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Chapter 6. The Sky 155
The ancient peoples, and many Third World people even today, accepted the
idea that the dream-state is nothing more than a continuation of the waking state
(or vice-versa); that is, when people sleep and dream, they commit acts in their
dreams that they carry the responsibility for. Bente Alver in his essay “Concepts of
the Soul in Norwegian Tradition” discusses two concepts of ancient soulcraft which
are related to the idea that dream and waking states were perceived to be on the
same continuum: the dream-soul and the free-soul.
“In recent tradition, there is very little that can shed light on dream-concepts.
But in ancient times, the dividing line between dream and reality was not
as strong as it is now. It was believed that part of the alter-ego–we call it
the dream-soul–left the sleeper and experienced life outside. From personal
experience, people regarded dreams as experiences of the soul. Since there
was no threshold between the worlds, the soul could pass through the realms
of the living and the dead. As we know from our own experience, a dream
can seem so real that we can reach out for someone long lost, and remain in
a half-waking state, wistful because no one was there.” 19
The rules of Midgard (of consensus reality) do not apply to the realm of dreams or
hallucinations: people can roam in the shapes of animals, non-physical beings exist,
time and space are altered so that minutes can pass as days or weeks and miles can
be covered in the twinkling of an eye. The sky realm of the Gods appears to have
been made of the same stuff that dreams are made of, but this, in itself, does not
make the experience any less real.
Alver continues his discussion to show that the journeys made by the Lapp
(Samí) shamans:
“The activities of the shaman among the Same [sic] (Lapps) must have
added weight to beliefs that certain people could obtain useful information
by the transmigration of the soul. But in tradition, the soul’s domain was
limited to the perceivable world, while the shaman’s soul travels everywhere.”
20
Alver feels that although it is true that there is not much material pertaining to the
concept of a free ranging soul in the sagaic or eddaic literature, the reason was not
that people did not have a knowledge of it, but that collectors of folklore have been
poor at spotting and collecting it.
The point here, then, is that what appears to be confusing descriptions of the
sky realm and its inhabitants today may not have seemed so to the early Germanic
19 Alver, Bente ”Concepts of the Soul in Norwegian Tradition” in Nordic Folklore: Recent
Studies Riemand Kvideland and H. Sehmsdorf, eds. (Indiana University Press) 1989, p. 119.
20 Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, eds. Nordic Folklore (University of Indiana Press) 1989, p. 123.