Wortes für Schlaf. Auch in der Verbindung (parallel zu "alle bösen Träume").’
23 Sethe 1926, 72.
24 Hannig 1995, 868. This definition does not appear under the entry qdd in the list of words related to sleep and dreams in his more recent companion volume Hannig 1998, 389.
25 Sethe 1926, 72.
26 Partially published in Vila 1963, 135–60.
27 Posener 1966a, 277–87.
28 Posener 1974, 283.The emphasis is mine.
29 P. Deir el-Medina 6. This meaning of qd in the context of this text islisted in Meeks 1980, 392 n. 78.4328.
30 See P. British Museum 10251 v. 44–7(L.2), P. British Museum 10587, r. 11–16 (L.6), P. Turin Museum1983 r. 17–26(T.1)P. Turin Museum 1984 r. 10–13 (T.2), P. Turin Museum 1985, r. 18–24(T.3), P. Louvre E 8083, r. 4–7 (P.2), Bibliotheque Nationale182, r. 5–8 (P.4), Cairo Museum 58035, 70–7 (C.1),University of Philadelphia E 16724, A 4–7 (Ph), and P. Berlin Museum 10462,r. 6–8 (⫖) in Edwards1960. Note that although P. Louvre E 25354, r.13–17 (P.3) has lacunas where one would expect the description of dreams as something one sees, it is highly unlikely that any other reading could realistically be inferred.
31 Edwards 1960, Metropolitan Museum 10.53,r. 60–5 (NY) and University of Chicago 69–76 (Ch).
32 Edwards 1960, P. British Museum 10587, r. 11–16 (L.6).
33 Respectively,the Biography of Ipuy (Stela Wien 8390), the Biography of Djehutiemhab (TT 172), and O. Turin 9587. The first two texts will be discussed indetail at a later point in this book. O. Turin 9587 is corrupt to sucha degree that my translations must be considered tentative. It is nonetheless included in the appendix.
34 Edwards 1960, 103, 107.
35 This text was found in the tomb of Sourere, and published by Posener 1951a, 27–49. In the text, the description of the encounter in Fragment A is followed by the phrase nhs pw jrj.n,‘[...](?) woke up [...].’ It is included in the appendix, but like O. Turin 9587 its fragmentary state precludes any detailed discussion, and the translation I have provided is provisional.
36 Zivie 1976, 128,ll. 8–14.
37 Examples abound of cultures which treat dreams as real, particularly those that have a tradition of mantic dreams. In her analysis, Jeffers (1996,138–9) suggests that the ‘underlying belief that dream sare a reality’ is one of the common features of all mantic dreams. As pointed out by O‘Flaherty, ’these two ideas – that dreams reflect reality and that they bring about reality – remain closely intertwined in Indiantexts on the interpretation of dreams’ (1984, 19).
The issue of dreams and their place in reality inWestern and non-Western cultures has been the subject of ongoing debate among psychologists and anthropologists for more than a century, andI will not attempt to solve it here. For an astute analysis of thehistory of the debate see Jedrej and Shaw 1992, 1–20.
38 Erichson 1954, 136.
39 Černý 1976, 127.
40 Goldwasser 1999.
41 Goldwasser 1999, 49.
42 Gardiner 1978, 450, where he describes D5and D6 being used as ‘det. actions or condition of eye, exx. dgi "look"; šp "blind"; rs "be wakeful" Foran interesting discussion on the significance of the determinativerelating words on a ‘categorical axis’ see Goldwasser1995, 90–ί4.
43 Notableexceptions include the Anubis determinative (C6) used in the Letter tothe Dead, Nag ed’ Deir 3737, and the Late Egyptian orthographyin the Oracular Amuletic Decrees NY and Ch, where it appears with thedeterminative of the head (D1). Referring to the New York text, Edwards1960, 105 n. 39, points out that the ‘tp’ here isprobably due to the scribes being used to writing rs-tp, although it is not actually written anywhere else in thisparticular text.
44 Winand 1986.
45 Winand 1986, 314.
46 Depuyd̲t 1988, 1–13.
47 As might be the case if the verbptr had been used in the older Egyptian examples. In cases where ptr is used in older Egyptian, it often assumes a meaningsimilar to that of rh and gmj. For a detailed overview of theverb ptr, see Winand
1985.
48 The use of the Late Egyptian nw inconjunction with the Middle Egyptian m⫖⫖ may bethe result of a Ramesside scribe writing in Middle Egyptian.
49 Bottéro 1987, 108.
50 Miller 1994, 16.
51 The same attitude towards dreams appearsin India, where one ‘does not pass judgment on the substantiality of the elements out of which the external world is built and the internal world is rebuilt; the same verb is used, here and̲throughout Indian literature, to denote one’s perception of bothworlds: one “sees” (drs) the world just as one “sees” adream’. O’Flaherty 1984, 16.
52 Erichson 1954, 136. Erichson here gives the definition of träumen for prj, citing Crum 268a, and Wb 1, 564 as additional references. As an example, he gives theconstruction j.jr=f prj r.r=f rsw, (da träumte er). Oncea gain, the dream is here the object of the activity of seeing.
53 Černý 1976, 127, referencing Crum 268a supplies the meaning ‘dream’. The author states explicitly that ‘the meaning “to see (a dream)” is attested forptr since XXth Dyn. (P. Der el- Medina 6, v. 3)’.
54 Černý 1978, 19; Wente 1990, 151.
55 The alternative leaves the following mtw=k as a dangling conjunctive (Sweeney
56 Studies of interviews and oral reports in contemporary cultures suggest that the visual or sensory perception of dreams is not limited to a textually based figureof speech, but rather reflects an actual theory of dreams. Turning to the Kagwahiv of Brazil, for example, we see that they regard dreams to be a ‘form of thinking while asleep which, in the vividness of their sensory imagery, more closely resemble waking perception than the faint sensory experience accompanying daytimethoughts... At the same time, dreams are held to be a special kind of perception, but of a different reality from that perceived by the waking senses’ (Kracke 1987, 34.).
57 For a related discussion see Lakoff 1997, 89–120. One must keep in mind, however, that metaphors are culture bound, and a search for universal applica- bility must be undertaken with great caution. In addition, Lakoff himself claims that the case history of the dreamer is vital in determining how unconscious metaphorical thought might shape dreams, and again, this history of adreamer is precisely the information we cannot obtain in the case of ancient Egypt.
58 The Egyptians arenot the only people to voice a spatial perspective on dreams. Freud also resorted to topographical thinking about dreams, describing them in terms of an ‘inner space’, a sort of geography of the interior , complete with maps and even directions such as‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘surface and deep’, and all the connotations that the use of such termsentails. The terms are now so ingrained in psychological discussions,that they are rarely given a second thought. A discussion of this issuecan be found in Hillman 1975, 237–321. For a brief discussion ofthe ongoing misunderstandings Freud’s statements engendered, see States 1997, 65.
59 The seminal work on the Egyptian fear of death is still Zandee 1977.
60 Zandee 1977, 11.
61 The dreams that the Egyptians bothered to report in texts do not mention the dreamer seeing any living person,nor do they express a desire to see anybody still in this world indreams.
62 Hornung 1956,28–32.
63 Hornung 1986,18–19.
64 The major referencesto these texts are: Gardiner and Sethe 1928; Gardiner 1930; Simpson,1966; Simpson 1970; M. Guilmot 1966. Translations can conveniently be found in Wente 1990.
For an overview of theseletters and their role in Egyptian religion see O‘Donoghue 1999.
65 One wonders whether it was believed thatthe dead were literate in the afterlife; or did they avail themselves of the services of scribes in the farworld, as the gods did?
66 Cairo Linen CG 25975 (Dynasty 6).
67 Cairo Linen CG 25975 (Dynasty 6). Anubis is also mentioned in conjunction with Osiris on the Berlin Bowl (FIP),but in the latter case it may simply be part of a stock htp djnsw formula.
68 Louvre Bowl E 634(FIP).
69 Louvre Bowl E 634 (FIP).
70 Berlin Bowl (FIP).
71 A female divinity‘ ᶜ⫖.t’, possibly Hathor, and the ‘nṯr ᶜ⫖’ in the Chicago Jar
Stand (FIP).
72 Published in Wente 1975/6, 595–600.
73 The word rsw.t here apparentlylacked a determinative.
74 Twoliterary texts which have been considered as possibilities are a pair of fragmentary ghost stories from Deir el-Medina, published by Posener1951–72 and Posener 1960b. Neither of these texts, however,describe the events as having taken place in a dream.
75 Published in Simpson 1966,39–50.
76 Parkinson 1991c,143–5.
77 A sketch of thisdepiction can be found in Parkinson 1991c, 144.
78 Hartmann 1984, 41–4. One of the motivating forces behind dreams can be an emotion, including guilt(States 1997, 235–50).
79 Marjasch 1966, 146.
80 In a previousarticle (Szpakowska 1999, 163–6) I had suggested that thedeterminative of rsw.t here might be the Anubis deity. Angela McDonald (article in press) has convincingly shown that the determinative is more likely to be the seated Seth deity, emphasizing the harmful nature of Heni’s dream.
81 The Letter to the Dead, Nag’ ed Deir 3500, published in Simpson 1970, 58–62. See also Goedicke 1972, 95–8.
82 Edwards 1960,L.1 r. 29–30; L.2 r. 76, 82–3; L.5 v. 17–18; L.6r. 12, 69–70; T.1 r. 92–3; T.2 v. 90–1; P.3 v.2–3; NY r. 44–5; Ch 32–3.
83 Borghouts 1973, 114–50.
84 Borghouts 1973, 114–15.
85 Borghouts 1973, 114–15, n. 3,‘following S2P: m⫖(w?) n=j w⫖ (S2C hasm⫖=j): "O you whom I have seen from afar." The other CT and ⫖D manuscripts have m⫖⫖ w⫖ which may contain an active participle. For the expression, cf., e.g., P.Chester Beatty III r. 10, 11 and 9, 4; VIII v. 4, 2–3 (gmhw⫖); Oracular Amuletic Decree L.2 v. 21–2 (nww⫖); Edfu II 288, 3.’
86 Faulkner 1997, 101.
87 The ability to see from afar, or to see that which is far away, nw w⫖.w, was one of the attributes granted by gods to the petitioner in the Oracular Amuletic Decrees, L.2, v. 21. Other parallel promises indicate, however, that in these instances it may simply have been a matter of being able to see and hear, without intimating any visual or auditory contact with the farworld, or other divine plane. The complete phrase in these texts is‘I shall enable his eyes to see and I shall enable his ears to hear’, jw=jdj.tnw jr.t=f jw=jdj.tsdm ‘nh.wy. SeeC.1 12–14; C.2 r. 24–6; NY r. 12–14; Ch9–11, 82–5.
88 This suggestion has also appeared in Parkinson 1991c, 145.
89 de Buck 1939, 28.
90 Hornung expresses a somewhat similar viewwhen discussing Nun: ‘In water and darkness, the “secret” deep part of the world is concretely and externally experienced, but in the analogy of dream and death we have, in the human unconscious, an opening into that deep part of the other world. In this truly
“secret” abyss, the walls between this world and theother are transparent because the speech of images removes this separation’ (Hornung 1986, 19).
91 An intriguing example of the former can befound in the beliefs of the Temne of New Guinea, for whom dreams and dreaming are a form of mediation between two distinct realms. There,‘the world of dreams is literally called the "place of dreams"(ro mere) and it is given as a spatial location – a town which is close to ro-soki which is inhabited by spirits’(Shaw 1992, h41).
92 Published byGardiner and Sethe 1928, 3–4, pl. 22a. Useful commentaries can be found in Gunn 1930, 150–1; Roccati 1982, 297–8; Roeder1961, 273–7; Wente 1990, 211–12, #341.
93 The domain of the dead is often referred̲to as ‘this city’ njw.t tn or the ‘greatcity’ njw.t wr.t, as in CT I 280e; II 278b, 279b;III 394c; IV 48f, 206b, 219a, VI 102h, 409f, while spells 466–8name a number of towns in the Field of Offerings (found later in Bookof the Dead spell 110). Coffin Text 1130 does refer to ‘one place’ s.t wc ;.t (VII 467f) in the context of the deceased being in the presence of Osiris: ’So now I will dwelltogether with him in one place.’ A number of Coffin Textsdescribe towns and fields where the deceased can be rejoined with hisrelatives (for example spells 131–46) and perhaps it was nearthese areas that the living and the dead could make contact.
94 Cultures expressing the notion of dream travel include Mesopotamia, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Celts whose dream narratives can include journeys (Jones 1992,197–9).
Examples of beliefs in the separation of a free-roaming soul which leaves the body during sleep can be found in many cultures, including that of the Tukolor, who believe that the shadow-self or soul leaves the body during sleep androams the earth at night (Dilley 1992, 74), the Quiche of Brazil(Tedlock 1987, 105–13), and the Sambia of Papua who believe that‘when one sleeps the soul leaves the body and roams in different places, near or far, familiar or unfamiliar, as if it could glide onthe wind. The soul takes one’s thought with it, leaving the body empty’ (Herdt 1987, 5).
95 Griffiths 1988, 99. See Caminos 1954, 321;cf. Assmann 1975, 384.
96 This term isused in, r. 9.14.
97 Posener 1956,99.
98 Gardiner 1916, 87.
99 Barta 1990, 23.
100 Parkinson 1997, 38.
101 Lichtheim 1973, 231.
102 Parant 1982, 126.
103 While the geography of the farworld wasmapped out in both words and pictures in a number of funerary compositions, the dreamscape was apparently allocated a specific space within that realm.
104 [sw]wbn (l. 4.)
105 prj.t ḥm=f ḥrḥtrj tp dw⫖y.t in the Memphis Stela ll. 21–2;ANET247.
106 Biography of Djehutiemhab, ll. 12–13.
107 Bleeker 1963a, 72–82.
108 The night does not lose its alarming aspect, however, and also remains the time when the less friendly inhabitants of the farworld can access the living in nightmares.
109 Gardiner1905, 31–2; ÄHG 316, no. 136.
110 See Gardiner 1905, 32 n. 3 for adiscussion of this lexeme as denoting being silent or ‘dumbfounded with astonishment’. Assmann(ÄHG 136) chooses to translate sg simply as‘Schweigen’.
111 Condon1978, pl. 21: 9–10.
112 Bryan1991, 146.
113 Zivie notes that‘shadowc may indicate the physical shadow as well as the metaphorical protective shade of the god (Zivie 1976, 141(kk)). Theshade offered here by the god is particularly welcome, for one of thefeatures of noon is that there is little shadow cast at this time ofday.
114 Notice that the deity whospeaks to Thutmosis is Horemakhet-Khepri-Re- Atum, thus three aspectsof the sun god are merged with the creator god Atum. See Bryan 1991,149–50, 155–6) for further examples of Thutmosis IV’s emphasis on the sun cult in this text.
115 Duerr 1985, 122–3.
116 Wb, WCN# 24457330, Pleyte and Rossi 1869–76 pl. CXXIV, who date the text to the Ramesside period.
117 The promise to guard at midday and at night appears in L.1 r. 62–5; L.2 v. 2–5;T.2 r. 107–9; T.2 v. 94–5; P.3 r. 81–3; P.527–30; C.1 16–20; Ch 59–61. L.2 clearly describesthis as a time when ‘I shall keep her safe < from any> malevolent deity (?) at midday and < any> malevolent deity (?) at night or at any hour whatsoever’(Edwards 1960). It should be noted that these references date from the Third Intermediate Period while the magical text referred to dates from the Ramesside Period. A diachronic study on the significance of midday in terms of the Egyptians’ religious outlook would be useful, and would perhaps help to explain the stress that Thutmosis IV chose toplace on the specific time of his divine revelation.
118 O’Flaherty 1984, 16, quoting the Brhadaranyaka U 4.3.9–10.
119 Meeks and Favard-Meeks 1996, 82.
120 See also in this regard Federn (1960,248), who discusses a reference to the expression iswt ntšms-ib in Coffin Text Utterance 62 ‘which seems to refer to extraterrene places or worlds that cannot be reached exceptmentally – in ecstasies or dreams or simply “by conjecture”’
121 Duerr 1985,121.