In the old texts a dream is rarely just a dream. It is a message, usually from a god, and someone has to be found who can read it. A shepherd’s son becomes the second man of Egypt because he can. A Babylonian king nearly kills his wise men because they cannot. In Australia the idea goes the other way: the world itself is a dream.
Here I bring those threads together, from dreams that warn to dreams that create, and then the later writers who tried to study sleep itself.
Dreams that carry a message
Joseph is the dreamer of the Bible. On Story of Joseph I follow him from his brothers to Pharaoh’s court. Mustafa El-Amin reads his first dream as a map of Egypt’s schools:
Joseph said to his father oh my father I did see 11 stars and the Sun and the Moon
Mustafa El-Amin, El-Amin on Joseph Egypt and the lodge, at 1:00
See El-Amin’s reading of Joseph in Egypt. In Babylon, Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue of gold, silver, bronze and iron, broken by a stone not cut by hands. See Daniel and Atlantis in the Old Testament.
The Mesopotamian heroes dream too. Before Enkidu arrives, Gilgamesh goes to his mother:
Mother, I had a dream last night.
Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I
See Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet I. In the flood story on The Story of Chaldea, Ea says he did not reveal the decision of the great gods outright; he sent a dream instead. And in the Qumran fragments the giants themselves are troubled by dreams. On The Book of Giants: What the Fragments Say the brothers Ohyah and Hahyah dream on the same night, and someone must be found to explain it:
He will appear as one of the great warriors from the mythical past, present only in spirit, to whom the giant Ohya comes to ask for an interpretation of his dream, thus playing a similar role than Enoch.
Iñaki Marro Sánchez, The Book of Giants (Munich dissertation, 2026), p. 98
A later dream changed the history of a religion. On Christianity Lactantius reports that Constantine was told in a dream, the night before battle, to mark his soldiers’ shields with the sign of Christ.
The world as a dream
The Australian accounts turn the dream into creation itself. Dolores Cannon records:
The beliefs of the aborigines of Australia explain the story of creation by saying that the dreamer dreamed it into existence. They say that the Dreamer’s first dream was the elements: fire, earth, air and water.
Dolores Cannon, Convoluted Universe Book II
See Australian aborigines: The dreamer dreamed it into existence. On In 3D you get to live the same book draws the conclusion:
The dreamer dreams the dream. He can change the dream. Amend the dream.
Dolores Cannon, Convoluted Universe Book II
The Dreaming is not only a story about the past:
these stories are not merely mythopoetic they are living narratives
Asangoham, A 50,000 year account of time, at 9:00
See Dreamtime and a culture’s account of time and the Seven sisters, where the Pleiades live in the Dreamings and songlines. On Dreamtime stories of the Seven Sisters Steven Strong says why the story matters so much:
It's the beginning of everything and that's why every tribe must know that story.
Steven Strong, Seven Sisters in the Dreaming, at 16:06
Even Eden has its dream: on Androgyne Adam Adam dreams that a wife has been given to him, and wakes to find it true.
Studying the dream
The modern side of the topic starts with Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury, the French scholar who studied how outside stimuli shape dreams, before Freud. Edgar Cayce, the “Sleeping Prophet”, gave his readings in a self-induced trance, and on Herb Puryear on Edgar Cayce Puryear describes how the dream records drew him in.
Channeled sources take dreams as travel. On Jane Roberts – Seth On Dreams Brian Scott presents Seth’s view of dreams as portals to other realms, and Astral Projection Techniques starts from the dream that vanishes the moment you wake. On Atlantis and Sumer: Kings, Crystals, and Advanced Flight dreams of extraterrestrials are read as contact during sleep. And on Channeling Zé Arigó keeps having the same dream, with a voice that will not leave him alone, before he begins to heal.
Related pages
- Story of Joseph
- Atlantis in the Old Testament: the divine stone
- The Book of Giants: What the Fragments Say
- Australian aborigines: The dreamer dreamed it into existence
- Jane Roberts – Seth On Dreams
- Edgar Cayce
- Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury
- Astral Projection Techniques
- Dreamtime stories of the Seven Sisters
For every page I tagged with dreams, see the Dreams tag archive.
