Western Europe's View of Sleep Prior to the Sixteenth Century

The conventional Western European view of sleep was as a pleasurable diligence that, like sex, provided a natural avenue for the temptations of the devil. Nocturnal emissions, or 'wet dreams', were an obvious result of demonic intervention. The Christian requirement for chastity in the clergy and the prohibition against masturbation paradoxically created the conditions most likely to promote these 'pollutions'. St Ambrose accordingly wrote a prayer to guard against them: Procul recedant somnia Et noctium phantasmata Hostemque nostrum comprinte, Ne polluantur corpora.

[Let dreams and nocturnal Phantasies depart far away, and suppress our enemy Lest our bodies be polluted.]

A modern and more finely wrought translation of the prayer indicates that this preoccupation has survived its medieval origins:

Suppress our foe's infernal arts, Lest sensual dreams defile our hearts, With vain deluding thoughts that creep On heedless minds disarmed with sleep.

St Augustine similarly asked God to keep him in 'chaste desire' during sleep, and to protect him from dreams that, 'owing to animal images', might lead him 'to pollution'.

Although Tertullian and St Augustine granted dispensations for these 'nocturnal pollutions', dreams were still regarded with deep suspicion. Dream interpretation had been widely practiced in the ancient world, but as Christian theologians could establish no way of differentiating between divine and demonic dreams, divination of any sort was pronounced heretical. The clerical domination of Western thought during the Dark and Middle Ages resulted in relative neglect of this subject until the sixteenth century, when the rather trivializing 'dream books' of Artemidorus were rediscovered.

Can we even construe Freudian theory as a nineteenth-century articulation of these ideas about possession? The id, according to Freud, is uncontainable throughout the night, and instinctual pressure periodically forces unacceptable and deeply disturbing ideas into our consciousness. Instead of prayers to protect us from these sources of guilt, shame and terror, Freud suggested that dreams took over, transforming the Gothic horrors into cryptic symbols only interpretable by psychoanalysts, the new priests of nineteenth-century rationalism.

In England, until the sixteenth century it was unremarkable to speak of visitations from incubi and succubi - evil spirits (male and female respectively) that were thought to descend on sleepers, seducing them and perverting them to the ways of the Devil. In particular witches were presumed to consort with incubi. But did this belief encompass the 'normal' dreams that everybody experiences? (Pre-scientific thinking in Europe is relatively well preserved in the writings of its poets.) The dream poems of Chaucer and the French medieval poets before him make clear that it did not. There is no hint that dreaming, in this context, was any more than a poetic device, with no connotation of the supernatural simply from the fact that it was a dream. A consideration of two dreams in Shakespeare's plays leads us to a similar conclusion. These are the Duke of Clarence's nightmare in Richard III, anticipating his own death, and Caesar's wife's dream in Julius Caesar. Both of them seem to involve precognition, predicting dramatic changes in the destiny of great men.