On Dreams and Literature
“We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.”
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611)
“A candy-colored clown they call the sandman/tiptoes to my room every night/just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper/’Go to sleep, everything is alright.’”
— Roy Orbison, “In Dreams” (1963)
Amongst the green-dappled Malvern Hills, where sunlight spools onto spring leaves like puddles of water in autumn, a peasant named Will is imagined to have fallen asleep on a May day when both the warmth and the light induce dreams. Sometime in the late fourteenth-century (as near as we can tell between 1370 and 1390), the poet William Langland wrote of a character in Piers Plowman who shared his name and happened to fall asleep. “In a summer season,” Langland begins, “when soft was the sun, /I clothed myself in a cloak as I shepherd were… And went wide in the world wonders to hear.” Presentism is a critical vice, a fallacy of misreading yourself into a work, supposedly especially perilous if it’s one that’s nearly seven centuries old. Hard not to commit that sin sometimes. “But on a May morning,” Langland writes, and I note his words those seven centuries later on a May afternoon, when the sun is similarly soft, and the inevitable drowsiness of warm contentment takes over my own nodding head and drowsy eyes so that I can’t help but see myself in the opening stanza of Piers Plowman.
“A marvel befell me of fairy, methought./I was weary with wandering and went me to rest/Under a broad bank by a brook’s side,/And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the water/I fell into a sleep for it sounded so merry.” Good close readers that we are all supposed to be, it’s imperative that we don’t read into the poem things that aren’t actually in it, and yet I can’t help but imagine what that daytime nocturn was like. The soft gurgle of a creek through English fields, the feeling of damp grass underneath dirtied hands, and of scratchy cloak against unwashed skin; the sunlight tanning the backs of his eyelids; that dull, corpuscular red of daytime sleep, the warmth of day’s glow flushing his cheeks, and the almost preternatural quiet save for some bird chirping. The sort of sleep you fall into when you’re on a train that rocks you to sleep in the sunlight of late afternoon. It sounds nice.
is of a medieval poetic genre known as a , or even more enticingly as a Most famous of these is ’s where its central character (who as in shares the poet’s name) discovers himself in a less pleasant wood than does Will, for that “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,/I found myself within a shadowed forest,/for I had lost the path that does not stray.” The Middle Ages didn’t originate the dream vision, but it was the golden age of the form, where poets could express mystical truths in journeys that’s ’s and the anonymously written (by the same lady or gent who wrote ). Those are only English examples (or I should say examples by the English; Gower was writing in Latin), for the form was popular in France and Italy as well. explains in that while sleeping “we undergo experiences in which we are freed from the constraints of everyday possibility, and which we feel to have some hidden significance,” a sentiment which motivated the poetry of Langland and Dante.
