(For the first two installments of this post, click here and here.)
Does it make sense to compare three dreams coming from three different worlds, separated from each other by centuries?
Will it make more sense if we add that all three dreamers were young women facing execution by the judicial machinery of despotic states? That they were almost exactly the same age? That two of the three nursed infants in their imprisonment? (But not the third. Already the rigor of the comparison begins to wobble.)
In my previous post, I quoted at length from the dream of Lucrecia de León (1568-?), the subject of dream expert Kelly Bulkeley’s fascinating new book. (You can access the whole report of her dream on Bulkeley’s “Sleep and Dream Database” website; instructions for how to get to it in my previous post.) She’s the second, chronologically, of our three dreamers.
The first was the woman known to the Catholic Church as Saint Perpetua, an aristocratic young lady of 22 who was arrested in Carthage by the Roman authorities in 203 CE. Bulkeley doesn’t mention her in connection with Lucrecia, but does talk about her in his 2016 book Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion. So did the classical scholar E.R. Dodds, 50 years earlier, in his Pagan & Christian in an Age of Anxiety.
Perpetua was threatened with death not for being a Christian or for having taken part in Christian worship, neither of which were criminal offenses, but for refusing to burn incense before an image of the emperor, which was. One pinch of incense and she’d have gone free, no one caring what she might have done in the past. Have pity on your father’s gray hairs, the magistrate exhorted her; burn the incense. Have pity on your baby boy.
She refused the appeal, and died a martyr.
In her prison diary, which you can read at the “New Advent” website, Perpetua described four dreams. In the first she saw a ladder stretching up to heaven, its base guarded by a dragon whose head she was able to use as a stepping stone in her ascent. In the last, she fought in the arena against a fierce Egyptian. Her body changed into a man’s, she vanquished the Egyptian and stamped on his head, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15. (Ditto for the dragon’s head in the first dream.)
The second and third dreams were about her little brother Dinocrates, who’d died of a horrific disease at age seven.
“I saw Dinocrates going out from a gloomy place, where also there were several others, and he was parched and very thirsty, with a filthy countenance and pallid color, and the wound on his face which he had when he died. This Dinocrates had been my brother out of the flesh, seven years of age, who died miserably with disease—his face being so eaten out with cancer, that his death caused repugnance to all men. For him I had made my prayer and between him and me there was a large interval, so that neither of us could approach to each other.”
Allusion to Luke 16:26? The following dream image sharpens the agony.
“And moreover, in the same place where Dinocrates was, there was a pool full of water, having its brink higher than was the stature of the boy; and Dinocrates raised himself up as if to drink. And I was grieved that, although that pool still held water, still, on account of the height to its brink, he could not drink.”
The pool is obviously the baptismal font; poor Dinocrates had died unbaptized. Perpetua prayed for him “day and night, groaning and weeping,” and after a time she had another dream:
“I saw that that place which I had formerly observed to be in gloom was now bright; and Dinocrates, with a clean body well clad, was finding refreshment. And where there had been a wound, I saw a scar; and that pool which I had before seen, I saw now with its margin lowered even to the boy’s navel. And one drew water from the pool incessantly, and upon its brink was a goblet filled with water; and Dinocrates drew near and began to drink from it, and the goblet did not fail. And when he was satisfied, he went away from the water to play joyously, after the manner of children, and I awoke.”
The theme of the incessant drawing of water is echoed in Lucrecia’s dream, nearly 1400 years later. “Give us some water!” the crowds sleeping around a well demand of her. “This well has a rope and a bucket.” She starts to pull out buckets of water, calling to the people to come and drink, just like a shepherd calling to his flock. “In this manner I was pulling out water, giving it to them and washing them all night.”
It comes as no surprise that an old man in the dream calls Lucrecia “a great Rebecca,” referring to the Biblical Rebecca’s watering the flocks in Genesis 24:15-21.
(There was an old man also in Perpetua’s first dream, the one of the ladder to heaven: “a white-haired man sitting in the dress of a shepherd … milking sheep” in the garden at the ladder’s top. “And from the cheese as he was milking he gave me as it were a little cake, and I received it with folded hands; and I ate it.” She awoke “tasting a sweetness which I cannot describe.”)
In Perpetua’s dream Dinocrates is saved, just as she hopes and expects that she herself will be. Yet—and this is an incredibly poignant touch—even in the blessed afterlife, he seems to be separated from her, running “to play joyously, after the manner of children.” (As he was so cruelly prevented from doing in his earthly life.)
Which brings us to our third dreamer: Sophie Scholl, a 21-year-old anti-Nazi student at the University of Munich, executed on February 22, 1943, for distributing leaflets against Hitler’s war.
“On a beautiful sunny day, I brought a child in a long white dress to be baptized. The way to the church was up a steep mountain, but I carried the child safely and firmly. Unexpectedly, there opened up before me a crevasse on the glacier. I had just enough time to lay the child safely on the other side before I plunged into the abyss.”
E.R. Dodds, following the Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, compares the ancient and the modern dreams: Perpetua’s ladder and Scholl’s mountain, Dinocrates and Scholl’s unnamed infant. (Who, I gather, didn’t exist in real life.) “For both dreamers the child is saved, and their maternal hearts are comforted,” Dodds writes. “But whereas Perpetua dreams of a Good Shepherd and a symbolic victory in the arena, Sophie Scholl is content to see herself fall into the abyss: faith in a miraculous future is a harder thing in the twentieth century than it was in the third.”
And Lucrecia de León?
In her dream she’s accompanied by two children, a boy and a girl, who go where she can’t. Like Scholl and her infant, “we climbed very high hills and rocks.” They cross a river, then come to a city which the boy tells Lucrecia is Toledo. She must not put him on the ground, he says, “until you take me to a church that I will show you.” Arrived at the church, she puts the boy down on the highest step. The girl “shook out her skirt that was full of dust, with her face looking at the church. And the boy waited for her to do this. And when she joined him, she put her right hand on his head and they went into the church together.”
They. Not Lucrecia.
* * * * *
Now for the freaky part:
Perpetua (age 22) and Scholl (age 21) both had their dreams when they’d already been arrested and imprisoned. Lucrecia had hers more than two years in advance. My linking of the dream with her imprisonment rests on what I see as foreshadowings in the dream of what was to befall her in real life: the journey to Toledo (where the Inquisition was to imprison and try her), the age of the little girl in the dream (five, which was the age of her real-life daughter Margarita in 1595, when the Inquisitors handed down their verdict).
Lucrecia was 19 years old when she had her dream, 21 when the Inquisition took her into custody.
Does this make her dream a genuine prophecy? Not necessarily. She’d already been arrested by the Vicar of Madrid, the month before the dream. Through the intervention of her patron, the nobleman Don Alonso de Mendoza, she was set free. But she must have intuited that she was living on borrowed time, that they would come for her again.
But her children, fleshly or spiritual, would enter the church where she could not go, and be saved.
* * * * *
Saint Perpetua was thrown to the lions. Sophie Scholl was beheaded. By these standards, Lucrecia got off lightly. Sort of.
Her judges sentenced her to one hundred lashes, two years’ confinement in a convent, and perpetual banishment from Madrid. She might easily have died from the flogging, but she didn’t. They tried to find a convent for her, but this required advance payment. They wrote to her father, asking for the necessary funds. Hostile as ever, he refused. They placed her in a beggars’ hospital and after a few months they wrote to him again.
This time he didn’t even answer. His stony indifference is baffling, as mysterious as his daughter’s dreams. Perhaps in the one riddle lies the clue to the other?
At this point Lucrecia vanishes from history. No one knows what became of her. We may hope, as Kelly Bulkeley does, for the best: help from a well-placed protector, reunion with her husband, a life of tranquil obscurity in some small town. The grimmer scenarios of poverty and isolation, disease and early death, seem more likely.
Four centuries later, she and her dreams live again, thanks to Bulkeley’s new book. I’m grateful to him for this gift.
by David Halperin
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