The Missing Cantos of Paradiso –or- Dreaming of Dante

During the day, we all forget many things, so for example, I recently was looking for my passport, because I was going on a trip...I couldn't find it. That night I had a dream that it was in a red folder. I had left the passport in my last trip pouch...sure enough...there it was (in the red pouch).

The Missing Cantos of Paradiso -or- Dreaming of Dante

"In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood

where the true way was wholly lost".

Dante Alighieri

Bruce Meyer Heros: From Hercules to Superman recounts the story told by Dante's biographer Paget Toynbee of how Dante's The Divine Comedy found completion. While historically uncertain, Dante may have contracted malaria and died suddenly from its consequences. At the time of his death, the last three cantos of Paradiso  had apparently not yet been written. The allegorical dream vision of The Divine Comedy was incomplete, the poetic journey of Dante's life and Beatrice's guiding pathway to the eternal light of the heavenly love of Paradice had met a literary road block. Legend has it that a number of months after Dante's death his son Jacopo had a dream in which his father appeared and told him where to find the last cantos.  After a desperate search in the room that his father had indicated in the dream, the final cantos completing Dante's poetic journey were found. Perhaps Dante had subliminally indicated to his son, that he was hiding parts of the manuscript in his room.

For Meyer the question as to whether the legend of Dante's son's dream is true "is not the point". Divine Comedy inspired Rodin to create (in the heroic tradition of Michelangelo) his plastic art work originally called The Poet which is known today as The Thinker who is contemplating The Divine Comedy. Dante's dream is already in part 700 years old, yet stories and dreams of unrequited love are still poetically circulating in modern dreamers, read; the IIDR interpretation Unrequited Love.

 

 

All material Copyright 2006 International Institute for Dream Research. All rights reserved.