A Journey Through Dreams Across Cultures

Since the dawn of humanity, people have closed their eyes at night and wandered into landscapes that felt both mysterious and profound. Dreams have always been more than mere illusions—they have been seen as divine whispers, ancestral messages, or windows into the human soul. Let us walk through history, across lands and cultures, to see how different civilisations understood the language of dreams.

Ancient Lands of Prophets and Pharaohs

Imagine standing in the royal courts of Mesopotamia. A king awakens troubled by a vision of floods and beasts. Immediately, priests and dream interpreters are summoned, for in this land, dreams were believed to be direct messages from the gods. Even the great hero Gilgamesh once relied on dream interpretation for guidance.

Travel down the Nile, and in ancient Egypt, dreams carried the voices of gods and the dead. Ordinary people recorded their night visions in papyrus “dream books,” which listed symbols and their meanings. A man dreaming of clear water might be promised good fortune, while another seeing fire could be warned of danger. Those seeking healing often slept in temple chambers, hoping the god Imhotep would visit them in a dream with the cure.

The Philosophers and the Prophets of the West

Cross into ancient Greece, where philosophers debate the mystery of dreams. Plato insists they reveal truths hidden from waking life, while Aristotle argues they are the echoes of our daily thoughts. In the temples of Asclepius, the god of healing, patients sleep in sacred halls awaiting dream-visions that would guide their doctors.

In Rome, dreams become entangled with politics and power. Generals hesitate before battle until they consult interpreters. The emperor Augustus himself is said to have trusted certain dreams as signs of victory.

Eastern Wisdom: India, China, and Beyond

In the East, dreams bloom with spiritual meaning. The Hindu Upanishads speak of three kinds of dreams—those born of the day, those born of desire, and those sent from beyond. To dream of flying, or of gods, was seen as an auspicious sign of progress on the spiritual path.

In Buddhist tradition, the birth of the Buddha himself is foreshadowed by his mother Queen Maya’s dream of a white elephant descending into her womb—a symbol of purity and destiny.

Meanwhile, in China, dreams were thought to be journeys of the soul. The philosopher Zhuangzi famously dreamt of being a butterfly and awoke unsure: was he a man who had dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man? Doctors, too, read dreams as signs of imbalance in the body’s vital energies, linking nightmares to disharmony in the heart or liver.

Sacred Nights in Faith Traditions

In Judaism, Joseph rose from prisoner to Pharaoh’s advisor because he could interpret dreams—of cows, of grain, of famine and plenty. In Christianity, dreams were seen as channels for angels and saints. Medieval monks often recorded their dream-visions as spiritual lessons for their communities.

Voices of the Land and Ancestors

Step into the red earth of Australia, and dreams take on an even deeper resonance. For Aboriginal peoples, the “Dreaming” is not just night visions but the sacred time when ancestral beings shaped the land, laws, and identity. To dream is to walk once again with the ancestors.

In the plains and forests of the Americas, Native American tribes viewed dreams as encounters with spirit helpers. A young seeker might embark on a vision quest, fasting and praying until a dream revealed their guardian animal or life purpose.

Across Africa, dreams are conversations with ancestors. Among the Zulu, a dream is not simply private—it is a message from those who came before, offering warnings or guidance for the living.

The Modern Mind and the Subconscious

Fast forward to the modern age, where science and psychology begin to unweave the fabric of dreams. Sigmund Freud peers into the subconscious and declares that dreams are coded expressions of repressed desires. Carl Jung takes another path, suggesting they are symbols from the “collective unconscious,” shared by all humanity. Today, scientists find yet another layer: dreams help us process emotions, strengthen memories, and rehearse survival in the theater of the night.

Epilogue: The Eternal Mystery

From temples of Egypt to Aboriginal Dreamtime, from Aristotle’s musings to Freud’s theories, dreams remain a bridge between worlds—between gods and mortals, ancestors and descendants, the conscious and unconscious. Across cultures and centuries, they remind us that the sleeping mind is never silent, but speaks in symbols that continue to guide, heal, and mystify.

My Dreams

When other children in my neighbourhood dreamt about lunchboxes, playgrounds and petty schoolyard dramas, my nights opened like a map to other worlds. While they chased ghosts of video games and missed homework, I was crossing constellations, stepping off into planets that felt as real and as solid as the pillow under my head.

I remember the first time I woke in a galactic battlefield. I was seven and somehow older at the same time — a small body with the memory of a hundred lives. I have died more times than I can count; the rules of those dreams did not promise immortality. I fell, rose, fought, and learnt the contours of fear and courage in languages no adult in my life could translate. People used to tell me, with the patient indulgence given to a child with wild tales, that you never really die in your dreams. I would smile and look away. In those places, death taught me something different every time.

Once — and this image has never left me, more than four decades later — I boarded a spaceship so enormous it swallowed the horizon. At its heart sat an old man whose hair and beard pooled like white rivers across the floor. He must have been eight feet tall if he was an inch; towering, yes, but his size was less frightening than the calm that radiated from him. His voice was the kind that made the air listen: low, steady, patient. When he spoke, the consoles dimmed and the stars outside seemed to lean in.

He taught me about planets.

“Son,” he said, as if I were a child and he an old teacher, “some planets are made of air” — he said the word “air” the way a seven-year-old would, simple and wide — “some from coal or diamond, rich in carbon. Others are soil and rock. Still others are iron and gold, heavy with metal. And many are mixes of all these things.” He tapped the map of systems with a long, slow finger and his face glowed in the ship-light. “There is a chance of life in twenty-five percent of solar systems,” he explained, “but only twenty percent actually harbour it. There are millions of life forms across our universe — and more in the spaces beyond, where other universes may lie. But son, Earth is special. There are not many like it. Gods and countless others desire to control it.”

He spoke not as prophecy but as pedagogy, and I absorbed every number and image as if they were facts to be carried in my pocket. The old man’s certainty anchored me in a universe otherwise wild with possibility; his softness made the facts feel like a benediction rather than a warning. When I woke, the smell of his spacecraft lingered in my nose for hours — metal and ozone and something faintly sweet that might have been starlight.

Before that, in another dream that felt less like a lesson and more like a fate being stitched into my spine, the goddess Durga appeared to me. She was not the distant deity of paintings; she was immediate and fierce and impossibly present. I saw myself on the field of a war that seemed to belong to the Earth itself — blades of grass or shards of crystal beneath my boots, friends and enemies murmuring like wind through trees. I won that battle. I bled. I staggered and the world blurred.

She took me in her arms then, and this is the image that split my dreamlife into a before and after: as I fell, she gathered me and laid my head against her lap. Her hands were both comforting and judgmental, like a mother’s touch that understands the cost of what she must permit. “You will fight a major war,” she told me without saying those exact words, because dreams rarely waste syllables. “It may be against your own people.” In the language of Sanatana Dharma, she is entrusted with the Earth; in the language of my sleep I understood that what I was to fight for was not land or title but the planet itself.

I have told the story of the white-bearded man and the goddess a thousand ways since then — to friends, to lovers, in the quiet hours of the night. The facts shift under retelling but the core remains: a child who dreamed enormous things, a teacher who explained the cosmos like a classroom, a goddess who folded him into her lap when the battle left him broken.

Now, older and with fewer nights spent crossing galaxies, the dreams still visit. They are quieter, perhaps, or perhaps I have simply learned to listen differently. The spaceship’s glow, the old man’s statistics, Durga’s lap — these are not prophecies I can unpack and prove. They are impressions, anchors in a life that sometimes feels ordinary and sometimes, unmistakably, like the opening chord of a war drum.

If anything remains clear after forty years, it is this: the Earth is rare, and there are forces — divine, terrible, and tender — that watch over it. Whether those forces speak in the voice of an old man on a ship or in the arms of a goddess, I carry their lessons with me. Some nights, when the world is quiet and the ceiling above my bed goes black, I close my eyes and become the boy again, ready to travel, to fight, and to be held afterward.