‘Life is a Dream’: Is Our Experience Real?

A review of ‘Life is a Dream’, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca; 1635.

Segismundo’s only crime was being born. Since birth, he has been bound in chains in a tower in the Polish mountains for his father, King Basilio, heard a prophecy foretelling that his son would kill him. An oracle had predicted that the son of the Polish king would not just kill him but be a tyrant, bringing shame, disgrace and suffering to Poland. Basilio, like the father of Oedipus, sought to stop the prediction becoming true.

A series of events lead Basilio to free Segismundo. He wants to see if his son will prove the oracle wrong. If Segismundo rules harshly, he will be deposed and the throne will pass to Basilio’s niece and nephew. If Segismundo is just, then he will remain King. But Segismundo, until then ignorant of his birthright, is wild and bitter from his years of captivity.

If Segismundo rules harshly, he will be deposed and the throne will pass to Basilio’s niece and nephew.

Chaos ensues at the palace. Segismundo resents his warden for keeping secrets from him; he finds Duke Astolfo, his cousin, unbearable; and he is dazzled by the beauty of Estrella, his other cousin. When a servant tells him that Astolfo and Estrella are engaged, he throws the servant from the balcony. Segismundo is drugged by his disappointed father and returned to his cell, where he is convinced by his warden that his time on the throne was a dream. It would be a spoiler to go into the events of Act Three, which deals with the fate of Segismundo and reconciles the prophecy that undergirds the story.

The play deals with human perception. Calderón uses bondage and freedom as metaphors for wakefulness and sleeping. Indeed the title points to this basic conventional distinction: that between life and a dream. ‘What is life?’ asks Segismundo. ‘A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction, and the greatest good is very little because all life is a dream and dreams are only dreams.’ Life and dreams, reality and illusion, essence and appearance—these distinctions loom large in the play. But, persuaded that his time as King was a dream, Segismundo is forced to doubt the fact of his reality. ‘If the things which I saw when I was dreaming were palpable and certain, what I see now must be uncertain,’ he says.

This calls to mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Zhuangzi’s ‘butterfly dream’:

‘Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, fluttering about freely and joyfully. He was fully immersed in the experience of being a butterfly, unaware that he was Zhuangzi. When he awoke, he found himself to be Zhuangzi again.’ However, this left him with a profound question: “Was I Zhuangzi dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly dreaming I am Zhuangzi?”’

That story explores the real and unreal, identity and transformation, the unity of all things and—crucially—the impossibility of certainty. This was why Michael Oakeshott, the great sceptical philosopher, was so enamoured of Zhuangzi. He did not believe that we can ever be sure about anything.

Life and dreams, reality and illusion, essence and appearance — these distinctions loom large in the play.

Neither does Calderón. In La vida es sueño, he avoids providing answers. Indeed he seems to say that in the tolerance of uncertainty lies wisdom. For the world is uncertain. Basilio’s fear of that uncertainty, and his prideful belief that he can order a chaotic world, leads him to fulfil the prophecy he is so scared will come to pass. Segismundo, in contrast, grows wiser as the last part of the play unfolds and he accepts life’s uncertainty. Calderón, as a man of his time, was deeply Catholic, and he points here to the notion that choice exists within the bounds of a divine will. It is paradoxical.

The play’s structure, which moves with Segismundo between palace and prison, prison and place, reflects its themes of the interplay of opposites, the coincidentia oppositorum, the precarious balance and complementarity of freedom and order, agency and fate. In fact La vida es sueño takes on the mantle of fable and treatise in its allegorical treatment of that profound question: What is real? And what does our answer to that question imply about right and wrong, about how we lead our lives? There is much in Calderón’s play that foreshadows the dream argument of Réné Descartes and the idealism of George Berkeley, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment and simulation theory (believed, by the way, by Elon Musk). It is a profound and luminous play.