Dreams and Knowledge in Early Modern Societies

This study deals with scientific, scholarly and philosophical opinions about dreaming and the uses of dreams. I want to lead my research with an historical anthropological questionnaire. The centres of attention are therefore the actors and their samples of acting and perceiving. The aim of this kind of projects is to explain, how fundamental human challenges could be managed in specific cultural contexts. For this objective, it is necessary to analyse the practice as well as the cultural objectivations offering the different options of acting as well as the social institutions, defining and restricting the possibilities to act. For that reason I have organized my project into three major parts. The first part discuss topics concerning in a wider sense the question of “justification” of scientific knowledge, whereas the second division should rather analyse questions concerning the topics of “discovery”. The third and last section deals with all kind of possibilities and attempts to control the dreams, the dreaming and the dreamer: I think as well of social as of political or psychological (self-) control and of the attempts to define a restricted ability to dream meaningfully.

One major problem concerning the research of dreams and dreaming has been pointed out by Florence Dumora and by Anthony Grafton, too: It isn’t possible to study the dream; we can analyse only the dream-narration and, consequently, we can’t decide definitely if the object of our study represent a real dream or simply a fictional dream-narration. However, this precarious character of dreams could be not only a difficulty for the analysis but in the same time a precondition to understand them as divine messages. Since it isn’t possible to verify the message, other authorities must assure the acceptance of the message – and that might be besides the visionary character of the message for example the dreamer’s personal authority.

The most important way in early modern erudite contexts to consider the knowledge and dream problem deals with the difference between dream and reality. There are before all Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), René Descartes (1596-1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) who give the crucial keywords. They open for the European culture really a new perspective on the Anthropological opinion about dreams. Neither Montaigne nor Descartes or Pascal accepts a fundamental difference between the dreamed perception and in state of wakefulness. Only the better order of experiences might be a difference. Montaigne reflects the difficulties to distinguish the valency of the dreamed insights and the daydreamed figments of imagination (rêveries). In a positive sense, Montaigne established the meditative reverie as a possibility to gain knowledge. It is quite clear, that daydreaming and meditations on the one side and visionary dreams must be distinguished, but in my opinion it is nevertheless evident and important, to remark that the perception and the construction of daydreamed knowledge are fundamentally shaped by the vivid tradition of visionary dreams. Furthermore, it seems that the imprecise distinction between daydreaming and real dreams promoted the possibility to combine the traditional prophetic and visionary authority of dreams with the new individual and more corporal perception of dreams.

The recognition of this method to gain knowledge is however very unstable and always precarious. For this reason, dream-narrations in scientific contexts are in most cases introduced by a description of a respectable and accepted scientific practice, which the dreamer exerted before he fell asleep. The transitional situation (place, practice and time) is described always very carefully.