28th December, 2008. 2:37am. The university is poorly organised. The administrators haven't realised they should've thrown me out last year when I failed to submit an American Literature assignment. I hate this course, yet I won't let go of the hope that some day they'll award me a Masters degree.

Sitting in my room, I wonder if I should visit my tutor. He doesn't even know my name. Perhaps he could suggest a way I can complete my degree. But I don't have the motivation to make up my mind. And then I hear a menacing sound behind me, and turn to find a spectre creeping up: black, shaggy, deformed.

I'm terrified, but turn my mind into the experience. I know I'm dreaming and surrender to the fear, realising that the apparition is harmless. Sure enough, the contraction of fear releases. I allow the monster to grab me and I embrace him. I kiss his face and the knot completely unties.

It's like the moment in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, when the narrator falls from a cliff into the waiting arms of Dirk Peters, his atavistic dark-skinned companion [1]. I'm not sure if this is part of the dream or a waking commentary upon it. American Literature was part of the course-work in my dream, which makes it doubly uncertain whether I am awake or dreaming.

But now that I've embraced my monster, the issues behind the confusion can surface.

Angels, the bene elohim, gave us human language. Because we did not invent it, this means human language is predicated upon non-human assumptions. Ancient scholars of the great traditions have formalised these assumptions and the types of problem to which they give rise at the human level.

I realise that I'm no student; I'm a teacher. I'm leading a seminar on methods of resolving problems in language. I'm describing lines of thought which, although obscure and difficult, have been explored and proved true by generations of scholars.

The particular formalisation I'm teaching addresses four or five problematic assumptions. The standard resolution of one of these gives rise to an ugly verb-form: foy or feu or feo [2]. I propose to the seminar that a better solution would be elufeio (or perhaps elofeio) [3]. It feels like I am replacing words from the modern Latin languages with terms from ancient Greek.

This is not more 'correct', but it is more elegant. This is not original thought on my part, but it is a successful attempt to reach for a more aesthetic solution. I do not delude myself that I'm 'right', but neither can I deny my ability to hold my own in these matters and teach others this difficult material, formulated long ago by great classical minds.

ελεφαιρο

After some searching I decided that elufeio or elofeio was elephairo, which, with my non-existent Greek, I'd render as ελεφαιρο. This is an obscure term, used rarely, whose meaning is not entirely certain. Elephas means 'ivory' and is the root of our word 'elephant'. Elephairo means 'to deceive' and appears most notably in The Odyssey:

Stranger, dreams verily are baffling and unclear of meaning, and in no wise do they find fulfilment in all things for men. For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfilment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them. But in my case it was not from thence, methinks, that my strange dream came. (The Odyssey XIX: 560-569)

Virgil uses this same idea of twin gates of horn and ivory through which, respectively, true and false dreams pass (Aeneid VI: 893-898), but Homer was using the image in a punning sense that neither English nor Latin can capture: the Greek for 'fulfil' is similar to 'horn', and the Greek for 'deceive' (elephairo) is similar to 'ivory' (elephas).

What can this be taken to mean in relation to my dream?

First off, the confrontation with the shadow seems to be the price of entry to what is revealed in the second part. The dream does all it can to pass itself off as waking reality rather than a dream – as if alerting us to the fact that something out of the ordinary is happening.

The way that Greek (elephairo) is being used to replace and elucidate Latin words chimes eerily with the way that Homer's untranslatable pun in Greek (elephairo / elephas, 'horn' / 'fulfil') is what underlies Virgil's more literal image of the gates in Latin. But, at the bottom of it all – the dream says – is the fact that language was given to us by non-human agencies, so we can't expect answers to human questions to be answered at the human level by language. What we do have, however, are the great traditions whose scholars successfully formalised the problems, recognising that they cannot be resolved at the human level but having attained the wisdom that the nature and origins of language are divine.

The passage from Homer is spoken by Penelope. She is telling a stranger that she dreamt her husband Odysseus came home from his wanderings, but she reasons that this dream came through the gate of ivory and is deceptive. Little does she know the stranger is Odysseus in disguise and the dream is true. Therefore, it is not the dream that is deceptive but her perception of the waking world.

The passage from Virgil describes Aeneas's return from the underworld, where he has had various visionary encounters. Virgil states that Aeneas returns to the world of waking reality through the gate of ivory – the gate of deception. There has been much debate on what Virgil was getting at, but Jorge Luis Borges offered an interesting possibility:

What then occurs is quite curious and has never been well explained, except by one anonymous commentator who I believe offered the truth. Aeneas returns through the gate of ivory and not through the gate of horn. Why? The anonymous commentator tells us: because we are not in reality. For Virgil, the real world was possibly the Platonic world, the world of the archetypes. Aeneas passes through the gates of ivory because he enters the world of dreams – that is to say, what we call waking. [4]

In other words, to return to the waking world requires passage through the gate of ivory (= 'deception', elephairo) because the waking world is falsity itself, the deception of human perception.

There's no solution to this deception at the level of the deception itself. However, language – our understanding – is given to us as a divine faculty and by arriving at an understanding of deception, profoundly grasped in its root sense (i.e. as the Greek term, elephairo) we can become aware that we apprehend everything through 'the gate of ivory'.

The dream therefore offers a model for all sorts of interesting relationships between language, dreams, perception and truth. The price of admission is embracing the shadow and thereby collapsing the boundary between waking and dreaming.

Notes

[1] Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), chapter 24.

[2] Feu: French: fire, light; feo: Spanish: ugly, plain; foy: Scots: a farewell feast, drink, or gift, as at a wedding, from Old French voie, from Latin via, road. Light on an ugly road? A 'Road to Damascus' experience?

[3] Elephairo, Ancient Greek, 'to deceive'. E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898). The significance of this word is discussed further in the main article, below. In Greek Qabalah ελεφαιρο enumerates to 5 + 30 + 5 + 500 + 1 + 10 + 100 + 70 = 721 = 'star' = 'shaft, stem'.

[4] Jorge Luis Borges, 'Nightmares', in Seven Nights, translated by Eliot Weinberger (New York: Norton, 1985).