Given the amount of time cipher mystery researchers spend banging their heads against the limits of knowledge (read: brick walls), the fact that these mysteries sometimes invade their dreams should be no great shock. Here’s a fine recent example of a Voynich dream from an anonymous correspondent (and no, it’s not me being coy):-
“I received in the post a 3-inch-thick wodge of eccentric handwritten notes from a mysterious Voynich researcher who had given up after years of work. The notes were very odd and wild and rather disturbing in nature, as if the product of a mental patient or someone very close to the edge, with some pages containing wildly-scribbled bits of english and other writings in uncontrolled or child-like hands. This was interspersed with other pages of interesting diagrams that looked potentially meaningful or useful. Then I came across a page which had a crayoned self-portrait of the author, who turned out to be a famous hoaxer: the pages that followed seemed to detail how the hoax was done, including illustrations showing how a stylised signature and the date 2009 had been hidden inside a page of pure Voynichese in a sort of “join the dots to see the letters” way. After that it got really weird and there were pages detailing the author’s radical Christian beliefs and even some nutty religious T-shirts that were inside the stack of papers.”
This is far from the only one: Robert Firth’s dream of 2nd February 1992 has all the richly hallucinogenic texture of iconology, yet he still manages to see someone sifting salt and pepper as representing ” the consonants and vowels of the Voynich script”, which Robert interprets to mean that “we shall never be able to separate them.” More recently, Gloria Amendola blogged about a 2008 dream (and a poem) inspired by seeing the VMs at first hand.
As for my own Voynich dreams: though I not so long ago blogged about a Belinda Carlisle / Voynich dream, my single most lasting Voynich dream image is of walking around an ecclesiastical basement (something like a monastery), and suddenly finding the design of the Voynich ‘t’ (with its distinctive symmetrical double-leg gallows) in a high-up pane of stained glass with the late afternoon sun behind it, in a vivid palette of reds, yellows, and black leading. Yes, I do dream in colour. 🙂
Are dreams able to cast useful light on what we are thinking about? Personally, I have woke up many times with insights and inventive solutions to problems that have been on my mind. But you may be surprised to know that in about 1887 a (still very young) William Romaine Newbold wrote an apparently still-cited article on how problem-solvers are sometimes able to devise answers in their dreams. Perhaps there is hope for us all, then – sweet dreams! 😉