The maximization of the spatial dimension figures among the fundamental organizational principles in Sor Juana's poem, El sueño. Her masterful blending of language and aerial imagery has produced a poetic text which transcends the boundaries of time and space through the establishment of relationships—horizontal and vertical—among distinct spatio-temporal realities, and surmounts the temporal barrier of sequence inherent in the literary act through the techniques of juxtaposition and simultaneity. More than a geometry of universal experience, this composition of the Latin American Baroque is a lyric, oneiric topology of psychic expanses and privileged moments, a fantastic landscape which reveals the dynamic quality of Sor Juana's time consciousness, and where time and space become the vehicles of freedom and flight.

The principal coordinates of Sor Juana's art are spatial forms and their interrelationships. Yet there is in the poetic text of Sor Juana a new conception and treatment of the poematic space that is distinct from that of her predecessors. Whereas the baroque poet seeks to exalt and transform reality, often replacing it with an elaborate ideality, Sor Juana's objective in El Sueño is to transgress the material world, etherealize it, internalize it, thereby rendering the fantastic landscape apprehensible only by the enlightened eyes of the intellect. Her principal concern is not with the glorification of external realities, but rather with an inner essence, that, like herself, is in a process of development. While the baroque poet responds to novelty and variety, associating colors and forms, and moving in the direction of more superficial transformation, the imagining forces of Sor Juana's spirit are guided by the search for that which is essential and eternal. The landscape that is evoked and painted in El sueño is of a highly geometric, stylized nature, a fundamentally mental construct; the description that prevails throughout the verses is that of a natural world that is not sensuous by nature, but rather abstract, conceptual. Sor Juana strives for the creation of an imaginative poetry that, freed from the yoke of description, renounces immediate reality and converts it into a fully and authentically human space of lyrical, subjective intimacy. She acts directly and dynamically upon material reality in order to successfully translate it into an intelligible surreality, at once particularly human and universal.

In an attempt to surpass the limits inherent in the human condition, and transcend the unknown dimension of the intellect and the threshold of illimitable reaches of interior space and time, physical reality is defiantly challenged as this seventeenth century Mexican writer strives to attain a truly authentic creative style that is capable of encompassing the totality of a reality which is increasingly more mutable and polymorphic. Among the dialectics of physical space exploited in this quintessential baroque composition are such qualities as depth, in the colonization of interior, subjective states and places, and the philosophical profundity of the poetic thought; polarity, in the dualistic opposition of imagistic forms and thematic principles, and in the dialectic unity and coexistence of contraries; height, in the identification of the soul with those images of elevation—particularly winged beings—which are associated with the celestial sphere, thereby conferring upon the poematic space a moral dimension; expansion, in the exuberant amplification of significant motifs, and in the establishment of distance—physical and psychic, spatial and temporal—between the images, and between the distinct planes or spheres of the poetic reality; and centrality, in the inferences and references to the mystic Center:

y a la Causa Primera siempre aspiera
—céntrico punto donde recta tira
la línea, si ya no circunferencia,
que contiene, infinita, toda esencia

It is, however, the dialectics of verticality/horizontality and ascent/descent, visible in the numerous images of forward and upward movement, which perhaps most singularizes this poetic text and elevates it to the apex of the poetic canon of the Latin American Baroque.

El sueño is fundamentally a poem of the aerial, an "invitation au voyage" as Gaston Bachelard (1943) would designate it. While the poem may spring from concrete material reality and objective physiological events or occurrences, it nonetheless is superior to these and transcends the limits of time and space inherent in these, transporting them to another, more fantastic sphere where their contingencies are displaced and their semantic function becomes multivalent.

The violation of spatial and temporal boundaries inherent in the poem serves to liberate the poetic expression of the most intimate dimension of the ontological process manifested in the oneiric odyssey of the soul. In the course of just one night, which constitutes the actual literary time of the text, the reader traverses multiple coextensive spaces, accompanying the soul to such remote corners of the universe as the island of Pharos, in the reference to the legendary lighthouse; the ancient capital of Egypt, Cairo, with reference to the two pyramids; and the island of Crete, in the suggested presence of the labyrinth from which Icarus escaped on wings of wax. With the soul acting as visionary and guide, the reader passes symbolically from the subterranean depths of Hades, or the nether world, ruled by Pluto to beyond the celebrated heights of Olympus, higher than the symbolic flight of the eagle, and far above the Egyptian pyramids and the Tower of Babel ("aquella blasfema altiva Torre"), two architectural marvels of antiquity that testify to man's innate desire to scale the heights and to construct an edifice that affords communication with the celestial sphere of Eternal Truth.

The significance of this poem is it rigorous exploration of both time and space as a means of examining subjective experiences, with its emphasis not on the verifiable chronology of events, rather upon the vertical structure of reverie and unrestricted imaginings. Here space and psychic time not only function as organizational principles, in the decisive contrast between "inner" and "outer" time, but also contribute to the overall aesthetic effect of time as an image of space. Through the system of interreferences by which allusions are made simultaneously to past, present and future, through the coincident presentation of mythological, physiological and fantastic phenomena, through the harmonious and poetic fusion of diachronic and synchronie aspects of time operative on all levels of reality, Sor Juana succeeds in transcending time and in creating one of the most solemn and affecting images landscape has ever offered.

The artistic value of Sor Juana's perceptions of the nature of time lies in the poetic energy that these generate, and much of this energy is produced by a pervasive and relentless conflict between the mind's thirst for eternal knowledge and immutability, and its perceptions of an organic changing universe. The opposition of successive temporal phases that comprises a substantial portion of the text of El sueño is essentially symbolic of a moral duality in which the forces of darkness struggle to wrest power from the positive forces of the celestial sphere, the latter of which ultimately triumph. The poetic recreation of the two entities of Darkness and Light by means of the temporal notions of Day and Night serves to advance the notion of the dichotomies existence/essence, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine. These immensities are evoked not merely as particular spaces within the Cosmos, but more importantly, for the sake of their unities. For night and day are but singular, circumstantial moments of darkness and brightness, death and rebirth. And the union of these opposing cosmic forces by means of the poetic word signifies the momentary, motionless crystallization of the particular and the universal. There is within the individual being, just as there exists on all levels of the cosmos, this dialectical and symbolic tension between the light and the darkness: the successive triumph and defeat of reason and passion, intellect and imagination, manifested in the alternation in each of us between the diurnal man, governed by reason, and the nocturnal self, characterized by free and unrestricted flights of imaginative fancy.

El sueño has a timeless, cosmic perspective, the action occurs in the interval that is night but extends into the vast realms of all our yesterdays and tomorrows. The landscape in the poem, with its visionary texture and symbolic topography, has a penumbral aspect. The central image of the initial verses, as well as that of the final stanzas of the text, for example, is that of the night as a bellicose geometric configuration that engages in battle with the diurnal forces of light and reason. It never completely triumphs, as the presence of the qualifying adjective "vanos" suggests—a foreshadowing literally and figuratively of the futile attempt by the soul to scale the summit of intellectual supremacy. Rather, Night, the shadowy conical projection of the Earth ("piramidal … de la tierra nacida sombra"), is limited in its capacity as a ruling force and must exercise its powers within the confines of the sphere of air, which is, coincidentally, the sphere of sound. The dominion of the night over the air is manifested in the very silence which no living creature nor any one of the elements can disturb.

The poet's sensitivity to light is revealed in her treatment of certain themes in a dramatic gray register, thereby transfiguring the fantastic landscape into the atmosphere of the dream. The chiaroscuro interplay between the twilight tonality of the netherworld evoked in the initial verses and the blinding light of Paradise at the end of the poem is but one illustration of the artist's intensification and manipulation of light, which not only contributes to the creation of a centrifugal force that heightens the sense of dynamism and movement in the overall design of the poematic space, but more importantly, modifies space and transvalues local and geometrically exact space into a tonality, a psychic topography. Sor Juana's vision of landscape is like a dream, for her poetic imagination catches the pulsation of oneiric light that works a metamorphosis of space and actual places, establishing a dramatic, pictorial illusion. The fantastic landscape offered in the poem allows interchanges of precision and imprecision, vague distances and vanishings into worlds not realized but only suggested. Such interchanges in space imply interchanges in time, the alternation between outer, chronometric time—episodic, isolating acts in sequence—and inner, psychic time, or the experience of interpenetrating moments felt by the human spirit in a continuum that expresses a condition or dimension of selfhood.

The world of outer time is not defeated by inner time, it is simply left behind, as the soul disengages itself from the temporal chains of the body and embarks upon an inward, intellectual flight to the heights of knowledge. Time in El sueño is best conceived as a progressive image, a process of transfiguration and of mythical evolution, from negative to positive, from darkness to light, from ignorance to enlightenment, all of which can be traced in the gradated presentation of ascendent images, at once particular and timeless. The poetic imagination at work within the poem is based upon the concept of time not as a social construct of horizontality, but rather, as a fundamentally human, interior time whose vertical axis provides a means of evasion from the realm of material reality into the diaphanous sphere of poetic thought and form. Psychic time for Sor Juana is a reflex of the psychic landscape that one would call poetic or fantastic with its shifting planes of reality, its enchanted atmosphere. Such poetic space is the vehicle of flight and freedom.

Throughout the poem time is segmented and structured into nonsequential relationships and surprising juxtapositions so as to give the impression of pictorial simultaneity in space, and to repeatedly distract the reader from the progressive temporal linearity inherent in the literary text. The processes of simultaneity and self-reflexiveness at work within the composition engender a series of interrelated correspondences totally independent of any temporal/causal sequence, as can be observed, for example, in the fusion of distinct spatiotemporal realities—the mountain Olympus, the magnificent Egyptian pyramids, the Tower of Babel, etc.—in the lengthy passage devoted to the pyramids and in the verses that depict the soul's ignorance concerning natural processes, such as the flow of the river and the attributes of the rose. By having to continually apprehend the poem's images and symbols by means of a single, instantaneous effort, the reader is forced to mentally map out the entire system of references and internal relations suggested in the poem in order to fully comprehend the ultimate significance of El sueño. And consequently, the successful apprehension of the poem's images and symbols is achieved only by means of this reflexive act in a particular instant in time.

While the poem transpires in the course of one night, a night that is at the same time every night and all nights, in actuality the principal diegetic, or poetically narrated, event—the ascendent flight of the soul—is outside the exclusively causal/temporal sequence. In order to amplify and optimize the poematic space to allow for the unfettered flight of the poetic idea, Sor Juana fuses distinct temporal spheres in a dramatic amalgamation of past and present times, superimposing, for example, the imaginative world of mythology upon other spheres—physical, physiological, oneiric—activated during the course of the narrative act. The creation of a mythical dimension of time symbolically reflects the repeated, universal effort of the individual to transcend physically spatial and temporal realities in order to enter into the realm of total knowledge.

As the reader can observe from a perusal of the poem's several hundred verses, Sor Juana employs a combination of present and past tenses to describe the events of the soul's oneiric odyssey, thereby imparting a sense of impreciseness and vagueness to this internally spatial and temporal action. After the presentation of night and of sleep as cosmic images, Sor Juana turns away from the exterior world in order to focus on the activities—physiological, psychic, oneiric—of internal space and time, thereby initiating the narration of the soul's lyrical adventures through the open skies of a spatially and temporally boundless imagination:

El alma, pues, suspensa
del exterior gobierno—en que ocupada
en material empleo,
o bien o mal da el día por gastado—,
solamente dispensa
remota, si del todo separada
no, a los de muerte temporal opresos
lánguidos miembros, sosegados huesos,
los gajes del calor vegetativo,
el cuerpo siendo, en sosegada calma,
un cadáver con alma,
muerto a la vida y a la muerte vivo,
de lo segundo dando señas
el del reloj humano
vital volante que, si no con mano,
con arterial concierto, unas pequeñas
muestras, pulsando, manifiesta lento
de su bien regulado movimiento.

The emphasis here is decidedly upon the actions of retardation ("lánguido", "muestras, pulsando, manifiesta lento") and suspension ("suspensa", "sosegada calma"), in terms of both physical and temporal realities ("muerte temporal"), and with regard to the narrative sequence. The alternation of the present tense with the past tenses, particularly in the section of the poem which treats the lyrical events of the philosophical dream, serves not only as a conscious literary device for securing greater vividness, but more importantly, for interrupting the continuity of progression of the narration and alluding to the supreme significance of the internal logic of emotional, psychological states over the causal logic of discourse.

The notion of suspension throughout this passage also alludes to a reality beyond the parameters of the narrated events of the text. The reader, like the protagonistic soul, is left suspended temporarily in the poematic space while the poetess turns away from the linear discourse which constitutes the narration of the epic flight of the soul in order to digress at length upon the regulatory functions of the body which know neither the spatialized time of the clock, nor the human time of the psyche, but follow, rather, the natural and constant, patterned rhythms of biological time. It is primarily through the rhetorical device "digressio" that Sor Juana succeeds in departing from and thereby detaining the central theme of the discourse and enlarging the poetic universe with her knowledge of physiological, psychological, and mythological phenomena.

The idea of separation—"remota, si del todo separada / no …"—denotes the release, or physical detachment of the Intellect, or the soul, from the corporal chains that bind it to the diurnal task of perceptive awareness. The periodic repose and suspension of the physical being during the state of nocturnal slumber does not necessarily imply a parallel quiescence within the realm of mental and psychological activity; rather it opens the doors and windows onto the limitless horizons of oneiric activity. The emphasis on suspension in these verses is an echo of the platonic conception of the relationship between the soul and the body developed throughout the poem. No longer bound by the tethers of sense perception that restrict it to the material realm, the Intellect embarks upon unrestrained pursuits in the limitless spheres of knowledge and imaginative endeavors. Accompanied by the reader, who as an active participant in the recreation of the poetic universe must allow himself to be suspended in the literary act, the soul proceeds along an axis of verticality on its intellectual ascent, through an oneiric time that belongs essentially to the world of poetic forms and images, traversing the fantastic regions of the dreamscape mapped out by the creative imagination of the poetess.

Essential to the comprehension of the poem is the recognition of the insistence of the human spirit on transcendence, on the overcoming of obstacles, both external and internal, in spite of defeat and failure. The recurrent use of certain symbols and images—particularly those of a dynamic aerial and ascensional nature—serves to heighten and confirm the syncretic fusion of multiple spatial and temporal spheres: the physical, the physiological, the psychological and the mythical. Essentially, the reader is confronted with what could best be called a Bergsonian conception of time (Bergson, Oeuvres, 1970): real time or human time ("durée", the constant creative flow of Becoming, suffused with élan vital, or the force that drives it) fuses with time in the narrow sense, spatialized or clock time, in order to create a temporal reality within the poem which is based primarily upon the principle of synchrony rather than diachrony.

The extremely private, human time of the creative imagination, not heedful of the ordinary logical relations of ordered, sequential discourse of the literary text, contracts and expands at will, arbitrarily sequencing and juxtaposing imagistic fragments pertaining to distinct temporal realities, thereby contributing to the amplification of the poematic space, and enhancing the reader's apprehension of El sueño's inherently spatial form. The coalescence, by means of the poetic word, of the dynamic, vertical time of interior, human subjectivity and the horizontal time of causality, further enables Sor Juana to construct a reality that is at once particular and universal, a fantastic dreamscape that transpires beyond the limits of successive time, unfolding within the spatialized moment of the poetic act.

The opening of the world by the poetic word is simultaneously the creation of the world, the postulation of other realities, the perpetual suggestion of coextensive spaces and times. In El sueño, the primary function of the poetic word is amplified, so as not to limit it to merely the creation of an object that corresponds mimetically to a contemplated reality, but rather to transfigure and transform that poetic function, and consequently endow the poetic word with a more plastic, flexible creative capacity. The poetic imagination that reveals itself in Sor Juana's poem is at once the essence and the very experience of becoming. Accordingly, the reader encounters an infinity of threshold images, images which allude to the point of entering or beginning, the place from which the ontological process departs, symbolized in the fantastic flight of the soul.

With its labyrinthine plan of reciprocal relations and reflexive references, it associations, suspensions, interruptions, and imprecisions, El sueño gives poetry the velocity of the dream where temporal relations are lived as a rhythm of intensities and measures that evade strict chronological sequence and spatial logic. Unfolding within the immobilized instant of spatialized time, El sueño is a dream of height which enables the reader to transport himself to the domain of the imaginary, to the cosmic realm of the infinite, where one is free to experience the dynamics and depth, the intensity and immediacy of the immanent and the intimate, both features of the fantastic landscape.