Edinburgh Napier University

  Ancient and tribal cultures perceive and describe the function of dreaming in distinctive ways. This paper examines theories of mind in ancient northern, Classical and tribal cultures in terms of the imagery used to describe the self and its faculty for apprehending the otherworld. Plutarch, for example, argued that the strangeness of the faculty of memory was evidence for the validity of prophetic dreams (Defect. orac. 432B). The material surveyed includes the imagery of the Irish threefold cauldron of poesy, Classical dream interpretation (oneirocritica), the Norse fylgja(animal self), and concepts of the double or multiple self in the dreams and visions of contemporary tribal cultures.