[In the following essay, Palley discusses the history of the “disembodied soul” motif in literature and comments on Becquer's use of it in his Rimas.]

The myth or image of the disembodied soul, leaving the body during sleep or in a death-like trance, is a pervasive motif of classical, medieval and romantic thought and art. It is taken up by Plato, Cicero and Macrobius, and becomes the basis for the dream-vision of medieval literature, whose paragon is Dante's Divine Comedy. In Western tradition it was Plato who first wrote of the winged and soaring soul, that of the pair of winged horses and a charioteer. When perfect and fully-winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world. In Book X of the Republic, the myth of Er relates how the son of Armenius was slain in battle, but later returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world. He said that when his soul left the body and went on a journey with a great company … they came to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth. In romanticism, the dream and its soaring soul return in Young, De Quincey, Novalis, Schiller and Becquer.

Cicero, in De Divinatione, presumes to attack the practice of oneiromancy, but while doing so engages in perspicacious reflection on the nature of dreams. For in sleep the soul is vigorous, and free from the senses … and, since the soul has lived through all eternity … it therefore beholds all things in the universe, if only it preserves a watchful attitude. Later, speaking of ecstasies and dreams: Those, therefore, whose minds, as it were, despising their bodies, fly forth, and wander freely through the universe, being inspired by certain divine ardour, doubtless perceive things which those who profecy predict. Plato's idea of a free and disengaged soul during sleep is therefore reinforced, and returns again in Cicero's famous account of Scipio's Dream (preserved and elaborately interpreted by Macrobius), in which the younger Scipio dreams of reuniting with his grandfather, Scipio Africanus, on a lofty perch, dazzling and glorious, set among the radiant stars. The older man's philosophical discourse includes a vision of the cosmos, and of the insignificance of Rome in that eternal setting; the genre is not unrelated to the Menippean satire, as cultivated by Lucian and others, although the intent is serious rather than comic.

The idea of the disembodied soul was taken up again by the early romantics and pre-romantics. Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1745) enjoyed a spectacular popularity in his lifetime, and inspired the Spanish pre-romantic Cadalso, but fell later into disrepute and is read now primarily for the splendid engravings by Blake that embellish it. Yet this discredited work contains some lines of exceptional beauty, lines that introduce the romantic theme of the wanderings of the soul in dream:

While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominian spread:
What, though my soul fantastick measures trod
O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom
Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep
Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool;
Or scaled the cliff or danced on hollow winds
With many antick shapes wild natives of the brain?

(Night Thoughts, Part I)

This flight of the self appears in the visions of those great romantic dreamers, Novalis and De Quincey. Novalis, who had been a student of Schiller, imagined vast cosmic voyages within the self (Polen, 1798). His unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, opens with a description of the hero's wild and far-ranging dreams:

He wandered over oceans with inconceivable ease; he saw strange creatures; he lived with many kinds of people, in war, in wild tumult, in quiet huts. he fell into captivity and into most ignominious affliction … He went through an infinite variety of experiences; he died and came to life again, loved most passionately, and was then separated from his loved one forever.

Novalis' novel was published posthumously in 1802; two decades later, [in Confessions of an English Opium Eater] Thomas De Quincey described his passionate, feverish, cosmic dreams. He was every night … transported into Asiatic scenes. In other dreams his alter ego traverses vast lakes and oceans, some populated by a human face, infinitely repeated.

This particular kind of oneiric experience, in which the disembodied soul rises, soars, travels vast distances, in an indeterminate time, becomes one of the characteristic forms that dreams take in Becquer's Rimas, It is, of course, a variation of the dream of flight, the imagination of ascension and verticality whose phenomenology has been delineated with poetic insight by Gaston Bachelard in his L'Air et les songes. Bachelard insists, rightly, that ascension and verticality always imply, metaphorically, a movement to higher moral and spiritual values; and that they express a kind of nostalgia for a state of lightness that we have lost: Is it not the timeless and immense memory of an aeriel state, of a state in which all is weightless, where our material has an innate lightness? Yet in Becquer's dreams, as well as in those of Novalis and De Quincey, the flight itself (so common in recorded dreams) is subordinated to an effortless transportation to higher or distant regions; they do not give us the sensation of flight, but rather its result. This transportation is similar in form to those dream experiences among primitive peoples described by anthropologists. In the Chumash culture of southern California, the eating of the datura or jimsonweed produced colorful hallucinations, and Shamans under its influence thought themselves transported through space and time. Albert Beguin refers to a similar observation by Levy-Bruhl: Pour les ‘primitifs’ de Levy-Bruhl, le sommeil est un veritable voyage au royaume des morts, ou l'ame, liberee, s'en va retrouver les esprits; et c'est la le sens le plus litteral. Charles T. Tart and others have reported scientific research and experimentation in what Tart calls Out-of-the-Body-Experiences (OOBE's), in which the second body or the astral soul leaves the body of the subject to view itself from the ceiling or to visit distant places. It is speculated that the belief in the soul leaving the body at death derives from such experiences. Tart claims evidence to support the veracity of his subjects' accounts of their OOBE'S. It would appear that Plato's myth of Er narrates an OOBE, occurring at near-death. Some of the subjects claim that they are not dreaming while undergoing an OOBE, but Tart admits that it could be a lucid dream, or a dream-within-a-dream, in which the subject is aware of himself dreaming. Becquer's out-of-the-body dreams seem to fit within a pattern of these experiences, especially “Rima LXXV.” This flight of the soul is to be found also in the first of Becquer's Leyendas, the curious “El caudillo de las manos rojas,” based on oriental sources:

Cuando la materia duerme, el espiritu vela. En tanto que el cuerpo del caudillo
permanece inmovil y sumergido en un letargo profundo, su alma se reviste de una
forma imaginaria y huye de los lazos que la aprisionan para lanzarse al eter; alli la
esperan las creaciones del Sueno, que le fingen un mundo poblado de seres
animados con la vida de la idea.

“Rima LXXV” is the most perfect embodiment of this experience. But this motif and related ones occur in several other of the Rimas. The idea of flight and weightlessness is present almost from the start: in “Rima V,” the self (yo metaphorically equals poetry) soars in a whirling cosmos: Yo sigo en raudo vertigo / los mundos que voltean. In “Rima VIII” the poetic speaker is overcome by a desire for ascendence, for pure verticality and aneantissement:

Cuando miro de noche en el fondo
oscuro del cielo
las estrellas temblar como ardientes
me parece posible a do brillan
subir en un vuelo
y anegarme en su luz, y con ellas
en lumbre encendido
fundirme en un beso

The persistent theme of the disembodied eyes of the beloved (as in the leyenda “Los ojos verdes”) takes the form of a dream-visitation in “Rima XIV”: Cuando duermo los siento que se ciernen / de par en par abiertos sobre mi. Like a benign incubus, the poetic speaker visits the beloved in dream or sleep, in “Rima XVI”:

Si se turba medroso en la alta noche
tu corazon,
al sentir en tus labios un aliento
sabe que aunque invisible al lado tuyo
respiro yo.

And in “Rima LXXXVI” (attributed) he once more asks the beloved if she felt his presence in dream, as he, in dream, was certain that he left his body to visit her alcoba:

No viste entre suenos
por el aire vagar una sombra,
ni sintieron tus labios un beso
que estallo misterioso en la alcoba?
Pues yo juro por ti, vida mia,
que te vi entre mis brazos, miedosa,
que senti tu aliento de jazmin y nardo,
y tu boca pegada a mi boca.

In “Rima LXXI” whose two first strophes describe what Freud called the hypnagogic state (between dreaming and awakening), the poetic speaker later suggests that he had a telepathic or precognitive dream:

Y oi como una voz delgada y triste
que por mi nombre me llamo a lo lejos,
y senti olor de cirios apagados
de humedad y de incienso.
Entro la noche y del olvido en brazos
cai cual piedra en su profundo seno;
Dormi y al despertar exclame: Alguno
que yo queria ha muerto!

Here the dreamer is visited by the disembodied soul of a recently departed friend, suggesting an experience which can be traced back to the myth of Er and to a variety of primitive beliefs. [In Parapsychological Dream Studies, in The Dream and Human Societies, eds. G. E. Von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois, 1966] Martin Ebon presents a balanced and objective view of parapsychological studies referring to the telepathic or precognitive dreams, and offers tentative evidence for their existence.

In “Rima LXXV” Becquer provides us with the most thorough rendering of the oneiric experience of the disembodied soul. This poem, one of Becquer's finest and best known, is quoted in its entirety:

Sera verdad que cuando toca el sueno
con sus dedos de rosa nuestros ojos,
de la carcel que habita huye el espiritu
en vuelo presuroso?
Sera verdad que huesped de las nieblas,
de la brisa nocturna al tenue soplo,
alado sube a la region vacia
a encontrarse con otros?
Y alli desnudo de la humana forma,
alli los lazos terrenales rotos,
breves horas habita de la idea
el mundo silencioso?
Y rie y llora y aborrece y ama
y guarda un rastro del dolor y el gozo,
semejante al que deja cuando cruza
el cielo un meteoro?
Yo no se si ese mundo de visiones
vive fuera o va dentro de nosotros:
Pero se que conozco a muchas gentes
a quienes no conozco.

It is noteworthy that Becquer presents these ideas and images relating to the disembodied soul as questions, in the first four strophes. The anaphora sera verdad? reinforces the hypothetical quality of his meditations. The poet is reluctant to assert as truths the whisperings of his intuition, in an age in which science was already challenging the domain of poetry and myth. Only in the final strophe does the interrogation cease, when the speaker insists on a kind of knowing that is the sole province of intuition, and not of science.

In the first strophe is announced that vertical flight, common to most dreams of this nature, which Bachelard associates with a movement to higher moral or spiritual values. The dream experience of lightness, freedom and flight is suggested in the third and fourth verses, in which the soul, like that of Saint John of the Cross, is freed from the carcel it inhabits. Like the casa of Saint John, the carcel refers, of course, to the body. In the second strophe, the soul, winged like Plato's metaphor of the horses and charioteer, soars upward to meet other souls freed from other bodies. The third strophe suggests an even closer affinity to the Platonic tradition: here, the spirit inhabits the silent world of the idea. The soul, although naked of human form, nevertheless laughs, loves and hates, and leaves a trail, in the beautiful comparison with the meteorite. In the last strophe, the speaker admits that he is uncertain of the real nature of his dream. The spirit could leave the body, as he suspects, or it could all occur within the unconscious, dentro de nosotros. The final lines are an almost prosaic statement of belief in a region of spiritual activity which science is never likely to explain, a region which he alluded to in “Rima IV”: Mientras … en el mar o en el cielo haya un abismo / que al calculo resista. These lines also suggest the possibility of a deja vu. At times we have the sensation that an activity or image of the present waking moment may have occurred before in dream.

Martin Ebon thus concludes his article on the telepathic dream:

And tears and tortures, and the touch of joy:
They leave a weight upon our waking thought …

(from first stanza)

“Beyond this, however, man's dreams have retained, even in our supposedly rational civilization, an aura of the unworldly; man, dreaming, is somehow believed to be in touch with worlds outside his daily ken, even if these be the worlds of his own unconscious. In dreams, we meet the archaic language of symbols; we are in touch with our ancient tradition of myth, or with childhood wishes and fears. These oneiric experiences are common enough to suggest some basis in reality. Becquer, hardly cognizant of problems of verifiable evidence, felt himself in tune with, and gave expression to, those ancient myths and archaic symbols which are part of our common heritage.

The dream and daydream are fundamental to Becquer's perception of reality, and of his attempts to transform these perceptions into poetry. Aquel fino y profundo Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, wrote Jorge Guillen in his study of dreams in the poet, es el espanol que asume del modo mas autentico el papel de poeta visionario. ‘Cuando la materia duerme, el espiritu vela.’ The line that separates reality from dream is often impossible to delineate: thus the Calderonian equation life-dream reappears, transformed but pervasive, in this romantic context. Seldom are night dreams recounted; but they are alluded to with great frequency, and in the leyendas the dream-vision plays a significant role. At least twenty- five of the ninety or so rimas attributed to Becquer are directly concerned with the state of dream, daydream or sleep. The dream motif reaches its culmination in “Rima LXXV”; the poet here recapitulates the myth of the disembodied soul, conveying it in his particular style and world view. The diaphanous, ethereal, airy images and metaphors, which are characteristic of nearly all of Becquer's Rimas, can thus be better understood as relating to the central dream vision of the disembodied soul, with its ascension and weightlessness.