Dreams have fascinated people for thousands of years, but it is only since the nineteenth century that dreams started becoming the subject of empirical research and scientific studies.
We spend at least a third of our life asleep and most of the time we do not remember our nocturnal dreams. The dimensions of space and time in dreams are misrepresented. It is probably for this that dream activity has been relegated to the realm of irrationality and animism for several years.
One of the main methods for studying dreams are historically the art of âinterpretation.â The first treatise entitled Oneirocritica, written by Artemidorus of Daldi during the second century AD, led to an important anachronistic paradox: oneirocriticism is distinguishable from false divination, as well as from magical or religious approaches. In fact, during ancient times dreams were regarded as messages to humans from the gods, which gave them a supernatural significance. Artemidorus did not particularly emphasize the role of the gods in dreams and appears to have been a pragmatic practitioner, who illustrated tools and skills for interpreting dreams.
Even now the art of âinterpretationâ is regarded as one of the main ways of studying dreams thanks especially to the spread of psychoanalysis. This book gives readers new ways of looking at their own dreams and draws on research and traditions that have not received as much attention as they should. It presents an interdisciplinary collection of topical histories covering a specific period of time, based on international historical analyses of studies of dreams and dreaming carried out in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Therefore, it is not a comprehensive history of dreams, and it does not claim to cover all times and all places.
For readers interested in the history of dream studies of previous centuries we would recommend an interesting book published by Carroy and Lancel in 2016. An in-depth history of sleep has been provided by Kroker (2007). The only work on the history of dreams that covers all periods is the index produced by Christopher Green (University of York) published in Classics in the History of Psychology series,1 but this is just a list of studies.
This project aims to fill a gap in the history of dreams and dreaming, since there has been no systematic work in this field to date. The volume was created with the objective of highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the long and varied history of scientific inquiry into dreams and the dreaming process. The main goal of this effort is to bring new voices to everyoneâs attention for any new future reflections on the history of dreaming. This is outlined in an epilogue by Hendrika Vande Kemp that places the material in a broader historical context.
Most of the chapters are written by expert authors of studies of dreams and dreaming who have already made a significant contribution to international journals in the field, with additional chapters featuring creative new research. The authors are well-established, internationally recognized experts in the dream literature, and rising scholars who offer creative, unique perspectives on the world of dreams and dreaming.
The final chapter will present empirical research that, using the historiometric method, will bring out the specific categorization and periodization of dreaming studies from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century.
This volume will be of interest to both experienced researchers and those just entering the field as an exposition of the main traditions of scientifically approaching dreams and dreaming as diachronically expressed in different countries. Therefore, the main aim of the volume is to fill a gap in the scientific literature on the study of dreams and dreaming to highlight historical continuities and differences between early and contemporary scientific inquiries and contemporary approaches, as well as to review historical literature not previously reviewed. An understanding of the historical literature is significant for scientific progress because the past literature on dreams and dreaming may shed light on current debates within the scientific dream research community.
Numerous scholars pioneered psychological, medical, and neurophysiological models of dreaming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Obviously, they used different methods for data collection and different approaches to data analysis than researchers of the twenty-first century. Contributors to this volume analyze in depth these approaches, methods, and results for early researchers in several different countries. These contributions flesh out the history of dream research in areas where historical publications have been neglected and may stimulate further research on the history of dreams and dreaming.
Hacking (2002), taking into account how epistemological concepts as objects evolve and mutate, states that the dream, as an object of science, is situated in line with the belief that whereas âobjectivity has its home in the waking life, dreams welcome unreasonâ (227). The way to weave dreamsâwhich are complex phenomenaâinto knowledge, evidence, and proof is through âputting dreams in places, or places in dreamsâ (223). Hacking not only outlines how dreams in the cultural tradition are characteristically associated with place , but also how important the place is where the sleeper is observed. Hacking proceeds to say, âMany are happy to say that the era of Descartes brought in a gamut of new types of demonstration, tests, and proofâbrought in a new sense of objectivity, a new feel for what is significant. It is part of that objectivity that dreams are ruthlessly excluded from real life, and cease to be signifiers at allâ (255).
In contrast, what we want to highlight in this volume is how research on dreams and dreaming was developed as an object of science in the frame of âsecularizationâ (Carroy et al. 2006). Departing from the secularization thesis of Yannick Ripaâs Histoire du RĂȘve (1989), this volume extends this thesis into the twentieth century and outside the boundaries of France.
The term âsecularizationâ in the nineteenth century began to indicate the progressive autonomy process of political and social institutions and cultural life from the control or the influence of religion and the church. In this context, we speak of a positive process of emancipation of the studies on dreams from an area predominantly metaphysical and religious (see Carroy and Lancel 2016; Morgese 2016).
According to this approach, more recent historiography from Pigman (2002) as well as Lombardo and Foschi (2008) highlights how the study of dreams was already undertaken using the âscientificâ method in the second half of the nineteenth century, before the birth of psychoanalysis. The approach used in this volume follows the principle of histoire croisĂ©e (Werner and Zimmermann 2006), which can be described as:The latter principle is the basis for the choice of a long period spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the first years of scientific interest in dreams (after the prophetic interest in dreams) to the discovery of Rapid Eye Movement sleep by Aserinsky and Kleitman in 1953. Instead of an analytical model, histoire croisĂ©e provides an opportunity to develop a toolbox that, while integrating the well-tested methodological contributions of the comparative approach and transfer studies, makes it possible to apprehend in a more satisfactory way the complexity of dreaming science.
- a multidimensional approach that acknowledges plurality and the complex configurations of the object;
- crossing over several times.
Initiated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, reinforced by the successive crises of different currents of positivism, and accelerated by the calling into question of scientific objectivism, historicization today is an inescapable dimension of the production of knowledge about human societies. According to Werner and Zimmermann (2006), historicization means articulating the essential aspect of reflexivity and the multiple time frames that enter into the construction of the object to the extent that it is envisaged as a production situated in time...