Histories of Dreams and Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Perspective [Hardcover]

In the late nineteenth century, dreams became the subject of scientific study for the first time, after thousands of years of being considered a primarily spiritual phenomenon. Before Freud and the rise of psychoanalytic interpretation as the dominant mode of studying dreams, an international group of physicians, physiologists, and psychiatrists pioneered scientific models of dreaming. Collecting data from interviews, structured observation, surveys, and their own dream diaries, these scholars produced a large body of early research on the sleeping brain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book uncovers an array of case studies from this overlooked period of dream scholarship. With contributors working across the disciplines of psychology, history, literature, and cultural studies, it highlights continuities and ruptures in the history of scientific inquiry into dreams.

1. A Vast Ocean of Neglected Dream  Studies.- 2. A History of Dreams and the Science of Dreams: Historiographical Questions.- 3. Dream Journals, Questionnaires, Interviews, and Observations: Precursors to the Twentieth-Century Content Analysis of Dreams.- 4. Thomas De Quincey and the Fluid Movement between Literary and Scientific Writings on Dream-Inducing Drugs.- 5. Sante De Sanctis' Contribution to the Study of Dreams between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Originality of the Integrated Method.- 6. Dissociation and Dreams: Access to the Subconscious Mind.- 7. Lydiard Horton's Reconstitutive Method of Dream Interpretation and the Trial-and-Error Theory of Dream Images.- 8. Dreams and Trauma: Late Modernity's Discourses.- 9. The Sleepless Dream: Movement in Twentieth-Century Observation-Based Dream Research.- 10. History of Dream Research: Categorizations and Empirical Findings.- 11. Epilogue: A Multiplicity of Contexts for Histories of Dreams and Dreaming.