Saturday, 24 August 2013

Why the renaissance took dreams so seriously

"Allegoria Con Pan" by Dosso Dossi.

During the renaissance, people took their dreams very seriously and the prophetic powers of dreams were treated with reverence. Was it not Shakespeare who said "We are such stuff as dreams are made of" The strange allegories of the time were as weird as dreams. Venuses, Adonises, Cupids, Minervas, Psyches and Ganymides.... all these mad and bizarre adventures in mythologies are. People believed that while sleeping their souls would transmigrate.

In FLORENCE there was an incredible exhibition about DREAMS. It was called 'il sogno nel Rinascimento' at the Palazzo Pitti. The ambiguity of meaning of the symbols of dream, like allegories, excited the imagination. In sleep, the natural order of sensible thought is broken down and then metamorphous and wonders abound.

The picture above is called "Allegoria Con Pan" by Dosso Dossi. It is about a man and a woman who have fallen in love, only the woman is terribly chaste, and is resisting and fighting the love of the man. Yet, in the picture she is sleeping, but the whole story of "The Battle of Love of Poliphilo" story takes place inside a dream. The man who loves her, Poliphilo, looks for his beloved in a forest. He is lost and meets dragons, wolves, girls and amazing buildings. Next, he meets his beloved (Polia, the woman sleeping in the painting) They are transported to the Island of Cythia after another separation and then they finally crown their love and are blessed by Venus. When the woman wakes up she finally stops resisting the man's advances in real life and lets herself fall fully in love. The satyr in the picture is the representing the man's desirous nature ... making love impossible to resist.

There were many images about dreams. There was a painting of a sleeping knight. He is dreaming of Hercules coming to a crossroads and having to decide between two roads: "Virtue" or "Voluptas" represented by two women, one gorgeous and the other rather formal. It was called 'Il sogno del cavalier' by Rafael. He of course wakes up and chooses the road to "Virtue" having slept through the this difficult choice, 'Voluptas' being a very attractive woman.

Another showed the dead meeting the not yet born... showing that dream can even bypass time... and bring together people from different eras. This is also shown in Danté's Divine Comedy, where the poet meets Homer in his strange allegory.

Our dreams certainly do bring up deep material. They say we are only conscious of 1 percent of what we are really thinking and knowing, and that intuition is doing a lot of work unconsciously. I almost felt jealous of the renaissance for their magical belief that dreaming is the 'education of the gods' So much value was given to thought that was not 'sensible' in those days.

Now science makes us very sensible. There is Freud and the surrealists, but they were wary of associating the dream symbolism with Gods and magic. Modern dream analysts like to associate it with the unconscious, a part of the scientific brain. They don't want to seem wacky, and like to have a reason behind everything.

Recently I dreamt there was a knock at the door. Someone said: 'Tell them to come back tomorrow" So I went to the door, opened it, and saw Father Time, only it wasn't Father Time, it was Pan in disguise. Under his black gown I could see the hoofed legs. 'Come back tomorrow' I said and obediently he went away. I took a train, but when a woman asked me where it was going, I had no idea of the destination.

For the moment, I have no idea what this means. Maybe Pan, my lusting inner God is trying to hurry me along. But I'm shutting the door for now and asking him to come back later.... Sometimes in self-discovery the answers are not there for a long time.

Just as Rilke says: