In the Epic Name of the Allegory of Love -or- The Art of Loving

Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters -or- The Romantic Passion

Many dreams sent to the International Institute for Dream Research (IIDR) speak of the poetic vicissitudes of Eros light and dark aspects of loving. This dream interpretation is synoptic in nature, synoptic in relation to the dream visions of love and loving. 

From my own perspective, three books come to mind, Jill Tweedies "In the Name of Love" features in her own words; "Love has been, is now and ever shall be our scourge and balm, our wound and our salve, source of our finest and most bestial actions, the emotion that passeth all understanding." Ethel Person's "Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion" provides a literary map of love and its emotional vicissitudes throughout the human life cycle. Finally, it is Erich Fromm's "Art of Loving", which finds pragmatic expression in the dream interpretation posted at the IIDR website "Groundhog Day in the Global Village". 

An A to Z list of dreams about loving and its vicissitudes is presented to you the reader towards the end of this interpretation.

The Allegorical Theatre of Love -or- Romantic Agony of Love Lost

The perennial question is... What is love? How is love poetically configured in our literary psychological perspectives? Are hormones love? Is attention love? Is flirting love? Is appearance love? The Western dramatic heritage comes from the ancient Greeks who saw theatre as a competitive, agonistic and cathartic spectacle. Each new generation becomes trapped in the never-ending theatrical/ filmic cycle of poetic allegory/plot/character/conflict (agon)/history. In postmodernism mass media has created the visual culture of the "Society of the Spectacle" "in the "global village". Postmodernism allows us to understand the poetic unity of the love's dream vision allegory.

Western love poetry arises out of the allegorical dilemmas of mind, body, and soul. Since the ancient Greeks, romantic poetry is how personality defines itself; we have not learned in 2,800 years to take our minds off the poetry of love, sex, power, conflict, frustration, and violence. In reading the poetry of love, many questions arise as to whether the language is personal and private or intended for public view.

Contemplating the allegorical and philosophical dilemmas of love, which include moral, aesthetic, knowledgeable, and metaphysical dimensions, there exists a primary poetic tension between erotic fate and freedom of choice. As the amorous integral part of our Western spiritual, intellectual, sentimental and physical selves, the allegory of love provides the philosophical fibre of the theatre of everyday lives. In "Life Against Death: Psychoanalytic Meaning of History", Norman Brown searches for a new historical form of libidinal Body Politic, with societal adaptation organized on an animistic science based upon our natural erotic and pleasurable sense of reality. As a work of radical cultural primitivism, Brown advocates the compelling needs of the body (ego) over conflict, repression of authority and inhibitions in the civilized society. 

For C S Lewis The Allegory of Love, allegory is when concrete poetic figures represent abstract ideas, emotions, or experiences. To illustrate, Christian in Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" represents Christianity or Christians in general, just as some of the characters Christian encounters in that allegorical journey represent typical Christian struggles such as fear, doubt, temptation etc. In "The Allegory of Love" Lewis examines the nature of medieval "courtly love" and allegory as a medieval literary form. Lewis traces the development of that literary form beginning with the Dream Vision of "The Romance of the Rose" to Edmund Spenser's Arthurian chivalric romance Faerie Queen.

Many of the dreams found in the IIDR's interpretation section address and speak about the various allegorical aspects of loving found both in men's and women's dreams - their expressions, repressions, and complications. For the modern soap opera, the dramatic centre of every plot is love, the erotic and sexuality. Brown's "Love's Body" is a metaphor and allegory for the successful sublimation of libido that produces the creative, artistic and sublime products of culture and civilization. For Brown, educational systems and social order would be dominated by an ecology of the mind, body and soul. Failures of sublimation of the art of loving, are the metaphoric basis for depression, destructiveness and the tragedies of loving.

Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia of Dream Vision in the Global Village

As a part of the romantic movement, Jean Jacques Rousseau in search of child like innocence, believed that we needed a politically level playing field that was transparent in order for real innocence, truth and justice to prevail over corruption and the social darkness of the opaque. Friedrich Schiller in "Kabbalah and Love" (literal translation) sheds light on the political dark side of the intrigues of loving. Novalis "Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia" believed that a universal poetry of art, religion and science could be unified into one encyclopaedia. Read the IIDR dream interpretation "Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Freud's Botanical Monograph".

This romantic novel's montage of dream vision story-lines would provide an A-Z literary guide into understanding the varieties of life and loving, its romantic departures and its literary destinations. Are these fantasies psychological vehicles for solving the conflicts of life and loving, or are they forms of escape? Can all life's problems be solved through a religion of love? While Novalis dream for such an encyclopaedia remains unrealized, the IIDR has been, and is working to complete the enterprise that Novalis and the "romantics" began.

Some of these literary dream vision fragments of this romantic encyclopaedia include; 

 

 

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