What are dreams?  In the modern world, we have come to understand our dreams as based on images and thoughts (both conscious and subconscious) from our daily lives that our brains choose to sort out while we are sleeping.  We see dreams as internal, fabricated in our own minds and dependent on our own experiences and thoughts.  However, people haven't always viewed the human mind as architect and builder of our dreams.  For example, Homer and Ovid, two ancient writers, characterized dreams as messages or warnings sent from external sources such as gods.  The dreamer's mind had no more involvement in the dream than registering what the dream messenger delivered.  Homer's Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses show how our view of not only the dream, but also the capabilities of the human brain have changed over the course of our history.
 

In the Iliad, dreams are entirely external creations.  In Iliad, book 1, for example, Achilles notes that dreams come from Zeus (Homer 3).  Right away, we can see that the mortals themselves believed that dreams were separate from their own thoughts, and that it was Zeus and his sub-gods who sent mortals their dreams.  Thus we can see that the ancients had a view of the mind very different from our own-its chief activity was to receive and register the god-sent dreams.
 

At the beginning of Iliad, book 2, Zeus sends a dream to Agamemnon to persuade him to fight the Trojans.  The dream comes down to Agamemnon in the form of Nestor, a friend whom he deeply respects.  Not only is the dream separate from the mind, but it is personified and even shaped into a person familiar to the dreamer.  Homer also notes that "The Dream listened and went" (Homer 20). Now the dream is capable of listening, following instructions, and delivering a message.  How different then is our modern view of the dream, in which we believe our brains, and not some outside being, to be the designers, creators, and deliverers of our dreams.
 

Ovid, a Roman poet, also personifies the dream and describes it as an external being in The Metamorphoses.  The goddess Juno requests that a dream in the form of King Ceyx be sent to his wife, informing her of his death at sea.  Here the gods are using dreams to update the mortals on current events.  To activate the dream, Juno sends the goddess Iris to speak to the cave of Sleep, "the most peaceful of the gods." (Ovid 262).  Iris tells Sleep where to send the dream, which mortal to imitate (in this case, King Ceyx), and what vision to create.  Preparing for the dream is as complex as putting together any theatrical performance.  "Sleep" must call on the set designers, his three sons, to shape the "empty dreams" lying around Sleep's kingdom into an imitation, or dramatization of King Ceyx (Ovid 263).  Once again, the dream is wholly separate from the mind of the dreamer; instead it is gods behind the scenes who write, design, and direct the dream production.
 

Today, as we learn more and more about the human brain, it is easy to rule out this "ancient" idea of the prepackaged, god-sent dream; we believe that the brain is unlimited in its capacity to create and that the dream is a symbol of this creativity.  Yet we must not overlook Homer and Ovid's idea of external influences on dreams.  Whether it is gods dictating dreams from above, or daily interactions influencing our thoughts and actions, our dreams are affected both by the environment around us as well as the thoughts that our brains generate.