The Dreamer of the Calle de San Salvador: Visions of Sedition and Sacrilege in Sixteenth-century Spain Book

A whole book of someone else's dreams risks being a yawningly tedious read. But Roger Osborne's The Dreamer of the Calle of San Salvador is the exception that proves the rule. For here are the extraordinary, lurid, blood-red dreams of a 19-year-old girl in 16th-century Spain, called Lucrecia de Leon, preserved for posterity by a curious quirk of history. So mesmeric were Lucrecia's dreams, that a group of local, disaffected clergy began to record them, believing that they foretold all kinds of things about Spain, England, the Roman Catholic Church and so on. They were rediscovered only recently in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition, and Roger Osborne has here given us a selection, along with his own detailed commentary. There is a problem here: Osborne, like the Counter-Reformation recorders from the Inquisition, takes it for granted that Lucrecia's dreams are loaded with political (and decipherable) significance, like the quatrains of Nostradamus. It does not seem to occur to him that Lucrecia, like most 19-year-old girls, was presumably at least as concerned with issues such as men, sex, love, marriage, children, as she was with the complexities of international power politics. And one doesn't have to be a hardcore Freudian to surmise that when Lucrecia dreams of a man who "took me by the hand and carried me on high towards the east, where he sat me upon a tower" or a beautiful woman "with a snake twined around her bare left breast" or of a steeple "which opened up like a pomegranate and I sat inside", she is not, as Osborne's glosses insist, dreaming about the defeat of the Spanish Armada or the death of Philip II. Dreams, like poetry, are polysemous, have many meanings, and for a 21st-century interpreter to tell us what this woman's dreams "really meant", seems rather an impertinence. But read this book, all the same, for the transcripts of these rare and wonderful nocturnal visions from an unconscious world both like and utterly unlike ours. (Lucrecia's countryman, Salvador Dali, would have loved them.) Because there's no doubt about it: Lucrecia de Leon was a beautiful dreamer. --Christopher HartRead More