Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oneirics in the Atlantic World, 1550-1750

My book takes as its starting point the dream as an imaginative and creative act performed in sleep: the creative activity a priori from which spring such phenomena as “narrative,” “fiction,” “metaphor” and, collaterally, poetry. In Europe before the Reformation it was persistently, if not universally, respected as a source of knowledge of the future. Dream reports are found among the earliest traces of writing, but in the developed modern world dreams have been privatized, persisting mainly sub rosa. This work of combined literary and cultural history, novel in its approach to dreams, will focus on the transitional period of early modern dream and its suppression in the Atlantic world (especially France, England, and the New World), by the end of which the dream has lost its epistemological and social prestige. Henceforth it is a diagnostic tool for physicians, then nothing at all: Débrun does not mention it in his foundational 1789 Cours de Psychologie. The practice is constitutively associated by the late 17th century with superstition, witchcraft, and nomadic societies in the New World. Why, and what were the consequences for the connected practices and histories of writing and of colonialism? The early modern is a dynamic period for the study of dreams, as a phenomenon relatively stable over millennia in bearing and value was challenged by major transformations in belief and social experience. French medicine, philosophy and literature are at the heart of them.