Dolores had just dreamed that someone was banging on the front door of her house in the middle of the night. In the dream, she walked down the hallway and saw a man in an overcoat through the front door, silhouetted by the full moon outside. He had a hat pulled down low over his face. Alarmed, she called out, 'What do you want?" He answered brusquely, "I want to sleep here tonight."

Dolores walked back to her bedroom and called the emergency operator. When she explained her concern about the man at the front door, the operator replied, "Oh yes, we know who he is. His name is Nisrock." Perplexed, Dolores asked for the spelling of the odd name.

Meanwhile, she could hear the man trying the other doors of her house. They were all well locked. A split second later, she noticed that her telephone was sitting on a large Spanish dresser she had left behind in a move sixteen years earlier. At that moment, she realized that this was a dream and awakened.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER

Still reflecting on the dream, Dolores stopped at the local library and found an interesting book about the unconscious. She opened it at random, and, to her amazement, saw a drawing from an old manuscript. The caption read, "Nisrock, the winged Babylonian god who takes the souls of dreamers to the place of the dream."

The remarkable synchronicity first led Dolores to conclude that the dream was precognitive. It seemed to foretell an event, namely the soon-to-be-discovered book with the origin of the name Nisrock.

However, as she began to reflect on her life in relation to the dream, she realized that the Nisrock figure was more accurately a representation of the unknown to which she needed to "open" herself. She had recently moved from the United States to another country and was worried about her ability to survive on her own. Her concerns had her "locked in" and she needed the courage to open herself to new experiences. As Dolores worked to more fully understand her dream, she realized that it was helping her psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually to embrace her new life.

SOURCE: Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them by Stanley Krippner, Fariba Bogzaran and André Percia de Carvalho, 2002, pp.1-2.

EDITOR'S NOTE

That last paragraph is misleading. "Nisrock" may or may not have been a dream figure meant to draw Dolores out more; that's therapeutic speculation, though plausible. But the dream was provably predictive. Nisrock is not the Babylonian god of dreams! "Nisroch" is mentioned in Hebrew scriptures as an Assyrian god, but no other records in the region mention any such god, and even the Hebrew texts don't associate him with dreams. So both the spelling Nisrock and the supposed god's function are unique to the book Dolores found; her dream looked days ahead to her personal encounter with that specific book; it didn't pull this god out of some Collective Unconscious.

The illustration? Carvings of this winged figure, some hawk-headed, some human-headed, were for centuries assumed to be Nisroch, but none are labeled that, or as a god at all; we don't know his name or function.

I agree with Dolores (or is this Dolores filtered through Krippner et al?) that this is a dream of reassurance. I just disagree how it reassures. "Nisrock" proves that Dolores can trust her intuition, even in an unfamiliar society, for she has a hawk-eyed unconscious that can see days ahead (and it's not Nisrock, but the emergency operator! Or did you too forget that third character in the dream?) Any shaman in the last 15,000 years could interpret it as such, without using psychobabble (Jungian or not). For this dream reassures by doing.

--Chris Wayan

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