In book 20 of The Odyssey, there are all kinds of things to be learned about dreams and the subconscious. Penelope tells Odysseus, who is currently disguised as a beggar, about a dream of her’s. In Penelope’s dream, she tells of an eagle swooping down and killing all the geese that were previously feeding and drinking at her well. Then the Eagle turns into the humanoid form of Zeus who tells Penelope that this will happen, the geese are not her beloved pets but the suitors who will be slain by the return of her husband Odysseus.
Dreams are important psychological tools. Dreams happen in the subconscious; they can give you self-revelations by unlocking knowledge within your brain that you already knew, knowledge that had not yet been brought to the surface of the mind, so you didn’t know you knew it. Dreams happen to help you process the day you just had and are out of the realm of reality, this causes your subconscious to do things out of reality that never would have occurred to you because they are impossible. Dreams cause curiosity, creativity, and a greater understanding of your own knowledge.
In Greek times, long before we understood what we know now about psychology, people would have dreams, and therefore have experiences that are impossible in the real world. They would learn things that hadn’t been brought to their attention until trapped in their own minds. This could’ve been seen as divine. How can you think of things that you didn’t know about before you thought of them? They weren’t brought to your attention by an outside source, how can you come to a conclusion just with your own brain?
This concept still has little to no explanation today, It is a little less complex when you are talking about when you are asleep. Something brought it to your attention the previous day; your subconscious just helped you process it. But the Greeks didn’t understand that, so an outside source had to be the explanation, but what outside source could cause you to see unreal things and give you information while you are asleep? Only a God would be capable of such things, not an unreasonable conclusion given the times.
During the time this was written, people could relate to Penelope’s dream. They had lucid experiences of their own. Now they could make sense of them. Now this can be perceived as a much simpler way to understand your own mind. The brain is a complex thing. Even now, by pulling meaning out of stories, applying that meaning to the context of my life where I can relate, the meaning I pull out is from my own brain. What meaning can you pull out of stories?
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