7 - Dreams and life

Summary

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DREAMS

Dreaming is an anomalous experience, a kind of consciousness present only during unconsciousness, and, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests, anomalies are often perceived as both a locus of danger and a source of power. Medieval discussions clearly recognize the power of the dream – its ability, in predicting the future, to escape temporal constraints; its potential access to a divine realm – but they also treat the dream as dangerous. Not only legal proscriptions against dream divination but the dreambooks themselves – by making dream experience regular, predictable, interpretable – work toward containing the dream's dangers. Dream theory, in its long history, may be read as an attempt to control the dream's dangerous power through codification. An experience that is, dizzyingly, divine, demonic, angelic, psychological, and somatic is made less strange if viewed not as one experience, but as divisible into distinct types, each attributable to a particular cause – whether angelic or demonic, internal or external. Dream theorists themselves, however, do not erase the dream's anomalies, as shown by the recognition of hybrid kinds of dream and the perception that, in practice, dreams may defy classification. Moreover, literary works often forcefully exploit the dream's anomalies, presenting dream fictions that fit neatly into no single category, and that therefore articulate important questions about the connections between (or breachings of) the categories themselves. Works like Oresme's Tractatus ask, for instance, what relation divine revelation bears to more mundane means of attaining knowledge.