| The author:Kasia Szpakowska was educated
at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught and
was also a Research Fellow. She has established herself as a contributor
to learned journals and collections on ancient Egyptian culture and
dreams. Her interests include the material manifestation of private
religious practice. She is currently writing a new interpretation
of the life of an individual in Ramesside Egypt and is investigating
the religious and magical function of Egyptian clay cobras in the
New Kingdom.
Dreams and nightmares have long puzzled and fascinated, yet this
is the first book to explore such visions in the Ancient Egyptian
world. The author traces the evidence from the first half of Egypt's
long history, the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom, a time-span
of over 1,000 years. The book is arranged thematically, with chapters
devoted to the literary use of dreams, to the political use of divine
visions, to the technology used to ward away terrorizing nightmares.
It also explores the Ramesside Dream Book, a unique text that reveals
the desires and anxieties that could inspire an Egyptian's dreams,
with images of sex and power, of gods and the dead. All the relevant
passages are conveniently translated in an appendix.
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