UCL Discovery

Abstract

The history of erotic dreams, nightmares, and erotic nightmares offers a valuable opportunity to study how such dreams tested Western ideas about the self, desire, and self-control. Like Foucault, I find it more productive to analyse these dreams, and the struggles to introject them, as sites of self-making rather than of repression. Erotic dreams and nightmares have been inflected by various historical strategies of self-making, themselves produced by different regimes of knowledge such as Christian asceticism, medicine, or philosophy. Erotic nightmares still proliferate today in reports of alien abductions. A reason for this historical tenacity has been the ease with which the affective sensations of the erotic nightmare – terror and sexual arousal – have jumped between genres as various as monastic handbooks, medieval folk-tales, gothic fiction, and personal dreams. This study demonstrates the importance of historical perspective for the ability to identify and understand culturally elaborated ('culture-bound') syndromes.