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1 results

  • Epilogue: Dream Epistemology and Religious Revelation in Dante’s Vita nuova

  • William Franke, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book:
    Dante's <I>Vita Nuova</I> and the New Testament
    Published online:
    03 September 2021
    Print publication:
    09 September 2021, pp 139-157

  • Summary

    Dreams reveal more than they can know or say about a reality that they only indirectly refract. They present a plethora of manifestly significant, yet non-transparent symptoms and indices. Dreams invite us to interpret their enigmatic representations as encodings of the mysteries of our existence. As essentially a form of interpretation, moreover, dreams can elucidate the logic of the consciously constructed narratives and lyrical compositions of poetry that elaborate and extend into daytime consciousness the mysteriously imaginative modes and darkly felt emotions of dreaming.

    Dreams can have a higher degree of truth than the ordinary empirical reality that presents us simply with one thing after another because the dream reveals more openly and directly the deep desires and shaping drives that infiltrate our actual experience of the real. The dream makes apparently separate things coalesce together and exposes the unapparent connectedness of them all. All become part of a unified meaning which the dream reveals. Poetic and dream knowledge alike furnish outstanding models for religious revelation.