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Spain  Dream  Enrique Fernández-­Rivera S ome forms of baroque art bring to mind a dreamscape so conspicuously that the expression “baroque dream” seems to imply the highest degree of unreality, as in Jean Baudrillard’s famous statement that “the Vietnam War never happened, perhaps it was only a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and the tropics.”1 Although Baudrillard is referring here to how the simulacra have superseded the physical world through the hyperreality of modern media, both periods suffer from a crisis of representation, from an uneasyawareness that the instability that governs the relation between signs and their meanings may be as loose and unfounded as the one at work during dreams.2 In seventeenth-­ century Spain, dreams were instrumentalized in the arts to convey the anxiety that daytime consciousness could be as unreal as dreams. Famously, two of the most representative characters in the period are strongly associated with this question : Segismundo, the protagonist of Calderón’s emblematic play Life Is a Dream, could not establish whether he was dreaming or awake; Don Quixote lived in a dreamlike world of fantasy induced by his excessive reading. For them, a cave could metamorphose into a palace and windmills into giants as easily as in a dream. For as far back as we have records, dreams have had the uncanny capacity to present a purely mental reality that competes with the awakened consciousness in its vividness and credibility. Consequently, since antiquity dreams have been celebrated as a privileged window into a preternatural world inhabited by gods and demons. In the seventeenth century, dreams were not yet the “royal road to the understanding of unconscious mental processes,”3 but the nature of what could be seen through this window was no longer deemed to be heavenly or revelatory.4 The Church and the Crown strongly persecuted those who publicized revelatory or prophetic dreams, not only because they opened a door to all kinds of heresies but also because dreams were often instrumentalized by political factions.5 A well-­ known case is Sor María de la Visitación, a Dominican nun of noble descent who began to have visions in her convent in Lisbon during the period when Philip II occupied the Portuguese throne. She prophesied that the Spanish king had no legal right to the throne of Portugal and that many misfortunes would fall upon him unless he abdicated.6 The demystification of dreams is reflected in the entry for soñar (to dream) in Covarrubias’s 1611 dictionary, which clearly states that dreams are merely nonsensical fantasies that creep in because common sense is asleep: they should be ignored altogether, because nothing is to be gained from them.7 Accordingly, Cervantes makes one of his characters state in Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda: If I were not already talking according to Catholic truth, I would quote what God says in Leviticus, “Do not interpret dreams nor believe in them.” Not everybody can understand dreams so I dare not interpret the one that has upset me so much. I think it came not from the usual origins dreams come from, which, if they are not divine revelation or demonic delusion, come from vapors triggered by excessive food in the brain, or from the matters one has dealt with during the day.8 Having lost their otherworldly cachet, dreams were reduced to a sphereofexistenceofobscureorigins but clearly not divine, whose main characteristic was lack of ontological soundness. This aura of unreality, however, was adequate to continue the ancient literary genre of fictitious dreams.9 In his famous Sueños, Francisco de Quevedo follows the convention of pretending to narrate his dreams, which, being by definition nonsensical fantasies, gave him license to write them as satires that lampooned the society of the day (Fig. 36). Connected to Quevedo’s use of the literary dream as a tool for social criticism was the writing of utopian texts that offered those in power advice as to how to fix some of the many problems that affected the Spanish empire.10 Closely related were the titles that included the word despertador, which can be translated both as the awakener and as alarm clock.11 These texts sometimes were intended to awaken the rulers from their political languor , especially the kings, who had notoriously delegated the onerous task of ruling to a favorite while they wasted their lives in hunting parties and distractions. Most despertadores , however, were religious texts intended to awaken...

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