Anecdote collection · Death & the departed
Honour the new Siren
Attica, Greece · 406 BCE
the Lacedæmonians made an incursion into Attica, and their leader saw in a dream Dionysus standing by him, and bidding him honour the new Siren with all the honours paid to the dead: and the dream seemed manifestly to refer to Sophocles and his plays.
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- Source
- Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.) — Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto, c. 150 / 1886 (trans.). Book I, ch. 21
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Attica, Greece · Ancient Greek
- Date
- 406 BCE
- Uncertainty
- High — From Pausanias’ Description of Greece (A. R. Shilleto trans., 1886); a local tradition recorded by a 2nd-century traveller.
- Imagery
- Music · War · Grave
- Feelings
- Awe · Grief
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
War
In the war, were you a soldier, someone fleeing, or watching from outside? Was there a particular enemy?
Homeric epic Classical text
Zeus sends Agamemnon a deliberately false dream promising that Troy will fall at once. The epic itself treats a war dream as something that can mislead.
Homer, Iliad II
Song-dynasty poetry Literature
Lu You and Xin Qiji, both kept from the frontier they longed to recover, kept dreaming of battle; their war dreams are read today as poems of unfulfilled duty.
Lu You; Xin Qiji
The dead
Who was it, and did they seem to know they had died? Was there something you were able to say, or not able to?
Jung · Objective level first
Jung’s memoir records his own dreams of his late father and treats them with seriousness rather than symbol-hunting: a dream of someone who has died is first about that person and that bond.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)
Early dream research Dream research
Ellis devoted a chapter to dreams of the dead, noting how often the dead appear as if alive and how such dreams can bring comfort.
Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. VIII
Homeric epic Classical text
Achilles dreams of the dead Patroclus, who asks to be buried; Achilles reaches out to embrace him and grasps nothing.
Homer, Iliad XXIII
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- You sleep, Achilles, and have forgotten me Troy (setting) · c. 8th century BCE
- A masked man asked for his bone back Huangkeng, China · c. 795
- When the dead return in dreams, the wailing begins again Lower Columbia River, Pacific Northwest · traditional (recorded c. 1880)
- She was not really dead England · before 1911
- The one goddess he never sang Thebes, Greece · c. 438 BCE
- Hector’s ghost before my sight Troy (setting) · 19 BCE (poem)