After looking into Shamanic imitation dreams a little, I’ve come across some interesting tid bits. Huges in book said that reading The Wanderings of Oisin could be read as a Shaman dream. Oisin explained his journey or “dreams” to an S. Patrick and it was the standard formula for a Shamanic dream. In the few Shamanic imitation dreams I’ve read, a man starts to be getting sick and falls in a sleep. Most of the time a woman appears and at times becomes his guide and teacher. At some point in these dreams, the chosen one is cut up in pieces and put into a pot or river and is cleansed. In one. the head is cutoff first, so the future shaman can see what is being done. Then after a certain fixed period of time, varying in different societies, the future Shaman is put back together and now has the knowledge of whether people can be healed or not by their body temperature. There is a lot of sex and ecstasy moments in these dreams, the initiated always has a guide or a teacher present.
Bottom’s dream and transformation into an ass does have the Shamanic imitation dream formula, though Shakespeare seemed to manipulate the formula as he had done previously with myths. Thus changing the chased and chasers and who should be doing the chasing or hunting. Titania remembers something of the dream or event, and in the Bottom Translation, Kott pretty much suggests that they did conjugate their brief encounter, and poor Bottom has no recollection of the dream.
Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism, after some of the initiated had become full blown Shamans, some of their vocabularies had hit 12,000 words, three times as many as any one else in their societies. This made me think of how Shakespeare had used twice as many words as the next playwright. I wonder what Shakespeare’s dreams were and if he put them down on paper. I’m hoping that The Tempest might put some of this into context, until then.
To be, or not to be: 