The Egyptians considered sleep, especially while dreaming, to be a state of being alert in another realm, allowing the dreamer to access things and people who were faraway. Dreams enabled people to pass into the realm of the gods, or at least to stand at the threshold of their realm. These contacts with the gods were not considered frightening, which perhaps reflects the confidence people had in the benevolent nature of their deities.
One of the best-known tales of contact with a god through a dream is the account of Prince Thutmose (later King Thutmose IV), who took a midday nap under the chin of the Sphinx at Giza. The Sphinx spoke to him and promised that if he cleared the sand away from it, he would become king. As with so many examples of human interaction with the gods, here again is a quid pro quo - the individual received something in exchange for a service to the god. In the autobiography of the priest and official Dheutyemheb (Dynasty 19), recorded in his tomb at western Thebes, Dheutyemheb recounts how he was contacted by Hathor "while I was in a dream, while the earth was silent in the deep of the night." In a brief text from the Ptolemaic Period, a man named Ptolemaios related that he invoked the god though a dream: "I dreamt that I called upon the great god Amun to come to me from the north with his two consorts [Isis and Nephthys], until finally he came."33
The practice of incubating dreams in order to contact the god is rare in the dynastic period. Most accounts of dreams, such as Dheutyemheb's, state that the god simply came to the sleeper without preparation or warning. An amulet of Ramesside date is inscribed, "Are the dreams which one will see good?" suggesting that it was associated with planned dream contacts, but otherwise there is no tradition of invoking dreams. Only in the Greco-Roman Period are there records of people spending the night in a temple to deliberately incubate dreams in which they would communicate with the god.
Other texts refer to individuals who saw the gods in a trance rather than in a dream. A text on a stela of Ipuy (Dynasty 18) claims that Ipuy saw Hathor. "I saw the Lady of the Two Lands in a dream." His reaction was
Ecstatic. He recorded that he was "bathed and inebriated by the sight of her," and that the wonders worked by the goddess "should be related [to the] ones who don't know it [the wonders] and the ones who know it." His tone is that of a recent convert proselytizing for the deity. This event could be taken as an account of a memorable dream, had not Ipuy stated, "It was on the day that 1 saw her beauty,"34 indicating that he was awake, not sleeping. The tone of his response and the fact that he chose to record the dream on his stela signifies the magnitude of the event for him.
World History
