Dream Work

More about Dream Work

Record

During the 1980s, dreams were treated as operational material rather than as symbols or reflections. They were used to guide movement and decision-making.

Dream:
On arrival in Coimbatore, adjacent to the bus stand, I encountered roadside booksellers operating from tables. On these tables were books and pamphlets. I was aware of the exact position on the table of two important items: one was printed material about a museum, and the other was a pamphlet describing the work of its curator.

Waking:
At that time, I was living in the Western Ghats in a place called Anikatti, studying Sanskrit. Anikatti is located on the western edge of the region historically known as Kongu Nadu. I traveled by bus into Coimbatore. The route followed established radial roads converging on the city center, terminating in Gandhipuram.

On arrival in Coimbatore, adjacent to the bus stand, I encountered roadside booksellers operating from tables. On these tables were books and pamphlets matching the configuration previously seen in the dream. Among them was printed material relating to the Hermitage Museum and a pamphlet describing the work of its principal curator, Boris Piotrovsky, including his excavation of the Iron Age culture known as Urartu.

At that time, I had no prior knowledge of the Hermitage Museum or Urartian archaeology. These psychic dreams were usually about things I had not yet encountered; it felt as though my subconscious was pushing me in a new direction. The pamphlet and the small book became a kind of dream artifact—something that had oozed out of the dream substrate and actualized in waking life.

Approximately thirty years later, for reasons that were not consciously planned, my attention returned to Saint Petersburg. Renewed interest was drawn to the Hermitage Museum, and I learned that there was an entire Urartu gallery organized around Piotrovsky’s excavations.

This later confirmation established a continuity between the earlier psychic dream activity, the encounter with printed material in Coimbatore, and the verified historical and institutional record. The sequence was not treated as symbolic interpretation but as an unresolved correspondence between inner perception and external discovery.

Recently, I was thinking about experiments and how, when research stalls, data can become obsolete or meaningless. When I thought again about this experience, it occurred to me that this dream material—despite how strangely it manifested thirty years earlier—had not degraded. It remained intact, as it always had, waiting to be picked up and analyzed.