This is the latest set of slides for the Romancing the Gothic course from the lesson 'I never saw a Ghost except once in a Dream: A History of Gothic Dreams.' It provides an overview of some dream beliefs, the Gothic depiction of Gothic dreams and some examples of the dream and the 'fantastic' in 19th century Gothic.

1. ‘I never saw a ghost
except once in a
Dream’: A History
of Gothic Dreams
@RomGothSam
#romancingthegothic

2. It All Started With a Dream
.

3. The Hideous Progeny of the Imagination
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not
sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination,
unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the
successive images that arose in my mind with a
vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I
saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together. I saw the
hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and
then, on the working of some powerful
engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy,
half vital motion.

4. The Hideous Progeny of the Imagination
I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me.
I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story, my
tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which
would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. "I
have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only
describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow." On the
morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day
with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a
transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.

5. The Nature of the Secular
The Secular Age – Charles Taylor – 2007
The inter-relation of Church and State and religion in the public
sphere
‘The falling off of religious belief or practice’
‘The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of
a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and
indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one
option among others.’

6. The Nature of the Secular
‘We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there
are a number of different construals, views which intelligent,
reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on.’
‘It is marked by an unheard of pluralism of outlooks, religious and non-
and anti-religious, in which the number of possible positions seems to
be increasing without end.’

7. Decoding the Dream in the Gothic
‘Multiple discourses intersect, at times competing and at times
coexisting, in many early Gothic texts: texts that tease out the reality,
meaning, importance and nature of the supernatural; the theological
continues to be a primary interpretative framework.’ (Me)
There was a ‘persistent fusion of natural and supernatural
explanations’. (Handley)

8. Dangerous Dreams
But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the
wheat - Matthew 13:25
‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who
can know it?’ - Jeremiah 17:9

9. Dangerous Dreams
According to medieval theology, the need to sleep was
a Divine punishment for the fall of man and a daily
reminder to mankind of their sinfulness, weakness and
imperfection. Therefore, sleep was seen in a rather
negative light, representing ideas of remoteness from
God, lost time...., loss of control over body and soul,
and absence of rational regulation. (Klug)

10. Dangerous Dreams
• Sleep as punishment
• Reminder of mortality
• Connected to remoteness from God
• Connected to absence of self-regulation
• Spiritual unreadiness
• Possibility of death ‘unshriven’
• Vulnerability to Spiritual and Physical Attack
• Echoes of the dangerous ‘sleep of the soul’

11. Paradise Lost – Dreaming Damned Us All
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve;
Assaying by his devilish art to reach
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams
Book 4, Lines 800-4

12. Thomas Nashe – The Terrors of the Night -
1594
Demonic influence
The material of the dream arises from the sinful self – the
treacherous heart
Imprisoned faculties –
dearth of reason

13. Thomas Nashe – The Terrors of the Night -
1594
• Sleep as punishment
• Night as the devil’s kingdom

14. Thomas Nashe – The Terrors of the Night -
1594
• Aims to create despair
• We are powerless to resist in sleep (the sleep of ‘reason’ and of ‘will’)
• Demonic apparitions
• The mechanics of dreams: humours
• Black Bile (melancholic), Yellow bile (Choleric), Blood (Sanguine), Phlegm
(Phlegmatic)
• Dream content comes from fancy, memory and the concerns of the
day

15. Thomas Nashe – The Terrors of the Night -
1594
• Content can be influenced by sounds and stimuli from the physical
world
• Good dreams are brief – the effervescence of joy after the troubles of
the day
• Sin-guilty conscience – evil begets evil dreams
• Rejects symbolic dream readings and dreams as prophesy
• Exception for biblical figures (dreams from heaven)

16. Thomas Tryon – A Treatise of Dreams and
Visions - 1689
Soul Imprisonment
Soul Freedom
Divine communication
Soul/Body distinction
Ghost super-highway

17. Thomas Tryon – A Treatise of Dreams and
Visions - 1689
• Dream Function: The Dream reveals the inner self
• Suppressed self
• Constitution/Complection
• Concerns of the Day
• Four Internal Senses: Common Sense; Phantasie; Judgement or Reason; Memory
• The problem of will
• Proof of immortality and immateriality of the soul
• A Question of Interpretation: Foolish to ignore or to superstitiously over-interpret
• Dreams are connected to virtue – good dreams only for the virtuous; only the
spiritual strong and good remember dreams
• Dreams can be controlled by evil spirits
• Nightmares prefigure hell

18. Daniel Defoe – The History and Reality of Apparitions - 1727
• ‘There may be Dreams without Apparitions, as there may be Apparitions
without Dreams; but Apparition in Dream may be as real an Apparition as if
the Person who saw it was awake.’ (Defoe)
• Almost all real apparitions are of friendly and assisting Angels, and come of
a kind and beneficent Errand to us, and that therefore we need not be so
terrified at them as we are; if it be true that when any evil Spirit does
appear, it is limited by a Superior Power

19. Mary Shelley – On Ghosts - 1824
I never saw a ghost
except once in a dream

20. Daniel Defoe – The History of the Devil -
1726
The Problem of Will – ‘Consent to the fact in sleep’

21. How Do Dreams Work Again?
Vapours and Humours
The Neurological Turn
• Thomas Willis - 1664 – Cerebri
Anatome
• 1667 - Pathologicae cerebri, et
nervosi generis specimen
(neurophysiology of the brain)
• William Cullen – work on nervous
system
• Associationism (Locke, Hartley,
Priestley)
• ‘We dream more often of those old
associations which have momentarily
flitted across our imagination, called
into brief but vivid existence by some
of the countless circumstances’ of the
day.’
• Proto-psychological
• John Ferriar - Theory of Apparitions
– 1813
• Dreams as hallucinations

22. Scientific and Medicalised
Explanations
The Failure of Theological
Explanations

23. Theological Survivals
• Biblical Precedents and Promises
• Dream’s place in discourse on immateriality and immortality of the
soul
• Demonic influence
• Potential portents
• Ghosts and visitations
• The importance of Interpretation
• Superstition – Enthusiasm - Atheism

24. A Philosophical Discourse on the Nature of
Dreams – Reverend Saalfeld - 1764
Natural
‘Domestick dreams’ are connected to ‘the thoughts we had while awake’ (p13)
Natural/Supernatural
Angelic Dreams: ‘instruct us in what regards our happiness, and warn us against what may
be detrimental thereto’ (p30)
Demonic dreams: ‘Devil’s can act upon us, and excite dreams, continue or carry them on,
and by them attempt our ruin.’ (p30)
Supernatural
‘Supernatural Dreams must be what is consistent with, and explicable only by, the power
of the Creator.’ (p42)
Rev. Saalfeld, A Philosophical Discourse on the Nature of Dreams (London: T. Becket,1764)

25. Which Dream is this?
Natural Natural/Supernatural Supernatural
Based on ‘the thoughts we had while
awake’ and our ‘hoped for good’ (p17)
Nightmares represent fears regarding
hoped for good
Images confused and disconnected.
Usually obscure.
Not significant
Personally responsible

26. Which Dream is this?
Natural Natural/Supernatural Supernatural
Based on ‘the thoughts we had while
awake’ and our ‘hoped for good’ (p17)
May be based on our own thoughts
but expanded
Nightmares represent fears regarding
hoped for good
Nightmares may be admonitory (A)
Nightmares may be torment (D)
Images confused and disconnected.
Usually obscure.
‘not of mere confused images but
contains discourses intentionally put
together’ (p37). Lively
Not significant Significant ‘has for its end our
happiness or misery, and which it
manifests afterwards by the event’
(p10)
Personally responsible Acceptance necessary for
responsibility

27. Which Dream is this?
Natural Natural/Supernatural Supernatural
Based on ‘the thoughts we had while
awake’ and our ‘hoped for good’
May be based on our own thoughts
but expanded
May be based on own thoughts but
expanded. Dreams of absent objects.
Nightmares represent fears regarding
hoped for good
Nightmares may be admonitory (A)
Nightmares may be torment (D)
Nightmares monitory or prophetic
Images confused and disconnected.
Usually obscure.
‘not of mere confused images but
contains discourses intentionally put
together’ (p37). Lively
Dreams always lively, rational
connected discourses
Not significant Significant ‘has for its end our
happiness or misery, and which it
manifests afterwards by the event’
(p10)
Significant. ‘Able to reveal future
things…the issue must verify divine
dreams.’ (p47)
No prophetic content Demonic: Can only reveal futures based on
present realities
Angelic: Can reveal future but usually limited
Able to reveal the future fully
Personally responsible Acceptance necessary for
responsibility
-

28. Interpreting the Dream
A dream will be
‘verified by the events’
Superstition is the first by-path, into
which the bulk of mankind
precipitately hurry, to the destroying
their own happiness, by false
interpretations of dreams, and to the
obstructing their own peace of mind.
Godlessness - ‘Some of those who
would avoid superstition on the one
hand, are betrayed into a by-path on
the other, and reject all dreams, as
insignificant sallies of our imagination’
All dreams rejected.

29. Wake Up! It’s Question
Time!

30. Ghosts Just Wandering about in Dreams
Clara Reeve – The Old English Baron – 1778
‘Edmund’s vision may have been little more than a
wishful reverie’ as it occurred in a dream.
(Handley)
Not JUST a ‘wistful reverie’ – clearly supernatural
‘The use of dreams as omens is designed […] to
protect the feelings of the reader from being too
violently aroused’ (Clery)
The Dream as ‘Supernatural Light’?

31. Ghosts Just Wandering about in Dreams
Sir Philip’s Dream Edmund’s Dream
• Parents appear at his bedside
(though he doesn’t recognise
them)
• Prophesy that he will restore the
house
• Revelation of their fates (funeral)
• Future prophecy of prosperity and
love

32. A Question of Interpretation
Ann Radcliffe – The Romance of the
Forest – 1792
• Adeline
• La Motte
• De Montalt
• 4 dreams

33. A Question of Interpretation
1. Walking with her father in the forest. Reflection of her broken and beaten in a
mirror. Warning voice – “Depart this house, destruction hovers here.”
2. A chamber she’s never seen. A sick man. Attempted communication. She wakes
in terror.
3. Wanders the passages of the abbey. A figure appears. She follows the figure.
She’s chased by the figure. She wakes in terror.
4. Can’t help falling back into the dream despite terror. She follows the man from
dream 3. There is a coffin with the man from dream 2. He’s wounded in the
side. Hears a voice speaking in ‘the voice she heard before’.

34. A Question of Interpretation
• Are the dreams supernatural?
• Connected
• Clear
• Present unknown and unknowable information (room,
knife, history)
• Present as concentrating on ‘absent objects’
• Future prophetic warning
• ‘She was suffered to live as an instrument to punish the
murderer of her father.’

35. A Question of Interpretation
Saalfeld
If God instructs us at a time when
our understanding and will, as
well as our passions, are laid
asleep, and at rest: This may serve
to teach us, that we are duly to
consider his revelations, in a calm
state of mind, and then without
precipitation pass a judgement
upon them.
Adeline
The longer she considered these
dreams, the more she was
surprised: they were so terrible,
returned so often, and seemed to
be so connected with each other,
that she could scarcely think them
accidental; yet, why they should
be supernatural, she could not
tell.

36. Demonic Dreams
Charlotte Dacre – Zofloya, Or The Moor –
1806
• Victoria, Berenza, Henriquez, Lilla, Zofloya
• Burning with lust for Henriquez
• Deception (false identity)
• Temptation (promises)
• Forewarning
• Complication of Guilt

37. Demonic Dreams
• Zofloya enters her dreams as a
‘noble and majestic form’
• ‘Victoria’s real sexual object’
(Micashiw)
• ‘He haunted her dreams;
sometimes she wandered with
him over beds of flowers,
sometimes over craggy rocks’

38. Demonic Dreams – Verified
by the Events
Matthew Lewis – The Monk – 1796
The Dangers of Misinterpretation
Elvira’s dream
Prophetic Warning
Results in her death
‘It was I who warned Elvira in dreams of your
designs upon her daughter’

39. Demonic Dreams – Verified
by the Events
Matthew Lewis – The Monk – 1796
The Dangers of Misinterpretation
Ambrosio’s Dream
A Natural Interpretation
He ‘awoke heated and unrefreshed’ - Madonna
and Mathilda
The Genesis of sin
Pinning down ‘the moment of seduction’
(Dream Sin)

40. Demonic Dreams – Verified
by the EventsHow do we interpret Lorenzo’s Dream?
He sees his own wedding to Antonia where
‘an unknown rushed between them…on his
forehead was written in legible characters –
‘Pride! Lust! Inhumanity!’ The creature goes
on to ravage Antonia before being ‘plunged
into the gulph’ attempting, but failing, to
drag her with him
Demonic despair and inevitability

41. Demonic Dreams can be Hard to Spot…
The Dream
• Unordered images
• Revelation of the identity of his
persecutor – he’s been musing on it that
day
• Vivaldi did not recollect ever having seen
before’
• Dagger unveiled
The Consequences
an unusual dread seized upon him; and a
superstition, such as he had never before
admitted in an equal degree, usurped his
judgment’.

42. Let Me Help You With Those Nightmare
Questions…
How Can I Help?

43. Secular Dreams
At the intersection of the Gothic and the Romantic,
with all its ‘irony, contingency and the indetermin[acy]’
(Miles) this secularising tendency begins to come
explicitly to the fore of Gothic texts. They openly
explore multiple interpretations of the dream, usually
occupy a fantastic space of uncertainty and explore the
boundaries of madness, self-deception and revelation
in their representation of the dream. (Me)

44. Divine Revelation or Wish Fulfilment?
Mary Shelley – ‘The Dream’ – 1831
The Dream on St Catherine’s Shelf
‘With soiled and tattered garments,
with unkempt locks and wild matted
beard. His cheek was worn and thin; his
eyes had lost their fire.’ Her heart then
whispers that ‘this was my doing’ upon
which ‘a veil fell from [her] eyes; a
darkness was dispelled before [her]’
• Idea presented as hysterical
• King
• Narrator
• She has a vision which shows an
alternative future
• She has a revelation
• She is the final speaker
• Polyphony: ‘independent and
unmerged voices…full-valued voices.’
(Bakhtin)
• The text confronts us with the
supernatural, asking whether we can
believe or whether belief is only a
trick with which we deceive ourselves.

45. Where Madness Ends and the
Supernatural Begins
Anon. - ‘The Astrologer’s
Prediction or the Maniac’s Fate’ –
1826
Reginald
The Astrologer – a prophecy, a
requirement, a warning
His mother
His wife
The Role of the Dream
• From ‘thy Reginald cannot harm
thee’ to murder in a fit of
‘determined madness’
• A dream of demons, angels and
mothers
• Expression of madness or
catalyst thereof?
• Inevitable destiny or a self-
fulfilling prophecy?

46. Gothic Comedy and the Dream
James Hogg – A Singular Dream –
1811
A ‘physical explanation’
A Demonic explanation
An angelic/divine explanation
An underlying irony
The question of the dream’s
existence
The unimportance of its reality

47. Ask Any Question that you Dream of…
But Think well Before you Dare to
Dream!

48. Bibliography
Primary Sources
Anon. - ‘Dreams’ in Dublin Literary Gazette, 23 – 1830
Anon. - ‘The Astrologer’s Prediction or the Maniac’s Fate’ - 1826
Charlotte Dacre – Zofloya - 1806
Daniel Defoe – The History of the Devil – 1724
Daniel Defoe – The History and Reality of Apparitions – 1727
Matthew Lewis – The Monk - 1796
Thomas Nashe – The Terrors of the Night – 1594
Clara Reeve – The Old English Baron – 1778
Rev. Saalfeld – A Philosophical Discussion on the Nature of Dreams - 1764
Mary Shelley – ‘On Ghosts’ – 1824
Mary Shelley – ‘The Dream’ - 1831
Thomas Tryon – A Treatise of Dreams and Visions – 1689
Horace Walpole – Castle of Otranto – 1764
Horace Walpole – Letter to Cole 9th March 1765 - http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence/page.asp?vol=1&seq=162&type=b

49. Secondary Sources
Mixhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics – 1973
Emma Clery – Women’s Gothic - 2004
Sasha Handley – Sleep in Early Modern England – 2016
Gabrielle Klug, ‘Dangerous Doze: Sleep and Vulnerability in Medieval
German Literature’ in Worlds of Sleep – 2008
Kim Ian Micashiw – ‘Introduction’ to Zofloya (Oxford Uni Press) – 1997
Robert Miles, ‘Popular Romanticism and the Problem of Belief’ in Ann
Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic
Charles Stewart - ‘Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to
Present’ inThe Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - 2002
Charles Taylor – The Secular Age - 2007

50. The Dream
The King
Those who visit the shelf ‘take the disturbed
visions that such uneasy slumber might produce
for the dictate of heaven’.

51. The Dream
The Narrator
‘There is no feeling more awful than that which
invades a weak human heart bent upon gratifying
its ungovernable impulses in contradiction to the
dictates of conscience’.

52. The Dream
The Revelation
‘To make the living happy was not to injure
the dead; and … how wicked and how vain
was that false philosophy which placed virtue
and good in hatred and unkindness.’