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Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800

Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800

G. W. Pigman III

(2019)

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Abstract

Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period when the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest—from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance—and the period when it began to become a secondary focus—the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, de Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.


“This shining example of Geistesgeschichte is a treasury of all the conceptions of dreams coming down to us from Antiquity to the end of the Enlightenment. It supersedes a whole library on the topic and will be an indispensable resource for further cultural dream studies.”
—Stefan Goldmann, Senior Research Fellow, Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany


G. W. Pigman III is professor of English at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He is the author of Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (1985), editor of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (2000), and editor and translator of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano’s The Virtues and Vices of Speech (forthcoming).


Byron’s designation of the dream as ‘the mystical usurper of the mind’ captures two aspects of its perennial fascination. Dreams are mysterious and they take possession of our minds as if they had an irresistible power of their own. The usurpation of the mind by dreams has contributed to the belief that they accurately and supernaturally predict the future, reveal things unknown in the present or warn the dreamer to do or not to do something. This kind of dream goes by many names – admonitory, divinatory, precognitive, veridical, and prophetic – and even today most people believe in it. ‘Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800’ presents the history of conceptions of dreaming in Europe from Homer to the turn of the nineteenth century, the long period in which the admonitory dream was the centre of learned and popular interest.

By the end of the eighteenth century many researchers were interested in the dream as a psychological event rather than as a portent of the future. More of them were ceasing to ask what dreams are and how they work and asking instead which dreams reveal the future, how and their interpretation. In broader terms, western European thinking about dreams up to 1800 was primarily concerned with what they might mean or reveal. Although revelation of the future was the most common kind of significance, dreams were also thought to reveal the health of the dreamer, their wishes, character and daily pursuits. Hence the overwhelming concern with classifying dreams as significant (requiring attention) or insignificant (safe to ignore). Since the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed an important shift in the study of dreams, the period from Homer to the turn of the nineteenth century should be taken as a whole – the period of the admonitory dream. During this period the admonitory dream was accepted, questioned or rejected. But it was rarely ignored or simply mentioned as a historical curiosity, as increasingly happened in nineteenth-century scholarly and scientific discourse.

‘Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800’ traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period in which the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest – from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance – and the period in which it begins to become a secondary focus – the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with the old questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, De Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Cover1
Front Matter iii
Half-title i
Title page iii
Copyright information iv
Dedication v
Table of contents vii
Acknowledgments ix
Chapter Int-epi 1
Introduction: The Period of the Admonitory Dream 1
Chapter One The Ancient World 15
Messenger Dreams 16
Homeric Messenger Dreams 21
Journeys of the Soul 28
Psychology and Allegory to the Late Fifth Century 32
Dream Interpretation and Medicine 36
Plato, Wish Fulfillment and the Soul 45
Aristotle: Naturalism and Illusion 48
Epicurean and Ciceronian Skepticism: Pursuits of the Day 54
Systems of Classification 58
Imagination and Memory in Late Antiquity 67
Character, Morality, Wet Dreams and Nocturnal Emissions 74
The Purpose of Dreams 84
Chapter Two The Middle Ages 85
Demonic Dreams 86
Classifications: Gregory I and Beyond 92
Aristotle Arabicus: The Symbolizing Imagination 103
The Synthesis of Albertus Magnus 113
Witchcraft: Transvection and Incubi 127
Chapter Three The Early Modern Period 137
Early Modern Aristotelianism 137
Wolff’s Innovations 168
The Embarrassment of Supernatural Dreams 179
Beyond Admonition: “From Particular Facts to General Laws” 188
Epilogue: Freud and de Sanctis 205
Freud: The Essential Nature of the Dream 208
De Sanctis: Methods, Facts and Theory 224
End Matter 237
Bibliography 237
Index 277