Thus far in the semester, dream visions seem to hold a really prominent place in Middle English Literature. The dream vision is supposed to be a recounting of what the author may have seen in a dream or vision and how it applies to their waking life. This is not so different from my own experience with dreams before taking this class. I am really fascinated by them and every time I have a pretty vivid one, I tend to do research on various symbols that stick out to me and that I can remember the next morning (a great site for this is http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/). I like to piece the various symbolic meanings in my dream together in order to make sense of the storyline and how it make sense to me personally. For example, a common dream that people tend to have involves death, which can symbolize either the end of something or a rebirth in their waking life. In other words, the dream is supposed to be representative in some way to the author/ person’s personal perspective and what they see in the world/ the waking life.

I guess what piques my interest about this mostly relates back to the author itself and is moreso a question I’ve been thinking about than anything else. If the dreams that we have are reflective of our own lives, how much of these Middle English dream visions are associated with the author’s own personal life? For instance, how much of Piers Plowman is directly from the author’s own experience? And if it is only a dream that they’ve had recounted, what of that dream applies to their own perspective of the world?