The Ekphrastic Medieval Dream Vision

Abstract

It is important to differentiate at the outset the medieval dream-vision text from the literal dream; they are not one and the same, and methods of interpretation intended for the somatic dream limit greatly what can be discerned from both the workings and object of the textual dream. Steven Kruger writes in Dreaming in the Middle Ages, “Ours is the century of the private dream,” and quickly outlines modern attitudes toward dreaming, from Freudian and post-Freudian interpretation of the workings of the unconscious mind to behaviorists’ dismissals of the dream as “leftovers” from daily routine or “as a kind of ‘reverse learning.’”¹ The dream vision of the fourteenth-century has little to do with this understanding of dream; it is first and foremost a text whose object may or may not be a “real” dream at all but a fictionalized one.² Thus, assumptions that the psychoanalytical interpretation of a private mind mightgive insight into the inner workings of the text are of little use here as the medieval dream vision is a formal construct, not a private experience, not even the journaling of a private experience: it is not, as the stream-of-consciousness novels of the twentieth century represent, the psychology of a single subject. The dream-vision text is a text that contemplates composition, both the process of composing and that of apprehending a composition. It is about how we understand and interpret composition.