Introduction

Abstract

Throughout the ages, dreaming has served as an analogy for the creation of literary fictions to such an extent that this analogy has turned into a metaphorical commonplace, evoked whenever we nonchalantly refer to Hollywood as a dream factory or to our nocturnal dreams as a dream theatre. Depending on cultural context and individual inclination, the metaphor of fiction as dream has been either negatively or positively connoted, ranging from a view of dreams as meaningless fancies to a view of dreams as divine revelations. Countless writers have, moreover, embraced the notion of a ‘dream-and-literature-symbiosis’, claiming to find creative inspiration and sustenance in their dreams, while their experiences have in turn inspired philosophical reflections. Thus, the Italian Renaissance philosopher Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) viewed dreaming and artistic creation as analogous processes, showing ‘an awareness that dream and art function as modes capable of extending the imagination’s creative powers’. Paracelsus (1493–1541), too, acknowledged the dream’s creative potential and its inspirational value for artists: ‘Frome time immemorial artistic insights have been revealed to artists in their sleep and in dreams, so that at all times they ardently desired them’. With the rise of Romanticism the aesthetic quality of the dream itself was increasingly emphasized, culminating in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) view of poetry as a ‘rationalized dream’ and Jean Paul’s (1763–1825) notion of dreaming as ‘involuntary poetry’. Even Robert Macnish (1802–1837), a nineteenth-century philosopher firmly rooted in the materialist tradition, marvelled that the imagination could produce dreams ‘lighted up with Prothean fire of genius and romance; […] magnificent poetry; [and] peopled with new and unheard-of imagery’. These ideas still reverberate in present times, for instance in Jorge Luis Borges’ (1899–1986) rephrasing of Coleridge and Jean Paul respectively in his references to literature as a ‘directed dream’ and to the act of dreaming as ‘perhaps the most ancient aesthetic expression’.