Life Is a Dream

Life Is a Dream, known in Spanish as La vida es sueno, is a play by the Spanish Golden Age dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca, first performed in 1635 and published the following year. It follows Segismundo, the imprisoned Prince of Poland, whom his father King Basilio has kept locked in a remote tower since birth because of a prophecy that the prince would grow into a tyrant and destroy the kingdom; when Basilio briefly frees him to test whether the prophecy can be defied, Segismundo's violent, undisciplined behavior seems to confirm his father's fears, and he is drugged and returned to the tower, told on waking that his brief taste of power and freedom was only a dream. The play uses Segismundo's confusion between his dreamed and waking experience to stage a philosophical meditation on free will against fate and on the uncertain boundary between dream and reality, themes that build toward Segismundo's eventual second chance to prove himself capable of just rule. Widely described as the supreme example of Spanish Golden Age drama, Life Is a Dream remains one of Calderón's most performed and studied works.