There is evidence of western European folk tradition regarding dreams. Many apparently believed that at least on some occasions, the spirit of someone dreaming could escape the body, sometimes in the form of a small animal, and that dreams represented the nocturnal adventures of the small creature. Besides the fact that legend “types” describe this sort of thing and are widely distributed, these stories apparently circulated for some time – indicating that the belief behind the legends had longevity and was common.

An excellent example of this appears in the fourteenth-century record, the Inquisition Register of Jacques Fournier, a document that Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie made famous in his book Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1979). The register records a story told by Philippe d’Alayrac of Coustaussa in the French Pyrenees. The excerpt refers to “believers,” members of the Albigensian heresy, a movement outlawed by Rome. The following is an excerpt from Montaillou, followed by an excerpt from my Introduction to Folklore, which I used when teaching folklore at university:

Once upon a time, two believers found themselves close to a river. One of them fell asleep. The other stayed awake, and from the mouth of the sleeper he saw emerge a creature like a lizard. Suddenly the lizard, using a plank (or was it a straw?), which stretched from one bank to the other, crossed the river. On the other bank there was a fleshless skull of an ass. And the lizard ran in and out of the openings of the skull. Then it came back over the plank and re-entered the sleeper’s mouth. It did that once or twice. Seeing which, the man who was awake thought of a trick: he waited until the lizard was on the other side of the river and approaching the ass’s skull. And then he took away the plank! The lizard left the ass’s head and returned to the bank. But he could not get across! The plank was gone! Then the body of the sleeper began to thrash about, but it was unable to wake, despite the efforts of the watcher to arouse it from its sleep. Finally the watcher put the plank across the river. Then the lizard was able to get back and re-enter the body of the sleeper through the mouth. The sleeper immediately awoke, and he told his friend the dream he had just had.

‘I dreamed,’ he said, ‘that I was crossing a river on a plank; then I went into a great palace with many towers and rooms, and when I wanted to come back to the place from which I had set out, there was no plank! I could not get across: I would have been drowned in the river. That was why I thrashed about (in my sleep). Until the plank was put back again and I could return.

The two believers wondered greatly at this adventure, and went and told it to a parfait [a heretical priest], who gave them the key to the mystery: the soul, he told them, remains in a man’s body all the time; but a man’s spirit or mind goes in and out, just like lizard which went from the sleeper’s mouth to the ass’s head and vice versa.

And my discussion of this passage:

This story is a variant of a popular European legend commonly called “The Guntram Legend” after its oldest recorded example, which appears in the “History of the Longobards” of Paul the Deacon (d. 790). Christiansen classifies the story as Migratory Legend 4000, “The Soul of a Sleeping Person Wanders on its Own.” For the most part, the tale of Philippe d’Alayrac is an unexceptional variant of this legend. The interpretation that the parfait provides, however, is unique. He explains the legend as a testimonial to the existence of the duality of the soul, a concept that suited his heretical purposes. For most of the peasantry, the ancient legend was simply a testimony to the belief that the soul can occasionally leave the body, and when it does, it assumes the form of an animal. The parfait was trying to reconcile two conflicting traditions – his form of Christianity and the pre-conversion legend.

The peasants must have been frustrated at times when seeking to find a place for their pre-Christian beliefs in the Christian cosmology. Many of these attempts were likely failures, causing the pagan tradition either to die out or to live on in a tenuous way. For example, although the European peasants knew of no reason to reject the Christian abstraction of good and evil, they could never assimilate it completely, and the concept continually conflicted in subtle ways with many of the beliefs that survived conversion. European civilization does not always represent the synthesis of different cultures but rather an uneasy coexistence.

Another example of this sort of thing occurs in some western European traditions about the nightmare. Again, excerpting from my Introduction:

The nightmare and the werewolf are two creatures that deal with the human spirit in a way different from other beliefs related to the soul. People believed that these were the products of bizarre transformations endured by innocent people who are unaware of the circumstance. While the nightmare was a traveling spirit of a woman, the curse of the werewolf affected men. In both cases, European peasants regarded them as victims of witchcraft. The cause of their suffering was that their mothers had used magical means to avoid the pains of childbirth, leaving their children to suffer these unnatural afflictions.

In the case of the nightmare, while a woman “went mare,” as it was called, she traveled the land to plague others. She frequently appeared as a mouse that would sit upon the chests of men, giving them horrible dreams.

There are many legends dealing with this motif. One tells of a young man who repeatedly suffers from a nightmare. His mother searched the house and found an opening large enough for a mouse. That night, when her son was in the throes of a nightmare, she plugged the hole and put a pot over the boy’s chest. The next morning, she removed the pot. A mouse jumped off the boy and transformed into a beautiful young woman. That very day, a woman in a nearby village died before waking.

Some variants of this elaborate story – Migratory Legend 4010, “Married to the Nightmare” – go on to tell how the young man married this strange visitor. They lived a happy life until one day the woman and her mother-in-law quarreled and the old woman told her daughter-in-law how she arrived in the household. She then removed the plug from the wall, and the young woman changed into a mouse and disappeared forever.

This echoes a motif usually found in folktales – which are sometimes told as legends – involving the magical bride captured because her garment of swan wings or seal skin is taken and hidden by the hero. One day, the woman finds her hidden magical wings or skin, and she is compelled to return to her former shape and life. This was an ancient story that combined with the idea of the nightmare.

These two legend types reveal an attitude toward dreams – this idea that a creature could escape through the mouth of a sleeping person, and the dreamer could subsequently interpret the adventure as one might in surreal dream-like fashion. In the case of a nightmare, we also can see a traditionally believed cause of nightmares. Nightmares were also believed to be caused by other supernatural entities, resting heavily on the chest of the victim, but in the case of Migratory Legend 4010, we have the added bonus of seeing the motif of a dreamer’s spirit leaving the body in animal form.

Did the same hold with dream interpretation true with the Finnlanders & Swedes as a possible source of the stories of the Kalevala?