Oh What A Time... -  #73 Dreams (Part 2)

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed from yesterday! This week we’re closing our eyes and going to the land of dreams. We’ve got: how the ancient Babylonians regarded the land of nod, great works of art and inventions that came to people while snoozing and also what Sigmund Freud made of sleepy time. And guess what! We’ve found the worst Christmas tree on earth and GUESS WHAT: it belongs to Elis and it’s been up all year. Please send your Christmas tree hate mail for Elis to: [e-mail] If you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER? In exchange for your £4.99 per month to support the show, you'll get: - two bonus episodes every month! - ad-free listening - episodes a week ahead of everyone else - And first dibs on any live show tickets Subscriptions are available via AnotherSlice, Apple and Spotify. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.com You can also follow us on:  X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepod And Instagram at @ohwhatatimepod Aaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice? Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk). Chris, Elis and Tom x Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit betmgm.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older. Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem? For free assistance, call the ConAX Ontario helpline at 1-866-531-2600. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Okay, welcome back to part two of our episode on dreams. Deep in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the US lies a really fascinating cuneiform tablet, which is a piece of inscribed clay that comes from an area of what is modern day Iraq. It was made, however, in the 15th century BCE, so almost three and a half thousand

years ago. And it has counterparts found in museum collections elsewhere in the British Museum in London, for instance. This is, by the way, this is definitely the sort of tablet that about 30 listeners have emailed in to say people didn't scratch the words into when it was dry. They did it when it was wet. As people very excitedly, and to be fair, quite right, pointed out that it would have been written in wet.

This is a mistake we made a few episodes ago. All three of us. The three of us had a collective brain freeze that we then put online. Which is such a shame. It went through an editor as well. So Jodie, our editor, listened and he went, yeah, that's fine. So it's four people. Yeah, that seems pretty normal. Send that out.

There are, amazingly, there are checks and balances on this podcast, but we all missed that. Yeah, absolutely. there are checks and balances on this podcast, but we all missed that. Anyway, so this tablet is a dream manual. So it's a professional ancient Babylonian's guide to the interpretations of dreams or sleeping visions. Wow. To give it its proper name, Onyromancy. Now Onyromancy was the counterpart of another form of divination, namely necromancy, which dealt with the interpretation of visits by the spirits and souls of the dead. Although the two were, interesting I thought, regarded

as separate matters. So those in need of dream interpretation would acquire the services of an interpreter, and so there was always a partnership between the two. And this makes perfect sense, because obviously, for as long as we've been alive, or for as long as humans have existed, we've dreamt. And people have always tried to interpret dreams. I remember there used to be columns in newspapers when I was growing up where you could send in a dream and an analyst would try and interpret it. I remember reading that in the weekend papers. And you see books all the time, places like Waterstones on how to interpret dreams. And I've never found it particularly interesting because I never agree with the interpretations. And to me it sounds like hogwash. But what I find interesting is you can tell a lot about the culture

of the time based on the interpretation. So for the Babylonians, for example, who were widely regarded as experts on such matters in the ancient world and left traces of their ideas in the dream interpretation works of other civilizations, including the Greeks. For them, dreams weren't direct messages from the heavens, but they were signs and portents relayed by spirits from the underworld. Mason- Right. Sam- So because they found them so important, they coded inferences that they needed translation by experts. Mason- And then they would then act on those translations. They would directly impact their life or form.

I think so, yeah. So as captured on dream tablets were very cultural conventions. So they had several deities of dreams and sleep. Okay, so for instance, the Babylonians saw the pointing to the right or looking to the right or east and north implied good fortune in a dream, whereas pointing to the left or to the west and the south suggested bad luck. If in your dream you sowed your crops to the right, they would flourish. If you sowed your crops to the left, they will wither." That's the sort of thing. So much of the past as well. I'm just reading about the French Revolution at the moment,

but so much of it is people worrying about crops. That is the main fundamental worry for a lot of society. Mason- Well, my friend Den's right, he's a gardener and the two of you met him on my stag do. Jason- He's lovely, yeah. Mason- Yeah, and I did a gig last night and he came and at the end of the show, he waited for me because he had a load of veg to get. Jason- Brilliant. Mason- What a legend. So...

Is he using the one day time machine to come back from 1600 to watch? And had he sewed those to the left? Did you find out that was where they... There's garlic in there. There's... I can't remember what there is in total. There's butter beans. There's Bolotti beans.

There's all sorts of stuff. But he was so biologic about the Bolotti beans. He was like, I've had a bad summer with Bolotti beans. I'm just so sorry. So he must be dreaming about crops. Mason- Yeah. But there would have been a point where crops were everything. Crops were survival. Not only was it work, it was the only way of feeding your community if it didn't work. You literally had to draw food from the land around you in what a way that was. There were no supermarkets, there was no mass production, all these sort of things. So crop failure would have been the end of your community. It could have meant death for you and your

family. So I guess it would have been on your mind. One thing I read about the French Revolution, which is just before it kicked off, eight out of 10 people in France were working the fields. Will Barron That was the original name of that panel show, wasn't it? Poor Jimmy Carr subbed it down. Will Barron That's why it didn't take off just before the French Revolution at the time.

Will Barron Now the barbelo onions, obviously if you're dreaming about a person that was going to be very significant. So for instance, if you dreamt, if you were pressing your nose up against something in a dream, like a window, that was a good sign. If someone whispered, shame will be brought upon you. If when one talks, they look at the ground, others will speak lies. Wow. So, so there's a lot of these dream interpretations were about how people looked. So the upper lip was thought to be good, the lower lip was meant to be bad. So if you were biting your upper lip, that suggested that joy will not be given and you would miss fortune ahead.

Interesting. So as it relates to dream interpretation methods, there were symbols to be found in food and drink. So having a dream about having a beer was a good sign. Yeah. And if you dream you're drinking water that implied purification and forgiveness of sin. But I was gutted about this because I love dates. If you dreamt about eating dates that was a bad sign. Because dates implied forthcoming sorrow, even though I actually think they're really nice and I often eat

them after I've played football. Will Barron That idea of whispered and shame is something I can kind of see some logic to that. That maybe in your mind this is stuff you're wanting to quieten down, to suppress, but on some level I can see where that meaning would be derived. Will Barron Well, you know, these dreams then became a key part of literature and culture. And so from those writings we learnt that there was a whole spectrum of dream types that people would try and analyse. And so from those writings we learned that there was a whole spectrum of dream types that people would try and analyse. Pleasant dreams, good dreams,

bad dreams and nightmares. So the latter were generally interpreted as an indication of illness, whether it was physical or mental, and so led to treatment to enable the patient to return back to pleasant dreams, which was regarded as the normal situation. Oh! So bad dreams are also subject to a wider range of euphemism. So you know, people are like, oh my god, he's evil, or he's strange, or you're confused, or he's just bad. Now as a result, there are dream tablets that survive as a form of almost like patient pathology. So a clerk or a scribe would record the interpreterters decoding of the dream, much as a psychologist

or a psychiatrist might record their interpretation of like a therapy session or a counselling session. So this is an extract from a tablet now held at Yale University. In a dream I saw the great star, Venus, Sirius, the moon and the sun, and I shall investigate them with regard to a favorable interpretation for my lord lord the king." So the dream is on the fifteenth day of the month and two days later the same patient said, I saw the great star and I shall now investigate with regard to a favourable interpretation for my lord the king and so on. So it wasn't super exciting, but the individual's dreams were guiding his actions in the waking world. It's because he'd had that dream,

he then went looking for signs. Because he dreamt about it, so he was convinced that it must happen. So he read omens or portents or signs. They were all worth, they were worthy of noting down and analyzing, apparently to the point of almost cultural obsession. So was the dream a message?

Should I do this? Should I avoid this? Was it a symbol? Was it a sign that something was happening and I wouldn this? Should I avoid this? Was it a symbol? Was it a sign that something was happening and I wouldn't be able to avoid it? So one poor bloke in this, or one poor person in this era, tended a dream interpreter to ask about a dream which he'd had lustful thoughts for his mum. And he said, you know, did this, all this happen? He asked, Because I've had sexual contact in a dream with my own mother. And the dreamer in question was given a prayer to recite to help him ward off such evil spirits

and dangerous thoughts. Now if I had a dream I was having sex with my own mother, I probably wouldn't mention it. I certainly wouldn't mention it to my therapist. Yes, wouldn't write it down. I'd focus on the crops. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mainly crop based this week. Bloody crops again. Out of curiosity, a friend is having dreams and he's having sex with his mum. I mean, what should I tell him? Yeah, okay. But me, just crops. The people who are reading into things for the king, for example, they must completely believe what they're doing.

Otherwise, you would just constantly give a favourable spin to everything, wouldn't you? Surely you would just report whatever information is going to reflect best on you. Will Barron Well, what occurred to me though was that we often talk about jobs in the past that you could do with our modern day skills and interpretation that we wouldn't find too difficult or challenging. I reckon I could black being a dream interpreter. Will Barron Oh yeah.

Will Barron In sort of ancient Mesopotamia. I'd be like yeah yeah I can do that. Come on, sit down. Will Barron If it has to impact their life you've just got to keep it a bit vague, haven't you? Basically, what the impact's going to be. You're going to come face to face with someone tomorrow who may have an impact on your day. Yeah, what do I think?

Oh, good and bad. Yeah, yeah, good. So, to finish this episode on dreams, which incidentally I've really enjoyed, what a fun subject, I'm going to talk to you both about the history of the psychological evaluation of dreams more recently. So, by the 20th century, the science of dreams had basically moved away from divination and religion and into the world of the psychologist and the psychiatrist. In fact, it was close to 125 years ago on the 4th of November 1899 that a landmark book was published on the subject of dreams called The Interpretation of Dreams. For a

point, any idea who wrote that book? Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud. Correct. Very, very happy. The big one, Sigmund Freud. Of course he was. Yeah, stop that. So published in Austria, originally in German, this book, which is just hugely impactful in terms of kickstarting a modern fascination on the evaluation of dreams. It was published, as I say, in Austria, originally in German, later translated into English, appeared in Britain in

1913. And from there, the modern study of dreams as a form of human psychology basically boomed when it came to Britain around that sort of time. What do you think your sort of gut reaction is to the analysis of dreams in a modern sense now? Is it something you'd be interested to have done? Do you think it's quackery? What's your feeling? Will Barron I think it's quackery. It's just this subconscious processing weird stuff that's happened to you. Will Barron I don't think you can pick up a book and go all dreams about teeth relate to money. I don't think there's a connection work

for everyone. Will Barron People are too weird and different. Will Barron Do you think there's a connection that works for everyone. Mason- People are too weird and different. Mason- Do you think there's anything to be learnt from dreams? Greer- I think it's an interesting… you can tell what your subconscious is maybe thinking about. That's probably as far as it goes. Mason- Yeah, and I think that more than anything, I think you can tell if someone is feeling agitated or if they're feeling calm from a dream. Mason- Okay, yes.

Mason- Like certainly when I've been worried about stuff, like when I was doing my exams at university or something, my dreams would become crazy. And that was because I was undergoing a lot of stress. So you think it probably reflects something you already know on some level, as opposed to giving you anything that will inform and improve your life. Yeah, it's very rare that I wake up and I think, what the hell was that? It's just… Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. Oh my god!

Good lord! You would have fitted in, okay, at the time this book was released, because a lot of people, when it was first released, thought it was complete and utter quackery. To quote one London newspaper, those who have read Freud's book on the interpretation of dreams know that it is one of the strangest essays in morbid analysis that has ever been given to the public. And initially it was a complete flop. This book, which is now considered as seismically important, was a huge failure. Would you like to guess how many copies it's sold in the first six years? How many copies do you think this book sold?

2000. No, much less than that. 500. Less again. It was much less than that. 500. Less again. It was 351 copies in six years. Whoa! That's crazy! It wasn't a success. But then, and this is quite interesting, the First World War happened and that caused untold horror across Europe – spoiler alert if anyone hasn't watched the documentaries, I'm afraid. It's not a happy time. Which in turn resulted in

millions of people returning and left wrestling with awful memories, trauma, PTSD, and indeed, dreams. So on a national level and across Europe, people's dreams were really affected by this horrific experience. And it was dreams that people wanted to understand and psychologists such as Freud also wanted to kind of learn from. So there was a rush on the analysis of people's dreams in the time after World War I. And this coincided with this book being translated into English and from there it really booms. And so over the next few decades, popular appetite for interpreting dreams just grew substantially. So much so that the book could be found in most public library shelves around the country. So bear in mind, it was 351 initially. Suddenly,

it's in every library and in more than a few personal book collections too, with classes in psychology among the most popular of those delivered to working class Britons in the 30s. So suddenly, this book becomes very, very popular because of the effect of World War I and the impact that's had on people's dreaming. Now the roots of Freud's work lay in a dream of his own, in fact, and he experienced this dream while staying at the Schloss Bellevue near Vienna. And years later he joked with a friend about a plaque being installed on this hotel to say, in this place on the 24th of July 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sibmund Freud.

Out of interest, what would the plaque on your house say? I think mine would be, in this house on the 13th of March, Tom Crane melted his kettle by leaving it on the hob. I think that's my most recent weird achievement. What's yours? Will Barron Ellis James lived here in 2022 to the date of my death. AKA Mr. Audio, a content creator for the ages. Will Barron So a lot of his work was rooted in this dream he had in this house on the 24th July 1895. And I'm going to give you two dreams and you have to guess which one of these was the dream that Freud had. Okay? First one

is the 89th minute, Austria Vienna versus Salzburg, and Freud is brought on and he scores the perfect hat trick, which is left foot, right foot, head, to win the cup. Also, his ex was in the crowd and she realised she was wrong to have dumped him and she thought the beard looked cool. Okay, so that's option one. Now that is a great dream and I would love to have that dream. Option one. Option two. Freud is treating a patient called Irma who's complaining about pain. He examines her and finds a problem with her throat and then other doctors appear and discover that Irma had been given a faulty injection by another doctor causing her illness. Which of the two do you think it is? 89th minute winner.

It's got to be the Rappavienna one, hasn't it? Yeah, surely. Exactly. Of course. The other one's too dark. So in Freud's essays analyzing this dream, he concludes his mind has been mulling over past mistakes, not only those involving his actual patient Irma. So Irma was this person he had been treating. And that when he was asleep, he was also engaged in an act of self-criticism, all leading to the fulfilled wish of becoming a better doctor. So in short, he thought that dreams were all about wish fulfilment. This is what he thought was crucial in dreams. It can be a big event, a small event, it can

be a glance across a room, maybe a mistake you made, and it's something that's happened in that particular day that's then developed during the dream that night. It might also be like a triggered memory that occurred during the day which then returns in the dream and so on. So having figured out, at least to his own satisfaction, what dreams were about, he then believed he'd found out a way to analyse the unconscious mind. So this is a thing that you don't really believe in, as you mentioned earlier, but he felt you could examine the unconscious mind through dreams. It was an intersplicing of childhood memories, basically trauma and past desires with the short

term impact of the present. Alternative theory, he's worth saying, also developed at this time. So Freud was the big boom idea. His approach to analysis was the one that really post-World War One really took over. But Carl Jung had also had an argument, which was that rather than wish fulfillment, dreams were full of symbols and that these could be analyzed for their meaning. So for example, the dream is a nocturnal theatre. That's how he described it. Oh, I like that. So as he wrote, dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche. Outside the control of the will, they are pure nature.

They show us unvarnished natural truth and are therefore fitted as nothing else is to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature, when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse." So he felt that they really showed what you needed, what you wanted, your basic human nature in its purest unfiltered form, which is why he believed that to analyse a dream you'd have to write down, paint, draw everything that could be remembered from a dream. So that's what he'd do. So the people, the places, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the colours, the conversations,

the thoughts, the feelings, he would get everyone to write down in ultra-detailed sense what had happened in their dream. It was interesting that you said that the experience of World War I turned Freud's book about dreams into a bestseller because Europe was undergoing a collective mass trauma. Because I read, over the summer I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Remarque, which is the best book about war I've ever read. The way he writes about the young soldiers, and they know that they're fucked really, and that they can't get over what they've been through. And they often are very resentful of the younger ones who aren't going to have to do it for

as long, and especially the older ones who had a normal life before. If you're 30, you can just go back and you were a farmer, you can just go back to being a farmer. But whereas I'm 19, this is all I've known, this is going to define me for the rest of my life now. And they often talk about that. It's really... Mason- It's interesting, yeah. Fechsohn- It's a really, really powerful book. And I can totally imagine how with, you know, obviously, as I said, it's written from the German perspective, but I can totally imagine how after

Europe was consumed by war, and everyone's undergone this trauma, same thing after World War II as well, you would be looking for answers. It's awful, that experience of World War I soldiers. And then you just fast forward 50 years, Keith Richards is asleep. BAM, BAM, NONONO. Whole generation of the trench, fast forward 50 years, having a laugh. Yeah, no wonder they were absolutely livid when the Beatles got in Bs. They were like, Jesus Christ, we all fought in wars.

So they've done his gigs in Hamburg. If you told me Keith Richards fought in World War I, I would believe you. Yeah, yeah, me too. Have a look at that. That's it for this week. Hope you enjoyed that. If you want even more O What A Timer, you can become an Oh What A Time full-timer. You get bonus episodes.

There's loads of good stuff on there. Imagine Futures, two bonus episodes every month, ad free listing, episodes early, et cetera, et cetera. For all your options, go to owhatatime.com to subscribe. Hope you enjoyed that. Also, in the not too distant future, we are going to be doing our first live show, which we can't wait to do. Oh, we'll have to sign full-timers, we'll get first dibs on those tickets, and we think

it's going to be really fun, we can't wait to do it. So if you want to sign up, there's many great reasons to do it, and there's another one to boot. And I'm just going to freestyle what you might see on stage. Jeremy Bentham, Ellis' Christmas Tree Live. Live on stage. What more do you need? I would buy a ticket, honestly. stage. Jeremy Bentham, Ellis's Christmas tree live. Live on stage. What more do you need?

I would buy a ticket, honestly. Taking that Christmas tree on the tube. To see it live. All the way to the show. It would be incredible live. Ellis, I mean this, I would rather have Jeremy Bentham's corpse in the corner of my room on Christmas day than I would your Christmas tree. Okay. That's better.

Leaving the presents down by his feet, bit of tinsel around his neck. Bentham's corpse would look less sad than your Christmas tree. I'm looking at it right now. It is not festive. No. And yet it is what the kids are used to. Thank you so much for listening guys. We will see you very soon and yeah, we really appreciate

the support. Have a lovely week. Bye! Bye! Music