The texts that I have been most fascinated with this
semester have all had something to do with dreams and nightmares, whether they
be nightmares in the mind or nightmares that characters like Maria live
through. The Romantics had a lot of ideas about dreaming. As Hogg states, “there
is no phenomenon in nature less understood, and about which greater nonsense is
written than dreaming.” There were a lot of theories, but no definitive answer.
This blog post is going to explore what the Romantics thought about how dreams
became nightmares and how this conclusion stems from the dream of the French
Revolution that became the nightmare that was the Reign of Terror. The Romantics used poetry as
Any post about dreams and nightmares in the Romantic Era has
to begin with the Fuseli’s Nightmare.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a nightmare as a “female
spirit or monster supposed to settle on and produce a feeling of suffocation in
a sleeping person or animal.” In the painting an incubus sits on the top of the
woman’s stomach, both the source and content of her nightmare. At this time, many believed that nightmares were caused by spirits and this belief found its way into literature and art. Check out the Tate Britain exhibit
There were many theories about dreams floating around but
most of them were either medical or philosophical. Leigh Hunt, a critic who was
friends with Keats and Percy Shelley, once stated that “dreams in general
proceed from indigestion…The inspirations of veal in particular, are accounted
as particularly Delphic,” (Jones 293). Whilst the comment seems to poke at fun at people who
are trying to find answers to where dreams come from, it is important in that
it shows the connection between what you physically consume and what you dream.
This make me think of De Quincey’s opium-fueled dreams
which caused him great pain. He identifies opium as the source of these strange
dreams, but Hogg also notes that the Malay who provides him his opium is what
makes him think of the Orient. It is not merely what he consumes that creates
his dreams, but also what he sees. Dr. Porter’s presentation on Darwin’s Dreams
included a quote from De Quincey’s “The English Mail Coach” where he muses on
how the “resemblance to a crocodile in the mail-coachman was soon made to
clothe him with the form of a crocodile.” The appearance of the man is
transformed into something more in dreams. The nature of things changes in
dreams as the innocuous appearance of the coachman becomes terrifying, “the
horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures.” It is difficult to
analyze this quote without the full context, but De Quincey seems to be fascinated
by how what we take in is processed in the mind to create something bigger and
more convoluted. The dreamer has no control over how what he experiences is
translated into dreams.
Whilst Coleridge also has opium-inspired dreams, he is more
interested in the output from dreams rather than what caused them. Coleridge
includes a note explaining the beginnings of “Kubla Khan” as a matter of “psychological
curiosity”. WorldWarZDude suggests that opium is a
key to the subconscious and “the drugs seem to unlock a further truth inside
himself in which he didn't realize without the drug.” Many Romantics believed that "the correspondence between the soul and the powers of the universe could be experienced in dreams. This correspondence was explained as a natural activity of the soul reawakening within the slumbering body," (Burwick 4). Coleridge who has a dream so
wonderful that even the small fragment that he remembers is enough to create a
famous poem. Lines 45-54 seem to be what he could have been if he could have revived the dream, creating this sunny dome with his poetry. For poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth, “Dreams offered an escape
from strict realism and an introduction to the mysteries of folk tale and
romance,” (Jones 294) In “Kubla Khan”, Coleridge dreams up Xanadu. Without the constraints
of realism, Coleridge can imagine this mystic place with its sunny pleasure dome
and a woman wailing for her demon-lover. It is interesting that just like with
De Quincey, the Orient makes its way into Coleridge’s dreams. The Orient seems
to embody the mystic and not fully-understood to Romantic poets.
Dreams are a source of inspiration and allow Coleridge to
escape the constraints put on the imagination by reality and many poets agreed
with him and with theories like those of Alexander Birch who believed that “dreams
were miraculous, potentially divine, event with prophetic powers, perhaps caused
by (good or evil) spirits or demons taking possession of the dreamer during
sleep,” (Jones 293). However in his etching The Sleep
of Reason Produces Monsters, Francis Goya seems to caution against this
outlook that seems to “imply that dreamers are distanced from moral awareness
of or responsibility for their dreams,” (Jones 293). (More about the Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters and how it relates to Goya's body of work here.)
The artist has fallen asleep at work and is now surrounded
by demons. The full epigraph of the etching says, “Fantasy abandoned by reason
produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts
and the origin of their marvels.” Goya seems to be suggesting that dreams must
be tempered by reason. Art is created by the combination of imagination and reason. The two cannot be separate. Otherwise, dreams that enter reality as they have been
formed in the brain tend to become monsters. This makes me think of Frankenstein
and the moment when he looks at what he has made and sees it as a monstrosity. Frankenstein tried to turn a dream into reality, but it turned into a nightmare. He turns to
science after seeing the destruction a storm could do and tried to harness that
power. In his mind, he was creating something great and the thought possessed him
so much that he did not fully consider what he was doing until that moment when
“the beauty of the dream vanished and breathless horror and disgust filled my
heart.” He tried to recreate the sublime, and he does. However, he cannot recognize the sublime in the creature because it does not look like what he has imagined.
Erasmus
Darwin says that, “we are perfectly deceived in our dreams; and that even in
our waking reveries, we are often so much absorbed in the contemplation of what
passes in our imaginations, that for a while we do not attend to the lapse of
time or to our own locality; and thus suffer a similar kind of deception as in
our dreams. That is, we believe things present before our eyes, which are not
so.” Frankenstein's imagination has prevents him from seeing the true form of the creature whilst he is still creating it and only when it is done can he separate himself from his dream and see the reality of what he has created. Shelley seems to suggest that the way for scientists, and really anyone, to be able to discern between dreams and reality is to have someone else there like the friend that Walton keeps yearning for. The second person does not share the dream and so can see the reality.
The problem with people is sometimes we become so enamoured
by the dream that we begin to confuse it with reality, no longer able separate
the two and see reality for what it is. It makes me think of solipsism and the
idea that we have no way to know what really is because it is all filtered
through and interpreted by our minds.
This thought of being unable to separate dreams from reality
brings us James Hogg and “The Expedition
to Hell.” The story begins with Hogg talking about how no matter how much they
try, people have no control over what they dream. Whilst the other writers have
theories about how dreams work, Hogg concedes that he really has no idea and no
one can because we have no control over our dreams. So it is better to consider
the dreams rather where they may come from.
The hero of this story is stuck in a nightmare than he
cannot escape. Gauchito notes the
Romantics as trying to keep the world of dreams and reality separate, something
that the postmodernists do not do, as exemplified by magical realism. Hogg
seems to be leaning towards the latter and “the Expedition to Hell” might be
read as proto-magical realism and a man is trapped in a nightmare with visible
signs on his body of what he has ‘dreamt’ as happening to him.
This all makes me think of how little control we have over
our dream. Could we say that we have no real control over not only what we
dream, but when we begin to dream and when our dreams end. WorldWarZDude says that “the story of the expedition to hell seems
to be more of a dream of warning to the main character, who might also
indirectly talk the reader, in understanding our own unconscious ideas that the
part of the brain stores and the other conflicts to whether our ideas are
really the truth we want.”
When I look at dreaming in the Romantic Literature that we
have studied, overall it seems to caution us as to what ideals and ideas we
attach to our dreams. People should proceed with caution when allowing their
dreams into the world as they have no control over what they will become. It
all makes me think of the French Revolution and the ensuing Reign of Terror. A
lot of people, including the Romantics, attached a lot of ideals to the
Revolution and it appeared to be the dawn of equality. However, the dream turned
into a nightmare because it was not tempered by reality. In the way that
reality becomes convoluted when we dream, the things we dream and think up also
become convoluted once you let them out into the world. Human beings always
fall short when they try to recreate dreams.
Works Cited
Black, Joseph,
ed. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature- The Age of Romanticism.
2nd ed. Vol. 4. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2010. Print.
Burwick,
Frederick. "The Dream-Visions of Jean Paul and Thomas De Quincey." Comparative
Literature. 20.1 (1968): 1-26. Web. 8 May. 2013.
Jones, Christine.
"Dreams and Dreaming." Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era,
1760-1850: A-K.. 1. New York: 2004. Print.
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