Leonardo Da Vinci remembered lying in the cradle when he was about two or three years old. He said that as he looked at the blue sky above, he saw a black spot come toward him, growing quickly until it revealed itself as two powerful wings and a bird's sharp beak. The bird's tail swished through the air and the shadow of wings hovered above the cradle. Then the creature opened young Leonardo's mouth with its tail and "struck me with it several times between my lips."

Was the bird anointing him or attacking him? A sign of humiliation or of greatness? Many interpretations are possible, but clearly da Vinci's first memory is as rife with ambivalence as his ultimate life was. After becoming both intuitive artist and rational scientist, da Vinci tried several times to formulate his sense that masterpieces are born of ambivalence: "That painter who has no doubts will achieve little."

Source: John Briggs, Fire in the Crucible (1988), p.96

EDITOR'S NOTE

I've included this in the World Dream Bank on the assumption it was a dream or vision, not a literal memory. It seems unlikely avian behavior--though the blackness implies a crow or raven, the kookiest of birds.

Even as a dream, it's weird. My only thought is that Leonardo, even as a toddler, may already have had communion wafers placed between his lips, and have seen images of white doves bearing holy messages in their beaks; in contrast Leonardo's visited by a black bird whose lip-invasion comes from the tail not the beak. Such inversions resemble Jung's first-remembered dream (age 3-4) of The Man-Eater, a terrifying god inverting his church's platitudes of Jesus.

To me this dream or vision of being touched by Raven makes sense for Leonardo--brilliant, aloof, coolly dissecting corpses, restless & reckless in his experiments... Even this young, trapped in a culture demonizing spirit guides, Leonardo sensed he wasn't fated to be a Christian... sheep.

--Chris Wayan

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