Bruno, 1715, likely from a lost contemporary portrait

One of the most magnificent historical examples of a sudden gain in perspective allowed by dream flight was recounted by the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, a former Dominican friar who became known all across Europe for his intelligence, erudition, polemical ideas, biting style, and astonishing abilities of memorization--which some of his contemporaries put down to magic, though Bruno himself described the elaborate mnemonic models he used in his book The Art of Memory. Among Bruno's many books, one was dedicated entirely to The Interpretation of Dreams--the same name that Freud chose to give his own seminal book more than three centuries later.

When he was thirty years old, Bruno experienced a dream vision that would become legendary. In those days, the great majority of astronomers still swore by the ancient Ptolemaic system, with Earth at the center of the solar system and a celestial vault made up of fixed stars on a transparent sphere.

The heliocentric theory of the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had few adherents, but even in the Copernican model the solar system was still the center of the universe. Bruno, however, had contact with cosmological texts from antiquity that assumed the existence of multiple worlds. It is also possible that he read works by the twelfth-century Iranian philosopher Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and the sixteenth-cenrury English astronomer Thomas Digges, which made some reference to the infinitude of the universe.

It was in this context that Bruno experienced his great dream. According to his account, his spirit left his body and rose up into the sky till it was far away from Earth. The documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, in the new version presented by the U.S. astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, described Giordano Bruno's experience thus:

I spread confident wings to space and soared toward the infinite, leaving far behind me what others strained to see from a distance. Here, there was no up, no down, no edge, no center. I saw that the Sun was just another star. And the stars were other suns, each escorted by other Earths like our own. The revelation of this immensity was like falling in love.

...Spinning around in space and understanding how tiny we are compared to all that there is, Bruno understood in his own dreamed body that the universe is incredibly vast and that the sun is no more than one of its countless stars, each of them surrounded by its own planets. The sun is not at the center of the universe, nor does a center around which everything orbits even seem to exist.

This profound astronomical truth, rejected during Bruno's lifetime by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, only began to be confirmed four years after his death, when the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei became the first to look at a srar from the Milky Way through a telescope. Meanwhile the empirical confirmation of the existence of multiple galaxies would only be possible three hundred years later, through the use of spectroscopic methods.

Some of Bruno's ideas, such as the plurality of worlds and life on other planets, were far ahead of their time, despite having ancient roots in Greek and Islamic philosophy. Thanks to his combative style, Bruno made powerful enemies, especially within the Church. His nightmare began in 1592, when he was arrested in Venice and handed over to the Inquisition, which transported him to Rome and tried him for heresy, blasphemy, and immoral behavior. During the trial the philosopher had opportunities to retract, but preferred to remain consistent and inflexible regarding the fundamental aspects of his doctrine.

In 1600, after seven years of dungeons and torture, having categorically refused to renounce his ideas, the brilliant and unbowed Bruno was muzzled, humiliated through the streets of Rome, and burned alive in the public square. Today, in the Campo de' Fiori, where this barbaric crime took placc, a solemn statue of Bruno presides over the fruit and flower rnarket on Sunday mornings. On its base, a moving inscription:

EDITOR'S NOTE

Many say Bruno was no scientific martyr, for his cosmology wasn't evidence-based, like Galileo's just a few years later (he faced the same Inquisitor; Bruno's fate may be why Galileo recanted). But his theory's dream-origin, just before telescopic observations began to prove his point, is exactly what interests me as a dreamworker. His dream makes multiple ground-breaking scientific assertions:

1. Terracentrism is false and even heliocentrism is merely our local bias
2. The universe is infinite, and has no center
3. The stars are other suns
4. Those suns will have their own planets
5. And life forms--why should we be special?

Thinking Bruno's a dismissable medieval crank because you believe dreamwork is superstition is doubly wrong.

1: What matters in science is your theory's content and how it proves out--not who you are or where you got it. From dice or dreams or the Tooth Fairy--so what? Our job is only to test them.

2: Dreams aren't mere dice. Dreaming is an intense, sometimes stressful, always calorie-burning and risky state--it paralyzes you! It'd be quickly weeded out if it weren't useful. So dreams' guesses are hard-thought-out, and mostly savvy; they need to be. On average. Of course, an individual case can always go awry...

As it did here. Bruno died of his (true) dream. Or rather, his truth outraged others, firm in falsehood, and they killed him. Bar him from the science-martyr clubhouse if you like, for he was unquestionably a mystic; but he was a martyr for truth.

FOLLOW-UP

I just read, or rather tried to read, Bruno's book 1584 book describing his cosmology, The Ash Wednesday Supper. I still disagree with his critics, but now I feel their pain. Bruno was a spectacular debater, but he's a disorganized, unclear writer, his argument lost in a tangle of mythological namedropping, tortured rhetoric and thorny diagrams. Mind you, plenty of Renaissance figures wrote for Classical scholars and find clear declarative sentences beneath their genius; some even dream in rhetorical knots, like Bruno's older contemporary Girolamo Cardano, hard-headed inventor of the universal joint used in drive shafts. His dream-conversations have lines like "Nothing is left of which you believe the opposite". Uh... right...

T'was the age of murk, and Bruno was its self-crowned king.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Oracle of Night by Sidarta Ribeiro, p.238-40. Ribeiro's footnote says he can't find the primary source of the dream; I can attest it's not Ash Wednesday.

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