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A 'dream vision' is a literary genre, literary device or literary convention in which the narrator falls asleep and dreams. In the dream there is usually a guide, who imparts knowledge (often about religion or love) that the dreamer could not have learned otherwise. After waking, the narrator usually resolves to share this knowledge with other people. If the dream vision includes a guide that is a speaking inanimate object, then it employs the trope of prosopopoeia.
The dream-vision convention was widely used in European literature from late Latin times until the fifteenth century. Boethius, in his ''De consolatione philosophiae '' (The Consolation of Philosophy), was probably the first to use this device. His work, composed in alternate passages of verse and prose, was written while he was imprisoned, circa 524 CE.

Contents

Authors and works

Latin

French

Italian

Old English

Middle English

Examples

Authors and works

Latin

★ Alain de Lille, "''De planctu naturae''"

★ Augustine of Hippo, "''Soliloquia''"

★ Boethius, ''De consolatione philosophiae''

★ Cicero, ''Somnium Scipionis''

★ Macrobius, ''Dream of Scipio''

French

★ Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, ''Roman de la rose''

Italian

★ Dante Alighieri, ''The Divine Comedy''

Old English

★ Bede, ''Vision of Drycthelm''

★ Anonymous, ''The Dream of the Rood''

Middle English

★ Geoffrey Chaucer, ''Legend of Good Women'', ''House of Fame'', ''Book of the Duchess'', ''Parliament of Fowls''

★ John Gower, ''The Complete Works of John Gower''

★ William Langland, ''Piers Plowman''

★ Anonymous, ''Parlement of the Thre Ages''

★ Anonymous, ''Wynnere and Wastoure''

★ Anonymous, ''The Pearl''

Examples

★ Dante Alighieri's '''The Divine Comedy''' is an example of the conventions of dream-vision literature; however, Dante specifically tells his reader that his Comedy is ''not'' a dream vision.

★ The Old English Poem, '''Dream of the Rood''', is another example. Unlike Dante, whose guide is Virgil, a real person, the guide in ''Dream of the Rood'' is the Cross on which Christ was crucified.

★ '''Piers Plowman''' (w. ca. 1360–1399) or ''Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman'' (''William's Vision of Piers Plowman'') is the title of an apocalyptic Middle English allegorical narrative attributed to William Langland. It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called "passus" (Latin for "step"). ''Piers'' is considered one of the early great works of English literature.

★ '''The Parliament of Fowls''' by Geoffrey Chaucer features a dream vision in which the narrator falls asleep while reading the Dream of Scipio until he is ushered into a walled garden. He is chaperoned in the dream briefly by Scipio the Elder himself.