Great Books Ep 116. Herodotus - The History - Book 7 (Polymnia). When Dreams Urge us on a Specific Path
How a recurring dream caused Xerxes to launch a massive attack against the Greeks without which the course of history could have been altogether different.
“The dreams that wander to and fro among mankind, I will tell thee of what nature they are—I who have seen so many more years than thou. Whatever a man has been thinking of during the day is wont to hover round him in the visions of his dreams at night.”
~ ‘The History’ (Book 7) by Herodotus (George Rawlinson transl. GB6 - p. 219)
The book/chapter was fascinating. It was much longer than I expected though. It included the battle of Thermopylae, which I first learned about from the movie 300 years ago. When I started reading Herodotus, I was very much looking forward to reading this part. The anticipation of reaching this part itself made the chapter feel special. The movie experience was unforgettable, and the reading experience was even more awesome - truly epic. A million people army against 300. Legendary stuff! (Yes, I agree that the movie had a lot of historical inaccuracies.) Herodotus says Xerxes’ total army strength was over 5 million. I was even telling myself how lucky I was to be an alumnus of SJSU (Spartan).
Anyway, one thing that really stood out to me since the start of this chapter was Xerxes’ dream. If he hadn’t had that dream, the whole march and the loss of so many lives might not have happened. After listening to his uncle’s advice, he didn’t want to go to war. But in his dream, someone threatened him with dire consequences if he didn’t go to war, and this happened more than once. A recurring dream in which someone urges you to do something is not something you can cast aside.
Dreams have been a recurring theme in classics. All the books in the series that I’ve read so far - The Iliad, The Odyssey, The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides - they all mention dreams in so many places. Dreams were pivotal to many protagonists making key decisions. I searched for ‘dream’ and found the following references in my past newsletters. It also made me wonder whether Substack should integrate an AI chatbot onto the site. ‘Search’ing feels so old-fashioned after using AI mode and AI chatbots for finding information.
Dream References in Past Posts:
Great Books Ep 2: Dissuade to Persuade: Saying One Thing with the Hope of Getting Another Thing Done
“Jove sends a Lying dream to Agamemnon, saying he could take Troy if he attacks now. Agamemnon wakes up from the dream, happy that he can finally conquer Troy.”
Great Books Ep 27: Beyond Competition: The Transformative Power of Games
Patroclus appears to Achilles in a dream and asks him not to hold off on the funeral any longer.
Minerva (Athena) appears in a dream to Nausicaa, the king’s daughter and inspires her to get up.
Atossa, Xerxes’s mother, enters and says that she had a bad dream in which her son was trying to control two beautiful women, one dressed as Persian and another as Greek, and falls down in the process. She says she woke up from the dream and went to the altar to make offerings to ward off evil but saw an eagle being attacked by a falcon.
In revenge for her being replaced, Themis’s mother Gaia caused ordinary people to see visions while in sleep about ‘what has been and yet shall be’. But Zeus takes it away from people and gives it to Apollo.
Astyages has a dream about his daughter Mandané in which water flowing from her floods the whole of Asia.
Hippias dreamt of lying in his mother’s arms like a baby and thought he will be able to take control of the country that he betrayed (Athens)
This is what I had written while reading Aeschylus’ “The Persians”:
Like the ghost that Murph sees in Interstellar turns out to be Cooper from the future, I feel that dreams are more than what we think, and we might get to know more in the future as we advance our studies. In a recent interview with Bill Gates, Sam Altman mentioned that it is tough to analyze our brains to clearly find the source of our thoughts, but it is possible to do a ‘brain surgery’ of an LLM and clearly locate the source of the words that an LLM produces.
So, should we believe in dreams and live life according to what our dreams tell us? Maybe not, because we don’t fully have the capacity to interpret our dreams, and mostly, we interpret based on our current events and fears. The right approach could be to not dismiss dreams entirely. A visceral dream that stays in one’s mind throughout the morning or a recurring dream might be a signal for us to do some self-introspection and realign things and people in our lives. Dreams offer insights into lessons that we can learn from our past; they offer seeds that, if planted properly, can make our future better.
This is what I’d written while reading Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Tauri
I think everyone dreams, and the mind is somehow able to predict things that could happen in the future. If the LLMs, based on transformer architecture, are able to create an amazing amount of text based on just predicting the next token, can the human brain, which is much more powerful, not do better? It requires time and self-awareness to understand our dreams. I also think that other people cannot fully interpret your dreams since your dream exists in the context of your life. But still, why do people throng to fortune tellers, astrologers and other people who might not be able to know their future better than them?
The accelerating pace of AI development is quite scary and fascinating. All the smart people seem to be predicting a radical change where AI is able to do most of the white-collar jobs. I feel that we’re at a stage where it has been proven that humans can build highly intelligent systems that exceed our capacity. But I doubt if we have resources on Earth to support billions of AI agents. There are so many other things that humans can do - cloning, gene editing, etc., that are either morally wrong or cost-prohibitive.
If we reach a point where energy becomes too expensive for people, since most of the power being produced is being used by AI, and we’re not able to produce power or build electrical grids to meet the demand, people could protest (Similar to the looming resource crisis during Xerxes’ campaign. Herodotus notes that Xerxes’ army was so vast that it drank rivers dry and required “110,340 medimni of corn” every single day just to survive). When the demand for “compute” begins to infringe on the basic needs of a household, when electricity becomes too expensive to heat a home because the nearby data center requires the same wattage, a revolution becomes imminent (reminded of the French Revolution and the Guillotine).
In that desperate state, if a powerful and charismatic person sees a nightmare and is convinced that wiping out AI is the solution to save humanity, it might lead to destructive wars. They will see AI not as a tool, but as a technological parasite draining the lifeblood of the planet. The unpredictability of human dreams and the force they have on people is something that AI will have to deal with in the future.
One could also argue that, many times, dreams have misled people into doing things they would normally not do. Especially when it comes to judging other people’s intentions wrongly. Dreams probably do exploit people’s existing biases. When we are in a state of high stress or resource scarcity, our dreams tend to project our deepest fears onto people or things we demonize. We might dream that a business partner is plotting against us, or that a foreign power’s AI development is a direct prelude to an unprovoked strike.
It is also scary to think about what would happen if AI agents became more powerful, misunderstood each other, and started fighting on a much larger scale. They cannot dream (since they don’t sleep) but they do hallucinate.