Dream Walking and why the MCU meaning is slightly headache inducing
To explain Dream Walking you need to understand certain Pagan and Indigenous Australian beliefs.
Let’s start with the Aboriginal Australians where the term has its roots most heavily. The ancient peoples of Australia believed that when you dream your soul enters another place, a place where all souls (or conscious minds) go when they sleep. This is a dimension (as we’d call it now) known as the Dream-Time (also spelt as Dreamtime) though today it is most commonly called The Dreaming. If you are a Sandman fan you might recognize that term. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman calls it The Dreaming and Marvel comics calls it The Dream Dimension but it’s pretty much the same place. It’s the place your soul goes when you sleep. As we have The Waking World, so is there The Dreaming.
The Dreaming is supposed to be vast and difficult to define because its meaning and purpose can be very personal or different from culture to culture, particularly in the preverbal landscape of of the Indigenous Australian peoples.
This is a spiritual belief but theoretical physics have debated on if there is a collective unconscious and if it should be considered another dimension. There have been studies and theories done exploring this idea and debating on if dreams and dreaming should be considered another dimension since we do spend about a third of our lives dreaming even if we don’t always remember it.
At the start of the Covid 19 Pandemic there was an unprecedented spike in people claiming to have had shared dreams where they have interacted with people in the dream and both (or multiple) parties claim to remember the interaction.
To Dream Walk or Dreamwalk (not to be confused with the spell in World of Warcraft) we must first consider Lucid Dreaming. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Lucid Dreaming is not merely being aware that you are in a dream. Sometimes you don’t even perceive that the place you are is a dream. What matters is you are in control of your own actions or better yet, in control of the environment around you and how it works. You could turn the sky orange or levitate yourself or make conscious choices within the dream. To Dream Walk one must first Lucid Dream.
Lucid Dreaming is not merely a spiritual belief, this one is a cognitive reality. Those who are particularly good at Lucid Dreaming almost never have nightmares but still manage vivid and recollected dreams.
Dream Walking, in theory, is the act of traversing The Dreaming and finding your way into the dreams of others while Lucid Dreaming. Hypothetically if the collective unconscious is a plane of existence that our minds “tap into” when sleeping, then all of us have an innate psychic link with one and other. To be able to consciously enter the dreams of others is to be a Dream Walker. Considering Rose Walker’s abilities as a “Dream vortex” in The Sandman: The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman, her name might have deliberately been “Walker” for this very reason as she could very much enter and manipulate the dreams of others.
The notion that when we dream we enter another world isn’t purely found in Australia. Homer once described the realm of dreams as having two gates, one made of horn, and one made of ivory. The ivory gates are where false dreams are found. The gates of horn admit the truth, whether literally or metaphorically. These gates are also used in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.
The Ancient Greeks believed that our dreams are ruled over by the Oneiroi, the living embodiment of dreams. They were said to have black wings. The Ancient Romans named three of these. Phobetor (meaning Terrifier), also known as Icalus, Phantasmos (meaning fantasy), and Morpheus (Shaper of forms). Though there were supposed to be thousands of Oneiroi (Dreams) only these three Dreams have names that are remembered and they roughly mean Phobetor specialized in making nightmares. Pantasmos specialized in fantasy dreams while Morpheus (who, today seems to be the most remembered among them created dreams that were either literally or metaphorically true. As these are the most common type of dreams people remember, it’s Morpheus, himself, who is most heavily regarded by the cultural consciousness. Though each of these entities is called an Oneiros (a Dream) they are actually anthropomorphic personifications of Dreams and by extension dream creators. This is why Neil Gaiman has his Sandman answer to both Morpheus and Dream.
In Hans Christian Anderson’s Ole Lukøje (The Sandman) he openly says that The Sandman is also the Roman God of Dreams (who Hans Christian Anderson would have known as Morpheus). Though The Sandman in Hans Christian Andersen’s story is Morpheus, he is given the trait of resembling Death. Death (Mors) is the brother of Somnus (Sleep) who in some myths is the father of Morpheus, however it is understandable that Hans Christian Anderson merged the lord of dreams and his father, the Lord of Sleep, into the same being. It also symbolically makes sense that Death and Sleep resemble each other. Neil Gaiman borrowed from this for his Sandman where Morpheus also known as Dream also resembles his older sister, Death.
Nineteenth century English Children’s literature used the term “The Land of Nod” to mean the place you go when you dream. This concept was used for Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905). Also later called “In the land of Wonderful Dreams.” The title is briefly referenced in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: The Doll’s House. Neil Gaiman also used The Land of Nod as a bit of a pun. After Cain murdered Abel it is said that he went to The Land of Nod so Neil used this to indicate that Can went to the land of The Dreaming. It makes sense on a symbolic level. Cain, and characters like him from other myths around the world, are engrained forever in the cultural collective unconscious and so yes, he lives in The Dreaming.
Dream Walking, spiritually speaking, is not just supposed to be the ability to enter other dreams while you, yourself, are asleep. Sometimes it’s a spiritual journey not unlike a vision quest. Sometimes it’s a method of learning a personal lesson and growth. It is something sacred. Though the concept of The Dreaming can be found all over the world, dream walking, is still considered a highly spiritual and personal practice. I am not saying it is wrong or offensive that the MCU should use the concept in their films, however, I do think they should have been more respectful to what Dream Walking entails and means. If Neil Gaiman can respect the Ancient Australian, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and folkloric beliefs he compiled to create his Sandman (Also known as Dream or Morpheus) and world he rules then why couldn’t the MCU have had the same respect?
The irony is Marvel’s original comics were somewhat more respectful to these old beliefs when they had Nightmare (roughly the same character as Neil Gaiman’s Dream AKA Morpheus only more heavily based on Roman mythology’s Phobetor) ruling over The Dream Dimension (Marvel’s version of The Dreaming). But instead they seem to use this post-modern and somewhat disrespectful “shifter” fad belief to suggest that we enter alternate universes when we dream instead of a realm created from the collective unconscious.
Much like with how they handled time travel, the MCU has yet again misrepresented theoretical physics, but this time they did so while combining and dimming down a real spiritual belief.
Honestly, I was disappointed. I was hoping we would see Marvel’s Nightmare in Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness but instead the current lore kind of undermines his very existence and the real world beliefs and mythology that were the basis of the character’s conception.
