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A midsummer night’s dream

Posté par admin
vendredi 12 août 2005 [n° 301]

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, wrote the famous play : “Life is a dream“.

SCENE XVIII.

SIGISMUND :

That is true: then let’s restrain
This wild rage, this fierce condition
Of the mind, this proud ambition,
Should we ever dream again:
And we’ll do so, since ’tis plain,
In this world’s uncertain gleam,
That to live is but to dream:
Man dreams what he is, and wakes
Only when upon him breaks
Death’s mysterious morning beam.
The king dreams he is a king,
And in this delusive way
Lives and rules with sovereign sway;
All the cheers that round him ring,
Born of air, on air take wing.
And in ashes (mournful fate!)
Death dissolves his pride and state:
Who would wish a crown to take,
Seeing that he must awake
In the dream beyond death’s gate?
And the rich man dreams of gold,
Gilding cares it scarce conceals,
And the poor man dreams he feels
Want and misery and cold.
Dreams he too who rank would hold,
Dreams who bears toil’s rough-ribbed hands,
Dreams who wrong for wrong demands,
And in fine, throughout the earth,
All men dream, whate’er their birth,
And yet no one understands.
‘Tis a dream that I in sadness
Here am bound, the scorn of fate;
‘Twas a dream that once a state
I enjoyed of light and gladness.
What is life? ‘Tis but a madness.
What is life? A thing that seems,
A mirage that falsely gleams,
Phantom joy, delusive rest,
Since is life a dream at best,
And even dreams themselves are dreams.1

“Life is a Dream” (La Vida es Sueño), was translated by the Irish writer Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817-1882).

Calderon is sometimes called the “Spanish Shakespeare“, which suggests that Shakespearian and Calderonian dreams are forged in the same vein as Dante’s “The Inferno”, Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” from the “Canterbury Tales”, H.P. Lovecraft’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, Gogol’s “The Mysterious Portrait”, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, “The Wizard of Oz,” , “Alice in Wonderland”.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” says Prospero, “and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” 2

Contemporary artists work with dreams in the creation of their artworks

Francisco Goya’s print “The Sleep of Reason,” in which a man is surrounded by demons and winged beasts is not very different from Bill Viola’s The Sleep of Reason (1988 video/sound installation).

Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has inspired many composers, including Mendelssohn’s famous “Wedding March”.

Peter Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 1, (“Dreams of a Winter Journey”), Richard Strauss, “Elektra”, Benjamin Britten’s opera, “The Turn of the Screw”, Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique” subtitled “Episode in the Life of an Artist”, all these masterpieces have a dream theme.

Dreams are not as alive as when we believe in them, specially when we are touched by true love. As a result, paying a visit to the Parlor of Dreamland was obvious.

Here is a fine example of the “Dream Songs : Dream Days Music by: Charles L. Johnson Lyrics by: Johnson Published 1913 by Chas. L. Johnson, Kansas City, Mo.

Ars memoria


Salvador Dali
Persistence of Memory
1931 Oil on canvas
MOMA, New York
_______________

Calderon’s “Life is a dream is a philosophical lesson on the ghosts of the human mind. But there comes a time when the meaning of what remains of the dreams reveals in its all complexity, the meaning of what has been lost. An exploration of the survival of the dreams of the past tells the story of a continually rediscovered loss.

Raoul Ruiz‘s movies for instance, explore the relation between the real and the realm of dreams in a deep and very complex way.

Prologue: the lights in the film theatre dim. Out of the darkness a voice speaks: ‘In early April 1974 a literature teacher, Ignacio Vega, had to learn the names of 15,000 anti-junta resisters. It took him only a week.’ Colour appears on the screen, a wavering greenness like luminous chiffon, over which the voice continues: ‘He had found a mnemonic.’ As a teenager he had once responded to a bet by learning off by heart the whole of Calderón’s seventeenth-century play Life Is a Dream. Later he uses the play as a mnemonic device for consigning to memory the 15,000 names: ‘Each line had a militant’s name, each metaphor an address, each stanza an armed operation.’ But shortly after this amazing feat he is caught and has to forget everything. With the loss of memory the screen goes black, a voice announces: ‘Ten years have passed. And our story begins.’ 3

Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory” also materialises what dreams are made of. 4

“How can one create a memory for the human animal ? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there ?”

Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals 5

______________________

«Segismundo

Es verdad; pues reprimamos
esta fiera condición,
esta furia, esta ambición,
por si alguna vez soñamos:
y sí haremos, pues estamos
en mundo tan singular,
que vivir sólo es soñar,
y la experiencia me enseña
que el hombre que vive, sueña
lo que es hasta despertar.
Sueña el rey que es rey, y vive
con este engaño mandando,
disponiendo y gobernando,
y este aplauso, que recibe
prestado, en el viento escribe,
y en cenizas le convierte
la muerte (¡desdicha fuerte!):
¡que hay quien intente reinar,
viendo que ha de despertar
en el sueño de la muerte!
Sueña el rico en su riqueza,
que más cuidados le ofrece;
sueña el pobre que padece
su miseria y su pobreza;
sueña el que a medrar empieza,
sueña el que afana y pretende,
sueña el que agravia y ofende,
y en el mundo, en conclusión,
todos sueñan lo que son,
aunque ninguno lo entiende.
Yo sueño que estoy aquí
destas prisiones cargado,
y soñé que en otro estado
más lisonjero me vi.
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño,
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños sueños son.»

Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), La vida es sueño.

Introducción y notas de Domingo Ynduráin, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989, págs. 98-99) – Centro Virtual Cervantes Instituto Cervantes (España)
quoted in Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño Por Lola Montero Reguera, 11 de diciembre de 2000


  1. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life Is A Dream, by Pedro Calderon de la Barca

    MacCarthy, Denis Florence, 1817-1882 translations, Project Gutenberg
    [back]

  2. The PG’s critics pick their dream theme team December 07, 2003 [back]
  3. Raúl Ruiz: An Annotated Filmography – Life is a Dream (Mémoire des apparences, France, 1986) Lesley Stern [back]
  4. Dream Art and Artists on the Web [back]
  5. Sur la question du réveil philosophique, voir aussi : “Quand l’intelligence perce ce voile du principe d’individuation, alors elle juge mieux ce que vaut une vie sous la condition du temps, présent de la fortune ou récompense de l’habileté, qui s’écoule au milieu d’une infinité d’existences douloureuses : le rêve d’un mendiant qui se croit roi ; mais le réveil viendra, et le dormeur éprouvera qu’entre les souffrances de sa vie réelle et lui il n’y avait que l’épaisseur d’une illusion ».

    Arthur SCHOPENHAUER (1788-1860), Le Monde comme Volonté et comme Représentation, PUF, 12ème édition, 1989, pp. 444-445.
    L’individu sur son faible canot par “Nuit à la bêtise” [back]

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