For some years now, historians and literary critics have found it both fashionable and fun to pick on Freud, and one of the easiest arenas for this sport is Freud's treatment of dreams. Straightforward Freudian oneiric analysis simply does not work for dreams and dreamers of past periods and ancient texts. Steven Kruger's Dreaming in the Middle Ages and Patricia Cox Miller's Dreams in Late Antiquity proceed from this assumption of Freud's historical and textual ineptitude. Both of these excellent books illustrate the great chasm dividing our imaginations -oneiric and waking -from the creative minds of ancient and medieval Europe. And both also provide a welcome reminder to humanists, social scientists, and clinicians that dreamland has always been a perilous border territory between the individual dreamer and his or her public culture.
Kruger's book is a revised doctoral dissertation focussing on late medieval dream literature. In order to interpret the medieval textual tradition of dreams, however, Kruger has laid out an interpretative framework derived from ancient experts on dreaming, including Aristotle, Macrobius, St. Augustine, and Prudentius, among others. Antique writers divided dreams into categories, Kruger points out. They asked, are dreams divinely sent or psychologically inspired; day residue, the result of gastrointestinal disorders, or revelation? Are they good or evil? But, having set up typologies and hierarchies of dreams, ancient oneiromancers immediately tinkered with the categories, using dreams to define a middle realm linking divine and earthly experiences. Dreamspace was where humans could experience the spiritual directly, using their imaginations -and methods culled from the experts, examples from the Bible, and direction from philosophers and saints -to interpret dreams' meanings for themselves.
Medieval poets, according to Kruger, drew directly on antique traditions in their own dream literature. Once they had rediscovered Aristotelian method (but discarded Aristotle's notion that no dreams are divinatory), they could reason their way through dream experiences to personal meaning. They could also employ dreams in poems and fiction to invoke the "middleness" of dreaming and to explore transcendence. Thus, in late medieval English texts in particular (which seem to be Kruger's real specialty), dreams allow Chaucer and others to connect the double meanings of literature to an author's practice of self-reflection in writing, and to contemplate the limits of human knowledge. In autobiographical writings, which only became popular again after the eleventh century, dream-writers could include right and wrong interpretations of dreams in their texts; they thus taught their readers how to practice the interpretation of dreams for themselves.
Kruger's nicest passages are his explications of late medieval dream texts, such as Guibert of Nogent's account of his bizarre dreams of his mother, or Nicole Oresme's Tractatus on a dream of measuring the cosmos. Some of the marks of a dissertation remain in Kruger's work, such as the provision of long passages from primary sources and equally long translations (but he might have translated the Middle English while he was at it). And his title is a bit misleading; a book about dreaming in the Middle Ages really ought to in-