Dream: SATOR Square

I mentioned on a friend's 'blog the other day that I had a dream on Saturday night that involved the need to make sure that a SATOR Square was complete and in the correct order. Several people in my dream were involved in working it out, not just me.

It was an interesting occurrence for several reasons.

Let's start with what a "SATOR Square" is. In the simplest description, it's a "magic square" of letters, with the same letters across and down. It's also palindromic: If you read it backwards and bottom up, you would get the same words as forwards from top down: "SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS" (assuming "AREPO" is a given name, suggested translations at Wikipedia are 'The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort' and 'The sower Arepo leads with his hand (work) the plough (wheels).')

The SATOR Square looks like this:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

There is also a version of it, appearing in several locations, where the word order is reversed (and is sometimes referred to as a "ROTAS Square"):

ROTAS
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR

The earliest SATOR square was found either near Herculaneum or in Pompeii (different sources give different locations), both of which were destroyed by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD, but others have been found in Europe (some as SATOR Squares, some as ROTAS Squares). There is some disagreement about exactly what the SATOR Square signifies, with many theories saying that it is christian in origin, and some saying that it is mithraic in origin.

What makes this interesting to me is a couple of things.

There's an online comic called SPQR Blues, set in the area of Pompeii and Herculaneum shortly before the eruption of Vesuvius. In the story, during a visit to someone's relative, you can clearly see a stela with the SATOR Square carved on it, although you wouldn't know the significance of it if you didn't already know about it. I remember remarking on it to my wife at the time.

Also, my wife and I are currently reading a book titled "Pompeii" by Robert Harris (which is interesting in its own right, because I knew a Robert Harris when I was growing up). The SATOR Square is not (at least, not so far at the point we're reading) mentioned in that book, but since it's current reading, it adds to keeping Pompeii and Herculaneum in my mind.

Until that dream, I had no idea that I had even held on to the actual layout of a SATOR Square, even if part of the dream involved puzzling out how it was supposed to be laid out. I know that memory and the subconscious can hold many things that may lie buried, but it's rare for me to be able to consciously access them, even in a dream -- my mind doesn't usually work that way.

Other parts of the dream were quite fuzzy by the time that I woke up, because solving the layout of the SATOR Square took up most of my attention in the dream by the time that I was close to waking. It was definitely an "active" dream, because I was working on setting the order in the dream (even though it was a group effort), rather than having the dream just happen.

After I awoke, I lay in bed, continuing to recite the order of the square in my head, setting it so that I wouldn't lose the conscious recollection of the layout. When I was able to look it up later, I found that the order was, indeed, correct.

I could speculate on mystic significance of dreaming about the SATOR Square (since the SATOR Square is believed by some to have mystic significance in and of itself).

But even without mystic significance, it was an interesting experience. I don't recall ever having a dream quite like that before.