Prophetic Dreams

In the Decameron, prophetic dreams are treated as more than images whose meaning can be guessed after the fact: Pampinea recounts a dream that forecasts a specific danger, and its details are fulfilled. The tale of Talano di Molese and Margarita makes the dream’s warning consequential. It gives Margarita a chance to avoid harm, but she rejects it because she distrusts her husband; the attack that follows turns the dream into both a prediction and a warning left unheeded.

The Dream as a Prediction

At the start of her story, Pampinea notes that the company has already discussed the truth sometimes foreshown by dreams, which many women scoff at. She offers the recent experience of a neighbor as a brief case in point. This framing matters: the episode does not set out an elaborate doctrine of dreams or explain how they work. Instead, it asks the listener to judge a particular dream by what happens afterward.

Talano dreams that Margarita is walking in a beautiful wood near their country house. A fierce wolf springs from a thicket, seizes her by the throat, and tries to carry her away. Although she escapes its jaws in the dream, her throat and face are left injured. The dream supplies an unusually concrete forecast: a particular animal, a particular place, an attack on her throat, and damage to her appearance. These details give the later event a clear measure against which the prediction can be recognized.

Warning and Distrust

When Talano wakes, he tells Margarita the dream and advises her not to go outside that day. He acknowledges that her difficult temper has often made life hard for him, yet says that he would still grieve if anything bad happened to her. He also urges her, at minimum, to avoid the wood. His warning translates the dream into a practical choice: stay away from the place where the danger appeared.

Margarita interprets the warning not as concern but as a scheme. She suspects Talano wants to meet another woman in the wood and has invented the dream to keep her from discovering him. She answers with the maxim, “Who willeth thee ill, dreameth thee ill.” In her reading, the dream exposes her husband’s supposed ill will rather than revealing a danger to herself. The reversal is central to the episode: the same warning that might protect her becomes, in her mind, evidence that Talano cannot be trusted.

Talano expects her to dismiss his advice. He repeats that he has warned her in good faith and again urges her to remain at home or at least keep clear of the wood. Margarita says she will do so, but privately resolves to go there and see what he is supposedly hiding. Once Talano leaves through one door, she slips out through another and makes her way secretly to the wood. She hides in its thickest part, watching for someone to appear, with no thought of danger.

Fulfillment and Consequences

A terrible wolf comes out of a nearby coppice and attacks Margarita at the throat. She can scarcely call for help; the animal holds her so tightly that she cannot defend herself. It begins to carry her off as if she were a lamb. The threat matches the dream closely, but the outcome is interrupted: shepherds encounter the wolf, shout at it, and force it to release her. They recognize Margarita and take her home.

Physicians tend her for a long time. She survives, but her throat and part of her face remain disfigured. The lasting injury completes the correspondence with Talano’s dream, which had predicted damage to those same parts of her body. What the dream showed as a future danger becomes a permanent consequence of Margarita’s decision to enter the wood despite the warning.

Meaning and Limits

Pampinea’s example gives prophetic dreams authority through precise fulfillment rather than through an explanation of their source. The tale does not claim that every dream is true, nor does it establish a general system for interpreting dreams. It presents one prediction whose setting, attacker, and injuries recur in waking events. Margarita’s reasoning is not disproved by an abstract argument; it is answered by the wolf.

The episode also makes belief consequential without making the warning coercive. Talano tells Margarita what he has seen and offers her a way to avoid the danger, but she remains free to choose. Her suspicion turns that opportunity into an occasion to test her husband, and the test places her in the very wood named in the dream. Afterward, she bitterly regrets refusing to trust a warning that, as Pampinea emphasizes, would have cost her nothing to heed. The dream’s significance therefore lies not only in foretelling the attack, but in showing how disbelief can help bring a predicted danger to pass.