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2 - The doubleness and middleness of dreams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2009

Steven F. Kruger
Steven F. Kruger
Affiliation:
Queens College, City University of New York
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Summary

GOD-SENT OR AGITATED DREAMS

Toward the beginning of his satiric “Dream, or Lucian's Career,” the second-century Greek author Lucian confidently announces that the dream he is about to relate was divinely-inspired:

What you shall hear next, gentlemen, is not to be made light of; it deserves a very receptive audience. The fact is that, to use the words of Homer, “a god-sent vision appeared unto me in my slumber Out of immortal night” [Iliad 2.56–57], so vivid as not to fall short of reality in any way.

After Lucian has recounted his dream, however, he abandons the notion that its source is divine, invoking instead a different kind of oneiric causation: “it was due, I suppose, to my agitation” (p. 231). In one description of the dream, it is a psychological phenomenon; in the other, it comes from an external, and elevated, source. The divine dream “deserves a very receptive audience,” but the psychologically-motivated dream it becomes only inspires the audience's derision:

Even as I was speaking … someone said, “what a long and tiresome dream!” Then someone else broke in: “A winter dream, when the nights are longest … What got into him to tell us this idle tale and to speak of a night of his childhood and dreams that are ancient and superannuated? It is flat to spin pointless yarns. Surely he doesn't take us for interpreters of dreams?”

(p. 231)
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Dreaming in the Middle Ages , pp. 17 - 34
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1992

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