Una arqueología de los sueños. El atomismo antiguo

Demócrito, Epicuro, Lucrecio

Abstract

Dreams are an ambiguous reality. Undoubtedly, they belong to the sleeper as he is the one who dreams, but, at the same time, he is convinced that he doesn’t exercise any control over them because they are due to a different logic. Under this conviction, our aim is to practice a small archeology on the subject: what is it that men have found in their dreams? This paper constitutes a fragment of an investigation on ancient philosophy and on some privileged dreamers such as St. Jerome Perpetua, because it is our believe that the indicated era anxiously interrogated dreams in search of voices quite different from those of the individual. In the following pages we focus on one of the answers provided by the antiquity: the Greek atomism. If the reader believes that dreams retain his interest, then he’ll perhaps joins us in this episode.