Authoritative and Explanatory Dreams
in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

David C. Carlisle (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

This paper is part of a study of Apuleius’ use of dreams in his Metamorphoses; it focuses on two passages, one a dream and the other containing an explicit comparison to a dream, and examines these to question how Apuleius’ use of dreams contributes to the effect of his novel on a reader.

There have been several studies on dreams in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in the last decade (Lev Kenaan 2004; Gollnick 1999; Annequin 1996), but more work needs to be done. The focus of such valuable publications has tended to be on the relationship between Apuleius’ use of dreams and some particular aspect of dreaming in the ancient world, whether religious, philosophical, and psychological (Annequin and Gollnick), or pertaining to literary genre (Lev Kenaan). This paper’s contribution, by contrast, is to examine the dreams in the novel internally, questioning their role in the narrative. The central argument is that Apuleius uses dreams to protect the credibility of his narrative by dictating the terms upon which that credibility can break down.

On the one hand, he sets up dreams as the authorization for stories in the first ten books: the best example of this is the baker’s daughter’s dream of her father’s death. Near the end of Lucius’ adventures as an ass, the narrator of the novel interrupts the tale of the baker’s death by voicing disbelief on the part of a hypothetical lector scrupulosus (Met., 9.31). Lucius’ response to this kind of skepticism is to tell how he heard the tale from the baker’s daughter, who learned about it in a dream. The dream thus serves here, as elsewhere, to lend credibility to the implausible.

On the other hand, Apuleius suggests that the relationship of dreams to waking reality is ambiguous and that therefore the credibility of the narrative, when connected to dreams, can break down. Hence, bizarre experiences can be explained away as dreams: the best example is the transformation of the witch Pamphile into an owl (Met. 3.21-22). At this key moment in the narrative, Lucius interprets this unbelievable and disconcerting vision as a dream, thus opening the possibility to the skeptical reader of accepting the incredible parts in Lucius’ story as fantastic and unreal occurrences.

Through Apuleius’ ambiguous use of dreams, the reality of Lucius’ experience cannot be completely dismissed, but may be disbelieved: the implausible parts of his experience may not have taken place in the “real world,” but they still have significance for that world (the alternative, that the narrative be dismissed as an intentional lie and wholly rejected, is thus circumvented). This ambiguity thus opens for a reader the possibility of interpreting the novel from a middle ground, a perspective from which the fantastic may be accepted without necessarily being believed. Apuleius’ use of the dreams secures for his novel the scrupulous attention of his readers, without their rejection of the narrative as a whole for the implausible (yet meaningful) elements it contains.