ON DREAMS
Below is the textual transcription to the oldest known dream interpretation text recovered from antiquity. It is nearly 3,700 years old. Wow. Below you will find the complete (surviving) text as well as a brief introduction from a scholar named H.F. Lutz. The statements from this ancient dream tablet are utterly fascinating and downright poetic: “If his left eye he turns awry: there shall be fulfillment of desire.” But first a detour.
Yesterday, Alenka Zupančič’s new book Disavowal (Polity, 2024) was just published and it begins with recounting a famous dream and its interpretation by Freud and Lacan. (I’ve also pasted below Zizek’s own gloss on Lacan’s take.) The analytic takeaways are as counterintuitive as they are super brilliant. OK. So first the patient’s dream:
A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.
Here is what Freud says: