'Am I not my selfe at that time?' : Sleep, dreams, and selfhood in early modern England

Boyce, Niall Patrick (2023) 'Am I not my selfe at that time?' : Sleep, dreams, and selfhood in early modern England. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

In the early modern period, dreams were a potential source of knowledge, but also a moment of inward anarchy when the senses delivered scrambled messages and the faculty of fantasy toppled that of reason. How was this dreaming self, with its bizarre actions and experiences, reconciled with waking life? This thesis uses evidence from domestic environments, diaries, pamphlets, and plays at the turn of the seventeenth century in England to explore sleeping and dreaming, and asks how these contributed to—and disrupted—the sense of an inner self at a point of major cultural and religious transition, as well as material alteration in sleeping practices. Taking a historicist and medical humanities approach, this thesis proposes that the dream-self was made sense of not through inward exploration of personal biography, or suppressed wants and desires, but rather through containment in greater superstructures of the divine, the influence of the stars, and the written and printed page. Moreover, the activation of the mental faculty of fantasy that typically occurred during the act of dreaming might also have been experienced and exploited in the playhouse, employing self-disruption to positive, creative effect.

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