Dumuzi's Dream: Dream Analysis in Ancient Mesopotamia.

Abstract

One of the benefits of exploring the texts of ancient dreams is that this kind of study can show quite clearly the way dream narratives are embedded within the realities of the culture in question, much in the same way that we as modern dreamers dream in a style influenced by our culture. This point is not always clearly acknowledged by psychological and neurological dream researchers, who at times describe dreams as if they belonged solely to the dreamer’s consciousness, independent of influences beyond their personal experiences, or represent that they derive from the physical structures of the brain’s architecture. The influence of cultural conditioning should not be overlooked in dream interpretation, no matter what the time and place of the dream may be. As well, through a study of dream texts we can obtain glimpses of earlier methods of dream interpretation, which were also necessarily situated within a cultural context different from our own. In some cases these are only implicit in the texts, whereas in others the methodology is laid out for us to examine in detail. And sometimes the contemplation of an ancient dream can bring a frisson of recognition across the millennia, especially when the culture in question is closely related to our own. The Sumerians were the first people in the world to create an urban civilization, economically based on a vast surplus of wheat and barley grown in the fertile floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in what is today southern Iraq. Their population grew quickly from small towns to city-states and eventually to larger political units. As the volume of surplus goods increased, the need for inventorying them and identifying their ownership