| A revisionist image of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's Dream (El Sueno) from a depth psychological reader response sees the text as amplification of dream, and the Novohispana poet as source of inspiration. When Sueno is constructed as dream text in its deeper hue, it is Sor Juana's statement on the hope to expose the immersion of the unconscious to herself--through thinking, writing and praying. The Dream is inscribed by "writing herself," similarly argued by Helene Cixous almost three hundred years after Sor Juana's death. Sor Juana's verse is her way to expose the soul's imagination actualized on earth, through mythology, metaphor and the cultivation of emblems. Seeing Sueno as dream text in its fullest depth with a new style of thinking, is to become questioner of what James Hillman terms in archetypal psychology, as The Dream's "vertical interiority" (Dreamand the Underworld 39). The Dream when understood as dream text is Janus-Gate, the archetypal numen of bridges going forth and returning. Decoding The Dream's metaphors formed and coerced into emblems are repository of secrets on soul; seeing through the image, is to map "a bridge inward," as described by Hillman in The Dream and Underworld (6). Sor Juana's images posed in the dream text seem to cartographically move toward transcendence into union with God; because as archetypal psychology describes, this is the way with images and with words. Sor Juana is the dreamer, and The Dream when seen as dream text, is ultimately an image of the collective archetype of what depth psychology terms Anima Mundi, or Soul in the World. Sor Juana, if seen as image of heroine and her art as a Jungian, "living thing," takes a reader writer into a personal space, into archetypes of imaginal areas as place--between sleep and wakeful states. Hers are verse of silent, hieroglyphic, somnolent places on voyages to sleep, or in twilight places lit upon waking from sleep, where thoughts and images are elemental. Maybe, it was for the dreamer place of discovery, like seeing in a much later Jungian mirror, that all gods are within. |
