Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial symbols used in manuscript and published notebooks
- Introduction
- 1 Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 2 Dramatic dreaming spaces
- 3 The language of dreams
- 4 Genera and species of dreams
- 5 ‘Nightmairs’
- 6 The mysterious problem of dreams
- 7 Translations of dream and body
- 8 The dreaming medical imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial symbols used in manuscript and published notebooks
- Introduction
- 1 Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 2 Dramatic dreaming spaces
- 3 The language of dreams
- 4 Genera and species of dreams
- 5 ‘Nightmairs’
- 6 The mysterious problem of dreams
- 7 Translations of dream and body
- 8 The dreaming medical imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
I have long wished to devote an entire work to the Subject of Dreams, Visions, Ghosts, Witchcraft, &c. in which I might first give, and then endeavour to explain the most interesting and best attested fact of each, which has come within my knowledge, either from books or from personal testimony.
(FII 117,11145)In spite of Coleridge's remarkable dedication to understanding dreams and dreaming, there have been very few studies dealing with his writings on dreams. There is no single collection of all of his dream cogitations; his thoughts remain scattered throughout his marginalia, notebooks, letters and formal writings. Nor has there been a comprehensive or contextual study of these dream writings. This book seeks to explore what Kathleen Coburn in 1979 rightly called a ‘subject in itself’; the ‘richness and variety of Coleridge's notes on sleep and dreaming’. His insightful observations on the ‘most interesting’ features of dreams, visions and ghosts, gathered together in the following pages, reveal the extent to which he utilised his own dreaming experiences as well as those he encountered through his wide reading. My emphasis throughout is on discovering what Coleridge's contemporaries wrote and thought about dreams and dreaming, and the ways in which his own experiences often challenged these contemporary theories. I particularly focus on Coleridge's exploration of dreams and dreaming states in his notebooks, because these have not yet been systematically studied, and because they yield the richest, the most surprising and most comprehensive discussion of dreams in his writings.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Coleridge on DreamingRomanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997