Rosalind Cartwright was a sleep and dream researcher who focused on women and emphasized dreams as problem-solving and identity-building--she showed a more active dreamlife speeds recovery from trauma or depression. Try her books Crisis Dreaming (1992) and The Twenty-Four Hour Mind (2010).

...Cartwright herself had a kind of recurring dream throughout her life, beginning in childhood: A harlequin in fanciful hats would heckle and trick her into acts of self-sabotage, like going into school on a Sunday. She could never remember what his face looked like.

Near the end of her life, Cartwright's grandson, when he came to visit, would lie beside her in bed in the evenings and they would talk. A month before she died, on one of these occasions, she told him that she dreamed that she had been giving a major research presentation to an auditorium full of her peers when she spotted the harlequin in the audience. She felt doomed, but there was nothing she could do. She kept lecturing.

When she finished, the crowd gave her a standing ovation, and she realized that the harlequin was gone. "He caused no trouble, no harm, he just listened," her grandson told me. "He had chosen to sit and be at peace, and therefore she could sit and be at peace. She didn't have to worry or fight against him."

Source: The New York Times Magazine, 2021/12/26, p.17-18, by Kim Tingley.

I posted this partly for the sheer persistence of this recurring dream figure; nearly a century! Has to be some kind of record. And for the final reconciliation--after a hundred years of being her best worst critic. --Ed.

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