PART 1

Good question! Although comprising one third of our lives, sleep and thought processes during sleep remain an unfortunately under-studied topic in the field of human history and comparative literature. In early modern European literature—Don Quixote, MacBeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robinson Crusoe, to name a few examples—sleep and dreams played key roles in the expression of culture, and the roles they played allowed human imagination to transcend the earthly limitations of knowledge, societal order, and natural laws. Early modern artwork also frequently incorporated motifs of sleep: see Hieronymous Bosch’s (1450-1516) Vision of Tundale painting, featuring the surreal dreamscape of an individual suffering a bad dream, or John Henry Fuseli’s (1741-1825) The Nightmare painting, depicting an incubus and its victim. By the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, composers such as Liszt and Debussy took musical inspiration explicitly from dreams. The themes of sleep, dreams, and parasomnia intertwine consistently with the fantastical, the magical, and the supernatural. This is due to a sense that—despite sleep’s inescapability and desirability—sleep was, and persists today as, a fundamentally mysterious and eerie segment of human existence, but a segment of existence in which things are possible that seem impossible in the daytime. In this series of comments, I'm going to try to illuminate how early modern Europeans understood sleep, dreams, and parasomnias in a context of magic, fantasy, and the supernatural. Likewise, I'm going to argue that the early modern European experience of sleep, dreams, and parasomnias (with a particular emphasis on sleep paralysis) heavily influenced magical, fantastical, and supernatural beliefs and literature.

In order to understand sleep and dreams in early modern Europe, I think one first needs to define sleep and dreams in said context. Today, the most widely-accepted concept of sleep comes from Dr. William Dement, founder of the Sleep Research Center at Stanford University, who elucidated “two essential features”: “that sleep erects a perceptual wall between the conscious mind and the outside world…. [S]econd…that it is immediately reversible…unlike coma, anesthesia, or hypnosis, which require injury, drugs, or some other outside influence.”[1] Explicating the biological mechanism and purpose of sleep, even today, remains more enigmatic. Aristotle’s De Somno et Vigilia (part of the Parva Naturalia)—as well as the later expounding on Aristotle’s work by seventh-century Greek physician Paulus Aegineta—explained sleep as the result of digesting food: the “concoction” of digested food turns into a gaseous flume that rises to the head and coats the brain in a heavy, wet substance, thereby inducing unconsciousness.[2] This view remained dominant in the early modern era, despite some contrary thinkers who ascribed sleep to the exhalation of “animal spirits” and the body’s need to cool down and replenish those vital forces.[3]

Early modern Europeans had a sense of the importance of what moderners would call “sleep hygiene.” Matthew Wolf-Meyer defines “hygiene” as “an attempt to make the biological a matter of public concern,”[4] or, more specifically, “a register of practice and thought about what occurs at the level of populations, … [as in] sleep, defecation, eating, respiration—and their social management.”[5] Early moderners based their sense of hygiene in large part on the inherited principles of Aristotelian and Galenic (humoral) medicine.[6] Early modern sleep hygienists made recommendations regarding ideal sleep positions (lying on the right side was best, lying on the back worst), diet (wine—in moderation—aided sound sleep, while sleeping on an empty stomach or too soon after a big meal caused bad sleep), pre-sleep activities (meditation and calmness

[1] Matthew Wolf-Meyer, “The Nature of Sleep,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 4 (October 2011): 946-947.

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[2] Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “Sleep: Theory and Practice in the Late Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 41, no. 4 (October 1986): 418, 422.

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[3] Dannenfeldt, “Sleep,” 439.

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[4] Wolf-Meyer, “Nature of Sleep,” 960.

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[5] Wolf-Meyer, “Nature of Sleep,” 953.

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[6] Dannenfeldt, “Sleep,” 416, 418.