Amanda Mims' Meditation #10

Life Is a Dream, to begin with is probably one of my favorite titles of a work because there are so many days were you just kind of wander through them, not really realizing who you are or what you’re doing, mostly you just exist. I believe this is what happens to poor Segismund every day of his life. He is forced to just be, chained and held prisoner due to a bad omen on the day of his birth. When give what I would call a “trial run” to see what kind of king he would be he fails miserably and they have to put him into a drug induced sleep in order to safely return him back to his prison. And when Segismund awakes he is told that the entire day was actually just a dream that he had by his jailer. Calderon really focuses on the philosophy of the time, mainly that of Decartes, about how life might quite possibly only be a dream, how there is a fine line between life and dreams, and also how we might dream ourselves into existence. The question of whether or not life is a dream and the dream philosophy lead to one of Rene Descartes’ most famous quotes, “I think; therefore I am.” You see he concluded logically that because he could think and even pose the question of whether or not he was living life or whether or not he was dreaming life clearly meant that he in fact was alive. However, Segismund does not think, he does not have to think because he is a prisoner, a captive, being chained and kept in a tower. So the real question I pose is what part of his life is the dream, does he even exist at all, because he doesn’t think and so logically following he cannot be. So in the end King Basilio gets his way, Segismund does not exist at all.