A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Medical tag
Dreams Nightmares
Dreams, nightmares and their interpretation.
Works
A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
Kant's first Critique asks whether metaphysics is possible as a science, and answers by examining reason's own powers before trusting any of its claims about God, the soul or the world as a whole. The first-edition preface describes human reason as burdened by questions it cannot dismiss and cannot answer, and the second-edition preface proposes a Copernican experiment: instead of assuming that knowledge must conform to objects, suppose that objects must conform to the forms of our knowing.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
Passages
- A Christmas Carol, Stave I
Scrooge attributes Marley's ghost to a disordered stomach, a period theory of apparitions and nightmares.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, The enchanted wood
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- Critique of Pure Reason, Refutation of Idealism (B 274–279)
Inner experience requires outer objects; representations in dreams and madness are acknowledged but said to derive from earlier real perceptions.
- Discourse on Method, Part IV
Methodical doubt including the possibility that waking experience is a dream; the conclusion that the thinking self is distinct from the body.
- Essays, On Superstition (Moralia)
Superstition analysed as fear that gives no rest, intruding into sleep and dreams, worse than atheism.
- Fragments, DK 21, 26, 75, 89
Fragments on sleep, death and waking; sleepers each turn into a private world.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. II, 'Of Imagination'
Imagination as decaying sense; dreams caused by internal bodily motions; apparitions and belief in ghosts explained as misread dreams.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation I
The dream argument: no certain marks distinguish waking from sleeping.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 4
Dream images, sexual arousal and erotic fixation are explained through bodily images and habit.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The castle exchanges
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives this tag concrete force through medical interest gathers around bodily vulnerability: decapitation, fear, dream, the nick on the neck, confession, and shame felt as an embodied wound
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 84, Arts. 7–8
Understanding depends on phantasms; lesions in frenzy and lethargy impair it; sleep, vapours, fever-dreams and partly lucid dreams explained physiologically.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Call of Cthulhu', Section I
Wilcox's fevered dreams and delirium; reports of worldwide nightmares, panic and asylum admissions among sensitives.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Caesar 63
Calpurnia's nightmare and other portents before the Ides of March.
- The Histories, Book 7.12–18
Xerxes' and Artabanus' recurring dreams urging the invasion, with a discussion of whether dreams are meaningful.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter I
Survey of external, internal sensory and organic stimuli as causes of dreams, including experiments on sleepers and the views of physicians and psychiatrists on dreams and insanity.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII, opening
The dream of the burning child, reported by a patient from a lecture, and Freud's account of how external perception and grief enter a dream.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 60e–62c
Socrates' recurring dream telling him to make music, and his argument that suicide is wrong until the god sends necessity.
- The Master and Margarita, Epilogue
Ivan, now a professor, is restless at each spring full moon, dreams of Pilate, and is calmed by an injection from his wife.
- The Persian Expedition, Book III, Chapter I
Xenophon's distress, insomnia and dream of lightning striking his father's house, which he interprets as both promise and warning before taking command.
- We, Records after meeting I-330
D-503 experiences desire, jealousy and dreams as illness or infection of the self.
Quotes
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are”
“their representations may very well be the mere products of the imagination (in dreams as well as in madness”
Frequently cited
“I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM”
“I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created”
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”
Frequently cited
“We live, as we dream—alone”
“If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever”
“so that sometimes while asleep a man may judge that what he sees is a dream, discerning, as it were, between things, and their images”
“We take delight in the immediate apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous”
“the content of the dream is thus the fulfilment of a wish; its motive is a wish”
“What does the goose dream of”
Frequently cited
“The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish”
Frequently cited
“The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it”
“Father, don’t you see that I am burning”
“As soon as he was fully awake, the first clear thought which came into his head was, Why am I lying here”
“The shepherd however bit as my cry had admonished him; he bit with a strong bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent—: and sprang up”