Coleridge often referred to his dreams as being like dramas, with their own characters, costumes, settings, and temporal and spatial conventions. The most essential quality likening dreams to drama was that both required the suspension of volition. From his earliest recorded thoughts on dreams, Coleridge considered the suspension of volition as one of the fundamental qualities of dreaming. Following from this, the illusory qualities inherent in watching a play are similar to the illusory qualities of a dream. He also often perceived his dreams as being performed on a stage – a space within which the actions and characters of the dream unfolded. He termed this theatrical dreaming space ‘Somnial or Morphean Space’ (CN iv 5360), and carefully recorded many of its features throughout his lifetime.

Both Andrew Baxter and Erasmus Darwin argued that in sleep the faculty of volition is suspended and therefore the many strange visions encountered in dreams are not considered surprising. Coleridge often remarked that when we are awake, the will is in control of all that is reasonable, creating the potential for the mind to be surprised by odd and unusual sights. The faculty for surprise exists in the waking state. In dreams, however, there is no sense of surprise, for all that happens is accepted without question (CN i 1250): the dreamer is bereft of a controlling sense of judgement, and no image or event is unlikely or surprising. This suspension of certain faculties requires the ‘voluntary Lending of the Will’ (CL iv 642). The question of the extent of the voluntary suspension of reason and volition is at the heart of Coleridge's analogy between the theories of drama and of dreaming.

Coleridge so often claimed that it was his diseased and ailing body which caused particular features of his dreams that it may appear impossible for the imagination to have played any role at all in the dreaming process as he understood it. But he was easily able to factor the imagination into the dreaming equation because the imagination was not only the forming power of poetry: it was also the ‘true inward Creatrix’ of many confusing nightmares, readily participating in them (CN in 4046), and in disease and illness. He perceived that the imagination was the linking faculty between the psychological and physical states of dreaming and disease, and that it displayed properties of both dreaming and diseased states of mind (CL ii 974). There were specific diseases which Coleridge argued illustrated this particular and fascinating species of dream: gout was caused by an ‘aggregation of slight Feelings by the force of a diseasedly retentive Imagination’ (CL ii 975). Sleep and disease possessed inherently similar properties and could therefore be studied as complementary disciplines. Dreams had long been considered to be types of diseases. What united the studies of dreams, disease and sleeping in Coleridge's thinking was the imagination. This emphasis on the physical, medical imagination calls for a re-evaluation of the broader concept of the imagination as Coleridge understood it, and consequently, for a re-evaluation of the critical notion of the Romantic imagination. For Coleridge, the imagination is not only an imagination capable of producing poetry and dreams: it is also an imagination of medicine and disease. Both notions were firmly grounded in the psychology and medical science of the late eighteenth century.

Although dreams and dreaming have been readily acknowledged as expressions of Romantic imaginative creativity, it is clear that for Coleridge dreaming was also a physical, painful experience. It was as much a bodily as a psychological experience, and Coleridge vigorously explored the relations between body and mind in dreaming states. His insistence on the corporeal, medical character of dreams challenges the notion of a purely aesthetic, idealist Romantic imagination entirely separated from material or bodily concerns. If dreams are medical, physical occurrences, then the imagination must be seen as capable of participating in physical and medical processes. But this is not to suggest that the roles of the imagination as both poetic and medical, dreaming and diseased, are mutually exclusive. Coleridge and other writers of his day were inspired to explore the mysteries and complexities of dreams because they perceived that they were not merely psychological curiosities, or the result of a large meal consumed before sleeping. Dreams were considered in the contexts of science, medicine, philosophy, superstition and prophecy.

The imagination was not restricted to an aesthetic arena: it was perceived not only as a faculty of the poetic arts, but also as a faculty of medical science. Body and mind were not easily separated, and the relations between the two were crucial in the formation of dreams and dreaming states. Coleridge's awareness of the imagination as a medical entity, capable of both curing and causing diseases, demands that the notion of the imagination as an exclusively poetic, aesthetic faculty be broadened. His engagement with so many diverse texts on dreaming and his recurrent belief in the importance of the bodily in the formation of psychological, emotional states create a more complex and at the same time more accurate portrait of what the imagination is and what its powers are.

Coleridge often suggests that his body, diseased and suffering from numerous complaints, causes his dreams and is intimately involved in many dreaming processes (CL v 385–6; N35, fos. 37v–38). His understanding of his body and of its role in dreams was significantly determined by his infirmities and the ways in which they were expressed in his dreams. Pain and disease underscore all of his enquiries into dreams and dreaming. In his efforts to account for both the origin and the nature of his dreams, he explored the fundamental properties that dreams and disease had in common. His deliberations on the body's role in causing dreams led him to examine the complex processes between his body and his mind during dreams. These processes he termed a translation or a transmutation, and for Coleridge they elucidated some of the most important phenomena of sleep and disease. They also revealed to him the many complex and exciting ways in which the imagination acts in dreaming states.

When he was sixty years old, Coleridge wrote in his notebook: ‘I am tied down, and strait-waisted by Disease, & driven inward on my own unworthy Self, fighting with my own sensations, listening to my own moans & groans, & imploring God's mercy on myself, on my miserable Self’ (N50, fo. 35v, 21 February 1832). This entry epitomises an ageing man's weariness as well as Coleridge's perception of his body as a vehicle for suffering, defined by pain and disease. The presence of continual illness meant that he was ‘driven inward’ on himself, forced to fight his ‘own sensations’. When the body is well, it is not often a subject for contemplation; but when sick and harassed by its own organs, it mercilessly forces attention upon itself.

After many years of studying his dreams and nightmares, Coleridge claimed that ‘no explanation of Dreams or attempt to explain them’ had ‘in the least degree’ satisfied his judgement or ‘appeared to solve any part of the mysterious Problem’ (CN iv 5360). In 1827 he declared that all he had read on dreams and dreaming was ‘utter shallowness and impertinency’ (CL vi 715). This perceived absence of any cogent or comprehensive theory that could account for the different and bizarre qualities of dreams presented him with no other option than to suggest his own possible solutions.

The question of the origin of dreams was one which intrigued Coleridge for most of his life. Throughout his notebooks, letters and critical writings it is possible to discern three general dream-origin arguments, all of which arise from his vast reading of dream and medical literatures coupled with his own experiences: first, that dreams are caused by gods intervening in the lives of men; second, that they are a result of the action of malignant spirits; and third, that the dreamer's bodily position and state of health both causes and influences dreams. This third possibility presented him with a greater dilemma than the simple question as to why it was that dreams were dreamt. The poet's body dominates all his speculations about dreams and dreaming: a body frequently diseased, racked with pain, and often violently opposed to his intellectual and moral life. Just as pain is a feature of the dream's language and the language of the dream, so too does pain become a feature of Coleridge's explanation of the origin of the many species and genera of dreams he experienced.

In spite of Coleridge's remarkable dedication to understanding dreams and dreaming, there have been very few studies dealing with his writings on dreams. There is no single collection of all of his dream cogitations; his thoughts remain scattered throughout his marginalia, notebooks, letters and formal writings. Nor has there been a comprehensive or contextual study of these dream writings. This book seeks to explore what Kathleen Coburn in 1979 rightly called a ‘subject in itself’; the ‘richness and variety of Coleridge's notes on sleep and dreaming’. His insightful observations on the ‘most interesting’ features of dreams, visions and ghosts, gathered together in the following pages, reveal the extent to which he utilised his own dreaming experiences as well as those he encountered through his wide reading. My emphasis throughout is on discovering what Coleridge's contemporaries wrote and thought about dreams and dreaming, and the ways in which his own experiences often challenged these contemporary theories. I particularly focus on Coleridge's exploration of dreams and dreaming states in his notebooks, because these have not yet been systematically studied, and because they yield the richest, the most surprising and most comprehensive discussion of dreams in his writings.

In elaborating the “social” half of the-individual-in-social-context construct, Allport and the Murphys sanctioned crossing beyond the confines of scientific propriety into the realm of “impure” science – “impure” that is, by the definition of scientists who sought to cleanse science of the taint of the social in their quest to obtain “pure” knowledge. As students of the “common public world of nature,” Allport and the Murphys, on the other hand, assumed that their endeavor was indeed a social enterprise, and that science was, as a result, shot through with moral and political values. As researchers, they believed that neither they nor their colleagues could – or should – sidestep confronting questions regarding the place of scientific elites in a democracy by hiding behind a veil of “objectivity.”

As Allport and the Murphys conceived it, one of their duties as social psychologists was to insist that the antidemocratic social structures of American life be identified and forthrightly examined – so as to discharge their public obligations as scientists working in a democracy, but also in order to chart the terrain in which they themselves, as scientists, labored. They fully expected that “impure” science, done properly, would be regarded as “dangerous” and “subversive” by those in positions of economic power, as Gardner Murphy maintained in his 1938 speech as chairman of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). Murphy's warning to psychologists that they must take responsibility to see that their “factual discoveries” were not placed in the service of the “exploitation of some by others” signaled the existence of a dissenting viewpoint that questioned the democratic pretensions of scientific practice.

As children of the Progressive Era who would later choose to work in the social sciences, Allport and the Murphys came of age in social and intellectual worlds that have been well scrutinized by scholars. Indeed, increasing historical attention has been directed at the fact that the attitudes characteristic of their parents' generation – reformist zeal, faith in scientific knowledge, and passion for organization building – powered the professionalization and institutionalization of the social sciences at the turn of the century. In many ways, the historiography of the social sciences in this period of disciplinary formation is a province of the larger realm of the historiography of Progressivism.

The most insightful set of interpretations that exist regarding the growth of the social sciences in the early twentieth century relate to the increasing appeal that scientism held for many practitioners. Dorothy Ross, for example, in The Origins of American Social Science, finds that “during the 1920s the cultural authority and social power of scientism pushed the center of gravity in the social science professions toward a harder and more technocratic conception of social science.” But as Ross herself has observed elsewhere, “The wave of scientism launched before and after World War I did not wholly prevail,” and, in fact, “scientism set in motion substantial countercurrents in defense of social science methods that took into account the uniquely human attributes of subjectivity and choice,” especially during the 1930s and 1960s, “when reformist attitudes arose in the society at large.”