Commentary Par III 7

What is the precise character of the sight (visïone) appearing to him?  Is it a dream?  Is it an experience of the noumenal world in a Pauline face-to-face encounter?  From the prose of the Vita nuova onward, these have been the two kinds of 'visions' that weave their way through Dante's works.  It would thus seem here that what he is seeing is actual, not dreamed; and it would further seem that, in seeing his first saved souls as they are for eternity (if not yet with their bodies [see [Par XXV 127-129]]), he is experiencing a higher form of vision than he has previously known, gazing on the presence of two heavenly souls in the very Moon, a collocation that causes, as we shall see, considerable difficulty in a reader's attempt to comprehend the ground rules governing the appearances of the saved in the spheres of the heavens.