Literary dream · Transformation
Cultivate and make music
Athens, Greece · 399 BCE
In the course of my life I have often had intimations in dreams ‘that I should compose music.’ The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: ‘Cultivate and make music,’ said the dream.
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- Source
- Phaedo (trans. Benjamin Jowett) — Plato; trans. Benjamin Jowett, 1871 (translation). Phaedo 60e
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- Athens, Greece · Ancient Greek
- Date
- 399 BCE
- Uncertainty
- Moderate — A recurring dream, which led Socrates to write verse in his last days.
- Imagery
- Music · Writing
- Feelings
- Wonder · Calm
How traditions have read this kind of dream
Psychological
Dreams of becoming someone or something else, or of not knowing whether one is awake, have long interested writers on lucid dreaming; Stevenson credited such night work with parts of Jekyll and Hyde.
Stevenson (1888)
Mythological
Metamorphosis is one of mythology’s oldest engines — Ovid’s Metamorphoses gathers hundreds of beings changed into trees, birds and stars.
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Chinese traditions
Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream gave Chinese thought the idea of wuhua, “the transformation of things”, and the phrase “Zhuang Zhou dreams of the butterfly” remains shorthand for the blurred line between self and world.
Zhuangzi, Qiwulun
These are cultural lenses, not a diagnosis.
Dreams that share its images
- An opera I had never heard Baltimore, USA · before 1911
- The five-coloured brush taken back Southern China · c. 500 (Liang)
- An orchestra of birdsong England · before 1911
- The scene at the window Bournemouth, England · 1885
- Swallowing pearls in the stream Nankang, Jiangxi, China · c. 880
- A living globe made of drops Russia · 1869 (novel)