SOME of us have dreams of such complexity that they might keep a
shrink going for months. For others, dreams can be as subtle as a
whack over the head. Josie Long, a comedian and the presenter of
Short Cuts: Waking life (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week),
is among the latter. She admits to dreaming about a former
partner's getting on a coach, and telling her that she could not
join him because she had "too much baggage". You can save yourself
a great deal of money on therapy with dreams like that.
Similarly obvious was the premiss for this sequence of anecdotes
about dreams: that "sometimes the boundaries between dream and
reality are blurred." And some of the neuro-bilge that we
encountered here - notably the item on the brain chemistry of love
- were as clichéd as a cheap Valentine's card. In contrast, the
item featuring Dr Moran Cerf, a scientist from the California
Institute of Technology, showed how the boundaries between science
and celebrity can be blurred.
In 2010, Dr Cerf and his team wished to promote their research
on brain activity during sleep, and in particular a machine that
could display electrical patterns while a subject was asleep. Many
news channels reported not only that Dr Cerf had created a
dream-reading machine, but that the FBI were using it to create a
database of people's dreams.
The film director Christopher Nolan, promoting his film
Inception at the time, wanted Dr Cerf to be his scientific
back-up; and when Dr Cerf protested, Mr Nolan told him: "People see
you as the dream-recording scientist now." To his credit, Dr Cerf
chose scientific status over celebrity status.
It is the blurring of boundaries between dream and reality that
lends Dante's Divine Comedy so much of its appeal; and
Stephen Wyatt's excellent adaptation, for the Classic Serial strand
(Radio 4, Sundays), preserves as much of the real-life
score-settling and politicking as the visionary fantasy.
Told as the recollection of an older Dante, embittered by his
exile from Florence, the tripartite series opened with the author's
consigning all his former enemies to various delicious tortures;
and an opportunity for Wyatt to linger on characters who have a
particular contemporary resonance: bankers and financial cheats in
particular.
It is hard for an hour-long audio journey through the nine
spheres of hell to avoid all unintentional humour; there were a
couple of episodes which sounded as if they were lifted from an
episode of the Andy Hamilton-scripted radio comedy Old Harry's
Game, and there was something hilariously banal about a
character, made to suffer the most abject punishment, declaring:
"This is a hard price to pay for liking sex with men."
The greatest challenge must surely be to keep up some semblance
of dramatic tension as, led by Virgil, the action moves from the
excitements of hell up to the highest levels of the cosmos. The
older Dante, played by John Hurt, is deployed as a framing device,
reminding us of a narrative arc that takes us through a spiritual
and psychological regeneration. Whatever Virgil charges for his
time as a therapist is money well spent.