"A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams"
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The line binds two realms usually kept apart: the fleeting, private night-world and the public, authoritative word. To call a dream a scripture treats the dream as a text, not a random noise of the mind. It comes charged with symbols, requires exegesis, invites competing readings. To add that many scriptures are nothing but dreams turns the insight around: many revered texts originate in visions, parables, and apocalyptic images, then become codified as doctrine. Both dream and scripture are woven out of signs seeking interpreters.
Umberto Eco, a novelist and semiotician, delighted in this traffic between sign and meaning. He set stories amid scriptoria and libraries, where monks parse prophecies and readers lose themselves in labyrinths of books, because the drama of interpretation is never neutral. Whoever claims to decode a dream or to gloss a sacred page claims authority. Desire, fear, and power enter. The line therefore reads as a hermeneutic warning: approach any text with humility, aware that images seduce, metaphors multiply, and literalism can turn the living movement of symbols into rigid dogma.
Calling scripture a dream does not dismiss faith; it elevates imagination as a vehicle of truth. Dreams reveal by indirection. They stage our anxieties and longings in figures and plots. Scriptures, too, often teach obliquely through narrative, allegory, and vision. Their truth is not primarily empirical but symbolic and ethical. Yet the same mechanisms that disclose meaning can also fabricate illusions. Eco was fascinated by conspiracies and esoteric systems as secular scriptures: intricate, intoxicating constructions spun from pattern-hungry reading.
The line finally asks for a readerly ethic. Read your dreams as you would a sacred text, patiently and skeptically. Read your scriptures with the alertness you bring to a dream, sensing where your own desire inserts itself. Between private vision and public canon stretches the hard work of interpretation, where responsibility for meaning cannot be outsourced to the text itself.
Umberto Eco, a novelist and semiotician, delighted in this traffic between sign and meaning. He set stories amid scriptoria and libraries, where monks parse prophecies and readers lose themselves in labyrinths of books, because the drama of interpretation is never neutral. Whoever claims to decode a dream or to gloss a sacred page claims authority. Desire, fear, and power enter. The line therefore reads as a hermeneutic warning: approach any text with humility, aware that images seduce, metaphors multiply, and literalism can turn the living movement of symbols into rigid dogma.
Calling scripture a dream does not dismiss faith; it elevates imagination as a vehicle of truth. Dreams reveal by indirection. They stage our anxieties and longings in figures and plots. Scriptures, too, often teach obliquely through narrative, allegory, and vision. Their truth is not primarily empirical but symbolic and ethical. Yet the same mechanisms that disclose meaning can also fabricate illusions. Eco was fascinated by conspiracies and esoteric systems as secular scriptures: intricate, intoxicating constructions spun from pattern-hungry reading.
The line finally asks for a readerly ethic. Read your dreams as you would a sacred text, patiently and skeptically. Read your scriptures with the alertness you bring to a dream, sensing where your own desire inserts itself. Between private vision and public canon stretches the hard work of interpretation, where responsibility for meaning cannot be outsourced to the text itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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