Category: Film & Art

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Penelope and Odysseus: The Perils of Dream Interpretation

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I’d like to illustrate some basic principles of dream interpretation by telling a story. It’s a very old story, one you may have heard before, but I’d like to tell it again because even though it’s “just a story” it highlights the real perils that come when these dream interpretation principles are overlooked.

The story has to do with the meeting of Odysseus and Penelope in Book 19 of The Odyssey. In many respects this encounter is the point of greatest dramatic intensity in the entire poem, and at the heart of the scene is a dream-Penelope’s dream of the twenty geese that are suddenly slaughtered by a mountain eagle. Odysseus, after leading the Achaean army to victory against the Trojans and after enduring a seemingly endless series of trials and adventures, has returned at last to his island home of Ithaca, where he has found a mob of rude noblemen besieging his palace. The crafty warrior has disguised himself as an old beggar in order to gain entrance into the palace without being recognized, and he is plotting violent revenge against the men who would steal his throne. Penelope, who for many years has desperately clung to the hope that Odysseus would someday return to her, has invited this strange wanderer into her private chambers to ask if he can tell her any news of her husband. The beggar fervently promises the Queen that Odysseus is very close and will return very, very soon. Penelope replies to the beggar’s story by saying she wishes his words would come true, but she doubts they will. She then asks her old servant woman, Eurycleia, to bathe the stranger and arrange a comfortable place for him to sleep. The Queen steps away while the old nurse washes the beggar’s feet. Then, before parting for the night, Penelope returns to the beggar and says (all quotes are from the translation of Robert Fagles, 1996, Viking Press),

“My friend, I have only one more question for you….
[P]lease, read this dream for me, won’t you? Listen closely….
I kept twenty geese in the house, from the water trough
They come and peck their wheat-I love to watch them all.
But down from a mountain swooped this great hook-beaked eagle,
Yes, and he snapped their necks and killed them one and all
And they lay in heaps throughout the hall while he,
Back to the clear blue sky he soared at once.
But I wept and wailed-only a dream, of course-
And our well-groomed ladies came and clustered round me,
Sobbing, stricken: the eagle killed my geese. But down
He swooped again and settling onto a jutting rafter
Called out in a human voice that dried my tears,
‘Courage, daughter of famous King Icarius!
This is no dream but a happy waking vision,
Real as day, that will come true for you.
The geese were your suitors-I was once the eagle
But now I am your husband, back again at last,
About to launch a terrible fate against them all!’
So he vowed, and the soothing sleep released me.”
(The Odyssey 19.575, 603-621)

The disguised Odysseus immediately replies,
“Dear woman,….twist it however you like,
Your dream can mean only one thing. Odysseus
Told you himself-he’ll make it come to pass,
Destruction is clear for each and every suitor;
Not a soul escapes his death and doom.”
(The Odyssey 19.624-629)

Penelope’s response to the beggar is this:
“Ah my friend, seasoned Penelope dissented,
Dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things-
Not all we glimpse in them will come to pass….
Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,
One is made of ivory, the other made of horn.
Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved
Are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit.
The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn
Are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them.
But I can’t believe my strange dream has come that way,
Much as my son and I would love to have it so.”
(The Odyssey 19.630-640)

So, what has just happened here? What is going on between Odysseus and Penelope, and what is the significance of her dream and their exchange about its meaning? The traditional interpretation of this scene, shared with near unanimity by scholars from antiquity to the present, is this. Odysseus has heroically controlled his desire to rejoin Penelope and hidden his identity from her for two reasons: one, to test his wife’s fidelity during his long absence (remember Agamemnon and Clytemnestra), and two, to pick up information about how to destroy the hated suitors. Penelope’s dream of the 20 geese is a straightforward prophecy, whose true meaning the disguised Odysseus instantly recognizes. But Penelope, who has shown a stubborn skepticism throughout the story, refuses to accept the dream’s obvious meaning. Indeed, perhaps she unconsciously enjoys the attention of the suitors and does not really want Odysseus to come back.

My dissatisfaction with this widely held interpretation centers on its strange depreciation of Penelope’s intelligence. This is a woman whom several characters have praised for her unrivalled perceptiveness, cunning, and guile; this is the woman who devised the famous ruse of the funeral shroud, by which she successfully deceived the suitors for three years. All of the evidence in the poem makes it clear that Penelope is not a fool: she is extremely perceptive and capable of remarkably subtle deceptions. So why, when we come to Book 19 and her meeting with the “beggar,” should we now forget all that and regard Penelope as a pathetically unwitting dupe in the vengeful scheming of Odysseus?

Here is the moment when careful reflection on Penelope’s dream can open up new horizons of meaning. The Iliad and The Odyssey together contain, up to the point of Penelope’s dream of the 20 geese, four major dream episodes: Agamemnon’s “Evil Dream” from Zeus (2.1-83), Achilles’ mournful dream of the spirit of dead Patroklos (23.54-107), Penelope’s reassuring dream from Athena (4.884-946), and Nausicaa’s arousing marriage dream from Athena (6.15-79). Viewed in this context, Penelope’s dream is unusual in at least two ways:

  • One, this is the only dream that occurs “offstage,” out of direct view of the audience. We do not “see” the dream while it is happening; we only hear the dreamer describe it, after the fact.
  • Two, this is the only “symbolic” dream, with its meaning encoded in stylized imagery. The dream thus poses a riddle, which must be accurately interpreted for the true meaning to emerge.

I believe these two details suggest a very different reading of the encounter between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus. Could it be that this is not a “real” dream at all, that in fact Penelope has made it up? Could it be that Penelope is deliberately using the riddle of her dream as a test to find out the intentions of this man, whom she consciously suspects is Odysseus? Could it be that while he thinks he’s deceiving her, she’s really the one deceiving him?

This would not be the first time in Homer’s poems that dreams have been used to deceive and manipulate others-in fact, it would be the fourth time: Zeus sending the “Evil Dream” to Agamemnon, Athena sending the “marriage dream” to Nausicaa, and Odysseus (at the end of The Odyssey, Book 14) making up a story about the “real” Odysseus making up a dream in order to steal another warrior’s cloak on a cold, windy night (14.519-589).

Why would Penelope make up such a dream? The answer emerges if we think carefully about what is happening at that crucial moment when the old nurse Eurycleia is washing the beggar’s feet. Penelope has removed herself and is standing alone, after a long and intimate conversation with a man who has detailed knowledge about Odysseus, who looks and sounds very much like Odysseus, who insists with passionate certainty that Odysseus will return to the palace the very next day. The question could hardly not arise for this most intelligent and perceptive of women: is this stranger Odysseus himself? If he is, then why isn’t he revealing himself? Penelope has just poured her heart out to him, saying how terribly she has suffered over the years-why won’t he drop his disguise and reunite with her this very moment?

When Eurycleia finishes washing the beggar’s feet, Penelope returns to him and says she has one last question-what is the meaning of her dream of the geese and the mountain eagle? The disguised Odysseus eagerly agrees with the words of the mountain eagle in the dream: the dream means “destruction is clear for each and every suitor.”

Penelope, however, disagrees. Her “two gates” speech that follows is a subtle but unmistakable way of saying “I don’t think so” to the beggar’s interpretation. She cannot agree with him for a simple reason: the mountain eagle and the beggar have both misinterpreted the dream. There are 20 geese in her dream, but more, many more than that number of suitors in the palace. As we learn in Book 16.270-288, where Telemachus tells Odysseus who all the suitors are and where they come from, there are a total of 108 men besieging the palace. Penelope’s refusal to accept the interpretation of the mountain eagle and the beggar is not due to stubborn skepticism, pathetic ignorance, or unconscious desire-she rejects the interpretation because it is wrong. The true meaning of the symbol of the 20 geese is surprisingly easy to find if we do not automatically assume that the mountain eagle and the beggar are right (that is, if we do not automatically privilege the hermeneutic perspective of Odysseus). The 20 geese symbolize the 20 years that Odysseus has been away fighting the war at Troy and journeying through the world. The exact length of Odysseus’ absence, 20 years, is mentioned five separate times in the poem, and most significantly the beggar himself comments to Penelope a few lines earlier in Book 19 that Odysseus has been gone for 20 years.

Thus, the first part of Penelope’s dream symbolically, and very accurately, describes her emotional experience of what has happened between them: Odysseus, by going off to fight in someone else’s war, has destroyed the last 20 years for her. What should have been the prime years of their marriage, the wonderful years of raising a family and creating a home, the years that Penelope would have “loved to watch” and care for, have been slaughtered by Odysseus. The second part of the dream expresses Penelope’s fearful perception of Odysseus right now, still standing apart from her in the disguise of a beggar. He doesn’t recognize her, and what the last 20 years have been like for her; all he can see are the suitors and a galling challenge to his honor. By posing this dream riddle to the beggar, Penelope is in effect asking if her suspicion is true: is the “real” Odysseus as blind to her feelings and as obsessed with killing the suitors as is the “dream” Odysseus? When the beggar agrees with the mountain eagle’s words in the dream, Penelope knows the unfortunate answer.

The mysterious poetry of Penelope’s two gates speech becomes all the more powerful when it is understood as a response to Odysseus’ failure of the dream interpretation test. To his reprimanding words, “twist it however you like, your dream can only mean one thing,” Penelope replies that dreams are always difficult to understand, and they do not always come true. The danger is that we will allow our desire to cloud our perception-taking as divine prophecy what is merely human fantasy. But some dreams, she goes on to say, do have the potential to come true-though only “for the dreamer who can see them.” That is precisely what Odysseus has failed to do. He has failed to see past his own desire for revenge.

I am reluctant to finish with this story, because there is so much more to be told (and so much more to be questioned, if you happen to disagree with my admittedly unorthodox reading of this scene). But I will close by reflecting on the interpretive principles guiding this approach to Penelope’s dream of the 20 geese. First, I chose to privilege the perspective of the dreamer, listening to her words, looking carefully at her experience, asking critical questions of her motivations, and ultimately grounding the dream’s meaning in the conditions of her waking life. Second, I focused special attention on the details of the dream, particularly on the exact number of geese, 20. Third, I located the dream in the context of broader cultural patterns, focusing in particular on how Penelope’s dream deviates from the narrative structuring of other Homeric dreams. And fourth, I tried to look beyond the seemingly obvious and self-evident to discover the new, the surprising, the unexpected.

 

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Mary Shelley’s Baby Comes Back to Life

In February of 1815 a baby girl was born two months prematurely to Mary Godwin, seventeen years old at the time, and the poet Percy B. Shelley.  Twelve days later Mary went to the child during the night and found she had died in her sleep.  On March 19, 1815 Mary recorded the following dream in her journal:

 

“Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.”

 

It would be easy to interpret this dream as a guilt-driven fantasy, a classic Freudian wish fulfillment.  We don’t know for sure, but we can fairly assume that Mary felt deeply saddened and somehow personally responsible for her child’s death.  The dream, in this view, satisfies her desire to defy death and magically restore her child’s life rather than tragically losing it.

The limits of that interpretation become apparent when the dream’s waking life impact is taken into account.  The dream did not diminish or obscure Mary’s awareness of what had happened.  On the contrary, the dream made Mary more aware of the reality of her child’s death and more conscious of her agonizing feelings of loss.  Far from a soothing delusion, this dream’s message to Mary seems almost cruel in its stark honesty: “Awake and find no baby.”

A better interpretation, I believe, starts with the dream’s emotional impact on her waking life. Mary’s dream marks a significant moment in her mourning process, her psyche’s way of making sense of a devastating loss and trying to reorient towards future growth.  Mary’s dream does not hide or disguise her child’s death.  When she wakes up, her first thought brings a fresh sense of loss and sadness.  But the dream also introduces a spark of vitality into Mary’s awareness.  Warmth, fire, and vigorous activity do indeed stimulate the creation of new life.  Mary’s dream is not delusional about that piece of primal wisdom. Mary may not have been able to bring her baby back to life, but she still had the drive, desire, and knowledge to create again.

Out of her mourning Mary did find new creative energies.  In January of 1816 she bore a healthy son, William.  That summer, she and Percy Shelley visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her first novel: “Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus.”

“Frankenstein” surely reflects the same wishful fantasy as Mary’s dream of the previous year, i.e., bringing the dead back to life.  But the differences are significant: In her dream, a mother tries to reanimate her daughter, whereas in “Frankenstein,” a male scientist tries to animate a creature stitched together from many different bodies.  The dream portrays a natural human desire for a personal relationship, while the story presents an unnatural and inhuman desire for impersonal control over another’s life. In “Frankenstein” Mary adds to her dream a dimension of horror and madness, along with a prescient critique of the self-destructive hubris and masculine grandiosity of modern science.  I don’t know much about her relationship with Percy Shelley, Byron, and other male poets, but I would guess that “Frankenstein” also reflects Mary’s feelings about gender, sexuality, and literary creativity.

Mary’s dream of her baby daughter did not simply inspire the “bring the dead back to life” plot line of “Frankenstein.”  The dream prompted a transformative deepening of her awareness about the creative tension between life and death, an awareness that enabled her to infuse “Frankenstein” with critical insight, emotional poignancy, and existential wonder.

 

 

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The Dreams and Nightmares of Harry Potter

More than four hundred million people, most of them children and teenagers, have read the Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling, immersing themselves in a fantastical world in which broomsticks fly, portraits talk, wizards cast spells–and dreams reveal honest emotional truths.  Rowling’s hugely popular stories about the magical education of young Harry Potter abound with dream experiences that weave prophetic visions with psychologically astute insights into adolescent feelings of loss, fear, desire, and hope.  Looking closely at the roles played by dreaming across all seven novels, it becomes clear that readers of these books are well primed to regard dreams as a piece of magic, as a mysterious, potentially dangerous, but extremely valuable source of power, meaning, and guidance in life.  Rowling’s fantasy tale carries a message of real-world significance: We Muggles (non-wizards) may not be able to fly on brooms or cast spells, but we do possess the magical power of dreaming.

The first time we meet Harry, in the opening pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, he is waking up in the tiny coat closet where his dim-witted Muggle relatives the Dursleys have kept him hidden for the past ten years.  Harry “rolled onto his back and tried to remember the dream he had been having.  It had been a good one.  There had been a flying motorcycle in it.  He had a funny feeling he’d had the same dream before.” (1.19)  When Harry mentions the dream to the Dursleys on a family drive to the Zoo, Mr. Dursley, introduced to readers as someone who “didn’t approve of imagination” (1.5), angrily shouts that motorcycles don’t fly.  Taken aback, Harry replies, “I know they don’t, it was only a dream.” (1.25)  What he does not yet know is that motorcycles do fly when properly enchanted, and a flying motorcycle in fact brought him to the Dursley’s house ten years ago.  His recurrent dream is not “only” a dream, but rather a meaningful and reassuring reminder of his true origins, despite the best efforts of the stubbornly pedestrian Dursleys to erase those memories from his mind.  This early debate about the significance of dreams establishes a basic tension running through all the novels between the infinite potentials of the wizarding world and the anxious Muggle determination to pretend that such potentials do not exist.

After the disastrous Zoo visit, when Harry discovers he can speak to snakes and sets one loose on his cousin Dudley, the flying motorcycle returns to spirit him away on a journey to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry’s home for the next several years.  On his first night at Hogwarts,

“Perhaps Harry had eaten a bit too much, because he had a very strange dream.  He was wearing Professor Quirrell’s turban, which kept talking to him, telling him he had to transfer to Slytherin at once, because it was his destiny.  Harry told the turban he did not want to be in Slytherin; it got heavier and heavier; he tried to pull it off but it tightened painfully–and there was Malfoy, laughing at him as he struggled with it–then Malfoy turned into the hook-nosed teacher, Snape, whose laugh became high and cold–there was a burst of green light and Harry awoke, sweating and shaking.  He rolled over and fell asleep again, and when he woke the next day, he didn’t remember the dream at all.” (1.130)

It’s too bad Harry forgets the dream, because it accurately reveals his ultimate challenge in this book and throughout the series: To defeat this malevolent lineage of characters from Slytherin, one of the four houses at Hogwarts, infamous for its attraction to dark magic.  Draco Malfoy, Harry’s bitter rival and classmate, is a member of Slytherin house and Professor Snape, Harry’s least favorite teacher, is Slytherin house master.  Though Harry does not know it yet, the high, cold laugh and the voice talking from Professor Quirrell’s turban come from his arch-enemy, the dark wizard known as Lord Voldemort (himself a former Slytherin student).  The burst of green light shows Harry what a killing curse looks like—something he has seen once before, ten years earlier, when Voldemort murdered his parents.

None of this registers consciously for Harry, but it’s all laid out for readers in his first-night-at-Hogwarts dream.  The talking turban directly foreshadows the climactic discovery at the end of this book that Voldemort (a tiny, shriveled being at this point) is controlling Quirrell by hiding inside the back of his turban.  More broadly, the fact that Harry himself is wearing the turban anticipates a series-long struggle with his “inner Voldemort,” a struggle in which his lightning-scarred head is the primary battleground.

As the story unfolds Harry learns more about his past, the death of his parents, and his strange connection to Voldemort.  Now he begins having recurrent nightmares: “Over and over again he dreamed about his parents disappearing in a flash of green light, while a high voice cackled with laughter.” (1.215)  By this point Harry recognizes that this horrible scene is not “only” a dream but an actual event that happened in his past.  The recurrent nightmares, like his other dreams, turn out to be legitimate memories of horrors in his past. The term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” is never used in the books, but readers with clinical training may find it impossible to ignore that diagnosis.  The long-buried memories surfacing in his dreams reveal a primal experience of severe, shocking pain.

The second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, also opens with a highly significant dream that Harry ignores.  The story starts with an elf servant named Dobby suddenly appearing in his room at the Dursley’s house and begging him not to go back to Hogwarts.  Mr. Dursley, furious at this magical intrusion into his well-ordered home, locks Harry in his room, puts metal bars on his window, and leaves him without any food.  As night comes,

“Mind spinning over the same unanswerable questions, Harry fell into an uneasy sleep.  He dreamed that he was on show in a zoo, with a card reading UNDERAGE WIZARD attached to his cage.  People goggled through the bars at him as he lay, starving and weak, on a bed of straw.  He saw Dobby’s face in the crowd and shouted out, asking for help, but Dobby called, ‘Harry is safe there, sir!’ and vanished.  Then the Dursleys appeared and Dudley rattled the bars of the cage, laughing at him.  ‘Stop it,’ Harry muttered as the rattling pounded in his sore head. ‘leave me alone….cut it out….I’m trying to sleep…’”  (2.23)

Harry awakens to the sound of his friend Ron Weasley ripping the bars off his window and helping him escape back to Hogwarts.  This incorporation of an external stimulus into the dream is a plausible and familiar dream phenomenon, and so is the dream’s continuity with Harry’s recent interactions with Dobby and the Dursleys.

But the dream’s references also extend to broader themes in the story.  The first novel began with a visit to the zoo where Dudley taunted a snake, and here at the beginning of the second novel Harry dreams of being in the same position as that captive creature, once again highlighting the eerie affinity he has with serpents.  His rare magical ability as a “parsel-mouth,” i.e., someone who can speak to snakes, come to the fore in this book as he seeks to unlock the “Chamber of Secrets,” where he must battle a massive Basilisk along with a ghostly version of Voldemort.  The all-caps reminder of his status as an underage wizard reflects the developmental challenge facing Harry at this stage of the series.  His sense of his own magical power is growing rapidly, yet his teachers say he must wait until he’s older before using it, even though at this very moment the forces of evil are rising again—the tension of this moral dilemma puts Harry on edge throughout the series.  If he doesn’t use his power right now, Voldemort may win; but if Harry succumbs to the dark temptations aroused by his own potency, Voldemort may win, too.

In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Harry must contend with a new species of wickedness—the Dementors, guards of the wizard prison Azkaban, ghoulish creatures of death and decay who feed on souls and leave their victims empty shells of despair.  The Dementors are like PTSD demons, and they affect Harry especially badly.  Professor Lupin explains why: Dementors take away everything good inside you so “you’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.  And the worst that has happened to you, Harry, is enough to make anyone fall off their broom.” (3.187)  Dementor attacks intermingle with Harry’s continuing bad dreams, and now he can distinguish in his memory a specific sound—his mother’s scream as Voldemort kills her.  At night “Harry dozed fitfully, sinking into dreams full of clammy, rotted hands and petrified pleading, jerking awake to dwell again on his mother’s voice.” (3.184)   As Harry uncovers more about his past, his initial reaction of wonder and delight at the magical world yields to an acutely painful awareness of the family he never knew and will never have.

Not that everything in Harry’s life is going badly.  About midway through the third book he helps Gryffindor house win a big Quidditch match (a wizarding sport), and during the match he fights off a (false) Dementor attack by successfully casting a strong though indistinctly shaped Patronus, an advanced level charm in which the tip of one’s wand shoots a jet of silver-white light that takes the form of a specific animal.  That night Harry goes to bed feeling better than he has for long time:

“[He] had a very strange dream.  He was walking through a forest, his Firebolt [his Quidditch broomstick] over his shoulder, following something silvery-white.  It was winding its way through the trees ahead, and he could only catch glimpses of it between the leaves.  Anxious to catch up with it, he sped up, but as he moved faster, so did his quarry.  Harry broke into a run, and ahead he heard hooves gathering speed.  Now he was running flat out, and ahead he could hear galloping.  Then he turned a corner into a clearing and—“  Suddenly Harry is awakened by a scream.  It’s Ron, who says Sirius Black, the notorious outlaw, was just in their dorm room.  Everyone says Ron must have been dreaming, but Ron insists it really happened.

This premature ending of the dream, just before an eagerly-sought moment of final discovery, resonates with common dreaming experience (and with literary history, e.g., Coleridge’s incomplete Kublai Khan).  It also makes for a dramatic turn of events, one that Harry, Ron, and the others completely misinterpret.  They assume Sirius Black is a Voldemort ally trying to kill Harry, whereas in truth Sirius is Harry’s godfather trying to protect Harry from a different agent of the Dark Lord.  Harry’s father and Sirius were best friends at Hogwarts, and Sirius turns out to be the mysterious donor of the Firebolt broomstick, which Harry received from an unknown source early in the story.  Harry’s father also played Quidditch, adding another layer of masculine/paternal meaning to the dream.

One need not be a zealous Freudian to recognize the phallic symbolism of flying broomsticks and silvery-white substances coming out of wands. The abrupt awakening from his dream prevents Harry from reflecting on its possible meaning, but when the story reaches its climax we realize the dream has accurately foretold the final turn of the plot.  Harry’s Patronus charm, when fully formed, takes the shape of a majestic stag—the same animal his father was magically able to turn into.  Just when hordes of Dementors have descended upon him, Harry finally understands that even though his father is dead, his paternal memory remains a powerful force that Harry can use to fight his enemies.  In his dream Harry takes on the role of a mythic hunter being lured deeper and deeper into the forest in pursuit of an enchanted deer.  Here at the end of the story he completes his heroic dream quest by fusing his power with his father’s to create a magical force for saving people, not killing them.

Most of Harry’s dreams convey meanings related to the battle with Voldemort, but sometimes they reflect his everyday concerns, even if the deeper conflicts are never far away.  The night before the final Quidditch match of the season, against the team from Slytherin, Harry “slept badly” and suffered anxious dreams of bizarre misfortunes.  This type of dream is familiar to anyone who has tried to sleep while worrying about a big event the next day:

“First he dreamed that he had overslept, and that Wood was yelling, ‘Where were you? We had to use Neville instead!’ Then he dreamed Malfoy and the rest of the Slytherin team arrived for the match riding dragons.  He was flying at breakneck speed, trying to avoid a spurt of flames from Malfoy’s steed’s mouth, when he realized he had forgotten his Firebolt.  He fell through the air and woke with a start.  It was a few seconds before Harry remembered that the match hadn’t taken place yet, that he was safe in bed, and that the Slytherin team definitely wouldn’t be allowed to play on dragons.” (3.302)

Wood is the Gryffindor team captain, and Neville is a hapless Gryffindor housemate. The dream is like a prism of Harry’s current anxieties, reflecting his concerns about letting down his house, losing a competition to a hated rival, appearing weak in front of his whole school, losing his magical power, losing his ability to fly, and ultimately losing the battle against Slytherin.  Harry awakens abruptly with the sensation of falling, another typical dream experience, and he has a moment of waking/dreaming uncertainty.  Once fully awake he takes comfort from the fact that the dream is not literally true, although the danger posed by Slytherin’s connection to reptilian phallic aggression remains real and ever-present.

The fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, marks a big leap in the length (734 pages), psychological depth, and moral complexity of the story.  Harry’s surprising, unwanted entry into the Triwizard tournament leads to ridicule and social isolation at school.  For most of the book he is a solitary, psychologically tormented figure brooding on feelings of shame, fear, and rage.  This is a much darker novel that thrusts Harry out of the simple wonders of childhood into the bitter, complicated concerns of the adult world.

As in the first and second novels, he initially appears in book 4 in the act of awakening: “Harry lay flat on his back, breathing hard as though he had been running.  He had awoken from a vivid dream with his hands pressed over his face….Harry tried to recall what he had been dreaming about before he had awoken.  It had seemed so real….” (4.16-17)   Despite the pain in his scar, after a few moments of thought he pieces together the scene revealed by his dream—a Muggle being murdered by Voldemort’s snake Nagini.  What Harry does not know, but readers do know from the preceding chapter, is that this dream is an accurate, real-time portrayal of something that actually happened.  When Harry gets out of bed and writes a letter to Sirius, he decides “there was no point putting in the dream; he didn’t want it to look as though he was too worried.” (4.25)

We know this is exactly the wrong thing to do.  Ironically, Harry is replicating Mr. Dursley’s bias against a troublesome imagination.

From the start of this novel J.K. Rowling sets us up to root for Harry’s dreams and against the skepticism of his waking mind.  We know his dreams are indeed telepathic and clairvoyant, giving him a potentially powerful resource in fighting Voldemort.  But Harry hesitates in trusting his dreams or telling them to others, unwilling to give people another reason to ridicule him.

While Harry worries about his dream, he also faces the life-threatening challenges of the Triwizard tournament.  The night before the second task, which involves finding a way to breathe underwater, Harry anxiously looks for answers in the library, and eventually falls asleep atop his books:

“The mermaid in the painting in the prefects’ bathroom was laughing.  Harry was bobbing like a cork in bubbly water next to her rock, while she held his Firebolt over his head.

’Come and get it!’ she giggled maliciously.  ‘Come on, jump!’

‘I can’t,’ Harry panted, snatching at the Firebolt, and struggling not to sink.  ‘Give it to me!’

But she just poked him painfully in the side with the end of the broomstick, laughing at him.” (4.489)

Harry awakens in the library to the anxious poking of Dobby, who tells him what he needs to breathe underwater.  The prefects’ bathroom, with its murals of mermaids, was where Harry discovered the initial clue about the breathing-underwater task.  As the youngest and least popular Triwizard champion, with the suspicious eyes of everyone upon him, facing a seemingly impossible task, Harry feels utterly powerless and alone.  The dream accurately reflects these feelings in the image of his prized Firebolt being snatched away by a mermaid, a creature of the water who looks down on him and mocks his impotence.

Harry’s class on Divination, taught by Professor Trelawney, comes across as the least reliable branch of magical knowledge, appealing to gullible people willing to see omens of death and doom in every cup of tea leaves.  Harry doesn’t take Professor Trelawney seriously, but one afternoon toward the end of the story (in a chapter titled “The Dream”) he falls asleep in her class and finds himself “riding on the back of an eagle owl, soaring through the clear blue sky toward an old, ivy-covered house set high on a hillside.” (4.576)  Inside the house Harry comes upon Voldemort, his snake Nagini, and his bumbling servant Wormtail.  He watches as Voldemort tortures Wormtail and promises Nagini he will soon be feeding on Harry Potter.  His scar burning his forehead, Harry awakens to the whole class staring at him and Professor Trelawney breathlessly asking to hear what he just dreamed about.

Harry brushes her off and runs to tell Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts.   This time Harry has no doubt that his dream contains meaningful information for the anti-Voldemort forces.  To his relief, Dumbledore accepts his dream as real and significant, explaining that the failed killing curse of the Dark Lord seems to have created a psychic connection between them.  Harry asks, “So you think…that dream…did it really happen?”  “It is possible,” said Dumbledore. “I would say—probable.” (4.601)

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Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”

Werner Herzog’s documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” has just been released in the US, and it’s worth seeing for anyone interested in paleolithic cave art and the origins of human consciousness.

The Chauvet caves of Southern France contain paintings dating back more than 30,000 years.  Herzog was granted a brief amount of time to take a small film crew into most, but not all, of the cave system.  The project undoubtedly appealed to Herzog’s gonzo filmmaking impulses, but he also found a proto-cinematic quality to the paintings that seemed to evoke for him a feeling of kinship between modern director and paleolithic cave-painter.

He interviewed several scientists and cave mavens, not all of whom add much to our understanding of the cave paintings.  But there’s a cool French archeologist with pony tail and scarf who says he began dreaming of  lions after spending five days of intensive research in the portion of the cave filled with lion images.   He’s my new hero!

As the film goes on and viewers become better oriented within the caves and more acclimated to their 3D glasses, Herzog presents several long, contemplative scenes that bring to life the implicit energy and vitality in the overlapping multitude of animal figures.  I appreciate Herzog’s willingness to acknowledge the deep psychological impact the paintings have, and to consider the implications that the paintings were designed for that very purpose–to elicit feelings of wonder and awe, to expand the viewer’s imagination, to hint at realities beyond the visible and below the surface.

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A Lucid Dreaming Cautionary Tale: Graham Joyce’s “Dreamside”

Later this month (3-23) I’m joining British novelist Graham Joyce at the Rubin Museum in New York City to discuss “Are Dreams Pure Fantasy?” as part of the museum’s “Brainwave” lecture series on dreams.  I’ve just read Joyce’s first novel, Dreamside, and it’s a hauntingly beautiful tale, both frightening and inspiring.  It raises vital questions about the perils and potentials of lucid dreaming.

Written in 1991, the novel accurately conveys the naïve excitement many people felt at that time about early psychological research on consciousness in dreaming.  The story concerns four college students who sign up for a study on the induction of lucid dreams.  The students form an unlikely team, each driven by very different motives.  Ella, a mercurial, sexually alluring spiritual seeker, will do and say anything to achieve transcendence. Lee, the central character, is a stolid, rather conventional guy painfully captivated by Ella’s erotic energy.  Brad, a medical student, has the most advanced innate skills at lucid dreaming, but he’s a cynical, drunken lout who can only express his sexual desires in the crudest of ways.  Honora, from Ireland, is the quietest and most innocent of the group.  Of them all, she is the most sincere in her desire to learn about dreaming.

Their guide from waking reality into Dreamside is Professor Burns, an elderly psychologist with a hobbyist’s interest in parapsychology and an ornery disregard for other people’s feelings.  Initially the lucid dream induction seminar is just a sham, as the Professor is in fact conducting a study of small group dynamics.  But when the students begin succeeding in their efforts—when they learn how to become aware in dreams, interact with each other, and perform various experiments to test their Dreamside abilities—Prof. Burns becomes excited, too, and pushes them further and further.

Without revealing any other plot developments, it may simply be said that everyone involved reaches a point where they deeply regret their blind rush into alien realms of psychic experience.

The moral of the story is not that lucid dreaming is bad.  Nor is it that Prof. Burns might have benefited from the input of a human subjects committee, though that’s undoubtedly true.  It’s rather that we need to ask the right questions about lucid dreaming.  The characters in Dreamside are so intent on figuring out how to induce lucid dreaming that they never ask themselves why they want to do so in the first place.  The “how” question is relatively easy, but if you haven’t reflected carefully on the “why” question you may find yourself woefully unprepared for what you encounter.

This is the same message that Hindu and Buddhist sages have taught for centuries: it is indeed possible to learn lucid dreaming techniques, but those techniques are best practiced within a context of spiritual training, guidance, and self-reflection.  The college students in Dreamside have grown up in the morally impoverished world of Thatcher-era Britain, and they have few cultural resources to help them make sense of their experiences.   Perhaps the greatest achievement of Joyce’s novel is that it provides what its characters lack—a wise and healthily cautious understanding of human dreaming potential.

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Dreams in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A dream researcher friend asked if knew anything about the role of dreams in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” since she could not find any good info on the web.  Here’s my response, which she suggested I post:

One way to think of this play is as a commentary on the glorious folly of love.  Shakespeare is saying that love is like a dream—it radically changes our perception of reality and other people, it compels us to behave in ways that are foolish and irrational, it’s wild and magical and unpredictable, and it ultimately must yield to the sovereignty of the waking social order (as the end of the play makes clear).

After Bottom has returned from donkey to human status he says some funny things about how crazy and unbelievable dreams are, which is extra amusing and paradoxical because we in the audience have just seen that his “dream” of being an ass was indeed real (IV.ii.203-222).

One of the young lovers, Hermia, has an alarming dream about her beloved Lysander smiling cruelly while a serpent bites her breast (II.ii.144-150).  Her dream turns out to be an accurate “threat simulation” reflecting Lysander’s sudden change of heart towards her.

When all the lovers awaken toward the end, they marvel at their strange nocturnal experiences, and say some nice things about sharing dreams with each other (IV.ii.189-202).

Add to this the fact that the play was originally intended to be performed on midsummer’s night, traditionally a “dreamy” celebration of the shortest night of the year, when people stay up and carouse about till dawn.

And in the final lines of the play, the mischievous Puck asks the audience to pretend they’ve been asleep the whole time, dreaming the spectacle before them (V.i.429-430).

All in all, it’s a play that emphasizes the powerful emotional truth of dreaming and the energizing tension between dream desire and waking structure.

Thanks to Justina Lasley of the Institute for Dream Studies!