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‘To What Purpose Does It Think?’: Dreams, Sick Bodies and Confused Minds in the Age of Reason

The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL

This paper investigates the debate on the nature of dreams that took place in eighteenth-century Britain. Focusing on the increasingly popular view of the time that perfect sleep was sleep without dreams, it examines the medicalization of dreaming that developed alongside the conceptualization of dreams as instances of mental derangement. At the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke had likened dreaming to madness and drunkenness, and characterized it as a disturbance of the self. In the course of the eighteenth century, physicians, religious preachers, champions of politeness and moral philosophers all provided competing accounts of the doubling of consciousness which was incidental to dreaming. This paper situates their attempts in the context of a re-assessment of the authorities that defined what constituted credible and reliable thinking. It does so by drawing attention to the body as one of the crucial sites in which changing attitudes towards dreaming were discussed and negotiated.

Key Words: body • consciousness • dreams • enthusiasm • Locke • mind • regimen • self • sleep

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