These words are spoken by Penelope (Queen of Ithaca and wife of Odysseus) to a guest-stranger after she recounts a disturbing dream in which a lone eagle slaughters her flock of twenty geese. In her dream Penelope wept and wailed for the murdered fowl. This vision, which the stranger (the-disguised-as-a-beggar-Odysseus) encourages her to trust, foretells the return of her husband and the violent dispatch at his hands of the gaggle of greedy, increasingly boisterous suitors. Nevertheless, it is apparent that she does not wholly trust the dream. Penelope must make decisions about her future, and though the dream seems to weigh on rather than guide her (she describes herself as “cursed by nightmares”), this exchange with the stranger-beggar-Odysseus prompts her to action. She resolves to stage a challenge for the suitors, an archery contest, and to take the winner as her husband.

Some dreams belong to the horizontal planes of fabulation, and some impose themselves on our vertical lives. Dreams are not just the visions that beguile us at night; they are also the aspirations and ambitions that consume us with the promise of new future. Dreams shape and shake lives; dreams create and destroy. Dreams get lost, thwarted and end up in the limbo of the moon.

In literature and artworks dreams often feature. It is a trope that succinctly captures the tension of pivotal moments, of hopes harboured or destroyed, fates tragic and glorious are announced with equanimity. In Italian paintings of the 14th and 15th centuries, dreams and visions are made charmingly substantial, the scenes depicted somehow feel solid, factual but simultaneously unreal. Like depictions of miracles, they usually unfold within the architecture of early Renaissance cities, gardens, or beds in private chambers that curtains demarcate. Cumulative
events, slow changes of heart, periods of growth or transformation in a life, are condensed and made dramatically decisive. Fear and hope are fleshed into visitations or manifestations that convince and frequently compel. Such dreams in literature and art change lives and prompt action. In just one day the events that Penelope’s dream presage will come true. Resolution for her is blessedly, bloodily imminent.

The works in the exhibition and the contents of the accompanying publication speak largely to the pre-history of the printing press. The dreams referred to are almost all had by men, all are dreams documented and shared in Judaeo-Christian, mostly Christian, and European sources.

Books like humans carry dreams around. I have lived a lot through reading — a vicarious traveller through time and place and consciousness — an incorrigible dreamer. Books, like dreams can put one in a different headspace. When the thoughts of a writer will not stay bound by the paper and board that carries them, a dream can steadily promulgate. On reading about the aspirations of the early history of humanism in the 14th and 15th centuries, the overwhelming impression it made on me was a sense of wonder at the trust that people can put in art, in literature and in a desire to find or create commonality between people. Imagine, I think, feeling that you can make
the world better. Imagine feeling optimistic.

We are all carried by currents not of our own construction. The power of a dream is in its capacity to inconvenience reality.

¹ Homer, The Odyssey, 442-443.