Erotic Dreams And Nightmares From Antiquity To The Present

Abstract

The history of erotic dreams, nightmares, and erotic nightmares offers a valuable opportunity to study how such dreams tested Western ideas about the self, desire, and self‐control. Like Foucault, I find it more productive to analyse these dreams, and the struggles to introject them, as sites of self‐making rather than of repression. Erotic dreams and nightmares have been inflected by various historical strategies of self‐making, themselves produced by different regimes of knowledge such as Christian asceticism, medicine, or philosophy. Erotic nightmares still proliferate today in reports of alien abductions. A reason for this historical tenacity has been the ease with which the affective sensations of the erotic nightmare – terror and sexual arousal – have jumped between genres as various as monastic handbooks, medieval folk‐tales, gothic fiction, and personal dreams. This study demonstrates the importance of historical perspective for the ability to identify and understand culturally elaborated (‘culture‐bound’) syndromes.