ABSTRACT
A sixteenth-century English dream book, Thomas Hill’s The Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams, recounts the following: “And one dreamed having thre sonnes, two of them cutte him into peeces and eate hym and that the yonger knowinge of the matter waxed sadde and disdayned them and refusinge also that shameful matter, sayde, I wil not eate of my father.” In dreaming that his sons would dismember and devour him, the father betrays his great fear of their power over him. Even hundreds of years later, this account gives one a sense of horror, for patricide is considered one of the most heinous of all crimes, and the eating of human flesh is taboo in most cultures. More importantly, this dream reveals one of the most intense sites of cultural anxiety in early modern England: conflicts between parents and their children. The dream suggests the plot of King Lear, where Goneral and Regan symbolically consume their father and his lands first in their over-lavish praise of him and then once they have taken over the lands that he had foolishly given them, they cast him out. But in the dream the children are male and two of them forthrightly devour their father.
