Dream-imagery and the supernatural 1560-1900

In the 16C, artists developed a visual language for representing dream-imagery as monstrous shifting forms, and this set of stylistics became reified and used as a shorthand for bad dreams into the 19C. At the same time, the even older idea of the nightmare as an attack from outside, by a supernatural antagonist, remained strongly rooted in folk and elite culture, even as its religious framework withered. This paper discusses how these two traditions were represented and debated, focussing mainly on the period between Francisco Goya (1746-1828) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). I argue that mainstream art conventions played an important role in the process of “relocating” supernatural threat in dreams, integrating it into imaginary dream environments, rather than, as before, embodying it in the persona of a dream antagonist. However, the nightmare-antagonist dream-type did not disappear; it was repackaged and translated, for instance, in popular genres such as the gothic.

These developments can be traced through contemporary dream accounts – drawn from diaries, letters, fiction, and medical literature – and through visual examples in popular illustration and fine art. The changes in imagery reflect and express wider changes in mentality, culture and habitus among city-dwellers, which tended to privilege psychological (i.e. scientific) explanations over magical ones, but were equally keen to retain the supernatural as a creative repertoire. Similar cognitive assumptions informed the emerging fields of parapsychology and psychoanalysis. The experience and stresses of the first century of industrialisation, the polarisation of attitudes to the supernatural between classes, as well as the growing dominance of scientific discourse, were the major forces behind the rapid evolution of dream-cultures and conventions in the 19C.