Lucrecia the Dreamer by Bulkeley Kelly

Author:Bulkeley, Kelly [Bulkeley, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

Lucrecia’s dreams have large amounts of both friendly and physically aggressive social interactions. Of the few references to sexuality, none of them relate directly to Lucrecia; they all involve the appearance and behavior of other characters. Her dreams include more references to falling than flying, and in only one of the latter references is she herself flying in a magical, physically impossible fashion. Mortality is a constant theme—almost two thirds of the reports have a reference to death. Every one of the dreams includes a verbal communication, and almost every report has a reference to some kind of thinking or mental activity. Half the dreams include something about reading or writing, which might seem surprising from a barely literate individual. Almost all the cultural categories have quite high frequencies, especially religion. In the dreams of contemporary people, the weapons frequency tends to be very low, usually under 5 percent, so Lucrecia’s frequency of 50 percent (including references to spears, swords, knives, arrows, guns, and crossbows) is impressive.

In previous studies of long series of dreams, I have used the method of focusing exclusively on the word usage frequencies and making inferences about the individual’s waking life with this information alone, bracketing out all other personal details about the dreamer and setting aside the dream narratives themselves. This method of “blind analysis” seeks to derive as much meaning as possible from the quantitative patterns of word usage.12 With Lucrecia, we have already discussed her dreams and personal life, so we are not “blind” in assessing the results in Table 8.1. But we can still look at the quantitative patterns in her dreams and make some inferences about her waking life that, even if we knew nothing else about her, seem fairly clear from the word usage frequencies alone. Based on these frequencies, the following inferences could be proposed.

She is a highly perceptive and thoughtful person. She can be characterized as friendly, talkative, and socially engaged. Religion is very important to her. Males predominate in her life. She is not sexually active. She is not especially close to her family. She has nightmarish fears about death, weapons, and physical aggression.

We already knew about these factors in Lucrecia’s biography, but the point here is to highlight their quantitative prominence in her dreams, too. The basic patterns of her dream content accurately reflect many of the most important features and concerns of her waking life.

Those are the obvious continuities, so what about the discontinuities? One possibility is that she has many dreams with references to reading and writing, but has only minimal literacy skills herself. Yet during this period of time Lucrecia had a scribe coming to her house every morning to record her dreams in manuscript form, later to be read by Don Alonso. The theme of reading and writing was definitely on her mind, even if she did not directly participate in these activities. So this theme is better understood as a continuity, not a discontinuity.

The high frequency of references to lions also stands out as unusual and potentially discontinuous with her waking life.

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