(Continued from my post of two weeks ago.)
At the end of our last installment, we left Lucrecia de León in the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition with her newborn daughter. Little Margarita would grow to be five years old in those same prisons, while the judges of the Inquisition dithered over what to make of her mother’s dreams.
They were troubling dreams by any account—grim, apocalyptic, forecasting a dismal future for King Philip II and his people. They criticized and sometimes bitterly mocked the king. They could be interpreted without too much strain as having foretold the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the brutal sack of a coastal town by English raiders the following year. Not only were they prophetic–or “anticipatory,” the word Kelly Bulkeley prefers in his new book on Lucrecia. They could be frighteningly clairvoyant as well.
Messages from God? Illusions of the Devil? Fabrications of a cunning and deceitful woman plotting treason against the king? The modern scholars who’ve worked with them, whose labors Bulkeley generously and justly credits, have preferred to focus on their message and to set aside the question of just what they were and how Lucrecia came to report them. These scholars’ interest is in Spanish history, not the psychology of dreaming.
Which is precisely what Bulkeley, author of more than a dozen books on dreams and dreaming, most cares about.
First, were these dreams at all? The practice of concocting pseudo-dreams, thinly veiled essays on politics or religion or philosophy, had a long history by Lucrecia’s time. The ancient Jewish “Book of Enoch” (chapters 85-90) relates a long and elaborate dream that supposedly came to the patriarch Enoch as “a vision on my bed.” There all of Biblical history is laid out under a disguise of animal symbolism, decipherable by anyone with the slightest Biblical knowledge. We intuitively respond: there’s no way anyone could have had a dream like that.
We know this from our own experience of dreams–fragmentary, jumbled, baffling and incoherent, yet emotionally gripping where “Enoch’s” dream feels cold and detached.
Bulkeley considers the possibility Lucrecia’s dreams might fall into the “Enoch” category. “It can still be doubted,” he writes, “whether anyone could actually have dreams like hers, so lengthy and visually detailed, with so many full-bodied characters and so much rational thinking.” From his rich knowledge of the dreams that our contemporaries do in fact have–as represented in his great creation, the online “Sleep and Dreams Database”–Bulkeley does his best to allay these doubts.
His arguments are persuasive, for the most part. Yet the subjective impression remains, at least with me: these “dreams,” to judge from the specimens of them that Bulkeley gives, don’t sound very dreamlike. They’re too rational, too ordered, too much like consciously constructed narratives.
Or are they?
In his “Conclusion,” Bulkeley extends an invitation unlike any I’ve seen in any other book. “The dream texts analyzed in Chapter 8 are available for study in the Sleep and Dream Database, where readers can explore the reports for themselves.” To get there, go to the home page, then “select ‘Word Searching’ from the horizontal menu bar. Then in ‘Build a Search’ step #1, scroll down the list of surveys to ‘Lucrecia Journal 1.’ Click on it; then click on the ‘Search’ button.”
When you get there, here’s the first item you’ll find:
“March 19, 1588. This same day the nineteenth of March I went to bed for a siesta just after I had lunch. I dreamt that I was in the middle of a field on a very dark night. I saw many people lying on the ground, sleeping. In the middle of the crowd, there was a well. Some of them woke up and the moonlight was shining on them (although I could not see it) and they said to me: ‘Give us some water! This well has a rope and a bucket.’ I started to pull out buckets of water and then I called them, whistling, as shepherds call their flock to come and drink. They got up and came to drink and all of them were dressed in black, and among them there was an old man who said to me: ‘You will wash these men’s ears with that water.’ And after he said this, I did not see him again.”
Part of this is quoted, and the rest of the long dream summarized, on pages 78-79. Yet in its fullness, as it appears in the Database, it feels different. It’s weirder, more like the dreams I know from my own night travels (travails?). Also, paradoxically, more affecting. Freud, whom Bulkeley mentions only tangentially and with considerable reserve, spoke of the “secondary revision” that a dream undergoes to bring it into conformity with waking standards of rationality and order, further blurring the symbolically expressed “dream-thoughts” that gave birth to the dream. I wonder if Bulkeley, unawares, hasn’t done a bit of “secondary revising” of his own.
As the dream of 19 March continues, Lucrecia draws water all night but then can’t draw any more. “The bucket was sliding down again and again, almost pushing me down along with it.” (Tell me you’ve never had a dream like that.) When at last the bucket emerges, a beautiful boy of about two sits atop it. “His skin was so beautiful that it shined. And … I said: ‘Baby, who is your father?’
“He answered: ‘I am the father!'”
The two set off on a journey to the east, joined by a five-year-old girl “dressed in widow’s clothes,” desperately exhausted in the dream as is Lucrecia herself; it’s hard not to think that she is Lucrecia herself. (And, in her age, she foreshadows little Margarita in a way that’s positively eerie.) “I thought we had walked so much towards the east that we had arrived at the end of the world; we found a rock that seemed to be touching the sky on that side.” They enter a city that the boy identifies as Toledo, where Lucrecia was afterward to be imprisoned. The boy leads them to a church.
“And there I put my boy down on the highest step. And I saw that the girl, who had been grabbing me, moved to one side of the church door. She shook 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.
“And then I woke up …”
Bulkeley calls this “a remarkably peaceful and hope-inspiring dream, with no sign of the three companions [who regularly featured in Lucrecia’s dreams], no geopolitical scheming, and no bloody encounters with vicious monsters.” True enough. But as it also has ominous undertones, foreshadowings of Lucrecia’s eventual fate, which I’d be half inclined to regard as retrospective, composed after her arrest in 1590 and projected two years backward in order to make her sound prophetic. Only they’re much too subtle, swallowed up in a mass of seemingly irrelevant detail.
And possibly, just possibly, they’re to be understood in the context of the dreams of two other young female martyrs–almost exactly Lucrecia’s age–confronting the machinery of a despotic state. Namely, Saint Perpetua, executed by the Romans in 203 CE; and Sophie Scholl, executed by the Nazis in 1943.
The implications of this are so fantastic that I hesitate to even make the comparison. (Which is entirely my responsibility; Bulkeley says nothing of this.) But I think it has to be said, if only to be dismissed.
In the next and final segment of this post, I’ll go ahead and say it.
by David Halperin
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