Dream Sending
dream sending In Magic, the ability to enter another person’s dreams to deliver a message, cause them to dream a certain dream, or influence their behavior and actions. Dream sending is an old magical art. The most common use of dream sending is for love Spells, to cause another person to fall in love with the dream sender. Ancient Egyptians priests or magicians performed rit – ual s to cause other persons to have a specifi c dream. A legend concerning Alexander the Great credits his divine origins to a sent dream. According to lore, Nectanebo, the last native king of Egypt, used dream magic to cause the Greek queen Olympias to dream that the Egyptian god Amun would make love to her and she would bear a god. Nectanebo accomplished this through sympathetic magic, by pouring the extracted juices of various desert plants over a wax effigy of the queen and reciting a spell. Nectanebo then turned his attention to Philip of Macedon. He said a spell over a hawk, which fl ew to the sleeping Philip and told him to dream that Olympias was going to bear a child who was the son of a god. The magic was successful, and when Alexander was born, his divine origin was unquestioned. The Greeks and the Romans, who also were very skilled in proactive and magical dreaming, had rituals for sending dreams by petitioning intermediary beings to serve as messengers. According to Greek magical papyri, they “extended the individual upward” by serving as “detectives of the heart’s secrets.” Dream messengers include 12 spirits or angels who govern the hours of the night and are under the control of Selene, the goddess of the moon. The rituals were performed in the middle of the night, with the appropriate angel invoked for the hour in which the ritual was done. The Papyri Graecae Magicae states that the sender should invoke Selene to “give a sacred angel or a holy assistant who serves this very night, in this very hour . . . and order the angel to go off to her, NN (“so-and-so”), to draw her by her hair, by her feet; may she, in fear, see phantoms, sleepless because of her passion for me and her love for me, NN, come to my consecrated bedroom.” Persons who work with their dreams discover that they often can send a dream message to others successfully. However, though recipients may receive the messages, it is unlikely that they can be coerced to take actions that they do not want to do. The noted psychical researcher Harold Sherman found that he obtained the best results with both sending and receiving impressions when in a relaxed state bordering on sleep. He would visualize what he desired to achieve, such as meeting someone he needed to see. The subconscious mind would attract the elements needed to materialize the goal. He experimented doing these visualizations when he was certain that others would be asleep and therefore more likely to be receptive to his telepathic images. According to lore, dream sending is best done during the waxing Moon. One can invoke Selene or Gabriel, the archangel who rules Monday and the Moon.
FURTHER READING:
- Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. Angel Magic for Love and Romance. Lakewood, Minn.: Galde Press, 2005.
- Luck, Georg. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
SOURCE:
The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy Written by Rosemary Ellen Guiley Copyright © 2006 by Visionary Living, Inc.