Medieval Dream-Poetry Quotes

“Part of the horror of his dream-experience is that he is trapped in a state of fear so deep-rooted as to have become an identity, which makes him from the beginning as unattractive to the other figures in his dream as they are to him.”
― A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry

“Dream is the mirror in which the soul sees itself, and in itself see the image of God.”
― A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry

“His aim is rather to let one person merge into another, to accumulate meaning and emotion round certain magnetic centres”
― A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry

“The fragmentariness of the poem, and its vagueness, are appropriate expressions of the human apprehension of transcendent realities. Despite the use the poem makes of scholastic methods (and we have seen that the Dreamer himself is a kind of barrack-room scholastic philosopher), its main effort is directed against the making of fine intellectual distinctions, and towards the building up of large ideas and images, which often have the vagueness of dreams, and are scarcely definable in theological terms, but which will have power over men's hearts and hence over their deeds.”
― A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry