In this article, I compare the dreams of two religious figures in the multicultural world of second-century BCE Egypt. By an amazing quirk of fate, these were the only personal dream narratives to survive from throughout the 3,000+ years of ancient Egyptian history.
One of the dreamers was a Greek named Ptolemaios and the other an Egyptian named Hor. It was fascinating to uncover the differences in their subconscious preoccupations, and how their dreams related to actual events in their lives. I also tried to interpret the dreams using ancient Greek and Egyptian dream interpretation books, hoping to understand what the dreamers themselves may have believed about them.
While the article doesn't deal with NDEs or afterlife themes, it does treat dreams as a form of religiously or spiritually meaningful experience. In some ways it planted the seeds for my later work - particularly in looking at the dreams as having universal, cultural, and individual layers of meaning.
This was my first article, published in 2006 (don't tell anyone, but it was actually a revision of my thesis for my BA in Egyptian Archaeology at University College London!). Rather than publishing it in an Egyptology, Classics, or other journal dealing with the ancient world, I chose to publish it in Dreaming - a publication of the American Psychological Association. I am a firm believer in interdisciplinary research, and of cross-fertilization between various areas of knowledge.
Click HERE and scroll down to download "A Comparison of Dreams in Two Ptolemaic Archives," and other articles.
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