The Gothic as a literary genre famously started with a dream: Horace Walpole's well-known vision of a disembodied hand, which inspired his seminal Castle of Otranto (1764). Dreams remained linked to the creation of Gothic texts, as we find in Mary Shelley's report of the inspiration for Frankenstein in her ‘Introduction’ to the 1831 edition, but also proliferated wildly through the novels, dramas and poetry produced in the Gothic mode. Dreams provide warnings (Lorenzo's dreams of Ambrosio's iniquity in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796)), reveal the past (Edmund's dream about his parents’ fate in The Old English Baron (1778)), incorporate prophesies (Constance's dream of an alternate future in ‘The Dream’ by Mary Shelley (1832)) or stand on the border between revelation and madness (such as the questionable dreams of the anonymously published ‘The Astrologer's Prediction, or the Maniac's Fate’ (1824)). The frequently supernatural dreams of the Gothic have often been investigated through their connection with Romantic conceptions of the imagination, through modern frameworks based on psychoanalytic readings of the dream, or more simply as narrative devices. In this chapter, however, I will argue that to appreciate the rich ideological work occurring within and through the dreams of the Gothic, we must read these dreams through contemporary conceptions of the dream, moving away from the almost ubiquitous modern psychoanalytic understanding of dreams as internally created and revelatory only of the individual psyche. Instead, recognizing the external imposition of Gothic dreams upon the dreamer – dreams which are almost without exception either depicted as supernatural or explicitly left open to supernatural interpretation – necessitates an engagement with the theological understandings of the dream which continued to exist in the period and underlined the possibility of supernatural dreaming.