Vasily Kostyrko. Otherworldly dream space

Otherworldly dream space
Dreams and visions in folk culture: Mythological, religious-mystical and cultural-psychological aspects / Comp. O.B. Khristoforova. Rep. ed. S.Yu. Neklyudov. (Series "Tradition, text, folklore"). - M.: Russian. state humanist univ., 2001. - 382 p. ISBN 5-7261-0335-9

Vasily Kostyrko

Publication date: April 5, 2002

Over the course of the twentieth century, a stable stereotype of comprehending archaic spiritual culture has developed in our minds. An anthropologist learns exotic languages, travels to distant countries to unknown savages, completely immerses himself in their culture (at least undergoes initiation into shamans ), and then, emerging back, writes his epoch-making scientific works.

The collection of articles and materials “Dreams and Visions in Folk Culture” shows that it is not necessary to go to the ends of the world. Sometimes it is enough just to reconfigure the usual research optics - and the above-mentioned type of thinking will begin to emerge right next to the researcher.

“One’s own” is usually called folklore . This term has two meanings - Western (material and spiritual culture in combination) and Russian (oral literature). Whichever one you take, one cannot help but admit that the folklore tradition in Russia has undergone great changes over the past 150 years . Nowadays you can no longer hear live performances of epics, fairy tales and calendar ritual songs - folk ensembles imitating antiquity do not count here. However, folklore consciousness itself has not gone away and continues to generate texts, using modern life as available material. And if we are not familiar with such concepts as “fiery serpent”, “dying away”, “ghost”, this only speaks of the cultural “multi-layeredness” of our society and the strength of the partitions separating it. The tradition, or more precisely, a number of genres and ideas retained within it, is still alive today.

It is the freshness of the published materials (most of them collected in the 90s) that distinguishes the collection “Dreams and Visions in Popular Culture.” The book presents the mystical experience of our contemporaries, who for the most part have not read books about mysticism (handwritten dream books and sectarian literature are much closer to oral tradition, since they are created by its bearers for their own needs) and are not inclined to use the phrase “mystical experience” itself. Among the materials in the collection there are visits to the other world in “extinctions” (visions of a person who has experienced clinical death), and communication with the dead, which a “fiery serpent” pretends to be, tempting grieving relatives (the visionary’s fellow villagers see the demon “as it is,” i.e. . in the form of a flying fireball), and “ghosts” (mirages repeated in places of ill repute), and, of course, prophetic dreams.

The materials presented in the book convince us that these beliefs are no different in nature from those observed by folklorists 100-150 years ago: despite their whimsicality, they, just like the previous tradition, are fundamentally different from the delirium of a madman , because they have a collective character. In other words, people “dream” and “see” the same thing.

The lion's share of the materials included in the book are stories about dreams. It is not so much the content of dreams that is mysterious, but its apparent accessibility. According to the profane view, sleep is a process occurring in real time that can be “remembered.” doubted this For the first time, the English philosopher, Wittgenstein's student , Norman Malcolm, . According to Malcolm , both the system of images and the sequence of events are attributed to the dream retroactively, during the process of telling. And although empirical research has been repeatedly conducted on this subject since the fifties of the twentieth century, the English philosopher still has nothing to object to: the content of the dream remains fundamentally unverifiable.

The authors of the collection choose a phenomenological approach , i.e. they analyze not dreams, but stories about them; the dream is considered not in itself, but as a genre of modern folklore. After all, most often they tell not a dream that they had yesterday, but stories about omens that came true. Most of these stories concern “bad” dreams, foreshadowing illness, accidents, death of the dreamer or his relatives, or, conversely, dreams predicting marriage or the birth of a child.

The authors identify a stable set of images and interpretations, a kind of “language” of dreams in folk culture. Raw meat portends illness, tooth loss - the death of relatives, a sheaf symbolizes a wedding, snow symbolizes a harvest, etc. However, a comparison of different handwritten dream books shows that there are very few stable correspondences between images and interpretations. A suspicion arises that for the bearers of the tradition, the very existence of a canon is enough, according to which the dream can be explained.

It is here that the phenomenological approach, conditioned, at first glance, only by the helplessness of the human mind in front of the mysterious element of dreams, reveals its strengths. Stable correspondences turn out to be concentrated precisely in stories about dreams. These stories are stereotypical, and some of them are simply striking in their “folklore traditionalism.” For example, in one of the informant’s stories, her future husband appears in a dream. He comes into the house and asks for water, i.e. a metaphor that is highly characteristic of traditional folklore (mainly epics and lyrical songs) is actualized - love longing as thirst.

The difference is striking between the stereotypical dreams of villagers or people from a rural environment and the confused, inconsistent dreams of modern city dwellers, which are only occasionally grouped into certain archetypal themes (for example, dreams about flying). The absence of a single “language” in the second group is obvious, which allows us to make the following assumption: the plot and figurative series of the dream are actually attributed to it retroactively and are set by the general folklore context. It is in the process of storytelling that the true “birth” of a dream occurs, and the possibility of interpretation is, as it were, initially built into its figurative structure - just as it was in time immemorial, when there was no writing, no television, no positive science.