Dream Narratives Research Articles

Deep Dream (The Network’s Dream)

Deep Dream (The Network’s Dream) Grégory Chatonsky (bio) “Dreams always precede waking life: It’s an absolute given truth, a truth like 2 plus 2 equals 4. This means that life always confirms what the dream has discerned and concluded beforehand.” (Louis Althusser, typewritten letter to Claire, dated 22 February 1958). It seems that brain, thought and computer have become intertwined and now share a common fate. An important part of neuroscience not only requires a computational paradigm but also relies on technology to be operational. Experiments in neuroscience are built on the use of material apparatuses dependent on the computer. Isn’t the emergence of the computer in the last century based on a certain representation of thought and the brain? It has become difficult to distinguish among these three representations (computer, thought and brain) since they seem superimposed upon one another through a fiction that operates in a very concrete way on the world. I would like to explore this fiction in order to analyze how a form of speculation that favors what is possible over what is real can produce a technological “reality” that challenges all certainty. Our contemporary world seems to contain an anomaly of which we can only trace the shadow: parallel to the progress made in neuroscience, our nervous system is increasingly stimulated by an interconnected digital environment that leaves us no respite. It consumes us and we in turn consume it. Is this a simple coincidence or can we analyze this phenomenon as a structural convergence? What relationship exists between the Web, which has assimilated an increasing number of human behaviors, and the human brain considered from the point of view of a programmed machine that has also learned to act like a brain? He Who Was Dreaming There is the dream and there is the dream of the dream, that is, the dream to see one’s own dream as that of another in order to confront it at the moment when it happens—not before, not after, but now. The desire to make the dream narrative and one’s own dream simultaneous is an attempt to try to close the gap between the two, since the dream generally is recalled after it has occurred.1 This is why we are never sure of its empirical status. Couldn’t the dream’s narrative be the creation of an afterthought, without relation, beyond the merely superficial, to a [End Page 61] phenomenon that is never within reach? It is because of this inextricable uncertainty that the dream is always close to a kind of repetition, in the form of a dream within a dream. In 2013, for my project Sleepless (http://chatonsky.net/projects/sleepless), I created an installation for a bedroom: the sleeper is given a watch to keep track of the amount of sleep (“life-logging”). Once the person has fallen asleep, a device installed in the room turns on. A camera films the person sleeping, while a screen projects her image recorded from the preceding night. This is an image of her unconscious and of the gap inherent in sleep. A visitor can enter into the room but must be careful not to wake the sleeper, for this would disrupt the projected image, as well as the spell, comparable to the scene that occurs when spectators viewing an exhibit in a museum turn around to glance behind themselves, because they suddenly realize that we are observing them observing a work of art. Neuroscience seems to be a privileged field for speculation, because although it promises to confront directly the unmediated experience of dreaming, it also produces technological devices that are not unbiased in constructing new conditions of experiment and verification. It is therefore difficult for us to distinguish what is observed from what is produced. The two form an additional level of repetition, particularly in the case of the dream, which exposes this doubt in a structural way. As we shall see, in the context of a research project pursued at Berkeley in 2011, Jack Gallant proposes to recover a series of images of neuronal activity and in this way create a new kind of dream within a...

Emotions as an object of interpretation in the Slavic prophetic dream narratives

Emotions as an object of interpretation in the Slavic prophetic dream narratives

The Power of Language: Globalizing “The Chinese Dream”

After assuming the Chinese presidency in March 2013, Xi Jinping introduced the new political slogan “the Chinese Dream,” which he does not only address to the domestic audience but also aims to promote to the world. Since his inaugural trip abroad, Xi has repeatedly used the term “Chinese Dream” in his speeches when addressing international audiences. However, nowhere has the catchphrase received as much appeal as in Africa. Simultaneously, African academics and other interested parties have observed the promotion of the idea of an African Dream by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with great suspicion as they view it simply as a projection of China’s own foreign policy onto Africa. But what do the Chinese Dream and African Dream actually mean? How can we make sense out of these terms? In order to decode or demystify the meaning behind the Chinese Dream narrative in the context of China’s foreign policy, this paper argues that it is essential to examine how it is constructed and projected to the international audience, in particular to Africa. The Chinese Dream is understood as a narrative which is strategically used by the CCP in order to shape perceptions and behavior of other international actors according to their own agenda. Moreover, the dynamic interactions between the media and politics and how they impinge on the formation and projection of the Chinese Dream and African Dream narrative will also be taken into account.

Dream narration in healthy and at-risk pregnancy.

During pregnancy and the transition toward motherhood, a special time for the restructuring of the female identity and representational world, dreaming may play an important function in the psychic life. If we accept that psychological and psychosocial risk factors influence representation during pregnancy, this article explores, from a psychodynamic perspective, how the presence/absence of biological risk is represented into women’s dream narration. Forty dreams of pregnant women (20 healthy pregnancies/20 at risk) were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. We performed a thematic analysis of multiple correspondences to see whether the dreams recounted by the women in the 2 different categories had any specific characteristics. Four thematic clusters resulted, which, after interpretation using factorial mapping, fall into 3 sense vectors: from the unrepresentable to the representable; from dependency to reciprocal relationships; from undifferentiated to different. The work we did enabled us to observe that in healthy pregnancies dreams have a mainly elaborative function, whereas when there are risk factors, it seems to be difficult to construct a psychic representational space.

Content analysis of 4 to 8 year-old children's dream reports.

The role of dreaming in childhood and in adulthood are still equally enigmatic fields yet to be fully explored. However, while there is a consensus at least about the typical content and formal characteristics of adult dream reports, these features are still a matter of debate in the case of young children. Longitudinal developmental laboratory studies concluded that preschoolers' dreams usually depict static images about mostly animals and body states of the dreamer but they basically lack the active representation of the self, human characters, social interactions, dream emotions and motion imagery. Due to methodological arguments these results became the reference points in the literature of developmental dream research, in spite of the significantly different results of numerous recent and relevant studies using extra-laboratory settings. This study aims to establish a methodologically well-controlled and valid way to collect children's dreams for a representative period of time in a familiar home setting to serve as a comparison to the laboratory method. Pre trained parents acted as interviewers in the course of a 6 week-period of dream collection upon morning awakenings. Our results suggest that even preschoolers are likely to represent their own self in an active role (70%) in their mostly kinematic (82%) dream narratives. Their dream reports contain more human, than animal characters (70 and 7% of all dream characters respectively), and social interactions, self-initiated actions, and emotions are usual part of these dreams. These results are rather similar to those of recent extra-laboratory studies, suggesting that methodological issues may strongly interfere with research outcomes especially in the case of preschoolers' dream narratives. We suggest that nighttime awakenings in the laboratory setting could be crucial in understanding the contradictory results of dream studies in case of young children.

Right hemisphere neural activations in the recall of waking fantasies and of dreams.

The story-like organization of dreams is characterized by a pervasive bizarreness of events and actions that resembles psychotic thought, and largely exceeds that observed in normal waking fantasies. Little is known about the neural correlates of the confabulatory narrative construction of dreams. In this study, dreams, fantasies elicited by ambiguous pictorial stimuli, and non-imaginative first- and third-person narratives from healthy participants were recorded, and were then studied for brain blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging on a 3.0-Tesla scanner while listening to their own narrative reports and attempting a retrieval of the corresponding experience. In respect to non-bizarre reports of daytime activities, the script-driven recall of dreams and fantasies differentially activated a right hemisphere network including areas in the inferior frontal gyrus, and superior and middle temporal gyrus. Neural responses were significantly greater for fantasies than for dreams in all regions, and inversely proportional to the degree of bizarreness observed in narrative reports. The inferior frontal gyrus, superior and middle temporal gyrus have been implicated in the semantic activation, integration and selection needed to build a coherent story representation and to resolve semantic ambiguities; in deductive and inferential reasoning; in self- and other-perspective taking, theory of mind, moral and autobiographical reasoning. Their degree of activation could parallel the level of logical robustness or inconsistency experienced when integrating information and mental representations in the process of building fantasy and dream narratives.

RÜYADA TERAKKİ VE MEDENİYET-İ İSLAMİYEYİ RÜ'YET

In the period between the end of the 19 th century and the first quarter of the 20 th century, many dream narratives were written in Ottoman Turkish literature. These narratives carried the features of utopia, a genre that is considered to be of a more western literature, in many ways. The so-called texts’ common feature is to provide solutions for pulling the state through the bad conditions and/or their efforts to convey indirect criticism of statesmen. In this respect, it can be argued that the ideal structures presented in the dream narratives r eflect the changes occurred in the Ottoman social structure in the period between the end of the 19 th century and the first quarter of the 20 th century, as well. The aim of this article is to discuss the concept of community and individual in the ideal social structure fictionalized in a text, which was written in the demise of the Ottoman Empire. This text is one of the mentioned above and called “ Envisioning Progress and Islamic Civilization in Dream ” (Ruyada Terakki ve Medeniyet-i Islamiyeyi Ru’yet), written by Molla Dâvud-zâde Mustafa Nâzim Erzurumi. Both the emphasis placed on technology in the text and its putting Islam as an order in the centre of the text makes it striking from different aspects.

Warning Dreams Preceding the Diagnosis of Breast Cancer: A Survey of the Most Important Characteristics

There are rare reports of warning dreams about breast cancer in the dream literature and even fewer in the medical literature. Anxiety about breast cancer is increasing due to uncertainty about conflicting guidelines regarding mammography screening. The purpose of the study was to survey women with breast cancer who had warning dreams prior to diagnosis to determine the most common and important characteristics of these dreams. Eighteen women with a known diagnosis of breast cancer completed a survey of 19 Yes or No questions about their warning dreams and submitted dream narratives. The five most common characteristics of warning dreams in descending order of frequency reported in the survey were: a sense of conviction about the importance in 94%; the dreams were more vivid, real or intense than ordinary in 83%; an emotional sense of threat, menace or dread in 72%; the use of the specific words breast cancer/tumor in 44%; and the sense of physical contact with the breast in 39%. Warning dreams of breast cancer were often reported to be life changing experiences that prompted medical attention leading directly to diagnosis. Further research needs to be done to determine the frequency of such dreams in women without known breast cancer in order to assess the predictive value of a warning dream. These preliminary results suggest that keeping a dream diary might be a useful adjunct to routine self-examination as part of a breast self-care program, particularly for women in a high-risk category.

The Mother Liquor

This text, as a whole, is a dream narrative. Only the parts in italics are the impressions that came to me upon awakening, as I wrote down the dream. I felt I should not dismiss them, as they emphatically asked to be recorded. They are herein transcribed in the strict order in which they came.

Dream Narratives in Patients with Eating Disorders

Dream Narratives in Patients with Eating Disorders

Folkloric Language of the Dream: Oneiric Narratives in the Social Communication

In culture research, just like in psychology, there is a tendency of defining dreams as specific language, characterized by its unique structure and meaning. Thus, distinction between absolutely individual language of the dream, which is, according to the cultural scholar Yuri Lotman, unsuited to communication, and the language of the dream narrative, which turns private oneiric experience into a public social performance, directly connected to tradition and social communication, acquires particular relevance.Here, several relevant aspects of the dream narratives as elements of the traditional communication are examined in greater detail. While studying the dream narratives recorded in the course of approximately a decade in various parts of Lithuania, it was noted that narrators belonging to the elder generation quite frequently refer to delivering a message gained in the dream (i. e., when the dreamer believes to have dreamt of something significant) to a person that has been dreamt of or is closely related to the deceased appearing in the dream (in order to warn or inform the person in question of something, or in order to encourage them to take certain action). The article is focused on the ways that such communication of the dream message affects the behavior of the community members and their relationships. Another group of the dream narratives analyzed in the article consists of stories about the deceased applying for help in the dreams. Here, narratives involving the deceased unexpectedly turning up in the dreams of strangers (not the family members or relatives) and asking for something, are considered. Like the whole paradigm of oneiric narratives associated with the requests of the deceased in general, these narratives support the essential notion shaped by tradition and religious practices: namely, that requests from the deceased are never accidental (the deceased only apply for help when it is necessary) and must be granted immediately. It seems that in such atmosphere of full-scale caring about the deceased sighted in dreams, the opposition of one’s own vs. strange is totally abolished.The dream narratives as elements of traditional communication correspond to the general view supported by many researchers maintaining that folklore is a communication phenomenon par excellence, provided it is viewed not just as a jumble of separate pieces, but rather as a continuous flow of tradition, as ways and processes of supporting the communal ties and mutual understanding, of sharing values and living accordingly.

Dreams in Cultural History: Dream Narratives and the History of Subjectivity

The article focuses on dreams as sources for European cultural history by showing how subjectivity can be historicized. Basing its analysis on twenty-one published dream narrations of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century about death and dying, this article examines which versions of the self become recognizable when one faced death, dying, and the end of life. These dream narrations provide insights into individuals' patterns of interpretation in their ambivalent contexts of norms, wishes, ideals, and fears. The dream narrations focus on various topics: dreams and visions of resurrection, the Last Judgment, and deceased close relatives. And some authors also reflect on the themes of life as a shadow and as a dream. Despite the quite heterogeneous source material, all of these dream narrations involve views of the self, for dreams about the end of life, death, and dying are closely related to writers' quests for identity. It shows how dreams work as catalysts for shaping spaces of the self.

Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece: From Antiquity to the Present editor by Steven M. Oberhelman (review)

Reviewed by: Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece: From Antiquity to the Present editor by Steven M. Oberhelman Peter S. Allen Steven M. Oberhelman, editor. Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece: From Antiquity to the Present. Surrey, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2013. 341 pp. Cloth £70/$119.95. Dreams are a part of everyone’s life. We try to interpret them, we try to control them, and we sometimes base important life decisions on them. Moreover, there is good evidence that we have been doing all of these things for a very long time. The authors of the articles in Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece chronicle such efforts among Greeks going back several thousand years. From early on, Greeks were not only concerned with dreams, but fortunately for subsequent generations, they wrote a great deal about dreams and their putative meanings. Dozens of sources are cited in these articles, attesting to the interest in dreams from early times to the present. Several themes emerge from these articles. Perhaps the most significant is the connection between dreams and health. Scattered all over the eastern Mediterranean were dozens of healing sites called Aesclepieia (after Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine and healing) where people would go to find cures for various maladies. Dreams and the interpretation thereof played a prominent role in the diagnosis and treatment of virtually every ailment, both physical and psychological. From the earliest times for which we have records, close links between dreams, disease, and healing were clearly established. It is the multifarious ways in which these links were made and exploited that comprise most of the material in this volume. Such seminal figures as Hippocrates and Galen employed dream interpretation and dream therapy in their treatment of virtually all diseases. Inducing dreams and interpreting them were central features of their diagnoses and praxis. All of this is skillfully illuminated here by an international collection of scholars with true expertise on the subject. Antiquity Maithe Hulskamp considers the outlook on dreams of such figures as the Hippocratics and Galen, arguing that some ignored dream contents and focused only on dream types for the sole purpose of diagnosis, whereas others used dreams for both medical diagnosis and prognosis. She also maintains that Galen put less stock in dreams than most scholars believe. [End Page 452] Louise Cillers and François Pieter Retief distinguish between two types of dreams involved in medicine: prophetic dreams which were seen as messages from the gods and dreams with physical origins that could be employed for pragmatic and diagnostic purposes. They maintain, however, that at the Asclepieia these two types tended to merge with dreams being viewed as messages from the god specifically on medical matters. Similarities in a representation of “medical dreams” described in various Hippocratic texts and some from the Asclepieion of Epidauros are the subject of Lee Peavey’s astute contribution. Since the standard edition of the works of Hippocrates runs to ten volumes, Peavy is quite selective here, but extremely insightful. He focuses, in particular, on the interpretation of dreams for the purposes of diagnosis and prognosis. His essay is larded with excellent examples and commentary on them. Janet Downie’s piece focuses on the dream narratives contained in a single work, Hieroi Logoi, by Aelius Aristides, a second century AD orator whose two years at an Asclepieion in Pergamum are the source of his writings. Aristides is perhaps the sole individual from antiquity who wrote about his own dreams. On the basis of an examination of the language and syntax of the writing, Downie maintains that the interpretations of dreams in this text are different from the interpretations of others. Moreover, unlike some of his contemporaries, e.g., Galen and Artemidorus, Aristides addresses non-meaningful dreams quite extensively, applying the same interpretative devices as others did to more significant dreams. Artemidorus, a second century AD professional diviner, has left us with an important text on the interpretation of dreams in antiquity, the Oneirocritica, which is the subject of Christine Walde’s contribution. She chronicles the definition, frequency, and causes of illness contained therein with an emphasis on the role of dreams in predicting and diagnosing illness. She...

At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi by Janet Downie (review)

Reviewed by: At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi by Janet Downie Dana Fields Janet Downie. At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. x, 223. $74.00 (hb.) ISBN 978–0-19–992487–5. Could we be witnessing an Aelius Aristides revival? Downie’s new book comes on the heels of several other monographs and an edited collection, all devoted to the author once called “suffering and insufferable.”1 The possibility of such a revival would likely please Aristides himself, especially as Downie presents him [End Page 135] in this study, which emphasizes the orator’s preoccupation with his posthumous legacy. Downie treats the unusual form of the Hieroi Logoi as a deliberate literary innovation by Aristides (rather than some failing on his part, as is so often assumed), and argues that the very strangeness of the text speaks in important ways about Aristides’ literary ambitions and sense of his place in the world. In fact, one of the greatest contributions of this book is the thoughtful way in which it approaches the jumbled impression created by the Hieroi Logoi as a whole, arguing that Aristides aimed to make the work an “open text” (one that reveals its process of composition) in order to call attention to problems of memory and memorialization, and “to capture more adequately the hybrid voice that he sees as characteristic of human-divine collaboration” (39; see also 128–29). Downie takes this argument even further when she suggests that the work does not aim to be sequential or complete, but rather “atemporal, comprehending the divine perspective of eternity” (51). Thus Aristides uses the surface disorder of the Hieroi Logoi to convey his closeness to the god Asclepius, who can be seen as both the dedicatee and the coauthor of Aristides’ works. In discussing Aristides’ dream narratives, Downie argues that we should understand as his aim the rhetorical effect of enargeia or “vividness.” Downie sees this as a sign of the author’s literary ambition because dreams provide “the ultimate test of enargeia in language,” in that “their status as objects of perception is ambiguous” (67). Dreams provide opportunities for self-promotion in other ways as well; by having interpretation occur within the dream itself, Aristides “turns his dreams into a free narrative space backed by divine endorsement, which allows him to dwell on the social and professional implications of his dreams” (79). Likewise, in his therapeutic stunt-bathing, “Aristides is engaged in the production of thaumata” (102), a term that encompasses not just divine miracle, but also personal heroism and the spectacles of contemporary agonistic elite culture. While Downie’s focus is largely on Aristides’ professional ambitions, it would be wrong to read her approach as cynical; she points out that “his healing narrative is concerned with describing not a return to health precisely . . . but rather the attainment of a state that exceeds any human conception of health: a feeling of perfect wholeness in communion with the god” (104). Yet this intimacy with the god also makes it possible for Aristides to return to his rhetorical career, as well as bestowing upon him the glamor of divine favor. Ultimately, Downie argues that rhetoric and religion are closely intertwined throughout Aristides’ work, and that the orator seeks to claim for prose the divine inspiration usually seen as belonging only to poetry. We see this not only when Aristides’ dreams place him among the great Greek writers of the past, but also when he seeks immunity from local and provincial offices on the basis of his special oratorical gifts and with the backing of Asclepius. This book reveals Downie’s profound engagement not just with the Hieroi Logoi but also with Aristides’ entire (and extensive) oeuvre. Her discussion of the text also includes comparisons with the presentation of divinity in earlier Greek poetry and with other ancient works on dreams, as well as addressing Aristides’ reception in later antiquity and making many brief references to Aristides’ contemporaries. Yet this is a book very much centered on Aristides himself, and the scope of the study will inevitably limit its...

‘She read me a prayer and I read it back to her’: Gagauz Women, Miraculous Literacy and the Dreaming of Charms

This paper explores the polyvalent and gendered nature of the relationship between the practices of reading and charming and the Mother of God in the dream narratives of Gagauz women in the Republic of Moldova. The most widespread healing text used by this Orthodox Christian minority, The Dream of the Mother of God , is paradigmatic of this relationship being the principle ‘site’ where images of and beliefs about healing and dreaming meet with women’s reading and writing practices. Women’s knowledge of reading and charming constitutes dangerous knowledge and their dream narratives of literacy and healing represent an important way in which gender and identity are performed by this group of women. I argue here that although dreams with the Mother of God and her text represent transgressions of patriarchal religious boundaries their ability to contribute to the reimagining or renegotiation of gendered social roles for these women is limited.

Visions of Muhammad in Bukhara and Tabaristan: Dreams and Their Uses in Persian Local Histories

Persian authors couched claims to the religio-political authority and legitimacy of their cities through dream narratives in local histories written between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Persians did not always fit neatly into genealogical claims to legitimacy like the Arab descendants of Muḥammad and his clan, and dreams form alternate avenues that sanctify and legitimate specific Persian cities and individuals. Dream narratives embedded in Tārīkh-i Bukhārā and Tārīkh-i Ṭabaristān are literary devices that bring the prestige of religious authority to their city and province and to specific persons. These dream narratives are not only windows into understanding the broader social, political, and religious contexts of local histories but also the particular anxieties and priorities of the authors.

‘She Read Me a Prayer and I Read It Back to Her’: Gagauz Women, Miraculous Literacy and the Dreaming of Charms

This paper explores the polyvalent and gendered nature of the relationship between the practices of reading and charming and the Mother of God in the dream narratives of Gagauz women in the Republic of Moldova. The most widespread healing text used by this Orthodox Christian minority, The Dream of the Mother of God, is paradigmatic of this relationship being the principle ‘site’ where images of and beliefs about healing and dreaming meet with women’s reading and writing practices. Women’s knowledge of reading and charming constitutes dangerous knowledge and their dream narratives of literacy and healing represent an important way in which gender and identity are performed by this group of women. I argue here that although dreams with the Mother of God and her text represent transgressions of patriarchal religious boundaries, their ability to contribute to the reimagining or renegotiation of gendered social roles for these women is limited.

Dream Narratives in Patients with Eating Disorders

Dream Narratives in Patients with Eating Disorders

Forms of Perspective and Chaucer's Dream Spaces: Memory and the Catalogue in <em>The House of Fame</em>

In the medieval intellectual tradition, the interior of an architectural space was well established as a metaphor for a different kind of interiority, the invisible space within the mind. The classical conceit of the memory palace--an ancient rhetorical technique for the organization of the memory as an internalized series of rooms--provided medieval authors with a practical tool for mnemonic enhancement as well as an imaginative means by which to link mental and physical interiors within the spaces of narrative. (1) Several recent discussions of space in medieval English literature, building on the work of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, have explored the social, political, and cultural implications of but few have closely considered the relationship between these two different forms of interior the material and the mental/memorial. (2) The role that plays in the narrative representation of space fundamentally links these two forms of interiority, and, in his discussion of Perspective and the presentation of space, F. K. Stanzel usefully emphasizes the connection between visual or spatial and the subjective perspective of narration (115-22; section 5.2). Tracing the complexity of interior spaces in inward-looking medieval fictions can extend and nuance the conclusions about in narrative that Stanzel draws based largely on 19th and 20th-century novels. (3) Although in the past romance has played the most prominent role in the application of narrative theory to medieval texts, (4) the conventions of the medieval dream vision--in which an autodiegetic narrator or narrator-hero typically reports the events of a dream after waking--ideally position this genre for investigation in terms of the relationship between and the representation of interior space. (5) For medieval writers like Chaucer, the depths of the mind and physical interior spaces could not be mapped onto one another perfectly, nor were they incommensurable: the medieval first-person narrative can demonstrate how the perceiving mind or consciousness organizes and makes sense of physical space in ways that resemble how the trained mind or memory organizes and makes sense of its own accumulated cognitive contents. Three of Chaucer's dream visions--The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame--closely link interior spaces with subjectivity, inwardness, and problems of perspective, but this essay will focus primarily on The House of Fame, a dream narrative structured as a personal journey through a series of three interior spaces. (6) Each of these dream visions, however, follows its respective narrator-dreamer as he moves through various interior spaces, on one level reproducing the mise-en-abyme effect of framed dream narrative itself, a multiply embedded voyage within the mind. The temples, palaces, walled gardens, and stranger interiors represented in these dream poems are most often constructed through the literary device of the catalogue, in which the contents of a given room are listed at length but rarely placed in precise spatial relation to one another. Drawing uncritically on Stanzel's distinction between perspectival and aperspectival spatial representation, one might not hesitate to associate these dream visions with the uncomplicated aperspectivism of the early Victorian novels to which he points. Yet the contexts and complications of spatial in medieval narratives like the House of Fame challenge the binary impulse of typologies like Stanzel's. The poem includes both aperspectival inventories and a handful of more perspectival depictions of spatial relations among objects, but the key technique of the list or catalogue, understood in the context of the medieval rhetorical arts, must be reevaluated as a unique organizing schema for representing and making sense of interior spaces. To employ the catalogue as the primary tool of spatial description may seem capable of producing only a jumbled, aperspectival representation of an interior, but the strategy aligns with the narrator's difficult task of organizing into narrative description and rendering intelligible the overwhelming profusion of information confronting his senses. …

A fantasia não dorme: linguagem da noite e males da ilusão

Na continuidade dos estudos sobre os males da alma segundo a cultura luso-brasileira e europeia dos séculos XVI ao XVIII, este artigo investiga diferentes interpretações e usos das narrativas oníricas. Em especial, trata de desordens causadas pelos excessos do gozo entendidos como engodos do mundo.