Literature, particularly the novel, has always had an affinity with dreams. This was already true long before dreaming became a serious object of inquiry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many major works of Western fiction include the narration of one or several dreams. Some consist entirely in the description of a dream, like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), while others supposedly derive from one of their author's actual dreams, as is the case for Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818; 1831). Whether that relation rests on an actual basis or whether it is a fiction invented afterwards matters little; novelists resort to this trope because it discloses the fact that, like artworks, dreams enable human beings to ‘make contact with imagination and with the imaginative element in all consciousness’, in Margaret Anne Doody's words (Doody 1996, 407). What you are reading was created by a human mind, those dreams seem to say almost explicitly, a suggestion which reflects upon the creative works they belong to and raises the question of their origin. As Ronald R. Thomas writes of the famous dream related in Mary Shelley's ‘Introduction’ to the 1831 version of Frankenstein,

In Frankenstein as well as in other dream narratives of the types described above, the imaginative act of creation in which the literary work originates is thus figured in a displaced form. This is also the case of course in another, more common type: the narration of a character's dream.

Many fictional characters dream, and either they or the narrative voice relate their oneiric experiences. A few examples from the time period this volume focuses on include Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana (1724), Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), M. G. Lewis's The Monk (1796), Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847).