Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial symbols used in manuscript and published notebooks
- Introduction
- 1 Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 2 Dramatic dreaming spaces
- 3 The language of dreams
- 4 Genera and species of dreams
- 5 ‘Nightmairs’
- 6 The mysterious problem of dreams
- 7 Translations of dream and body
- 8 The dreaming medical imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
8 - The dreaming medical imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial symbols used in manuscript and published notebooks
- Introduction
- 1 Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 2 Dramatic dreaming spaces
- 3 The language of dreams
- 4 Genera and species of dreams
- 5 ‘Nightmairs’
- 6 The mysterious problem of dreams
- 7 Translations of dream and body
- 8 The dreaming medical imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Coleridge so often claimed that it was his diseased and ailing body which caused particular features of his dreams that it may appear impossible for the imagination to have played any role at all in the dreaming process as he understood it. But he was easily able to factor the imagination into the dreaming equation because the imagination was not only the forming power of poetry: it was also the ‘true inward Creatrix’ of many confusing nightmares, readily participating in them (CN in 4046), and in disease and illness. He perceived that the imagination was the linking faculty between the psychological and physical states of dreaming and disease, and that it displayed properties of both dreaming and diseased states of mind (CL ii 974). There were specific diseases which Coleridge argued illustrated this particular and fascinating species of dream: gout was caused by an ‘aggregation of slight Feelings by the force of a diseasedly retentive Imagination’ (CL ii 975). Sleep and disease possessed inherently similar properties and could therefore be studied as complementary disciplines. Dreams had long been considered to be types of diseases. What united the studies of dreams, disease and sleeping in Coleridge's thinking was the imagination. This emphasis on the physical, medical imagination calls for a re-evaluation of the broader concept of the imagination as Coleridge understood it, and consequently, for a re-evaluation of the critical notion of the Romantic imagination. For Coleridge, the imagination is not only an imagination capable of producing poetry and dreams: it is also an imagination of medicine and disease. Both notions were firmly grounded in the psychology and medical science of the late eighteenth century.
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- Information
- Coleridge on DreamingRomanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination, pp. 183 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997