“Only to see the dead, without any other accident or speech, is to be in the same estate and affection wherein the aforesaid dead persons were towards us: for if they were our benefactors, the dream signifies good and joy to us, and so on the contrary. It is exceeding bad when the dead seem to carry away and take from us apparel, goods, monies, or victuals, for it is death to the dreamer, or some of his parents or friends. If the dead give us victuals, money or apparel, that is a good dream, but to such as they who give none, it is another case. I knew a man which dreamed that his wife being dead, made all the beds in his house, and the next day after, many of his greatest friends fell sick.”
Daldianus Artemidorus, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. by Robert Wood (London: J. Bew, 1786), p.70.
“[…] a melancholy or half-mad person is somewhat in the same condition with him who, not being thoroughly awake, is doubtful whether his dream be not true or something real. The difference between dreaming and madness, (which is nothing material in the present case) seems to be only this; that the bodily organs (where-ever it is that the soul hath its chief residence) of mad-men are shattered, or put out of their natural frame and order: in dreamers, there is a stupor which possesseth them. But the effects are the same: as appears from mad-folks fancying themselves to be other beings than they are; from their not knowing themselves to be mad, and when recovered of their madness, their considering it, as a man awake does his past dreams.”
Zachary Mayne, Two Dissertations Concerning Sense, and the Imagination: With an Essay on Consciousness, (London: J. Tonson, 1728), p.188.
“ ’Tis this Ignorance of Causes, &c. subjects us to mistake the Phantasms and Images of our own Brains (which have no existence any where else) for real Beings, and subsisting without us, as in Dreams where we see Persons and Things, feel Pain and Pleasure, form Designs, hear and make Discourses, and sometimes the Objects are represented so Lively to our Fancies, and the Impressions so Strong, that it would be hard to distinguish them from Realities, if we did not find ourselves in Bed.
But if a Melancholy Man sitting by himself in a doleful Mood, with his Brains brooding upon Visions and Revelations, should carelessly nod himself half asleep, and his Imagination having received a vigorous representation of an Angel delivering a Message to him, should Wake in a Surprize, without having observed his own sleeping (as often happens) I cannot see how he should distinguish it from a Divine Vision.
There have been surprising Instances of this kind in extatick Fits and Trances, which are but Sounder Sleeps, that cause more lively and intense Dreams: some in these Deliriums have fancied their Souls to have been transported to Heaven or Hell, to have had personal Communication with God and the Holy Trinity, have given descriptions of the Angels and their Habitations, and brought back Messages, Prophesies and Instructions to Mankind, which Phœnomenas however strange at first sight, are easily to be accounted for by natural causes, for the ideas and operations of our Minds being evidently produced, by the agitations and motions of the internal parts of our own Bodies, and impressions heretofore made on them, as well as the actions of Objects without us […]. It must necessarily happen when the Organs of Sense (which are the Avenues and Doors to let in external Objects) are shut and locked up by Sleep, Distempers, or strong Prejudices, that the imaginations produced from inward Causes must reign without any Rival, for the Images within us striking strongly upon, and affecting the Brain, Spirits, or Organ, where the imaginative Faculty resides, and all Objects from without, being wholly, or in a great measure shut out and excluded, so as to give no information or assistance, we must unavoidably submit to an evidence which meets with no contradiction, and take things to be as they appear.”
John Trenchard, The Natural History of Superstition, (London: A. Baldwin, 1709) pp.11-13.
“This perpetual flow of the trains of ideas, which constitute our dreams, and which are caused by painful or pleasurable sensation, might at first view be conceived to be an useless expenditure of sensorial power. But it has been shewn, that those motions, which are perpetually excited, as those of the arterial system by the stimulus of the blood, are attended by a great accumulation of sensorial power, after they have been for a time suspended; as the hot-fit of fever is the consequence of the cold one. Now as these trains of ideas caused by sensation are perpetually excited during our waking hours, if they were to be suspended in sleep like the voluntary motions, (which are exerted only by intervals during our waking hours,) an accumulation of sensorial power would follow; and on our awaking a delirium would supervene, since these ideas caused by sensation would be produced with such energy, that we should mistake the trains of imagination for ideas excited by irritation; as perpetually happens to people debilitated by fevers on their first awaking; for in these fevers with debility the general quantity of irritation being diminished, that of sensation is increased. In like manner if the actions of the stomach, intestines, and various glands, which are perhaps in part at least caused by or catenated with agreeable sensation, and which perpetually exist during our waking hours, were like the voluntary motions suspended in our sleep; the great accumulation of sensorial power, which would necessarily follow, would be liable to excite inflammation in them.
When by our continued posture in sleep, some uneasy sensations are produced, we either gradually awake by the exertion of volition, or the muscles connected by habit with such sensations alter the position of the body; but where the sleep is uncommonly profound, and those uneasy sensations great, the disease called the incubus, or nightmare, is produced. Here the desire of moving the body is painfully exerted, [but] the power of moving it, or volition, is incapable of action, till we awake. Many less disagreeable struggles in our dreams, as when we wish in vain to fly from terrifying objects, constitute a slighter degree of this disease. In awaking from the nightmare I have more than once observed, that there was no disorder in my pulse; nore do I believe the respiration is laborious, as some have affirmed. It occurs to people whose sleep is too profound, and some disagreeable sensation exists, which at other times would have awakened them, and have thence prevented the disease of nightmare; as after great fatigue or hunger with too large a supper and wine, which occasion our sleep to be uncommonly profound.
[…]
This vivacity of our nerves of sense during the time of sleep is evinced by a circumstance, which almost every one must at some time or other have experienced; that is, if we sleep in the daylight, and endeavour to see some object in our dream, the light is exceedingly painful to our eyes; and after repeated struggles we lament in our sleep, that we cannot see it. In this case I apprehend the eyelid is in some degree opened by the vehemence of our sensations; and, the iris being dilated, the optic nerve shews as great or greater sensibility than in our waking hours.
When we are forcibly waked at midnight from profound sleep, our eyes are much dazzled with the light of the candle for a minute or two, after there has been sufficient time allowed for the contraction of the iris; which is owing to the accumulation of sensorial power in the organ of vision during its state of less activity. But when we have dreamt much of visible objects, this accumulation of sensorial power in the organ of vision is lessened or prevented, and we awake in the morning without being dazzled with the light, after the iris has had time to contract itself. This is a matter of great curiosity, and may be thus tried by anyone in the daylight. Close your eyes, and cover them with your hat; think for a minute of a tune, which you are accustomed to, and endeavour to sing it with as little activity of mind as possible. Suddenly uncover and open your eyes, and in one second of time the iris will contract itself, but you will perceive the day more luminous for several seconds, owing to the accumulation of sensorial power in the optic nerve.
Then again close and cover your eyes, and think intensely on a cube of ivory two inches in diameter, attending first to the north and south sides of it, and then to the other four sides of it; then get a clear image in your mind’s eye of all the sides of the same cube coloured red; and then of it coloured green; and then of it coloured blue; lastly, open your eyes as in the former experiment, and after the first second of time allowed for the contraction of the iris, you will not perceive any increase of the light of the day, or dazzling; because now there is no accumulation of sensorial power in the optic nerve; that having been expanded by its action in thinking over visible objects.”
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1796), I, pp. 204-7.
“I am prolix, and I fear tedious, in treating of the sensory; but it is a point of some consequence, and this ingenious Author’s scheme principally turns on the supposition of its being shut up during sleep, from the soul’s inspection; whereby he divests it of memory, and thence infers it of memory, and thence infers the necessity of receiving all the materials of our dreams from foreign agents. I am induced to conjecture, that he found himself a little pressed by Mr. Locke’s arguments against the soul’s perpetual thinking, but that it sometimes nods with the body, which has an aspect of making them too nearly related; and perfectly to get over this difficulty (which he has otherwise, with much success attempted) he deemed it proper to detach the soul from having the least dependence on the body as to dreams, by drawing a veil over the sensory in sleep; whereby too, the irrationality charged on our sleeping thoughts cannot be attributed to our wanting the assistance of the body, as tho’ we owed the perfection of thinking thereto; but must be occasioned by spirits, who obtrude on us what we then think about. But I cannot help apprehending, that tho’ his Hypothosis makes the soul sometimes active, whilst the body sleeps, and its thoughts at that time independent on the body; yet it renders the view of the sensory so necessary to thinking, that, should the soul, deprived of its aid, be at the same time unoccupied by spirits, it might, nay must, as soundly nod, as by the other supposition.”
Thomas Branch, Thoughts on Dreaming, (London: R. Dodsley, 1738) pp. 25-6.
from ‘Lady Barbara; or, The Ghost’, Book XVI of Tales of the Hall.
‘But then in sleep those horrid forms arise,
That the soul sees,— and, we suppose, the eyes,—
And the soul hears,— the senses then thrown by,
She is herself the ear, herself the eye;
A mistress so will free her servile race
For their own tasks, and take herself the place:
In sleep what forms will ductile fancy take,
And what so common as to dream awake?
On others thus do ghostly guests intrude?
Or why am I by such advice pursued?
One out of millions who exist, and why
They know not – cannot know – and such am I;
And shall two beings of two worlds, to meet,
The laws of one, perhaps of both, defeat?
It cannot be.— But if some being lives
Who such kind warning to a favourite gives,
Let him these doubts from my dull spirit clear,
And once again, expected guest! appear.’
[39-56]
‘Yes, all are dreams; but some as we awake
Fly off at once, and no impression make;
Others are felt, and ere they quit the brain
Make such impression that they come again;
As half familiar thoughts, and half unknown,
And scarcely recollected as our own;
For half a day abide some vulgar dreams,
And give our grandams and our nurses themes;
Others, more strong, abiding figures draw
Upon the brain, and we assert “I saw;”
And then the fancy on the organs place
A powerful likeness of a form and face.
‘Yet more – in some strong passion’s troubled reign,
Or when the fever’d blood inflames the brain,
At once the outward and the inward eye
The real object and the fancied spy;
The eye is open, and the sense is true,
And therefore they the outward object view;
But while the real sense is fix’d on these,
The power within its own creation sees;
And these, when mingled in the mind, create
Those striking visions which our dreamers state;
For knowing that is true that met the sight,
They think the judgment of the fancy right.
Your frequent talk of dreams has made me turn
My mind on them, and these the facts I learn.
Or should you say, ’t is not in us to take
Heed in both ways, to sleep and be awake,
Perhaps the things by eye and mind survey’d
Are in their quick alternate efforts made;
For by this mixture of the truth, the dream
Will in the morning fresh and vivid seem.
‘Dreams are like portraits, and we find they please
Because they are confess’d resemblances;
But those strange night-mare visions we compare
To waxen figures – they too real are,
Too much a very truth, and are so just
To life and death, they pain us or disgust.’
[814-855]
George Crabbe, ‘Lady Barbara; or, The Ghost’, in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Norma Dalrymple-Champneys and Arthur Pollard, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1988) II, pp.547-573.
“In healthy sleep we often fly rather than walk, our dimensions are enlarged, our resolutions have more force, our actions are less confined. And though all this depends on the body, as the least circumstance respecting the soul must harmonize with it, as long as her powers are so intimately incorporated with its structure; yet the whole of the phenomena of sleep and dreaming, which are certainly singular, and would greatly astonish us, were we not accustomed to them, shows us, that every part of the body does not belong to us in the same manner; nay, that certain organs of our machine may be unstrung, and the superior power act more ideally, vividly, and freely, from mere reminiscence. Now since all the causes that induce sleep, and all its corporal symptoms, are, not metaphorically, but physiologically and actually analogous to those of death; why should not the spiritual symptoms of both be the same? Thus, then, when the sleep of death falls on us from weariness or disease, still the hope remains, that death, like sleep, only cools the fever of life, gently interrupts the too uniform and long-continued movement, heals many wounds incurable in this life, and prepares the soul for a pleasurable awakening, for the enjoyment of a new morning of youth. As in dreams my thoughts fly back to youth; as in them, being only half-fettered by a few organs, but more concentred in myself, I feel more free and active: so thou, revivifying dream of death, wilt smilingly bring back the youth of my life, the most pleasing and energetic moments of my existence, till I awake in its form—or rather in the more beautiful form of celestial juvenility.”
Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. by Thomas Churchill (London: J. Johnson, 1800), p.122.
“The Dreams of sleeping Men, are, as I take it, all made up of the waking Man’s Ideas, though for the most part oddly put together. ’Tis strange if the Soul has Ideas of its own, that it derived not from Sensation or Reflection, (as it must have, if it thought before it received any Impression from the Body) that it should never, in its private Thinking, (so private that the Man himself perceives it not) retain any of them, the very Moment it wakes out of them, and then make the Man glad with new Discoveries.”
John Locke, An Essay concerning human understanding in 4 books, (Edmund Parker: London, 1731) vol.1 of 2. p.76
“[…] when all is at rest and silent, and the impressions on the sensory designedly sealed up from the view of the mind; it is easy […] to make new and foreign impressions on the sensory; nothing else acting upon it at the same time. And these impressions must be perceived; for the soul is still active and percipient; and its perceptivity is now no other way solicited by any thing external. And the register of former impressions being sealed up from its view, these new impressions must be perceived without memory of what hath passed before: and therefore they must be perceived as caused by real external objects, such as usually make impressions upon the sensory.
[…]
“A set of new objects is immediately presented to it, and that succeeded by another, and that still by another, with greater variety and latitude of nature, than what it perceives by the in-let of the senses; for a new creation of things, of different species and other natures, really beyond the licence of the Painter or the Poet’s imagination, is now offered to it, or forced upon it.
[…]
“To say the soul acts without willing the action, hath been shewn […] to be repugnant: and since willing is one species of consciousness, or thinking; not to be conscious of our own willing, is not to be conscious of our own consciousness.”
Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul: Wherein the Immateriality of the Soul is evinced from the Principles of Reason and Philosophy, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: A. Miller, 1737) II, pp. 8-14
“I grant that the Soul in a waking Man is never without Thought, because it is the Condition of being awake: But whether Sleeping without Dreaming be not an Affection of the whole Man, Mind as well as Body, may be worth a waking Man’s Consideration; it being hard to conceive that any thing should think, and not be conscious of it. If the Soul doth think in a sleeping Man, without being conscious of it, I ask, whether, during such Thinking, it has any Pleasure or Pain, or be capable of Happiness or Misery? I am sure the Man is not, no more than the Bed or Earth he lies on. For to be Happy or Miserable, without being conscious of it, seems to me utterly inconsistent and impossible; or if it be possible that the Soul can, whilst the Body is sleeping, have its Thinking, Enjoyments and Concerns, its Pleasure or Pain apart, which the Man is not conscious of, nor partakes in: It is certain, that Socrates asleep, and Socrates awake, is not the same Person: But his Soul when he sleeps, and Socrates the Man, consisting of Body and Soul when he is waking, are two Persons; since waking Socrates has no Knowledge of, or Concernment for that Happiness or Misery of his Soul, which it enjoys alone by it self whilst he sleeps, without perceiving any thing of it; no more than he has for the Happiness or Misery of a Man in the Indies, whom he knows not. For if we take wholly away all Consciousness of our Actions and Sensations, especially of Pleasure and Pain, and the Concernment that accompanies it, it will be hard to know wherein to place Personal Identity.”
John Locke, An Essay concerning human understanding in 4 books, (Edmund Parker: London, 1731) vol.1 of 2. p.72-3
JRWB 