Crossing Dreams: the Neglected Dreams of the Homeric Poems and the Poetics of Epic

This article explores the status of dreams in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.Dreams serve many different purposes in the epic; they also continuously elude all attempts to define or categorize them in a single, conclusive way. Stubbornly, they resist any model that would force them to conform to a single interpretation. I argue that there is a “subver¬sive” side of dreams under(mining) the epic conventionality, a side that seems to question the epic itself but, at the same time, to originate it and I suggest that the poetics of the Homeric epics may be based precisely on a subterranean merging between the “awake” story of the epic and its dreams. The dreams of the Homeric poems seem to yield both epiphanies and the epic song; they are situated as an intermediary realm both between men and gods, and between men and their stories.