The Enigma of the Night: Dream Interpretations in Medieval Slavonic Apocrypha

From the revelation of the future to the miraculous cure and the conceptualization of history, dreams occupy a special place in medieval cultures. Their appearance indicates an enigma, a hidden meaning, a challenge to the cognitive process. This article focuses on a number of medieval Slavonic apocryphal texts, such as dream books, The Story of Sibylla, The Account of the Prophet Samuel, Тhe Twelve Dreams of the Persian King, The Dream of King Joash, all of which were disseminated to the Slavic cultures from Byzantium. The paper explores how these texts were reshaped in the Slavic milieu, contrasting them to dream visions from the original Slavonic hagiography. It shows that some of the dream-related genres (as dream books) had modest and delayed transmission in the Slavic cultures. It was non-apocryphal Slavonic hagiography that offered original narratives, creatively followed Byzantine examples and displayed a sophisticated exegetical approach to dream symbolism. Translated from Greek, Slavonic apocrypha went through a number of changes, reshaping the original meaning of the dreams, and using the Judeo-Christian heritage as a page on which to inscribe local histories and beliefs. In particular, The Story of Sibylla transformed Christian eschatological dream visions into powerful ethno-centred narratives.