DREAM GALAXY

Literary dream · Nature & weather

At the gaming tables of Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo · Date unknown · literary dream-story

Such were the monotonous continually recurring sentences, always spoken in the same impassive tones, to which I listened as I stood by the tables in the gaming-rooms of Monte Carlo. Such are the sentences to which devotees of the fickle goddess, Chance, listen hour after hour as the day wears itself out from early morning to late evening in that beautiful, cruel, enchanting earthly paradise, whose shores are washed by the bluest sea in the world, whose gardens are dotted with globes of golden fruit, and plumed with feathery palms

Original text — Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part II: Dream-Stories, Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland

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Source
Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part II: Dream-Stories — Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland, posthumous edition (1908 Project Gutenberg source edition). Part II, IV. A Turn of Luck
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
Monte Carlo · British
Date
Date unknown · literary dream-story
Uncertainty
Low — Literary story from Part II; the narrative place is stated, but no composition date is claimed.
Imagery
Sea · Garden · Food · Tree
Feelings
Unease · Wonder

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

Water

Was the water clear or muddy, still or rising? Which water in your own life — a place, a swim, a flood — does it bring back first?

Jung · The unconscious

Jung called water the most common image for the unconscious: something deep, below the surface, that we can look into but not see through.

C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works 9i

Classical Chinese medicine Historical medicine

The Lingshu pairs dream images with the balance of yin and yang: when yin is excessive, one “dreams of wading through great water, and is afraid”. This is a historical theory about the body, not medical advice and not a way to diagnose anything.

Huangdi Neijing, Lingshu ch. 43 “Yinxie Fameng”

Hebrew Bible; Babylonian myth Myth & scripture

Several creation stories begin with primordial water — “darkness was upon the face of the deep” in Genesis, the fresh-water Apsu in the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Here water is what exists before order.

Genesis 1:2; Enuma Elish I

All perspectives on water →

Garden

Whose garden was it? Was it tended or overgrown, and could you leave?

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

The first garden is a place of ease and of loss: God plants a garden eastward in Eden and puts the man in it, and the man and woman later hide “amongst the trees of the garden” when they hear God walking there.

Genesis 2:8; 3:8 (King James Version)

Chinese opera Literature

In “The Peony Pavilion” the young Du Liniang walks into her family’s garden, sighs “So all this riot of colour blooms for nothing but ruined wells and broken walls”, and falls asleep. In the dream that follows she meets her lover.

Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion, scene 10 “Startled Dream”

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Food

Were you eating, being fed, or watching others eat? Had you eaten, or gone without, before you slept?

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

In prison Pharaoh’s baker dreams of three white baskets of bakemeats on his head, from which the birds eat. Joseph reads the baskets as three days, within which Pharaoh will lift up his head and hang him on a tree; on the third day “he hanged the chief baker”.

Genesis 40:16–22 (King James Version)

Psychoanalysis Depth psychology

Freud described a dream he could bring on at will: after salted food such as anchovies and olives, he dreamed he was drinking deeply, then woke thirsty. He called it a “dream of convenience”, a dream that substitutes for getting up.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ch. III (Brill trans.)

All perspectives on food →

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images