Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800

An intellectual history of European theories of dreaming.

‘Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800’ is an intellectual history of European theories of dreaming from Homer until the end of the eighteenth century, the period during which the dream as divine revelation was at the centre of dream theory.

Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period when the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest—from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance—and the period when it began to become a secondary focus—the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, de Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.