THE OTHER SIDE OF SLEEP: DIVERGENT VIEWS ON THE ROLE OF DREAMING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
THE OTHER SIDE OF SLEEP: DIVERGENT VIEWS ON THE ROLE OF DREAMING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURYIn the nineteenth century, philosophers held widely divergent views on the role of dreaming. Some decried dreams as pointless and irritating, describing them as psychological activity that is “transported from the brain of a reasonable man into that of a fool”; others looked on them as nothing more than a degradation of the intellectual and rational capacity of the mind. Immanuel Kant ascribed an important biological role to dreams, believing them responsible for stimulating and regulating the function of “vital organs” such as the digestive system. (Conversely, Dickens’s Scrooge attributes the appearance of Marley’s ghost to a “fragment of an underdone potato” or an “undigested bit of beef”—”There’s more of gravy than of grave about you whatever you are,” he chuckles.) Nietzsche believed passionately that dreams were an integral part of our psychological makeup, exclaiming that “nothing contains more of your own work than your dreams! Nothing belongs to you so much!”*284\226\8*
