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Caedmon's Hymn

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For thousands of years, dream interpretation has been an avid study by hundreds of different cultures. Dreams have been the inspiration for songs, poems and stories, and were even recorded on clay tablets far before the time of Christ. Caedmon’s Hymn is said to have come to him in a dream, with angels singing the poetic lyrics sweetly into his ears while he slept. What is the significance of dreaming in response to this literature? Why is it a popular trend for dreams to play a part in old myths, fables and Bible stories? Caedmon was an old english sheep herder, who was very quiet and never voiced any singing talent. Until, according to the legend, Caedmon fell asleep while watching his herd. God then came to him in his dream with a couple dozen angels. The Lord looked down at Caedmon and told him that he would bestow upon him a great musical talent. The angels then started singing the poem, and Caedmon quickly memorized the lyrics. He woke from his dream, and started singing the words in a strikingly beautiful voice. He then went on to write it, and the Hymn became popular a hundred or so years later. The hymn itself is quite short, and is a praise song for “God the Creator”. This tends to be a popular theme with Bible stories and legends. God or angels appear to the sleeper in a dream, and …show more content…

In the fable The Cock and the Fox, a rooster dreams about a fox coming to eat him and all of his hen wives. He wakes up and frantically tells his wives about it, and they tell him to just ignore it, that dreams don’t mean anything. The rooster then ignores his uneasy feeling, however later in the day a fox comes to the farm and tries to eat the chickens, just as his dream predicted. The moral of this fable, as every fable has a moral at the end, was to never ignore your intuition. This story is an example of many written during the time that has a plot that revolves solely around a

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