> Was there pressed grass where she lay?
>
Lay he brode waking?
One of the most interesting things (to me) about many of these dreams is,
rather than the having of them, the remembering of them. I have had, like
all of you, I suppose, hundreds of memorable dreams in my age of man; but
can remember, now, only a handful (and, alas, they are irrelevant). The
urge, or need, to remember a dream upon waking often fails, even when
intensively cultivated; and often (always?) dreams can only be reliably
encoded in the memory if they are narrated in words, immediately, and
repeatedly, in subsequent conscious experience. What has fascinated me
about many of these dream-stories (like Anne's, for example) is their
story quality: the way they have been assimilated as narratives into
waking interpretations of self, given to oneself, and to others; they do
work. Dreams in themselves, in the having, are less interesting than the
invention of them, and the disposing of them. What do we come to know
about ourselves not from our dreams, but from the way we need to use, and
share certain dreams?
Is this something that we have tended to overlook in the interference of
Archimago in Redcrosse's dream-sleep? The epistemological confusion in The
Faerie Queene (for Redcrosse, for Arthur) about whether they have seen
(aisthesis) the truth (episteme), or merely a vision (doxa) obviously
draws on the vast skeptical tradition (Sextus Empiricus, Academica,
Diogenes Laertius; but also Greek tragedy) newly available and current in
the 1580s and 1590s after Etienne's editions of 1563-69; but ought we to
be thinking not only of the epistemological status of these dreams as
evidentia, or 'warrant', but also about the way they subsequently become
narrativized in psychological/social transactions? Redcrosse's encounter
with Errour precedes his hermeneutical error, and the forsaking of Una;
might we think of Spenser as psychologizing the very human need to
interpret and tell a story about a dream that fits the contextual
requirements of a subsequent social, psychological, political situation?
I've obviously been using rhetorical terms throughout--inventio,
dispositio--and I think that perhaps this is an idea basic to a rhetorical
understanding of how information is met with, acquired, and systematized:
does disposito in fact contaminate inventio? Are we, like Redcrosse (like
Arthur?), psychologically speaking prisoners of the need of the now? Do we
unwittingly rewrite experience in the now to serve a future need? Do we
not have, but remember, dreams?
This is what rivets me in Wyatt's poem every time: 'It was no dreme'. The
sudden interference of this judgment (had we any reason to think it a
dream before this line?) completely reverses for me, in the opening of the
third stanza, what has come before. I had accepted the story, till then;
suddenly I was aware that its status was contested; and in that
contestation, the assertion of its truth becomes the movement that effects
its historical positioning, not in my perception, but it my memory. It is
a movement like mourning, and it is a grief that like Wyatt, I want to
circulate.
Ultimately the truth value of the dream or vision may not be so important
as the memorialization of communicating, circulating, narrativizing, and
applying a dream. I lay brode waking.
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