If it is true that the Bible is full of dreams, it is also true that poets and story-tellers have taken over where the Bible left off. Bunyan is one obvious example. He is plainly inspired by the Gospel as he describes the parade of personalities who become part of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. In his masterpiece ‘Piers Plowman’ William Langland similarly discovers a fair field full of folk that includes the disreputable Lady Meed. Both Bunyan and Langland offer their tales in the guise of dreams.
Going further back, we find a more unusual dream-motif in ‘The Dream of the Rood’ (or ‘The Vision of the Cross’) when the writer, perhaps Cynewulf, interprets the crucifixion as a hero taking on his given burden. The Anglo-Saxons were, maybe, prone to melancholy (blame the weather and the long winter nights) but they had an awareness of the centrality of the cross in the Gospel and this is apparent in an Old English poem composed before the Norman Conquest. Gustav Aulen examined the same emphasis centuries later when he wrote on the atonement. Perhaps there is something in the Scandinavian temperament that induces such an understanding.
And then we come to ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Macmillan had just published Kingsley’s ‘Water Babies’ and liked the look of the tale about Alice’s dream of a white rabbit, a Cheshire cat and other strange creatures. The shy mathematician Lewis Carroll (Charles Ludwig Dodgson) found himself dealing with London publishers, a new experience for him as Morton Cohen points out in a recent biography of Dodgson.
With Alice we plunge into the dream-world of the unconscious mind. Perhaps there are elements in our humanity that can be dealt with adequately only in dream-speak. Nonsensical, bizarre, weird our dreams may be but throughout the ages dreams have been recognised as a window allowing us to see what is going on in our head even if we fail to understand it, let alone control it.
In ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘The Tempest’ Shakespeare explores this territory. We understand Caliban when he hears the island’s strange music and is enraptured. We, too, may have occasionally felt that ‘when I wak’d, I cried to dream again.’
ESCOMB CHURCH
A hundred years before ‘The Dream of the Rood’ was written, Escomb parish church, Durham was built. It has been described as ‘the earliest largely complete Anglo-Saxon church in England, and well worth a visit.’ Stones from a nearby Roman fort were incorporated in it.
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