The Hardest Part About Being An Ancient Time Traveler

Doesn't anybody want to talk about their dreams anymore?

Say time travel exists. Say a young fellow from Etruria, from Akkad, from La Venta, from Ur, from Thebes, from Zhaoge, from Göbekli Tepe, from Constantinople, stumbles forward into our time. He come to us, we don’t come to him.

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Say he can adjust with remarkable swiftness to the presence of the internet, to airplanes, to electricity, to modern plumbing, to industrialized food, to the global supply chain. He can appreciate the Dorito just fine.

If he ever begins to feel lonesome, there is still millet. There are still dogs. There are still sheep and goats, there are still beds, there are still copper and clay pots. He can, if he likes, visit Troy. But who will he talk to about his dreams?

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It is not, broadly speaking, well-mannered to discuss one’s dreams with other people today. You might get away with relating them to your parents as a child, but most of the time it will be fairly obvious that they are only listening to be polite, and barely being polite, at that.

It is not well-mannered to discuss your dreams because it is not considerate; it is not an equitable conversation because there is almost nothing your conversation partner can say back to you, in the year 2025, beyond variations on “That’s really interesting” and “What do you think that means?”

The dream-listener feels privately terrified and cornered, much in the same way a pedestrian does when they realize they’re about to walk into a group of street canvassers. Color-coordinated T-shirts, coordinated grins that are both sheepish and wolfish at the same time:

“Do you have a minute to talk about ____?”

“You look like someone who cares about _____.”

You never know when the dream conversation is going to end, which sometimes makes people uncomfortable. There is no telling how many details the dream furnished the dreamer with, and any number of them could plausibly be discussed endlessly. People want to know where to make their exit.

And (rightly or wrongly) people who are generally keen to discuss their dreams have a reputation for wanting to discuss their dreams almost exclusively. Someone who might have bookmarked several YouTube playlists on lucid dreaming — or worse, who might buy pop-psychology books about “harnessing the power of creativity in dreams” to increase your business acumen. It’s associated with light boorishness, flakiness, self-centered squishiness, and early-morning chatter, all of which tends to excite one’s sense of defensiveness.

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None of which is our poor Sumerian’s fault, our poor Akkadian’s fault, our poor Dongsonian. He would have traveled miles to sleep in an especially auspicious cave, or on the banks of a particular river, for a really interesting dream. The sons of night, the brothers of sleep, and nobody wants to discuss them.

He might try framing it obliquely: “A god was in my head last night…” but as soon as his interlocutors realize that he’s trying to tell them about his dreams again, they shake their heads politely but firmly, and redirect.

We would be happy to hear about how you built canoes out of reeds again. But we do not want to hear about your dreams. We will discuss any other form of divination and omens you like. Astronomy is fine. But dreams are not a good subject for polite conversation.

“The God Shumash was there, plainly announcing how the course of events would be. And an ass crouched beside him. We must build a temple in Lagash.”

There is already a temple in Lagash. Eat your cereal.

“I am familiar with cereals. This is not cereal.”

It comes from cereals.

“I was told in my dream that if I were to gaze toward the right my adversary would die. If I gazed toward the left my adversary would over come me, and if I look backward, I will not attain my desire.”

Well, I wasn’t in your dream with you, so none of these references trigger memory or useful context for me. You’ve got all the clues and I’m floundering in the dark. It doesn’t matter how carefully you describe each detail of your dream, it will never produce the same mental map in me it does in you. That’s why it’s no longer polite. It puts me in a dream, to hear you talk of yours: Dark, lost, without reference, alone. There is no need to make sense of dreams. Dreams and sense do not need to go together.

So he will close down the district of dreams and sit quiet at the breakfast table. His nights will be as busy as ever, but his mornings will be lonesome.

A person can get used to a great deal of change, but it’s very difficult to adjust to a new morning routine. I think everyone is most conservative first thing in the morning. They want to do everything just as they always have. When the world was still bronze, all dreams were up for public examination and review; you would no more keep one to yourself than you would a stew.

But I think once our time traveler hears about 19th-century Vienna, we’re going to lose him.