Thread: Knowledge in the Dream World

You could have seen and heard information concerning that topic some time ago and thus in your dream it was brought up from deep in your subconscious.

I don't know if this kind of thing is normal or not, but it reminded me of something I read this morning in Patricia Garfield's book Creative Dreaming, which says:



In the field of anthropology, an astounding dream discovery was made by Hermann V. Hilprecht, professor of Assyrian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hilprecht was working late one evening in 1893 trying to decipher the cuneiform characters on drawings of two small fragments of agate that he thought were Babylonian finger rings found in temple ruins. He tentatively assigned one fragment to a particular period (that of the Cassite period, c. 1700 B.C.) but he was unable to classify the other. He went to bed about midnight, feeling uncertain about his classification and had this dream:

A tall, thin priest of the old pre-Christian Nippur, about forty years of age and clad in a simple abba, led me to the treasure chamber of the temple, on its southeast side. He went with me into a small, low-ceiled room without windows, in which there was a large wooden chest, while scraps of agate and lapis lazuli lay scattered on the floor. Here he addressed me as follows: \"The two fragments which you have published separately on pages 22 and 26, belong together, are not finger rings and their history is as follows: King Kurigalzu (Ca. 1300 B.C.) once sent to the temple of Bel, among other articles of agate and lapis lazuli, an inscribed votive cylinder of agate. Then we priests suddenly received the command to make for the statue of the god of Ninib a pair of earrings of agate. We were in great dismay, since there was no agate as raw material at hand. In order to execute the command there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder into three parts, thus making three rings, each of which contained a portion of the original inscription. The first two rings served as earrings for the statue of the god; the two fragments which have given you so much trouble are portions of them. If you will put the two together you will have confirmation of my words. But the third ring you have not found in the course of your excavations and you will never find it.\" With this the priest disappeared...I woke at once and immediately told my wife the dream that I might not forget it. Next morning—Sunday—I examined the fragments once more in the light of these disclosures, and to my astonishment found all the details of the dream precisely verified in so far as the means of verification were in my hands. The original inscription on the votive cylinder reads: \"To the god Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.\"[/b]

Humans have weird minds. We remember so many things that we aren't even aware of. Just think of your dream worlds, if you had to think in your mind when your awake of all the small details of places and people you know, it would be almost impossible. yet in your dreams, everyday locations, and locations you've seen only once are recreated in perfection. Your "extra" knowledge is just an exstenstion of this. Cool isn't it?

I don't really think I believe in precognition, and things like that. I think that you either saw the information a long time ago without knowing it.

An interesting thing I'm sure some of you have read, is that you can (technically, but extremely difficult) use lucid dreaming to read, 1,000,000 words per minute. The Idea is this:
Your subconcious can process an extremely large amount of information at one time, much larger than your concious mind, so If you could a achieve a trance state, and have something like a computer program flash pages and pages of text at you in such a way you were "reading" 1 million words per minute. You would not remember anything of what you just saw. However, once you achieved lucidity in a dream, you can tap in to your subconcious and meet the author, and ask him questions about what happened in the book. The answers you would recieve would be correct. Pretty amazing. I wish I could achieve this....

No more reading for dumb reports!

Yeah, its amazing what you dont consciously know is still in your memory. That's one of the most important aspects of dreaming, practically, i think, especially for the area of research in psychodynamic therapy.

Hey, Don't I Know You! . Pretty interesting expirence! I had two small thoughts on this subject...

-Either you may have just stumbled upon this information on Egyptian Gods and Anubis at some point in time, even for a split second, but your subconcious mind picked up on it without you realizing it. As Barbizzle said, it's amazing what your subconcious mind can pick up and even replicate perfectly.

-Or you perhaps (if anyone has believes in this area) that you were in someone else's dream/even in another plane, if again anyone believes in any of that kinda stuff. I'm a little scepticle of that subject myself.

Anyways cool subject and those were just some of my thoughts!

Originally posted by Don't I Know You?
Do you sometimes find that you have knowledge in the dream world that you do not normally have in real life?

Here's an interesting experience that occurred to me last night:

I dreamed that I was at a garage sale in my old neighborhood, and an old lady had set out a table upon which was a large bust of the Egyptian god Anubis, with the head of a jackal. When I awoke, I lay in bed for a few moments remembering details, then turned to the pad I keep by my bed to jot down a few keywords. I wrote \"old woman garage sale anubis bust,\" without really thinking about it.

then on my way to type it into my dream-journal, I realized that I am not at all familiar with the names and appearances of the Egyptian gods, and that I probably had made a mistake in naming the god Anubis in my mind. But when I looked up \"Anubis\" online, I found that not only was that the correct name for the jackal-headed god, but that many EXACT statues exist like the one in my dream.

Is it unusual to have knowledge like this in the dream world?

Good. What we have here, princibly, is similar to an instance of "Shared Dreaming". Now, in the dream you do not remember where you came across the term "Anubis" but it certainly was given to you in a prior dream. Few people realize that the Dream Self has its own set of memories. Unlike for our waking selves, in which our Dream Memories are sporadic and disconnected, the Dream Self never ceases in dreaming and the Dream Self has a continuous memory of its Endless Dream. Your Dream Self was able to interact with another Dream Self, along the Way, who educated it about the artifacts we now call "Anubis".

That was not shared dreaming. You already had that information in you, but forgot it or had no conciseness awareness of it, but it was there.

Originally posted by Barbizzle
That was not shared dreaming. You already had that information in you, but forgot it or had no conciseness awareness of it, but it was there.

You know, you might as well call him a 'liar'. It is bad science to simply dismiss empirical evidence because it does not fit into your a priori model. To say "what you claim to have happened did not happen" is pure denial and it short-circuits any true and valid enquiry into the Reality of what was described. It is the Orthodoxy of Science enforcing its own bigotted Dogmas.

I think we have to consider all possibilities.

In my experience and opinion, I think Barbizzle is most likely correct in his guess. Our subconscious mind picks up so many different things that we are never aware of, and those things can show up in dreams.

Right, it's important to always consider the possibilities.

But Anubis is both a cultural and historical icon. I'm confident that you have at least seen both the name and figure while paging quickly through a school book. The writing in those books are boring so they can't resist to spice it up with Egyptian intrigue.