What History Can Teach Us About Sleep and Dreams

As a historian, what first drew you to sleep and dreams? 

I’m an early modern historian, which in Europe usually means the period between the Renaissance and the French Revolution, though it overlaps with the beginning of industrialization, too. I’ve been drawn to that period since I was an undergraduate, for reasons I can’t entirely explain. 

I’m also a cultural historian, so I’m interested in practices, belief systems, values, ritual, religion—the ways people make meaning. Sleep and dreams fit very naturally into that. They’re part of how people understand themselves and the world around them. 

And on a personal level, I’ve long been fascinated by altered states of consciousness. I have a vivid dream life myself, and I take sleep very seriously. I grew up in a family that talked about dreams, or at least found them interesting and entertaining. But I also come from a very middle-class American culture that values efficiency and productivity and often treats sleep almost like an inconvenience—as if it would be better if we didn’t need it. That idea is horrifying to me. Sleep is not wasted time. 

How have attitudes toward dreams changed over time? 

I think we may be in the middle of a cultural shift now. People seem more open again to the idea that dreams might have meaning—not only in a psychoanalytic sense, as wish fulfillment or repression, but also in a spiritual sense. There’s more willingness to talk about dreams as messages, or encounters with ancestors or guides, or something beyond the strictly rational. 

In the early modern period, people often had more conceptual space for dreams. Of course, it depended on class, gender, region, and religious setting, but dreams were often taken seriously. Among ordinary people, dreams might be understood as messages from God. Among elites, especially after the Scientific Revolution, there could be more skepticism, but not only skepticism. 

Descartes is one famous example—he described receiving his philosophy through a series of dreams. Later, you have figures like Swedenborg, and then Romantic writers like Blake, who also took dreams and visionary experience seriously. So it’s not really a simple story of moving from belief to disenchantment. 

Did people in the past have categories for dreams, the way we do now? 

Yes, though not in modern psychological language. They didn’t have Freud, and they didn’t talk about the unconscious in the way we do. But they absolutely had categories. There were prophetic dreams, visionary dreams, and visitation dreams. There were dream manuals—very popular ones—that told readers, in effect, if you dream this, it means that. These circulated in Protestant and Catholic cultures, and Jewish traditions of dream interpretation were important too. So people certainly classified dreams. What changes is the framework. In earlier periods, dreams were often understood within a religious or spiritual cosmos. Today, many people are more likely to treat them as something internal—as a path into the self. 

You spoke about dreams as an altered state of consciousness. What interests you there? 

We tend to imagine only two states: waking and sleeping, as if it’s just an on-off switch. But dreaming complicates that. It’s a liminal state, and it suggests that consciousness may be more of a spectrum. 

For many people, dreams are a way of going inward, into an inner world. But in many spiritual traditions, dreams can also be understood as openings onto other worlds—the realm of ancestors, angels, divine beings, other planes of existence. In those experiences, space and time often feel fluid or irrelevant. That’s true in dreams, but it’s also true in mystical experience more broadly. What fascinates me is the way dreams blur boundaries: inner and outer, self and world, here and elsewhere. 

Where does lucid dreaming fit into this? 

Lucid dreaming is when you realize, while dreaming, that you are dreaming. Some people are suspicious of it because they think it means trying to control the dream rather than receiving its message. But lucidity doesn’t necessarily mean total control. You may choose to open a door in the dream, but what’s behind it can still surprise you. 

For a long time, people assumed lucid dreaming was either modern or imaginary. But both historical and scientific research suggest otherwise. It was scientifically confirmed in the late twentieth century, and historically, we can now see that earlier thinkers were interested in it too. 

What I find especially striking is that some eighteenth-century writers were already describing lucid dreaming in therapeutic terms. They wrote about becoming lucid in frightening dreams and then using that awareness to face what they feared, instead of running from it. That could be deeply healing. And it also complicates our image of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not simply secular, rational, and dismissive of altered states. It was more varied than that. 

Why do you think lucid dreaming appeals to people now? 

Part of the appeal is experiential. Lucid dreaming gives people a sense of freedom and possibility that they don’t often encounter in ordinary life. But I think there’s also a deeper appeal. 

In some religious traditions, lucid dreaming teaches that dream reality is malleable, responsive to the mind. And the implication is that reality itself may be less fixed than we assume. That’s a spiritual idea, but it also has broader consequences. If people believe the world can change, they may be more likely to act as if it can. 

As a historian, I’m always aware that what people take to be fixed is often historically contingent. So lucid dreaming interests me not only as an experience, but as something that can loosen rigid assumptions about reality. 

Are there historical precedents for practices that cultivate lucid dreaming? 

Yes. Tibetan Buddhist traditions have very elaborate lucid-dreaming practices involving visualization, meditation, seed syllables, and disciplined attention. Islamic traditions, especially Sufi traditions, also take dreams very seriously. And then today, you have a much more improvised internet culture around lucid dreaming, where people do “reality checks”—looking at a clock twice, checking their hands, seeing whether something in the environment changes unexpectedly. The point is to train the mind to ask, “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” What’s interesting is that for many people, this spills into waking life. Lucid dreaming becomes tied to mindfulness—to paying closer attention to experience itself. 

In your work, you connected dreams with creativity. 

Yes, absolutely. Across centuries, artists, writers, and thinkers have described dreams as sources of ideas. Sometimes people explain that in terms of the unconscious. Sometimes they use more mysterious language, as if creativity comes through them rather than from them. 

Many creative people work deliberately with dreams. They may try to incubate a dream by asking for guidance before sleep, or become lucid and ask the dream directly for help with a chapter, a painting, or a problem. Then they wake up with an image, a phrase, a scene, or a structure. 

So dreams are not just a strange residue left over from the day. They can be an active resource—not just for artists, but also for scholars. 

One of the most memorable points you make is about segmented sleep. What did you mean? 

Before industrial modernity, many people slept in two phases: first sleep and second sleep. They would go to bed earlier, wake in the middle of the night for some period of time, and then go back to sleep. If you look at preindustrial sources, references to that pattern come up all the time. It fit an industrial society that wanted people to sleep efficiently and then work long hours. In that sense, sleep became more utilitarian. 

Today, if people wake in the middle of the night, they often assume something is wrong with them. But historically, waking in the night could be perfectly normal. Some of the anxiety comes from assuming that uninterrupted eight-hour sleep is the only healthy pattern. 

So the modern problem is not just biological. It’s historical too. 

Exactly. We pathologize forms of sleep that don’t fit a fairly recent model. And that model aligns very neatly with industrial capitalism. It also encourages us to think of the body as a machine: you recharge, then you go back to work. But that strips sleep of its healing, creative, and mysterious dimensions. It reduces us to batteries. There is so much richness in sleep and dreams, and I think many people have lost touch with that. 

Do you think we’ve also lost the habit of talking about dreams? 

Yes, in many settings, I think we have. People still dream, of course, but they may not remember them, or they don’t talk about them, or they don’t take them seriously. That feels like a loss to me. Dreams are a free resource. They can offer ideas, creativity, insight, and healing. Even in academic life, I find dreams very helpful in writing and thinking. But many academics have a very fraught relationship with sleep, and they don’t see dreams as part of intellectual life. And yet that richness is already there. We don’t need to invent it. We just need to notice it.