A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Medical tag
Dreams Nightmares
Dreams, nightmares and their interpretation.
Works
A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
On a hot summer afternoon Alice, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, sees a White Rabbit in a waistcoat take a watch out of its pocket and hurry down a rabbit-hole. She follows, falls slowly down a long well past cupboards and bookshelves, and lands in a hall of locked doors.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
Kant's first Critique asks whether metaphysics is possible as a science, and answers by examining reason's own powers before trusting any of its claims about God, the soul or the world as a whole. The first-edition preface describes human reason as burdened by questions it cannot dismiss and cannot answer, and the second-edition preface proposes a Copernican experiment: instead of assuming that knowledge must conform to objects, suppose that objects must conform to the forms of our knowing.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731 at the monastery of Jarrow, tells how the peoples of Britain received the Christian faith. A dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria explains that history offers good examples to imitate and bad ones to shun, and names his informants, chief among them Abbot Albinus of Canterbury and the priest Nothelm, who searched the papal archives in Rome.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion.
Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
The first two books of Procopius's History of the Wars tell the long contest between the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and Sasanian Persia, from the early fifth century to 549. Procopius opens by declaring that he writes so that great deeds will not be lost, that he was an eyewitness as adviser to Belisarius, and that truth alone suits history.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, is Isaac Newton's experimental account of light and colour, written in English and published in London in 1704. Newton opens by announcing that his design is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments, and the three books carry out that plan.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Sanshirō follows Ogawa Sanshirō, a young graduate of the higher school in Kumamoto, through his first autumn and winter as a student at Tokyo Imperial University in the late Meiji period. The novel opens on the long train journey from Kyushu.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
That Hideous Strength, subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, completes the trilogy that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, though it moves the action from other planets to an English university town. Mark Studdock, a young sociologist and fellow of Bracton College in Edgestow, longs to belong to the inner circle of the college's Progressive Element.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Mabinogion is the name given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, together with the Tale of Taliesin, which Lady Charlotte Guest added from a later source. The library text is Guest's translation in the one-volume form, with her introduction and a few of her notes; it follows her order, opening with the three Arthurian romances.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Poetic Edda is the collection of anonymous Old Norse poems about the gods and heroes of the North, preserved chiefly in the Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, written about 1270. The library text is the complete translation by Henry Adams Bellows, published in 1923 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which renders thirty-five poems in alliterative verse and adds a general introduction, an introductory note to each poem and extensive notes.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Problems of Philosophy is a short introduction to philosophy, chiefly to the theory of knowledge, written for a general reader. Russell opens by asking whether there is any knowledge so certain that no reasonable person could doubt it, and the fifteen chapters work toward a qualified answer.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's account of her first twenty-two years, written while she was a student at Radcliffe College. She begins at Ivy Green, the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where she was born on June 27, 1880.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The Travels of Ibn Battuta is the account of a Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier in June 1325, aged twenty-one, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not settle at home again until 1349. Its Arabic title, given by its editor Ibn Juzayy, means A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling; it is usually called simply the Rihla, the Journey.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Chronicle of Narnia to be published. Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are spending the summer holidays with their aunt and uncle in Cambridge, where their cousin Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a priggish, bullying boy raised on modern notions, makes them miserable.
The Wise Woman is George MacDonald's fairy-tale parable of two spoiled little girls in an odd country where everyone wants what he has not got. Princess Rosamond, whose name means Rose of the World, has been given everything she cried for, including a silver disc to stand in for the moon, and has grown into a raging, greedy child who beats her pets and has nearly killed her nurse.
Through the Looking-Glass is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On a snowy afternoon, the day before a bonfire she hopes to see, Alice sits by the fire scolding her black kitten, wonders what the room behind the drawing-room mirror is like, climbs onto the mantelpiece and passes through the glass.
Till We Have Faces, subtitled A Myth Retold, rewrites the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's Golden Ass, told by one of Psyche's elder sisters. Orual, now an old queen of Glome, a small barbarian kingdom on the edge of the Greek world, writes her book as a formal accusation against the gods.
Unbroken is Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini, an American runner and Army Air Forces bombardier who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift in the Pacific and more than two years as a prisoner of war in Japan. The book begins with Louie as the restless, thieving son of Italian immigrants in Torrance, California, in the 1920s.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Passages
- A Christmas Carol, Stave I
Scrooge attributes Marley's ghost to a disordered stomach, a period theory of apparitions and nightmares.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, The enchanted wood
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter XII
Alice wakes on the bank and her sister half-dreams the same scenes, explaining the adventures as a dream.
- Carmilla, Chapter I, An Early Fright
The six-year-old Laura wakes with a sensation as of two needles piercing her breast; the household searches the room and a doctor and priest attend her.
- Critique of Pure Reason, Refutation of Idealism (B 274–279)
Inner experience requires outer objects; representations in dreams and madness are acknowledged but said to derive from earlier real perceptions.
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
The dream of the Dionysian rite, described as a bodily and mental experience that crushes Aschenbach's resistance.
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), The Subterfuges of the Sophists
The dream argument and two months of doubt described as a malady healed by God.
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), Sufism (opening) and The Reality of Inspiration
Drunkenness and the doctor's knowledge of it; ecstasy and dreams as states beyond ordinary perception.
- Discourse on Method, Part IV
Methodical doubt including the possibility that waking experience is a dream; the conclusion that the thinking self is distinct from the body.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book V, Chapter XII
Drythelm, who seemed to have died, revives and describes a vision of the places of the dead, then lives as a penitent monk.
- Essays, On Superstition (Moralia)
Superstition analysed as fear that gives no rest, intruding into sleep and dreams, worse than atheism.
- Fragments, DK 21, 26, 75, 89
Fragments on sleep, death and waking; sleepers each turn into a private world.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§5-8
Childhood dreams and visions of devils and hell-fire at nine or ten years old, and their eventual fading.
- Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
The 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy weighs death, sleep and the dreams that may come after.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 3
Lady Percy describes Hotspur's lost appetite and sleep, his starting, sweating and murmuring of battles in his dreams.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Origin at Pelusium, spread along coasts, apparitions and dreams before onset, the mild fever and the appearance of swellings.
- Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2
Calphurnia's dream of Caesar's statue running blood, and Decius's flattering reinterpretation.
- Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3
Brutus reports that Portia, distracted by grief and fear, swallowed fire; Caesar's ghost then appears to him at night.
- Legends of Charlemagne, The War in Africa
Orlando is seized, washed and bound; Astolpho stops his mouth so that he must breathe through his nose and holds the vial beneath his nostrils, and Orlando wakes as if from a terrible dream.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. II, 'Of Imagination'
Imagination as decaying sense; dreams caused by internal bodily motions; apparitions and belief in ghosts explained as misread dreams.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 5
At the night assembly the littluns' nightmares and fears of the beast are aired.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation I
The dream argument: no certain marks distinguish waking from sleeping.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section II, ch. 2 (Noteworthy Cures)
Cures by ibn-Butlan and others: dropsy, a dust-clogged throat, a feared leprosy, a cold in the head, a chill and a colic cured after a dream.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 4
Dream images, sexual arousal and erotic fixation are explained through bodily images and habit.
- Opticks, Book I, Part II, Prop. VII
Colours seen in dreams and by a madman, or by pressing or striking the eye, set aside as arising from causes other than light.
- Richard III, Act 1, Scene 4
Clarence's dream of drowning and of judgment by the souls of Warwick and Prince Edward, followed by his murder and drowning in a malmsey butt.
- Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3
The ghosts of Richard's victims visit his tent; he wakes in a sweat to the trembling and terror of conscience.
- Sanshirō, Later chapters (Hirota's dream)
Hirota tells Sanshirō of dreaming that he met a girl from his youth who had not aged.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The castle exchanges
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives this tag concrete force through medical interest gathers around bodily vulnerability: decapitation, fear, dream, the nick on the neck, confession, and shame felt as an embodied wound
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 84, Arts. 7–8
Understanding depends on phantasms; lesions in frenzy and lethargy impair it; sleep, vapours, fever-dreams and partly lucid dreams explained physiologically.
- That Hideous Strength, Chapters 3 and 7
Grace Ironwood questions Jane about her dreams and tells her they are true visions, not a disorder to be cured.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XXXIV, Oracle of Aesculapius
The sick sleep in the temple at Epidaurus to receive healing responses; Bulfinch compares the cure to mesmerism and tells how the god's serpent came to Rome in a time of pestilence.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Call of Cthulhu', Section I
Wilcox's fevered dreams and delirium; reports of worldwide nightmares, panic and asylum admissions among sensitives.
- The Canterbury Tales, The Nun's Priest's Tale
Pertelote's diagnosis of humours too abundant and her herbal prescription; Chanticleer's defense of prophetic dreams.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets VII-VIII
Enkidu dreams of the gods' council and of the house of dust, falls sick, lies ill for twelve days and dies; Gilgamesh laments him and will not yield the body until decay begins.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Caesar 63
Calpurnia's nightmare and other portents before the Ides of March.
- The Histories, Book 7.12–18
Xerxes' and Artabanus' recurring dreams urging the invasion, with a discussion of whether dreams are meaningful.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter I
Survey of external, internal sensory and organic stimuli as causes of dreams, including experiments on sleepers and the views of physicians and psychiatrists on dreams and insanity.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII, opening
The dream of the burning child, reported by a patient from a lecture, and Freud's account of how external perception and grief enter a dream.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 60e–62c
Socrates' recurring dream telling him to make music, and his argument that suicide is wrong until the god sends necessity.
- The Mabinogion, The Dream of Rhonabwy
Rhonabwy sleeps three days and nights on a yellow calf-skin and dreams the entire Arthurian vision that forms the tale.
- The Master and Margarita, Epilogue
Ivan, now a professor, is restless at each spring full moon, dreams of Pilate, and is calmed by an injection from his wife.
- The Moonstone, Fourth Narrative
Jennings' journal records his own opium dreams and pain, the preparation of the house, the forty-minim dose, and Franklin's trance-like reenactment.
- The Persian Expedition, Book III, Chapter I
Xenophon's distress, insomnia and dream of lightning striking his father's house, which he interprets as both promise and warning before taking command.
- The Poetic Edda, Baldrs Draumar
Baldr's evil dreams send Othin riding to Hel to wake a dead seeress and learn his son's fate.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 23, Dr Kelman
The king tells of his despondency, sleeplessness, dreams and suspicion; the doctor fills the glass from a phial and takes out a lancet before Lina seizes him.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 29, Barbara
Evil dreams left by the doctor's medicines wake the king in terror, and only the sleeping child Barbara laid in his arms drives them away.
- The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter II
Dreams and the hypothesis that the whole of life is a dream, weighed against belief in an external world.
- The Ramayana, Book II, Canto LXIX (Bharat's Dream)
Bharat, far away in his grandfather's kingdom, is troubled by an evil dream on the night the messengers arrive.
- The Roman History, Book XX, ch. 5 and Book XXV, ch. 2
Julian sees the Genius of the State in a vision at Paris and again, departing in grief, before his death.
- The Story of My Life, Part III, Chapter V
Keller's description of her dreams and how the senses she lacks appear in them.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapters XXXV-XXXVI
Kostbera and Glaumvor recount ominous dreams to their husbands before the ride to Atli, and the men explain each one away.
- The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1; Act 5, Scene 1
Prospero walks to still his beating mind, confesses his old brain is troubled, and says every third thought will be his grave.
- The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Chapter II (Alexandria)
Sheikh al-Murshidi interprets the dream of the great bird as a prophecy of travels.
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 12: The Dark Island
The crew enter the island where dreams come true and flee in terror; Lord Rhoop is rescued after years of living nightmares.
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story), Chapter III
Rosamond's dream that she is the old cold woman in the sky, wandering forever over blue sand.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter IV
Tweedledum and Tweedledee show Alice the snoring Red King and tell her she is only a sort of thing in his dream.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter XII
Awake, Alice asks the kitten which of them dreamed it, herself or the Red King.
- Till We Have Faces, Part Two, Chapters 2-4
Orual's visions of becoming Ungit, of Psyche's labours and of the court of the dead, which she cannot separate from waking life.
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Part V (homecoming)
Recurring nightmares of the Bird, flashbacks, drinking and despair before the 1949 crusade.
- Understood Betsy, Chapter I, Aunt Harriet Has a Cough
Aunt Frances's nightly dream interviews, her worry over the child's nerves and appetite, the doctor's verdict that the child is sound, and his alarm at Aunt Harriet's cough.
- Watership Down, Part I, opening chapters
Fiver's vision of the field covered in blood and his collapse into fear before the flight from Sandleford.
- Watership Down, Part II, the Nuthanger raid
Hazel is shot by the farmer and lies wounded in a drain until Fiver, led by a dream, finds him.
- We, Records after meeting I-330
D-503 experiences desire, jealousy and dreams as illness or infection of the self.
- White Fang, Part V, Chapter V
During convalescence White Fang dreams again of the lair, Lip-lip and Beauty Smith's fighting pen, and suffers a recurring nightmare of electric cars turning into lynxes.
Quotes
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are”
“their representations may very well be the mere products of the imagination (in dreams as well as in madness”
Frequently cited
“I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM”
“I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created”
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”
Frequently cited
“We live, as we dream—alone”
“In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d, And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars”
“He felt like one who had awakened from a painful dream, in which he had believed that monsters were about to tear him to pieces.”
“O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown”
Frequently cited
“My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.”
“If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever”
“so that sometimes while asleep a man may judge that what he sees is a dream, discerning, as it were, between things, and their images”
“Here the sick sought responses and the recovery of their health by sleeping in the temple.”
“We take delight in the immediate apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous”
Frequently cited
“Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking, mad, or well-advis’d?”
“the content of the dream is thus the fulfilment of a wish; its motive is a wish”
“What does the goose dream of”
Frequently cited
“The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish”
Frequently cited
“The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it”
“Father, don’t you see that I am burning”
“Rose late, after a dreadful night; the vengeance of yesterday’s opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams.”
“As soon as he was fully awake, the first clear thought which came into his head was, Why am I lying here”
Frequently cited
“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.”
Frequently cited
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
“saw in a dream the same night, myself placed on the wings of a great bird, which fled away with me towards the temple at Mecca.”
“The shepherd however bit as my cry had admonished him; he bit with a strong bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent—: and sprang up”