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10 "To "To sleep, perchance to dream," says Hamlet in Shake- speare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark—a tragedy in which an apparition of the murdered king is seen by Hamlet in a vision, and celestial omens come to play. In the ancient Near East dreams were not considered a matter of chance; they were all, to varying degrees, Divine Encounters: in the least, omens that portend things to come; throughout, channels for con- veying divine will or instructions; and in the utmost, carefully staged and premeditated epiphanies. According to the ancient scriptures, dreams have accompa- nied Earthlings from the very beginning of Humankind, start- ing from the First Mother, Eve, who had an omen-dream about the slaying of Abel. After the Deluge, when Kingship was instituted to create both a barrier and a link between the Anunnaki and the mass of people, it was the kings whose dreams accompanied the course of human affairs. And then, when human leaders strayed, the Divine Word was conveyed through the dreams and visions of Prophets. Within that long record of dreams and visions, some, as we have seen, stand out by crossing into the Twilight Zone, where the unreal becomes real, a metaphysical object assumes a physical exis- tence, an unspoken word becomes a voice actually heard. The Bible is replete with records of dreams as a major form of Divine Encounter, as channels for conveying the deity's decision or advice, benevolent promise or strict ver- dict. Indeed, in Numbers 12:6, Yahweh is quoted as explicitly 212 ROYAL DREAMS, FATEFUL ORACLES