DREAM GALAXY

Literary dream · Nature & weather

The cave where Sleep lives

Land of the Cimmerians (myth) · c. 8 CE (poem)

There is near the Cimmerians a cave with a long recess, a hollowed mountain, the home and the habitation of slothful Sleep, into which the Sun, whether rising, or in his mid course, or setting, can never come. Fogs mingled with darkness are exhaled from the ground, and it is a twilight with a dubious light.

Original text — The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books VIII–XV (Riley trans.), Ovid; trans. Henry T. Riley

Open this dream in the galaxy →

Source
The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books VIII–XV (Riley trans.) — Ovid; trans. Henry T. Riley, c. 8 / 1851 (trans.). Metamorphoses, Book XI
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
Land of the Cimmerians (myth) · Roman
Date
c. 8 CE (poem)
Uncertainty
High — From Ovid’s Metamorphoses (H. T. Riley prose trans., 1851): the classical picture of the god Sleep’s home, beside the river Lethe.
Imagery
Mountain · Darkness · River · Flower
Feelings
Calm · Awe

Another way to look at this dream

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

Mountain

Were you climbing it, looking at it, or already on top? What would reaching the summit mean to you?

Japanese custom Folk saying

An Edo-period saying ranks the luckiest images for the first dream of the New Year (hatsuyume): “first Fuji, second a hawk, third an aubergine”.

Edo-period saying on hatsuyume

Chinese poetry Literature

Li Bai climbs Mount Tianmu in a dream, sees a whole immortal world open up, then wakes on his pillow — and decides not to bow to the powerful.

Li Bai, “Dreaming of Tianmu” (c. 745)

All perspectives on mountain →

Darkness

What could you not see in the dark — and did it feel like something could see you?

Jung · Nigredo

Jung borrowed the alchemists’ word nigredo, “blackening”, for the dark first stage of a transformation — a time of confusion that comes before anything clarifies.

C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy”, Collected Works 12

Greek myth Myth & scripture

In Hesiod’s family tree of the gods, Night (Nyx) is the mother of Sleep (Hypnos) and of the tribe of Dreams. Darkness here is where dreams come from.

Hesiod, Theogony 211–212

All perspectives on darkness →

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 →

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

Dreams that share its images