Dreaming of Wild Things

It isn't remotely medieval, but this article got me thinking about my Piers problem. It concerns the critic's changed relationship to Where the Wild Things Are (the book) on the occasion of the new movie adaption. The upshot is that he had greeted the book with an uncaring shrug as a child (and his children now do the same), but "after a decade of talk therapy" he could appreciate how Sendak expressed a complex psychological process in a concise and artistically satisfying fashion.

I have always been suspicious, as I have said, of the imputation of any importance to dreams, but this is really only a subset of my legion antipathies towards "talk therapy." I like some aspects of psychoanalytic theory as philosophy -- it makes good reading -- but the actual therapeutic practice has always seemed a bit of a sham to me. OK, more than a bit. But making this connection really should help me get over my dream-vision allergy, since there's nothing psychological at all about medieval dream-visions; they are contacts with the divine, not with the unconscious.

Dante doesn't (thank God) cheapen his journey by calling it a dream, but there shouldn't be a qualitative difference. A dream or a vision is a revelation as surely as Dante's very physical journey through the architecture of the afterlife. Yet how much immediacy is gained by that physicality! And this is what makes Where the Wild Things Are so fantastic, in both senses of the word: Max doesn't dream that his room is the world: his room becomes the world. This, I submit, is the exact trick that Dante plays. I wish Langland had done the same, but for now I'll just read him pretending he has.