The Dream and Its Telling.

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Meditating on The Evil Clergyman, which H. P. Lovecraft claims to have drawn from a dream and which he never published in his lifetime (and which is therefore, technically, unfinished), Nanni Harbordt raises a stimulating question, asking to what extent an account of a dream can be considered reliable as such. That Lovecraft spoke of it to Clark Ashton Smith confirms the existence of the account of a dream, not that of the dream itself, still less the fidelity of the narration. Following Bachelard, Nanni proposes reading the dream not as a repository of repressed psychic material but as an autonomous form of the poetic imagination, one that is born already transformed at the instant memory becomes language. The attic, the books, the clergyman, the exchange of identities would then not be the "contents" of a dream but images that acquire body only through memory and speech.

I believe the observation captures the very workings of the experience of dreaming. Ignacio Matte Blanco distinguishes two modes of being in thought, the symmetrical and the asymmetrical: the first, proper to the unconscious, knows neither time, nor space, nor negation, and makes opposites coincide, part and whole; the second, that of the intellect, of rational thought, orders the world into sequences, differences, hierarchies. The language of the dream is symmetrical in kind; its narration is necessarily asymmetrical. In the translation from one register to the other, what in its conception was simultaneous becomes sequence, and what in deep sleep (or in the half-waking state) left consciousness a minimal margin of intervention is filtered through reasoning: the result is indeed a new product, an autonomous narrative. In other words, we may say that no narration of a dream corresponds to the dream narrated.

If the account then passes from private to public, or even literary, the matter grows further complicated, since no one can compare the normalized version with an experience that took place beneath the threshold of consciousness, even for the dreamer himself. Consider the visionary dreams in the lives of the saints, generally elaborated after their deaths, or the dreams of Dante Alighieri, the auspicious or ill-omened dreams of the classics: once it becomes public and shared, the dream resolves itself into exemplary narrative.

When Lovecraft, in his notes on the writing of supernatural fiction, names dream material among the sources from which he habitually draws inspiration, he is thus referring to a use and not an interpretation, in the sense that semiotics gives the two terms: the image is employed as an instrument for producing new meaning, not deciphered in order to trace back to what it conceals. The logic is that of the poets who set out from a spread of tarot cards to compose verses or invent stories, such as Aretino or Boiardo in the 'triumphs'. The figures operate as mnemonic keys, they are nothing but sets of archetypal symbols, they express themselves in the symmetrical language of dreams, but the message drawn from them is conscious, rational, linear.