{rosetta stone | tabula rasa}

Carved in 196 B.C. and found by French soldiers in Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt in 1799, the 1700 pound Rosetta Stone now lives in the British Museum.  This stone, written in Hieroglyphics (the script used in Ancient Egypt for key religious documents), demotic (common Egyptian writing) and Ancient Greek scripts,  enabled Researchers and Egyptologists to unravel the mysterious meaning of hieroglyphics.  This discovery was a key that enabled Jean- François Champollion to decipher hieroglyphics, unlocking the texts of Ancient Egypt.

Nowadays, the phrase Rosetta stone is used colloquially to indicate something which brings illumination, a breakthrough, or enables one to solve a puzzle. A tabula rasa, on the other hand, is blank. It’s Latin for scraped tablet, or, as we often say, a blank slate.  Your mind is no tabula rasa. You have layers and layers of content and context. There are memories tucked away in there that you aren’t even aware of yet. Sometimes it may seem that you need a Rosetta stone to figure out what is going on. This is where dreams come in. And daydreams. And inscrutable desires.

Our understanding of dreams is, at best, incomplete.  Dreams have been described as our mind’s sorting process, whereby we order the events of a day or week like good little psychological file clerks. They have also described as adventures and travels, in which the soul leaves the body to explore. The truth is that though there are various explanations, dreams are puzzling. We consider them commonplace because each of us has them, but almost no one understands their baffling language or cryptic symbols.

Dreams are something truly enigmatic that we each experience with relative frequency. All humans (as well as, birds and mammals) dream. Whether we recall these dreams or not, we all have them.  Interestingly, science tells us that when we experience activities in our dreams, the same parts of the brain fire as when we do the actual activities, meaning that at some level dreams are quite real, but that is the subject for another post.

Throughout human history, dreams have held significance for many societies. They have predicted the falls of kingdoms, inspired enduring music and literature, scientific discovery,  and medical advances.

Dreams can tell us something or nothing. Dream dictionaries attempt to explain all kind of symbols, like that a dream of sauerkraut indicates good health or the common dream of losing teeth means one lacks self-confidence. These definitions may seem silly, but some interpretations are fairly ubiquitous. For example, dreams of a house often correlate with the body and water often tells the dreamer something about their emotional state. The rest of the typical dream motifs tend to be deeply personal. To simplify: what a bat symbolizes for an American and what it means to a Chinese person is different. In essence, each person is the Rosetta stone needed to understand their own dreams. And this applies as well, to all subconscious desires and inner stories. All the mysterious things that come to our minds, can only be categorically understood by our own minds until properly deciphered and brought into the daytime world. Interpreters can repeat our dreams back to us, enabling us to make necessary connections, but we alone have the Rosetta stones to our depths.