The title is a good question; I am not an interpreter as I have always wished to be. I can’t even remember my dreams in the latest years as I did in my youth.

Yes, the Master tells the truth. My brother Al had the talent of the interpretation, as one of my aunts; Rakhshi. When someone talked about her/his dream, they could analyse it so well that one could be agreed immediately.

Now I want to share here with you a great article by Dale M. Kushner  MFA, who is founder of The Writer’s Place, a literary center in Madison, Wisconsin. She has an MFA in poetry from Vermont College and has served as poetry editor for The Journal of Pastoral Care & Counseling. http://dalemkushner.com/about/ It is much worthy to read.

Dale M. Kushner Transcending the Past

Can Dreams Be Prophetic? How might you tell if your dreams are predicting something?

Posted Feb 28, 2020

Years later, in his memoir, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he recalls the event and his concern that he was having a psychotic break.

“I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.”

The following spring of 1914, he had three catastrophic dreams in which he saw Europe was deluged by ice, the vegetation was gone, and the land deserted by humans. Despite his awareness that the situation in Europe was “darkening,” he interpreted these dreams personally and feared he was going mad. However, by August of that year, his dreams and visions were affirmed: World War I had broken out.

Some fifty years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had a prophetic dream. Three days before he was assassinated, Lincoln conveyed his dream to his wife and a group of friends. Ward Hill Lamon, an attending companion, recorded the conversation.

“About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Think I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”  (Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 by Ward Hill Lamon, published 1911.)

Two weeks later, on April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. As in his dream, his casket was put on view in the East Room of the White House and guarded by soldiers.

These are two chilling examples of dreams that occurred during periods of collective crisis which accurately predicted historical turning points. Do prophetic dreams occur more often during turbulent times? How does the dreamer know if a dream is to be interpreted personally and symbolically or as a warning for others and the world at large?

I asked these questions to Dr. Murray Stein, a renowned author and Jungian analyst at the International School for Analytic Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. Stein replied that he had no statistics on whether people have predictive dreams more frequently in times of crisis than at other times. In his experience, one can’t know if a dream is precognitive until after the event. After 9/11, he told me, people reported precognitive dreams that foretold the disaster. He said people also reported that dreams foretold the financial crisis of 2008, which he called, “a black swan event.” According to Investopedia:

“A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe impact, and the practice of explaining widespread failure to predict them as simple folly in hindsight.”

The recent outbreak of the coronavirus might be considered a black swan event, and perhaps we will soon hear about people who have had prophetic dreams of its manifestation.

While there is no simple answer or proven method to discern whether a dream should be interpreted personally or more broadly, we can go about exploring its contents with both aspects in mind. For example, if I have a dream in which I am a child who has been put into a cage. I might ask: What aspect of me feels “caged” right now? Noting that I am a child in the dream, I might further inquire: Is there something from my childhood that is still confining and constricting me? I might try to estimate the age of the child in the dream and reflect back to when I was that age and try to remember if something significant happened then. Maybe my parents had begun to think about divorce at that time and I felt caged by their emotions. I might then inquire if there is something similar going on in my life right now, not necessarily a divorce, but an imminent disruption or the loss of a treasured relationship. When we go back into a dream to amplify it, each question generates other questions that can lead to deeply buried insights. (For a more complete explanation of Jung’s use of amplification as a technique, please see Michael Vannoy Adams’ description on JungNewYork

But what if I dream that I am a child that has been put into a cage, and a few days later, I discover that children of immigrants are actually being held in cages in detention centers? My dream, while personally relevant, would carry a collective, or more public meaning, as well. This collective meaning of the dream attests to the interconnectedness of our species, to our capacity for empathy (we see a horror on the news and we feel it enter us) and to the common values we share about the quality of human life.

If we had lived during the early part of the last century, or in an Indigenous culture, or in ancient Mesopotamia, we might examine our dreams for deep wisdom and as augurs for the future. These days we are more likely to look to neuroscience to understand our dreams. Neurobiology tells us that sleep is a complex neural activity of the brain that stays busy activating and deactivating complicated neuro-systems while we doze, including consolidating memories, regulating mood, restoring immune function, and many other important utilitarian tasks. But neuroscience tells us nothing about the meaning of dreams or why our dreaming life has carried significance for humans since we first walked the planet.

About thirty thousand years ago, toward the end of the Paleolithic Era, our hunter-gather forebears descended into the subterranean darkness of caves to enact rituals of trance and dreaming. Recently, archaeologists and ethnographers have speculated that the artifacts found in the caves of southern Europe—bone flutes, whistles, and types of drums—and the now-famous discovery of cave wall paintings indicate that ancient shamans may have used these caves for ceremonial dream retreats (See in particular the work of David Lewis-Williams). We can speculate that the depictions of bison and large and small game along with scenes of hunting painted on the walls may reflect shamanic dream content. Perhaps the shaman ascended from his retreat having had visions about the abundance and location of prey, which would be crucial information for the clan.

Later human societies continued to transcribe their dreams. The oldest written dream recorded is in the Sumerian epic poem of Gilgamesh (2100 BCE). Not unlike King Nebuchadnezzar’s frightening dream in the Book of Daniel, Gilgamesh, the king of the Sumerian city Uruk, has violent nightmares about death, which shake him to the core and send him on his quest for immortality. But Gilgamesh cannot interpret his own dreams, and like many of the dreamers in the Old Testament, he is in need of an interpreter. How telling that from ancient times the one who receives the dream and the one who knows its significance are different people.

In some contemporary cultures, dreams are thought to be a way of receiving messages from the spirit world. A holy man or medicine woman, an elder or shaman is the receiver of the prophetic dream, which is given for the benefit of all and linked to the survival of the tribe or people. Black Elk, the holy medicine man of the Lakota Sioux, stated this when he said a dream is worthless unless it is shared with the tribe.

How can we relate to the dreams that pursue us? Are they simply the result of complex neurological activity and without real meaning, just as we know the moon is no enchanted sphere but a mere rock in space? What might we miss if we cast our lot with a viewpoint based wholly on the material world? Is it possible to consider the two worlds as being equally meaningful, the world of science and—to borrow the phrase John Keats used to characterize adventurers on the threshold of a new frontier—the world of “wild surmise”? Can we think of ourselves as vessels open to receiving wisdom through non-ordinary means? Can we be our own shamans?

via https://www.psychologytoday.com/us

Originally; https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/transcending-the-past/202002/can-dreams-be-prophetic

I don’t know if you have ever think about it? I do! Maybe because of the age… or maybe because I have a lot of loose (death) in my small family that I just can hardly wait for my turn.

Sorry for not dying! He said; in one of his latest concerts. Yes, Leonard Cohen had a feeling of it. Mike Steeden – MIKE STEEDEN – surely can sing a perfect song on him and his life but I do it as well.

I don’t believe in life after death though, the whole energy which we still have, in my opinion, is a miracle, and would certainly do it’s best to survive!

First, we take Manhattan, then We take it All.

Now let’s again have a nice trip on the master to describe his thoughts on this unknown… position…

http://www.openculture.com/

via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/eVdYn20T-x0/an-animated-leonard-cohen-offers-reflections-on-death-thought-provoking-excerpts-from-his-final-interview.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

A month before Leonard Cohen died in November, 2016, The New Yorker‘s editor David Remnick traveled to the songwriter’s Los Angeles home for a lengthy interview in which Cohen looked both forward and back.

As a former Zen monk, he was also adept at inhabiting the present, one in which the shadow of death crept ever closer.

His former lover and muse, Marianne Ihlen, had succumbed to cancer earlier in the summer, two days after receiving a frank and loving email from Cohen:

Well, Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.

The New Yorker has never shied from over-the-top physical descriptions. The courteous, highly verbal young poet, who’d evinced “a kind of Michael Corleone Before the Fall look, sloe-eyed, dark, a little hunched” was now very thin, but still handsome, with the handshake of “a courtly retired capo.”

In addition to an album, You Want It Darker, to promote, Cohen had a massive backlog of unpublished poems and unfinished lyrics to tend to before the sands of time ran out.

At 82, he seemed glad to have all his mental faculties and the support of a devoted personal assistant, several close friends and his two adult children, all of which allowed him to maintain his music and language-based workaholic habits.

Time, as he noted, provides a powerful incentive for finishing up, despite the challenges posed by the weakening flesh:

At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.

He had clearly made peace with the idea that some of his projects would go unfinished.

You can hear his fondness for one of them, a “sweet little song” that he recited from memory, eyes closed, in the animated interview excerpt, above:

Listen to the hummingbird

Whose wings you cannot see

Listen to the hummingbird

Don’t listen to me.

Listen to the butterfly

Whose days but number three

Listen to the butterfly

Don’t listen to me.

Listen to the mind of God

Which doesn’t need to be

Listen to the mind of God

Don’t listen to me.

These unfinished thoughts close out Cohen’s beautifully named posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance, scheduled for release later this month.

Dianne V. Lawrence, who designed Cohen’s hummingbird logo, a motif beginning with 1979’s Recent Songs album, speculates that Cohen equated the hummingbird’s enormous energy usage and sustenance requirements with those of the soul.

Read Remnick’s article on Leonard Cohen in its entirety here. Hear a recording of David Remnick’s interview with Cohen–his last ever–below:

Related Content:

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Interview: Recorded by David Remnick of The New Yorker

Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Published: Discover His Final Poems, Drawings, Lyrics & More

How Leonard Cohen Wrote a Love Song

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Monday, December 9 for her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

” To live means to be sick for a long time: I owe a bird to the saviour Asclepius.” Socrates.

No doubt I am a pessimist, but I’d never give up questioning! In all through my life, I was in the search of finding answers and with every step, I had to suffer more and my pain increased.

There I have understood that there is no knowledge without pain, but I am happy to suffer than be ignorant!

And I’m honoured to have such as great companions.

Now let’s read this wonderful post by SearchingTheMeaningOfLife about one of the greatest philosopher of all time by another greatest one. I try to translate from Greek. with thanks 🙏

https://searchingthemeaningoflife.wordpress.com/author/searchingthemeaningoflife/

The wisest people of all time have come to the same conclusion about life: it’s worth nothing … Everywhere and always one hears the same sound from their mouths – a sound full of doubt, of melancholy, of tiredness of life, of resistance to Zoe. Even Socrates said when he died: ” To live means to be sick for a long time: I owe a bird to the saviour Asclepius.” Even Socrates was tired of life. – But what does this prove? What does it mean?

• Sometimes one would say (oh, it has been said, and even loudly, and especially by our pessimists!): “Something like that must be true! The Consensus Sapientium (consent of wise) indicates the truth. ” – Can we talk like that today? Should we talk like that? “Something like that must be sick,” we answer: we must scrutinize these wisest people of all time! Did they not get on their feet well? Were they late? deceivers? decadents; Does wisdom on earth appear as the crow that the odour draws from the crow?

This perverse thought that the great wise men are types of decadence was born in exactly one case where the prejudice of both intellectuals and others is very strong: I saw Socrates and Plato as symptoms of degeneration, as instruments of Greek disintegration, as Pseudo-Greeks, as anti-Greeks (Birth of Tragedy, 1872). This consensus sapientium – as time goes by I understand it better – does not prove at all that they were right in agreeing: it seems rather that they themselves, the wisest of men, were in some natural agreement and so they had – they had to take – the same negative attitude towards life. Judgments, judgments about life, for or against, can never be true: they only have value as symptoms, they deserve attention only as symptoms; We need to stretch our fingers and try to grasp this amazing finesse (finesse of character, refinement) that says he can not estimate the value of life. It cannot be appreciated by a living person because he is an interested party or an apple of contention rather than a judge – not even a dead man, for other reasons. Seeing a philosopher as a problem in the value of life is, therefore, an objection to himself, a question mark for his wisdom, a complete lack of wisdom. – How? And were all these great wise men not only decadents but also no wise men at all? – But I return to the Socrates problem.

By Socrates’ descent, he belonged to the lower people: he was a virtuous man. We know, we can still see, how ugly he was. But the ugliness, in itself, was a defect for the Greeks, almost a denial. So was or not Socrates Greek? Ugly is often the expression of a junction, a junction fractured by evolution. In other cases, it appears as a downward trend. Those who are anthropologists forensics tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in front, monstrum in Animo (Animus). ” But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? – At least that would not disprove the famous judgment of the physiognomist who so badly sounded at Socrates’ friends. A stranger who knew how to read physiognomy, he once passed through Athens and told Socrates how he was a monstrum – that he hid all the bad appetites and appetites within him. And Socrates simply replied, “You know me very well sir!”

The decline in Socrates is not only indicated by the admitted Achaemenidism and anarchy of his instincts, but also by the hypertrophy of logical ability and the malice of the militant that distinguishes him. Let us also not forget those acoustic hallucinations that, as a “demon of Socrates,” were interpreted religiously. Everything in it is overdone, buffo, caricature – at the same time everything is hidden, post-bulky, hypochondriac.

I try to understand what temperament gives this Socratic equation of rationality, virtue, and happiness: this equation the most curious of all, which has, in addition, all the instincts of the older Greeks against it.

With Socrates, Greek tastes turn to dialectics: so what exactly happened? First of all, a gentle taste was lost – with the dialectic the blade rises to the top. Before Socrates, dialectical ways were rejected by good society: they were considered bad ways, they were dangerous. They were warning young people about these ways. They also distrusted those who presented their arguments in such ways. Honest things, like honest people, do not offer their arguments manually. It is inappropriate to point at all five fingers. It is not worth much to prove it first. Everywhere where authenticity is still a part of good behaviour, wherever one develops arguments but gives orders, the dialectic is a kind of a jerk: they laugh at him, they don’t take him seriously. Socrates was the jerk who managed to take him seriously: so what happened then?

One only chooses dialectics when he has no other means. He knows that this causes distrust, that he is not very convincing. Nothing is easier to erase than the resonance of the dialect: it is demonstrated by the mere observation of each meeting that is being discussed. The dialectic can only be self-defence in the hands of those who no longer have any other weapons. One has to reinforce his law: once he succeeds, he no longer uses it. The Jews were dialectic for this reason Reineke Fuchs was dialectic: how? Was Socrates dialectical too?

Is Socrates’ irony an expression of rebellion? Disillusioned? Does he, as an oppressor, enjoy his own wilderness with the knives of his reasoning? Is he revenging the nobles whom he charmed? – As a dialectic one holds a ruthless tool in his hands; he can become a tyrant thereby endangering those he conquers. The dialectician leaves to his opponent the care to prove that he is not an idiot: he leaves the other angry and at the same time helpless. The dialectic renders his opponent’s intelligence invalid. – How? Is Socrates’ dialectic just a form of revenge?

I have given you an insight into how Socrates could be disliked: that is why it is now more than necessary to explain his charm. Here’s the first reason: he discovered a new kind of struggle and became his first teacher in the noble circles of Athens. He was fascinated by irritating the racing impetus of the Greeks – introduced a variation on the boxing match between young men and teenagers. Socrates was also great in eroticism.

Socrates, however, fought even harder. He looked behind his noble Athenians; he realized that his case, his temper, was no longer an exception. The same kind of degeneration was developing silently everywhere: old Athens had come to an end. – And Socrates understood that the whole world needed him – they needed his means, his healing, his own art of self-preservation … Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere everyone was five steps from exaggeration: the monstrum in Animo was common danger. “The impulses want to become a tyrant we must find a stronger anti-tyrant” … When the physiognomist revealed to Socrates what it was – a cave full of bad appetites – the great ironic let another word that was key to his character escape. “This is true,” he said, “but I control them all.” How could Socrates become the master of himself? – In-depth his case was merely the extreme case, just the most striking example of what was beginning to become a common concern: no one was master of himself anymore, the instincts were turning against each other. Socrates was fascinated by the extreme case; his dreadful ugliness made it known to all eyes: it is obvious that he was still fascinated by the answer, the solution, the apparent cure for this case.

‘When one finds it necessary, as Socrates has done, to turn the rational into a tyrant, there is little risk that something else will become a tyrant. Then rationality was discovered as a saviour neither Socrates nor his “patients” were free to choose rationality: this became “de rigueur”, their last refuge. The fanaticism in which all Greek thought is cast into rationality betrays the existence of a hopeless situation; there was danger, there was only one choice: either to lose or to become unreasonably rational … Greek morality is pathologically defined, as is their appreciation of dialectics. The equation rational = virtue = happiness simply means: one has to imitate Socrates and permanently set against the dark appetites daylight – the daylight of the rational. One has to be in every way intelligent, clear, brilliant: every concession to instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards …

I explained how Socrates was fascinated: he seemed to be a doctor, a saviour. Do we still need to point out the mistake he made in his belief in “rationality in every way”? Philosophers and moralists deceive themselves when they believe that they are free from decline by simply declaring war on it. Discharge is beyond their power: what they choose as a means, as salvation, is but another expression of decline – they change its expression but are not discharged from the decline itself. Socrates was a misunderstanding of the whole morality of improvement, including Christianity, was a misunderstanding … The most glaring daylight – rationality in every way life, brilliant, cold, careful, conscious, without instinct, contrary to the instincts – all this was just another illness, another illness, and no return to “virtue”, “health”, happiness … The obligation to fight instincts – this is the recipe for the decline: as long as life sustains one on the upward path, happiness is identified with esteem etc.

Didn’t Socrates, the smartest of all those who fooled themselves, realize this? Did he finally confess it in the wisdom of his courage before death? Oh, Socrates wanted to die: the Cone chose him and not Athens; he forced Athens to condemn him to death … “Socrates is not a doctor,” he said in silence: “here the doctor is only death … Socrates was just sick for a long time! “ (or of a long Life!)

~ from Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols

Source:  http://antikleidi.com