Although it is an indispensable part of the human biological clock, sleep is seen as an unwonted and border-line state that gives rise to numerous questions and queries. Almost all mythologies and sacred books in the world tell stories of bizarre dreams. Shamans, high priests, royalty and prophets, as well as ordinary humans all have dreams in which the secrets of the netherworld are revealed.

Traditional beliefs and folklore in Bulgaria also give sleep and dreams their due – both as an everyday occurrence and in terms of their mystical meaning. For the hard-working farmer sleep is the sweetest thing – rest well earned after the long hours in the fields. It is said that sleep is essential to babies and children - that is why it is customary for guests to a house where there is a small child to leave a thread from their clothing or coins – so the child may buy sleep. Insomnia in adults and night-time crying in babies is also seen either as the result of a curse cast by the evil eye or as the work of a particularly demonic being called Forest Mother. Tales depict her as an old woman with buck teeth, with the head of a bull and the eyes of a buffalo who lives in the forest and puts spells on humans. When you lose your sleep that is because she has banished sleep. Unless the being is exorcised, the patient will go mad and die. Magical practices and incantations will banish the evil spirit as will a special herb also called Forest Mother.

Sleep is popularly called little death, and this is corroborated on a linguistic plane by expressions like to sleep like a corpse or to sleep like a man butchered, as well as in the euphemistic the sleep of death. Expressions such as these suggest the idea that sleep is a border-line and even dangerous state when man is at his most vulnerable. According to popular belief, when one is asleep the human soul or shadow departs from the body and leaves for the unknown and it is dreams that are the memories of these travels. A man asleep must not be startled or moved because the soul might not be able to reenter and the human being falls sick and dies. There are a number of prohibitions – one must not fall asleep in places inhabited by supernatural beings, especially wood-nymphs. Folk songs sing of sleepy maids, who fall asleep at wood-nymph horo dances or feasts and are abducted by the wood-nymphs and taken to their kingdom.

And it is precisely because it is deemed border-line that sleep in traditional culture is seen as a gateway to the world beyond. In their sleep people see saints or angels who give them valuable advice, cure them or warn them of pending disaster. Legends of churches and chapels built or renovated, of miracle-working icons found in the ground after bizarre dreams are especially popular. Deceased friends and relatives appear to people in their sleep – thus sleep bridges the gap between life and death, playing the role of mediator between the two worlds.

The belief that dreams can tell future events if they are interpreted correctly is particularly popular. However that is something given to a select few – wisemen and fortune tellers capable of “reading” the language of dreams. There is a folk song that tells the story of Queen Militsa dreaming a frightening dream – the sky is split asunder, the stars fall to the ground and the evening star turns blood-red. Worried, she recounts her dream to her husband who sends her to churches and monasteries to look for old abbots – the only ones who can interpret a dream. The sage monks tell the queen what her dream means – something that would soon come to pass in reality – that the Bulgarian kingdom would fall under Ottoman domination.

There are popular methods of reading dreams with the help of dream-books. To begin with they were oral and only later took on written form as popular publications and nowadays – on the Internet. They offer the reading of the images appearing in the dream, usually using folklore semantics, for example: if a snake appears in your dream – that is bad, if you kill it, you shall vanquish an enemy; if you ride a horse – that is good, an acquisition, but if you fall off the horse – you shall have a mishap. It is said that bad dreams must not be recounted before noon on the following day or they will come true.

Maids try to tell their fortunes – who their future husband shall be – by placing a morsel of the ritual Christmas Eve bread under their pillow to see who shall be the youth they shall dream of on Christmas Eve. Another widespread practice is sleeping in a sacred place for curing disease and making your wishes come true, records of which go back to ancient times, to the temples to Asclepius, though it is still popular to this day in many parts of Bulgaria. Spending the night at a given location in hope of a cure is also part of the ritual known as walking on fraxinella, when the ailing person spends the night out in the open along with a sworn brother or sworn sister for curing wood-nymph disease or sterility.

English: Milena Daynova