My Dream Life as a Polish Prince

Grappling with Calderón's masterpiece

Plato's Allegory of the Cave, by Jan Saenredam

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When I was six years old, I was playing on the grass near the pool behind the apartment building where we then lived, my father sitting on a bench nearby with half an eye on me and my three-year-old sister. At some point I set off for a little walk down a hill, my sister toddling behind, and found myself on a dirt path in the woods. My sister and I had been walking along this path for a few minutes when we were confronted by a barking dog. My sister began to cry, and I, in an attempt to protect her, threw a stick at the dog, hoping it would run off to fetch it. I don’t believe it did, but neither did it bother us, and eventually both it and we turned around and walked away from each other.

At this point I was anxious to get back to familiar territory. But over and over, I walked back and forth, back and forth along that path, and I didn’t find the pool, the apartment building, my father. Finally, in desperation, I left the path and clambered directly up the grassy hill—and wound up just where I wanted to be, back at the pool, my father still on his bench asking me where I had gone to. I’d forgotten, you see, that I climbed down the hill to get to the path in the first place.

The experience obviously left a profound impact on me, because for years afterward—well into my adolescence—I had a recurring nightmare in which I woke up back on that path, because I had never left it. I was whatever age I was in reality—if I was thirteen when I had the nightmare, I was thirteen in the nightmare—but all the intervening time since I was six, all the experiences I thought I had had at school, home or anywhere, was revealed to have been a dream. In the nightmare’s “reality,” I had never gotten back to the pool, the apartment, my father. Instead, all that time, for however many years had passed, I had been living a feral existence with my sister down on that path, sleeping on a bed of leaves under a canopy of branches, foraging for food, fending off the attacks of wild dogs. That was the true reality of my life.

Eventually I would wake from this nightmare back in my room, in my bed, in my real life—but the transition was frequently a jarring one, because, of course, in the nightmare I had waked to find that this waking was a dream. How was I to know which was which? It wasn’t just a philosophical puzzle; it was a source of profound personal terror. At any moment, everything I thought was real could be torn away, revealed to have been an illusory escape from an unbearable reality. My life could be just a dream, my true reality a nightmare. How could I know for sure that it wasn’t?

I haven’t had the dream for many decades, so I suppose I should be confident by now that the life I’ve been living is real. But I don’t think I’ve ever shaken the destabilizing feeling that the recurring nightmare engendered. Instead, I’ve tried to use it in various ways. I repurposed the story in a shamefully anodyne way to anchor one of the essays I wrote for my college applications (apparently, the moral of this horrifying recurring nightmare was “never stop exploring!) and it’s cropped up from time to time in other writing of mine. (Here’s an example, in a piece about Lenny Abrahamson’s harrowing and powerful film, Room.) More recently, I’ve decided to try putting it to work directly, by writing an adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s masterpiece Life Is a Dream, a play I first read in college and which, for obvious reasons, made an enormous impact on me at the time.

But I’ve gotten stymied right at the outset by something very fundamental about Calderón’s story, and that’s what I want to use this space to ramble about.

First of all, let me back up a bit and describe Calderón’s play, which is probably unfamiliar to most people. (My Spanish not being what it once was, I recently re-read it in two modern English translations, by Gregory Racz and Helen Edmundson respectively.) The main story revolves around Segismundo, Prince of Poland, whose mother died in childbirth and whose father, King Basilio, is haunted by a prophecy that the boy will grow to be a monstrous and tyrannical man who will overthrow his father and tread upon his neck. To prevent that horrible prophecy from coming true, King Basilio has his son imprisoned in a tower from infancy and raised in chains there by his vassal, Clotaldo. Now Segismundo has grown to manhood, and at this point King Basilio’s nephew, Astolfo Duke of Muscovy, and his niece, Princess Estrella, come to Poland to ask to be named the joint heirs of the King, who they think is childless. So before acceding to their wishes, King Basilio decides to try an experiment to see if his son could inherit his throne after all. He has Segismundo drugged and brought to the palace, and told, upon awakening, the truth about his parentage and status. If the revelation inclines him to rule wisely, then he will inherit the kingdom; if not, he’ll be drugged again, returned to prison, and told that all this was a dream.

Well, needless to say Segismundo doesn’t exactly take in stride the revelation that he is the son of the king and was unjustly imprisoned for his entire life to this point. He is violent and impetuous, murdering a servant who tries to restrain him and attempting both to rape every woman he meets and to murder his old jailer, Clotaldo. So they put the “it was a dream” plan into action, returning Segismundo to his prison unconscious. But the rest of the world hasn’t forgotten that there is a rightful Polish heir; the people revolt against the idea of a Muscovite cousin inheriting the throne, spring Segismundo from prison, and join him in an assault on the palace against his father. (There’s also an elaborate subplot involving a woman whom Astolfo has wronged and the mystery of her parentage which comes to a head at the same time.) But Segismundo has been changed by his experience. While he is determined to win his rights, he is simultaneously apprehensive that all of this could still be a dream, and therefore could vanish at any moment. This realization makes him behave more chivalrously toward his former jailer, toward the women he desires, even toward his father. In triumph, he behaves magnanimously toward all those who wronged him, and only punishes the man who sprung him from prison—because he was a traitor to the rightful king, Basilio—and is hailed as a wise and judicious prince fit for rule.

A lot of critical discussion of the play revolves around whether that is supposed to be an ironic ending or not. Is this the behavior of a wise prince, or the behavior of a devious disciple of Machiavelli—or are those one and the same thing? It’s an interesting question for a director or adapter, but it’s not what I’m struggling with. I’m struggling with something much more fundamental, the assumption that a profound doubt that anything you experience is real, that your life might be a dream and your reality much more horrible, would induce you to behave in a less impulsive and egotistical manner, as Segismundo comes to do. Why would that be?

The contemporary version of this story—the Matrix films—doesn’t go in that direction. The original film (the only one I’ve seen; I didn’t really like it, and so was never moved to see the sequels) is a pretty straightforward Gnostic allegory. Neo, at the outset, is perfectly comfortable and socialized, unaware that he’s in prison inside a simulated reality. Then he takes the red pill and learns the reality: everything we experience is an illusion produced by an evil demiurge. One he has pierced the veil, he learns to use this secret knowledge to manipulate the illusory reality in which he lives, aggrandize his own power, and eventually liberate himself—and everyone—from the demiurge’s tyranny. It’s a perversion of Plato’s allegory of the cave, with appropriately perverse, solipsistic and anti-social consequences.

Calderón’s version of the story isn’t Gnostic, but neither does it strike me as exactly Catholic. The pleasant life that may be a dream is real, not a trick of the demiurge, but so is the imprisonment and torture that Segismundo grew up with and reawakens to when the pleasing dream passes. He never says so exactly—he gives differing explanations for why he is inclined to behave better—but in his newly skeptical frame of mind, Segismundo behaves as if he believes that his behavior—good or bad—has an effect on whether the pleasant dream continues or comes to a sudden end. This is actually true—but only because his life isn’t a dream, but rather being manipulated by his flesh-and-blood father, precisely as everybody says it is once he has escaped from prison. It feels like what his father has accomplished, by the end, is to make his son believe that there is a much greater figure who is truly responsible for whether he wakes to horror or continues to dream joyfully, some master of reality above King Basilio. But there isn’t, at least within the world of the play, and I don’t think reading the king as an allegory of the divine father works either, because what then would Segismundo’s ascent to the throne mean? (Maybe it’s a Mormon allegory? Hmmm.)

Anyway, none of this is helpful to me, because I can’t connect to the idea of this horrible experience of waking from what you think is your life to find that it has all been a dream, and reality far more terrible—an experience I have had!—as morally instructive. To me, it’s profoundly destabilizing not to know whether anything you think is happening is actually happening, and I don’t think you need a demiurge or a father figure controlling things to make it terrifying. If anything, the absence of such a figure (and there was no such figure in my recurring nightmare) makes it worse; the pleasant illusion is then our own creation, the deepest possible life-lie. How could puncturing it—or living with the constant apprehension that it might be punctured—lead to a better life? I picture Segismundo as king, never sure whether tomorrow his entire kingdom might wink out of existence, and wonder how he much importance he could invest in digging a new canal or recovering lost provinces from the King of Sweden when all is vanity? I wrote a piece a few years ago on Hamlet’s connections with Ecclesiastes, but Life is a Dream (which also quotes Ecclesiastes, at least in the translations I consulted) takes that book’s skepticism about as far as one can go, yet never, to my mind, convincingly depicts how it is supposed to lead one to be not just a good person but a good king (which I’m aware isn’t always the same thing).

If I want to pursue this project, it’s a problem I need to crack, because I believe that adaptations need to lean into the spiritual essence of the work being adapted. There’s something you love about a work, that draws you to it, and that has to be the heart of the matter for the adaptation; you can’t start with what you don’t like or think could be improved with revision. What draws you may not draw someone else; what you see as the spiritual essence may seem off the mark to someone else; no great work has only one way in. But your way in has to be a way in, not a way around. And I haven’t found that way yet. I want to—I want to make sense of Segismundo’s journey, not redirect it. But I haven’t yet, perhaps because I’m still on it myself.