In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), Frankenstein's creature and Catherine's ghost, respectively, make their first appearances in scenes permeated by nightmarish intensity. In each novel, a narrator awakens from a terrible dream just before encountering the disturbingly unnatural or supernatural being. Consequently, a nightmareimbued atmosphere frames the emergence of both preternatural characters. I posit that the terror that these scenes evoke is, to some extent, the product of a generally overlooked convention of Gothic literary dreams, which I will refer to as the ‘tandem dream sequence’. I will use this term to describe situations in which an ordinary dream prefaces, and thereby provides a foil to, a second, more noteworthy dream or dreamlike occurrence. Both Shelley and Brontë draw from this Gothic tradition of the tandem dream sequence, but they do so in distinctive and revealing ways. I contend that through their unique approaches to this device, these female Gothic writers mobilize the conflicted status that dreams held in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Great Britain to heighten emotional intensity and thereby construct ideas of Gothic monstrosity.

As this chapter will argue, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century dream theories and traditions emphasize the capacity of dreams to evoke affective or emotional intensity. For this reason, the relatively recent ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2007, 32) can provide unique insight into the lens through which authors and readers would have conceptualized literary depictions of dreams during this period. ‘Affect’, a term sometimes used interchangeably with ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’, comprises the ‘phenomenal, unaccounted-for quality of sensations’ (Cohn 2015, 20). The most significant way in which affect theory differs from traditional analytical approaches is that it focuses on these embodied sensations rather than on symbolic interpretation. Because affect is, according to Gilles Deleuze, an embodied, ‘non-representational’ experience of ‘intensity’, it cannot be reduced to signifiers (Deleuze 1978, 2). Thus, resistant to interpretation, affect has a formal reality, meaning that it exists as something in itself rather than as the symbol or the inaccessible signified of something else. Operating as ‘an unmediated experience’ (Massumi 2002, 2), affect is a ‘mode of thought insofar as it is non-representational’ (Deleuze 1978, 2).