The Dream Report as a Literary Device in Medieval Hispanic Literature

Abstract

A LTHOUGH interesting work has been done on the topic of the dream in medieval English, French, and Old Norse literature, relatively few Hispanists have dealt with dreams in any period at all.1 It is my intention to examine the circumstantial setting of dream narratives in medieval Hispanic texts in order to show that literary dreams served as extensions of reality in a body of literature whose normal contours were limited with respect to portrayals of individualized reality. Landscapes, people, and animals were presented as ideas of themselves and not as individuals.2 For this reason, medieval Hispanic authors tended to put dreams, which were in themselves individualized narratives, in realistic settings to make them credible. Without their association with familiar daily experiences-disrobing, falling asleep, awakening frightened, relating the dream to a friend-, these vividly visual representations might not have been acceptable to a reading public accustomed to a non-visual idealized style. To a great extent dreams were validated in the reporting. While we can identify various literary purposes which dreams served, e.g., a pretext for the inclusion of fantastic material, an explanation for the appearance of the spirits of the dead (who were often gifted with the power of prophecy), we are able to generalize an overall function: incorporating this material into a portrayal of reality. A brief glance at the wide variety of dream situations enables us to dismiss the notion that dreams were a mere literary convention or topic. We can find no single metaphor for which the act of dreaming might stand. John F. Priest, writing of dreams in classical literature and in the ancient Near East, goes to the heart of the matter: In either case it is tacitly assumed that the function of the dream is to establish a contact between the noumenal and