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T O W A R D  A  H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y 
O F  D R E A M S :  A  D I S C U R S I V E 
P E R S P E C T I V E
L a u r a  J .  V o l l m e r
The State of the Art and a New Direction
Historical overviews of dreams beyond religious or natural scientific 
perspectives are rare and limited to specific issues, time periods, and 
geographical areas with the exception of a few works that discuss a more 
nuanced history of dream theory and the evolution of dream studies in 
different fields.1 As restricted as the history of dreams is, the historiogra-
phy of dreams is even worse off. Astonishingly, Google Scholar searches 
for “historiography of dreams” and “historiography of dreaming” only 
give fourteen total results!2 There are many key historiographic changes 
1  Such as the edited volume Dreams and History by Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper (London: 
Routledge, 2004).
2  Both accessed September 6, 2023, from the United States. The total number of results 
was the amount of hits minus duplicate results (different authors from the same edited volume 
were considered one result) and minus non-English results (which only “hit” because of refer-
ences to these other results). The best treatment of the historiography of dreams that I have 
found is the volume edited by Giorgia Morgese, Giovanni Pietro Lombardo, and Hendrika 
Vande Kemp entitled Histories of Dreams and Dreaming (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 
but with a narrow focus on the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and the science 
of dreaming. And others with any significant degree of discussion (which is still very limited), 
three edited volumes, are restricted to the ancient and early modern periods and to the locales 
of the Byzantine and the Atlantic world. These include Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle’s 
Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of 
Pennsylvania Press, 2013); George T. Calofonos’s Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2014), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315578064; and Bronwen Neil and Eva 
Anagnostou-Laoutides’s Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 
2018). 
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2023.414 Poligrafi, no. 109/110, vol. 28, 2023, pp. 83–104
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that have yet to be addressed in the study of dreams that are worthy of 
consideration as they reflect wider intellectual developments underly-
ing academic thought that often appear as tacit knowledge. It is our 
premodern to post-postmodern epistemes3 that have impacted the his-
tory of dream research via the varying constructs of the “dream” that I 
will mainly discuss here in a primarily exploratory way to suggest how a 
historiography of dreams might develop. In order to create a more self-
reflective history, these epistemes should be brought to the fore.
following the thought of Michel foucault, I examine discourses 
through a “genealogy” of dream research, which demonstrates domi-
nant epistemes underlying shifts in intellectual thought. “Genealogy” is 
defined by foucault as “a form of history which reports on the constitu-
tion of knowledge, discourses, fields of objects, etc., without having to 
relate to a subject which transcends the field of events and occupies it 
with its hollow identity throughout history,” which has been systemati-
cally applied in the field of discourse analysis.4 Therefore, I will not be 
defining the term “dream,” which might convey a misleading red thread 
in history, but rather I will look at how the concept has been histori-
cally discursively constructed in dream history and research. Discourses 
“are to be treated as practices which systematically form the object of 
which they speak.”5 This emphasizes the role of language, which, in 
this article, is English and its historical context in the Western world. 
Epistemes, according to foucault, refer to that which “defines the con-
ditions of possibility of all knowledge.”6 Epistemes are the implicit rules 
of what counts as legitimate knowledge, such as the dictate of natural-
ism in order to be considered scientific, which change through time. 
of course, there have been different narratives within dream history. 
However, here, I am concerned with dominant discourses in historical 
perspective, which should be kept in mind when I speak in some gener-
alities. And though more complex approaches have developed in dream 
3  The periodizations of intellectual history are mainly heuristic, of course. The premodern 
through post-postmodern epistemes simultaneously exist in past and present discourse.
4  Quoted in translation in Siegfried Jäger, “Discourse and Knowledge,” in Methods of Criti-
cal Discourse Analysis, eds. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage, 2001), 37–38.
5  foucault quoted in translation in Jäger, “Discourse and Knowledge,” 39.
6  Michel foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 168. 
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studies than those outlined here, these discourses still impact a lot of 
research today. The line of inquiry is: How has the “dream” as an ob-
ject of study been constructed in the history of dream research? What 
are some important dominant epistemes that have impacted these dis-
courses? 
The Localization of Dreams: 
Internal/External and Subjective/objective
The ascription or denial of the significance of dreams appears in 
many historical discussions and primary material. This is closely related 
to whether dreams are constructed as stemming from external or in-
ternal sources and whether those sources are fashioned as objective or 
subjective forms of knowledge. The external/internal in terms of (meta)
physical space (relative to the self ) is not consistently mapped onto the 
objective/subjective in terms of epistemological status, so these things 
must be considered separately. The localization of dreams and how this 
is connected to legitimation discourses is the first historiographical as-
pect that I will explore. 
Among the primary ways that dreams have been constructed in his-
torical accounts is in terms of external supernatural causes. This is be-
cause, from ancient to contemporary times, people have often framed 
dreams as prophetic, carriers of omens, or as messages from supernatu-
ral beings. In these contexts, a dream was “received” rather than “had.” 
Dreams were taken as legitimate sources of knowledge precisely be-
cause there was thought to be some external force beyond the self that 
was operative in their manifestation that gave them a privileged place 
as knowledge. This is evidenced by the fact that most societies have 
differentiated between their own, unimportant dreams and significant 
dreams originating outside the self.7 
Like externalizing dreams, localizing dreams in the internal is a dis-
course found throughout time. In modern Western discourse, inter-
nalization occurred via localizing dreams first primarily in the mind, 
associated with the subjective, and then in the body as the objective, 
7  Patrick McNamara, Dreams and Visions (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016), 41.
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which fed the delegitimation of dreams as religiously significant. This 
is intimately related to wider discourses on legitimate knowledge and 
the modern construction of “science” in the nineteenth century and 
the establishment of the scientific episteme, placed in a cosmic order of 
natural, material, and objective knowledge.8 And this, in turn, was part 
of a larger process of the secularization of society, which has historically 
been understood as a separation from religion.9 As religion and science 
first became conceptually differentiated, between approximately 1620 
and 1830, they were discursively assigned the realms of the subjective 
and objective, respectively (even though, historically, this is not always 
so clear cut). This was by no means a given; it was part of a purpose-
ful and self-aware movement to carve out intellectual, political, social, 
and cultural space for science in a world dominated by religion. And 
methodological objectivity “became generalized, not only as science, 
but as fact and truth and reason,” while religion was placed in the con-
ceptual space of internal subjectivity, falsehood, and irrationality, that 
is, as epistemologically insignificant.10 
Dreams were first internalized in the psyche, which involved an em-
phasis on the subjective mind over the objective body on the part of 
early psychologists. Meanwhile, the physical world was increasingly as-
sociated with the “real world,” which was rhetorically situated as the 
sole domain of science at this time, while the mental portion became 
not only metaphysically but also epistemologically subjectivized, in-
creasingly thought to have tenuous connections to reality. The rhetori-
cal and discursive reaction on the part of early psychologists was to 
frame psychology as more scientific, to use more rigorous empirical 
study, and to objectify the mind localized within the physical world of 
causal laws (meaning, at this point, that the internal/external division 
8  for a discussion on how the “cosmic order” or “symbolic universe” serves legitimation, see 
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor 
Books, 1967), 92–128.
9  Giorgia Morgese and Giovanni Pietro Lombardo, “History of Dream Research,” in Histo-
ries of Dreams and Dreaming, eds. Giorgia Morgese, Giovanni Pietro Lombardo, and Hendrika 
Vande Kemp (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3–4.
10  Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: oxford University Press, 1976), 235. Emphasis 
original. for an extensive discussion, see Laura J. Vollmer, [working title] The Relational Struc-
ture of Discourse: The Case of Religion and Science (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming), chap. 2. 
T O W A R D  A  H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y  O F  D R E A M S
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was muddied, and subjectivity/objectivity became the more operative 
discourse).11 Dreams were localized in the physical spaces of the brain, 
the overall nervous system, and sleep posture, for example.12 The lo-
calization of dreams in physical space became particularly salient with 
Sigmund freud’s publication The Interpretation of Dreams, appearing in 
English in 1913. “freud’s revolution may be viewed as the discovery of 
a way of locating in the mind objective entities which can be studied 
like physical things.”13 That said, this was part of the earlier, broader 
nineteenth-century movement mapping all mental processes onto neu-
ral or other physical processes. And demarcating the physical processes 
of dreams (and other mental phenomena) as mutually exclusive with 
religious understandings helped the field of psychology gain objectivity 
and respectability.14 
This is because scientific advances in the nineteenth century were 
largely communicated as negations of religious beliefs in order to frame 
science as authoritative, reacting to the premodern religious episteme.15 
As for dreams, a considerable amount of scientific research has its ori-
gins in translating psychological states to physical ones in a direct at-
tempt at refuting “superstitious” and “popular” beliefs,16 labeling that 
stigmatizes and delegitimizes religious notions. Correlations between 
internal, often physical, understandings of dreams and a negation of 
religious notions (though not always religion in total) can be found in 
Walter C. Dendy’s On the Phenomena of Dreams and Other Transient 
Illusions (1832) and Robert Macnish’s The Philosophy of Sleep (1834), 
for instance. In another example, W. Newnham, in Essay on Supersti-
tion (1830), states that dreams (and other “morbid states”) “consist not 
in variety of spiritual essence, but of the material medium through which 
11  Doris Kaufmann, “Dreams and Self-Consciousness,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, 
ed. Lorraine Daston, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 70; Vollmer, The Relational 
Structure, chap. 3.
12  Kaufmann, “Dreams,” 75, 80, and passim.
13  Lawrence friedman, “Reasons for the freudian Revolution,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 46, 
no. 4 (1977): 623, https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1977.11926818. 
14  on dreams as such, see, e.g., Morgese and Lombardo, “History,” 248. on religion and 
science conceptualized in this way, see Vollmer, The Relational Structure, chap. 3.
15  Vollmer, The Relational Structure, chap. 2.
16  Morgese and Lombardo, “History,” 248.
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its manifestations are made.”17 These correlations continued through the 
nineteenth century and into the early twentieth until religious explana-
tions of dreams did not feature in general scientific discussion so often. 
freud, for example, explained his view on dreams in specific contrast 
to “pre-scientific” concepts of dreams in terms of the supernatural and 
spiritual.18 
Ian Hacking notes that “dreams are made ‘objective’ (…) by embed-
ding them in place,” and via this discursive construction, “dreams are 
ruthlessly excluded from real life, and cease to be signifiers at all.”19 of 
course, the premodern religious episteme and religious takes on dreams 
did not disappear from mainstream society overnight, and books on 
revelatory and other spiritual dreams—like Mrs. Blair’s Dreams and 
Dreaming (1843)—appeared alongside scientific ones. Situated in this 
tension between a declining religious episteme and a rising scientific 
one, nineteenth-century people “considered dreams to be meaningless 
and meaningful, mere physiological artifacts and messages from the 
great beyond.”20 By the twentieth century, psychological factors were 
largely regarded as “explaining away” religion and dreams as “illusions”; 
freud positioned both as forms of wish fulfillment, for example.21 As 
the naturalist, objective paradigm came to dominate interpretation, 
dreams were denied the religious import that they had previously en-
joyed. The scientific episteme set the rules for what counted as legiti-
mate knowledge, guiding the historical construction of the “dream” in 
a particular direction: localized in internal processes, associated with 
the natural, objective, and physical, and communicated as a refutation 
of religious understandings. This discourse systematically formed the 
object labeled “dream.” 
17  William Newnham, Essay on Superstition (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1830), 146. 
Emphasis original.
18  E.g., Sigmund freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), 5.
19  Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 228 
and 254.
20  Jonathan C. Glance, “Revelation, Nonsense or Dyspepsia,” Mercer University, April 29, 
2001, http://faculty.mercer.edu/glance_jc/files/academic_work/victorian_dream_theories.htm.
21  on religion as wish fulfillment, see Sigmund freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: 
W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 30–31, 35, 42–43, 52; on dreams, see freud, The Interpreta-
tion, passim.
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The Imagined Spaces of Dreams: 
Communication Models and Social Realms
The objectification of dreams places dreams in an impersonal so-
cial and communicative space, and this and other imagined spaces 
of dreams make up another evolving discourse that has shaped the 
“dream.” Hendrika Vande Kemp, for instance, notes particular histori-
cal phases of dream studies based on the spaces of the “transpersonal/
superpersonal,” placing the cause of dreams as supernatural; the “inter-
personal/extrapersonal,” in which dreams are thought to originate with 
others who are sending a message; the “impersonal/nonpersonal,” with 
dreams constructed as an epiphenomenon reducible to physiological 
and objective factors; and the “intrapersonal,” with the dream under-
stood as a message from the self.22 We can consider these imagined 
spaces as they relate to source/cause and “communication forms” (as 
in the field of communication studies), similar to what Vande Kemp 
does, but also as metaphysical, epistemological, and/or social spaces. 
As I have already discussed the philosophical spaces of the internal/ex-
ternal and objective/subjective above, I am primarily thinking of these 
dimensions as social here, which are sometimes communicative and 
sometimes simply thought to “occupy” social realms or other imagined 
spaces. I use “imagined space” to refer to a discursive representation 
of space experienced through the world of ideation, a subjective de-
marcation, such as in Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” or 
Edward Said’s “imagined geographies.”23 The imagined space of dreams 
is the perceived place they occupy, such as the communicative space of 
the impersonal when scientists “distance” themselves from the object of 
study or the social realm of religion or the religious world as such where 
the transpersonal dream is sometimes located. 
22  Hendrika Vande Kemp, “The Dream in Periodical Literature,” Journal of the His-
tory of the Behavioral Sciences 17, no. 1 (1981): 88–113, https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-
6696(198101)17:1%3C88::AID-JHBS2300170111%3E3.0.Co;2-W. I discuss Vande Kemp’s 
more recent research in the conclusion.
23  There are many, varying uses of the term “imagined space” and related ideas, typically 
drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992) and/
or Edward W. Soja’s Thirdspace (Cambridge, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996).
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The transpersonal space of dreams involving the spiritual or super-
natural realms evident in religious reflections has, as already mentioned, 
occupied a lot of historical accounts of dreams. The impersonal space 
has also received disproportionate attention in the history of dream 
studies as it relates to natural scientific studies. As we have seen, the 
religious and scientific epistemes dominated how the dream was con-
structed in terms of metaphysical and epistemological space, and the 
same can be said of these social and communicative spaces. 
However, psychoanalysts also ascribed significance to dreams because 
they offered internal insight, an intrapersonal exchange between the 
conscious and unconscious mind. Even though psychology distanced 
itself from ideas of religious significance, as discussed above, the notion 
of intrapersonal dreams was enthusiastically taken up in the New Age 
and is a theme that still appears in many new religious movements. The 
importance placed on the intrapersonal space of dreams could be read 
as a reflection of the rise of “spirituality” as an alternative discursive 
form of “subjective religiosity,” and New Age religion certainly exhibits 
this tendency to relocate the sacred at the individual level, often invok-
ing discourse on “spirituality,” as well as positioning dreams as sources 
of intuition.24 “Spirituality,” as a term, has historically emphasized inte-
rior and experiential knowledge to situate it in a world that rationalized 
and naturalized religion, as seen in Romanticism and Transcendental-
ism and continuing as an important discursive strand in contemporary 
religion. We might interpret the spiritual turn to constitute an episteme 
of its own in the sense that it has its own rules for what is considered 
legitimate knowledge, an “epistemological mode” that attributes mean-
ing to life and finds personal significance when scientific epistemology 
fails, as some have argued.25 In this way, placing dreams in an intrap-
ersonal, spiritual space serves to relegitimate dreaming in the form of 
24  Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman, eds., Religions of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Wouter 
J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (New York: SUNY, 1998).
25  See Simone Schröder, The Nature Essay (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 111 for the quote and 111–
73 for a discussion; and Michal Izak, “Spiritual Episteme,” Journal of Organizational Change 
Management 25, no. 1 (2021): 24–47, https://doi.org/10.1108/09534811211199583. Spiritu-
ality is also increasingly considered an important discourse in the post-postmodern episteme, 
also positioned as a reaction to scientific materialism. Alan Kirby, Digimodernism (New York: 
Continuum, 2009), 25.
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self-knowledge as distinct from universal scientific knowledge, which is 
in line with New Age emphasis on antiauthoritarianism and its critique 
of reductive epistemology found in the sciences.26 This discursive read-
ing is supported by the many popular publications exhibiting this New 
Age vibe that position dreams in terms of personal and spiritual growth 
while drawing upon the natural sciences but ultimately challenging the 
hegemony of their materialist philosophy, such as Andrew Holecek’s 
The Lucid Dreaming Workbook (2020), Julie Loar’s Symbol and Synchro-
nicity (2021), and Athena Laz’s The Alchemy of Your Dreams (2021), to 
name but a few from recent years.
Some other imagined spaces that deserve historiographical consid-
eration relate to “dream engineering” (techniques that alter dreams). 
Dream engineering—through drug use or lucid-dream-induction tech-
niques, for instance—has been around since antiquity or earlier and 
can involve various communicative spaces. In contemporary times, this 
has taken a novel, interpersonal direction in oneirology. In this context, 
dream engineering sometimes occupies interpersonal space not only 
because of an exchange between the scientist inducing the state in the 
dreamer but also because it is used as a tool for social change via crea-
tive production, healing, and even advertising. Regarding drugs, there 
is active research in medicine and quantitative science on the effect 
of various pharmaceuticals on dreaming.27 And marketing specialists 
are testing the modification of purchasing behavior through “target-
ed dream incubation” and other dream hacking, such as Xbox’s Made 
from Dreams project aimed at inducing dreams about video games.28 
Dream engineering is a relatively new natural scientific approach to 
26  Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman, “Silicon Valley New Age,” in Religions of Modernity, eds. 
Aupers and Houtman (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 165; Aupers and Houtman, Religions of Modernity, 
passim.
27  E.g., Alain Nicolas and Perrine M. Ruby, “Dreams, Sleep, and Psychotropic Drugs,” Fron-
tiers in Neurology 11 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2020.507495; and Kamalanand 
Krishnamurthy and Mannar Jawahar Ponnuswamy, “A Mathematical Exploration into Ma-
nipulation and Control of a Bifurcative Dreaming Process,” International Journal of Dream 
Research 6, no. 2 (2013): 110–13, https://doi.org/10.11588/ijodr.2013.2.9977. for the history 
of dream-related drug use, see Gianluca Toro and Benjamin Thomas, Drugs of the Dreaming 
(Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2007).
28  Dustin Marlan, “Branding Dreams,” Bill of Health, Harvard Law, october 4, 2022, 
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/10/04/branding-dreams/.
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dream studies, which can be seen, in part, as a product of the techno-
logical epistemic turn, constituting a technology itself in the sense of 
applied knowledge. In this context, the historical object “dream” is not 
“received” nor “had” but “made.” 
Current directions in intrapersonal dream engineering also display 
a technologizing turn. The MIT Media Lab has developed a device 
called a Dormio to not only induce dreams but direct them according 
to words or images selected by the dreamer “to augment human creativ-
ity,” displaying the personal-growth trope.29 In this intrapersonal con-
text, the dream is democratized by placing the power of its making in 
the hands of the individual. While dream engineering has been around 
for a long time in general history, in the scientific study of dreams, these 
new developments constitute a shift from a focus on theory and analy-
sis to application that involves reshaping the historical scientific object 
“dream” from impersonal to interpersonal and sometimes intrapersonal 
spaces. 
Another interpersonal aspect contributing to the “dream” construct is 
dream sharing, used for self-assertion, building a persona, and forming 
social connections.30 This has displayed a technologizing turn as well with 
dream sharing occurring in a new imagined space—cyberspace—which 
provides further opportunities for such individual and group transfor-
mation.31 Joseph B. Walther’s research on virtual space led him to devel-
op a new communication model, referred to as the “hyperpersonal.”32 
This is characterized as strategic development and editing for optimiz-
29  MIT, “Dormio,” accessed September 21, 2023, https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/
sleep-creativity/overview/.
30  Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle, “Introduction,” in Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions, eds. 
Plane and Tuttle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 8; Jacques Le Goff, The 
Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 229.
31  E.g., see Shulamit Geller et al., “Dreams Shared on Social Networks During the Co-
VID-19 Pandemic,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 20, no. 4 
(2023): 3534, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20043534. 
32  Joseph B. Walther, “Computer-Mediated Communication,” Communication Research 23, 
no. 1 (1996): 3–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/009365096023001001. The hyperpersonal is con-
sidered a form of interpersonal communication here, but given that reciprocal communica-
tion may be delayed or removed altogether (as not every electronic communication receives a 
response) in addition to the fact that there is the intrapersonal aspect of identity building, it 
might be considered its own communicative mode.
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ing self-presentation, specifically enabled by computer-mediated com-
munication. Research is scarce, however the hyperpersonal has assur-
edly constructed the dream in a new way, the potential for revision 
and selective presentation making the hyperpersonal dream specifically 
mutable, destructible, and biased. That is, a dream shared online can 
be edited, deleted, or censored for the purposes of self-image, self-pro-
motion, or other self-serving motives that skew presentation, making 
for a dream that is largely unique to electronic communication. Indeed, 
online dream sharing has been shown to fulfill such individual goals 
as bonding, coping, and belonging, with the motives—among other 
things—of emotional relief, entertainment, to “make oneself more in-
teresting,” or self-expression and the tone of the shared dream reflecting 
the motives for sharing it, suggestive of the hyperpersonal dream.33
The multiple authorship and instability of the narrative along with 
the decentering and decontextualization of the self in cyberspace 
may also contribute to another communication model: what might 
be called the “metapersonal,” by which I mean that it is beyond the 
bounds of the personal with no single individual or group determin-
ing the course of the communication though all can contribute. for 
instance, Shulamit Geller et al. approach dreams as “both individual 
creations and group property.”34 We might ask what a metapersonal 
dream might look like. Because discourse also features a simultane-
ously individual and collective communicative mode, we could say 
the metapersonal dream is the discursive dream, that is, specifically 
constructed in its variety (as done here). Typically, when we examine 
a given text, the discourse surrounding a word like “dream” is (at 
least somewhat) internally coherent. Approaching the internet as text, 
though, we instead get encyclopedic incoherence (think a Wikipedia 
entry outlining the various understandings of the “dream”). This col-
lective, incoherent, and remarkably democratic discursive perspective 
33  for the quote, see Daniel Graf, Michael Schredl, Anja S. Göritz, “frequency and Mo-
tives of Sharing Dreams,” Personality and Individual Differences 175 (2021), https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.110699. See also Geller et al., “Dreams.” The former study does not 
focus on what is off- or online, but rather general motivations for dream sharing; the latter is 
specifically regarding dream sharing on social media.
34  Geller et al., “Dreams.”
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is itself discursively constructing the object. And with the technologi-
cal turn and the explosion of discourse in cyberspace, the metaper-
sonal dream has become ubiquitous. 
Theoretical Paradigms of Dreams: 
Essentialism and Contextualism
Another historiographical consideration is the different theoreti-
cal paradigms applied to the nature of dreams, including essentialism 
and contextualism, respectively situated in modern and postmodern 
epistemes, which, like in the other cases, are sometimes connected to 
discourses of authority and power. The discussion on the contextualism 
and essentialism of dreams, as noted by Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper, 
is part of a wider historiographical debate on these paradigms as they 
relate to human nature more broadly.35 But it is even bigger than that. 
Essentialism is an ancient philosophy, and it has been a defining feature 
of the modern episteme, of Western histories, and even of the forma-
tion of academic subjects, making theoretical paradigms a key histo-
riographical consideration in the history of dreams and dream studies. 
An essentialist paradigm persisted in the academic study of religion 
for some time in that religion was treated as something sui generis, 
such as put forth by Mircea Eliade. As Russell McCutcheon explains: 
“A dominant aspect of the modern discourse on religion is (…) estab-
lished and maintained by such ideological and rhetorical strategies as 
dehistoricization, universalization, and decontextualization.”36 Essen-
tialist accounts of religion bled into analyses of dreams. for example, 
as Eliade puts it, “it has been found that dreams (…) may present (…) 
a ‘religious aura’ (…) homologous with the experience of the sacred.”37 
Edward Burnett Tylor similarly presented “dreams” and “religion” in 
essentialist terms, universalized across cultures when he suggested the 
former was the source of the latter. Andreas Nordin and Pär Bjälke-
35  Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper, “Introduction,” in Dreams and History, eds. Daniel Pick 
and Lyndal Roper (London: Routledge, 2004), 15.
36  Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion (oxford: oxford University Press, 2003), 28.
37  Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 17.
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bring challenge this predominant historical narrative of dreams, instead 
emphasizing how “religion” is not a monistic, universalized thing but 
rather made up of heterogenous parts—exemplifying the contextualist 
turn—and, as such, argue “religious dreaming” should be approached 
as “fractioned,” “comprising a range of phenomena.”38 
This theoretical transition can be seen across the humanities. In an-
thropology, the overemphasis on cultural continuity eventually gave 
way to increasing concern of cultural contingency, agency, individual-
ity, and counterculture in an approach to dreams as cultural artifacts.39 
Bernard Lahire’s The Sociological Interpretation of Dreams (2020) con-
textualizes dreams in individuals’ social environments. And while early 
histories of dreams overwhelmingly focused on scientific or religious 
perspectives, as noted, historians have recently been more careful to 
present dreams as highly contextualized in time and place (see note 2). 
However, contextualism is so paradigmatically “academic” that we seem 
to forget the context of our contextualism as product—and producer—
of postmodernism, meaning its antifoundationalist, antiessentialist, 
and destructuralist tendencies have tacitly structured our approach to 
the material and framed contextualism as a prime indicator of legiti-
mate knowledge.
We see a similar move from essentialism to contextualism in the sci-
ences. freud essentialized the nature of dreams as illusory, the function 
as wish fulfilment, and the content as symbolic. Though Carl Jung, as 
well as freud in some regards, emphasized individual circumstances, 
he also argued for the universality of archetypes based in the collec-
tive unconscious, which is another essentializing notion, an innate and 
uniting factor across all humanity.40 This was taken up by many in an 
38  Andreas Nordin and Pär Bjälkebring, “The Counterintuitiveness of Supernatural Dreams 
and Religiosity,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 21, no. 3–4 (2021): 309–30, https://doi.
org/10.1163/15685373-12340114.
39  Plane and Tuttle, “Introduction,” 20. for a discussion of the history of the anthropology 
of dreaming, see Robin E. Sheriff, “The Anthropology of Dreaming in Historical Perspective,” 
in New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming, eds. Jeannette Mageo and Robin E. Sheriff 
(oxford: Routledge, 2021), 23–49.
40  Carl Jung, Dreams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 77, describes the univer-
sality of archetypes and situates the psyche as both personal and collective, though elsewhere he 
notes some contextual considerations for archetypes as well. E.g., Jung, Dreams, 106–9.
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essentialist fashion, particularly in dictionaries of dream symbolism. 
Universality is epitomized in such “keys to dreams,” which make up a 
lot of popular publications on dreams to this day, often invoking Jung’s 
name despite his opposition to this approach.41 Though essentialized 
dreams remain the dominant trope in popular publications, essential-
ism in science eventually gave way to the idea of a contextualized nature 
of dreams, and increasingly, specific variables have been targeted for 
analysis, especially in the hard sciences. Sometimes, contextualism is 
so narrowly applied that dreams are entirely individualized, ultimately 
situated in each person’s given circumstances. This approach already 
appeared by the late nineteenth century, such as in the case of psycholo-
gist Sante De Sanctis, for example, who argued that the “whole person,” 
including the dreamer’s life experiences, character, habits, passions, and 
health conditions, plays into dream content, which cannot be interpre-
tated based on specific symbology.42
Essentialism helped breed authority. Religious studies was “con-
structed, initially legitimized, and finally authorized” as a field of study 
through essentialist “exclusionary claims.”43 Similarly, in the sciences, 
framing dreams as essentially and reducibly natural (the paradigm of 
legitimate knowledge, as we’ve seen) places authority in the hands of 
scientists. The postmodern shift to contextualism, though, fed an al-
ternative current in discourses of authority over dreams. Alongside dis-
courses on authority within the scientific episteme, value was placed on 
self-analysis.44 from the perspective of an individual nature of dream 
symbolism, one must become familiar with their own patterns and as-
sociations in their dreams in order to understand them, situating exper-
tise in the self. Contextualized interpretation nourished the democra-
41  on “keys to dreams,” see Jacqueline Carroy, “A History of Dreams and the Science of 
Dreams,” in Histories of Dreams and Dreaming, eds. Giorgia Morgese, Giovanni Pietro Lom-
bardo, and Hendrika Vande Kemp (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 21. Regarding Jung’s 
views, see Jung, Dreams, 72–73. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for directing me to this 
passage.
42  Morgese and Lombardo, “History,” 264, which provides several references to De Sanctis’s 
work.
43  McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, 28.
44  E.g., Carroy, “A History,” 26, notes that the importance placed on self-analysis by contem-
poraries was even picked up by freud in a small way.
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tization of dream interpretation in this way (even though universalist 
notions persist). In current discourse, we see this trend with empha-
sis on build-your-own dream dictionaries and learning your personal 
dream language, such as in Richard Nongard’s Panoramic Dream Analy-
sis (2023), Joanne Hedger’s Dream Interpretation for Better Sleep (2022), 
and Robert J. Hoss’s Dream Language (2015). 
Conclusion: Dream Research Today and 
the Post-Postmodern Episteme
What is a dream? Not so shockingly, experts disagree on how to de-
fine a “dream.” We have seen how the dream as an object has been vari-
ously constructed throughout history as constituting different physical, 
metaphysical, epistemological, and social spaces, forms of communica-
tion, and theoretical paradigms, as a religious experience, cultural arti-
fact, social expression, historical object, and discursive construct. What 
has historically been attributed to the object “dream” has varied wildly 
through time, reflecting dominant discourses guided by overarching 
epistemes. Despite all these proposed answers, the question of defini-
tion is one thing that virtually all present-day research shares. And this 
question is itself a product of the postmodern episteme and even more 
paradigmatic of the academic cultural environment than contextualism 
itself: a doubting, a skepticism of metanarrative that has thrown our 
central terms of inquiry into chaos. And what I have seemingly done 
here is provide a painfully postmodern skeptical view of the metanar-
ratives applied to “dreams” variously constructed. But the story needn’t 
end here.
Instead of focusing on a highly contextualized and contingent 
“dream,” plurality is increasingly emphasized in scholarship. This per-
spective on the nature of academic objects of study is, too, historically 
situated, a reflection of post-postmodernism. There is no consensus nor 
even a generally accepted notion of “post-postmodernism.” But as with 
any period in intellectual history, it is helpful to position it in conversa-
tion with previous eras. As such, we can think of post-postmodernism 
as situated in the debates between modernism and postmodernism on 
foundationalism/antifoundationalism, structuralism/deconstructionism, 
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objectivity/relativism, and essentialism/contextualism. Post-postmod-
ernism, according to cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin 
van der Akker, “negotiates between [and “beyond”] the modern and 
the postmodern (…) both here and there and nowhere.”45 They em-
phasize oscillation over balance, arguing the post-postmodern appears 
as a “‘both-neither’ dynamic” toward the modern and postmodern. 
Though they are speaking of a turn in art, architecture, etc., I argue 
elsewhere that this reflects an increasingly prevalent discourse on recon-
ciling dichotomies—including the modern-postmodern binaries listed 
above—that speak to the larger epistemological condition without a 
reductive identity between the “opposites.”46 In fact, it is a rejection 
of such dichotomies as necessarily oppositional. While postmodernism 
emphasizes the contingency of knowledge in the sense of epistemologi-
cal skepticism, post-postmodernism sees the multiplicity of narratives 
as epistemologically enlarging, a diversification of understanding the 
human condition. for example, a post-postmodernist might take the 
dichotomy of essentialism and contextualism not as mutually exclu-
sive but as mutually inclusive, existing in a fundamentally relational 
mode of “other” referentiality and equally important parts of the story, 
which historiography at large—with its emphasis on eliminating essen-
tialism—could benefit from taking into account. In terms of how the 
theoretical paradigms shape the object, the modern essentialist dream 
was one thing; the postmodern contextualist dream was nothing; the 
post-postmodernist plural dream is everything. 
In the case of dreams, the post-postmodern turn can be seen, for 
example, in the recent positioning of dreams in terms of ontological 
multiplicity. for instance, in the natural scientific study of dreams, the 
object “dream” was originally restricted to REM-sleep mental activity 
but now includes the hypnagogic and hypnopompic stages. This has 
led to further pluralization of the object: the construction of the dream 
not as a static entity but as something that lies on a continuum from 
focused waking to daydreaming to dreaming (hence the “object” is not 
45  Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of 
Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010): 6, https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677, and for “beyond,” 4.
46  Vollmer, The Relational Structure, chap. 8.
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monadic), as put forth by dream researcher Ernest Hartmann in The 
Nature and Functions of Dreams (2011), for example. 
We can also see a post-postmodern turn in the historiographical 
considerations discussed in this article. Recently, the internal-external 
division of dreams has been disputed. Phyllis Mack, for instance, argues 
this binary is a bit forced, as many premodern dreams were regarded 
as both internal and representing transcendent truth, and the same is 
true for many people today.47 The internal and external are not neces-
sarily mutually exclusive even though that discourse certainly exists, 
and multiple constructs are thus simultaneously upheld. Speaking to 
the contingency of the internal-external divide, Ann Marie Plane and 
Leslie Tuttle argue a historiography of dreams should take note of the 
teleology of externalization to internalization,48 which is part of a larger 
teleology evident in the modern worldview of moving from a more 
“primitive” or religious understanding to scientific ones. In a self-re-
flexive way, historiographers should also note that the awareness of this 
teleology is itself constructing new historical objects, such as the plural 
dream, reflecting a new, post-postmodern discursive phase in this tele-
ological evolution of which we “conquer teleology.” 
Regarding the conversation on the imagined spaces of dreams, we 
can also detect traces of post-postmodernism. Vande Kemp, in her later 
work, revised her earlier statement on the historical phases to be more 
on the point of dimensions of dreams rather than eras. She does not 
think of the spaces of dreams as mutually exclusive, though some en-
joyed popularity at different times. Instead, there is a “scope” of dreams 
evidenced in the given interdisciplinary research, and she notes the con-
tingency of “truth” and “facts” on these various dimensions but does not 
dip into relativism.49 Instead, she argues, “scholars are studying dreams 
in ways that reflect all four dimensions of human existence.”50 In other 
words, the various imagined spaces of dreaming are all “true” (as reflec-
47  Phyllis Mack, “The Unbounded Self,” in Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions, eds. Ann Marie 
Plane and Leslie Tuttle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 207–25.
48  Plane and Tuttle, “Introduction,” 8.
49  Hendrika Vande Kemp, “Epilogue,” in Histories of Dreams and Dreaming, eds. Giorgia Mor-
gese, Gionvanni Pietro Lombardo, and Vande Kemp (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 277.
50  Vande Kemp, “Epilogue,” 280.
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tions of the data) even when their individual “truths” may vary, a very 
post-postmodern view of inclusivity. further, though theories abound 
regarding what characterizes the post-postmodern episteme, technol-
ogy features as a central, defining discourse.51 And we saw the impact of 
this as regards the inter- and intrapersonal space of dream engineering 
and in the construction of the “dream” in cyberspace, with the discur-
sive dream particularly exemplary of post-postmodern pluralism. 
As for the essentialism-contextualism debate, in psychoanalysis, an-
thropology, and the history of dreams today, paradigms of archetypes, 
cultural unity, and universalization exist alongside disparateness and 
contextualism at the levels of society and the individual. furthermore, 
dreams are constructed as simultaneously individual and communal 
(in terms of psychology, culture, society, etc.): dreaming is a “collec-
tive phenomenon,” “shaped by social and cultural forces,” as argued 
by Jacques Le Goff, for instance.52 In a similarly pluralistic ontologiz-
ing, Kelly Bulkeley and Maja Gutman’s 2020 Dream Project analyzes 
dreams as part of “collective experience” relating to real-life historical 
events, another example of a continuum but, this time, among one’s 
own dreams and others.53 Similar approaches can be found in the I 
Dream of CoVID project and collections of dreams related to the his-
torical events of 9/11, the atomic bomb, and Nazism, which “calls for 
a framework that can hold a space for dreams that emerge between 
minds,” as Adelais Mills argues.54
This paper has but brushed the surface of possible historiographi-
cal considerations taken from changes in intellectual history related 
to discourses on the boundaries and legitimacy of different forms of 
knowledge. other possible directions for future research include: dis-
cursive links between dreaming and psychosis (potentially a reflection 
of legitimation discourses of rationality/irrationality); changes to what 
is considered the function of dreams (divination, healing, contempla-
51  Vermeulen and van der Akker, “Notes,” 3.
52  Le Goff, Medieval Imagination, 229.
53  Kelly Bulkeley and Maja Gutman, “The 2020 Dreams Project,” accessed September 24, 
2023, https://tiger-grape-astm.squarespace.com.
54  Adelais Mills, “Pandemic Dreaming,” in Lockdown Cultures, eds. Stella Bruzzi and Mau-
rice Biriotti (London: UCL Press, 2022), 244.
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tion, creativity, memory consolidation) and how the “function” es-
tablishes/reinforces power structures; the types of dreams considered 
within the boundaries and worthy of scientific study (from lucid to eve-
ryday dreams to “big dreams”); other localizations of dreams in physi-
cal places to imagined spaces ranging from temples, freudian couches, 
individual beds, virtual reality, and sleep laboratories55 to waking life 
(e.g., as in research on how dreams impact the day’s mood); the many, 
many other social realms of dreams that shape the historical object, 
such as art and film (e.g., as a theme or as an aesthetic but also in terms 
of narrative instability—a possible postmodern decentering of the self ); 
and the power of dream interpreters throughout history and its impact 
on social structures of gender and sexuality. 
further research should pay attention to countercurrents as well 
since the ways of constructing dreams discussed here are more a reflec-
tion of the discursive power of dominant epistemes than the reality of 
the variety of “dreams” in lived experience. The reality is even more 
diverse. Moreover, the dichotomies drawn upon in this reconstruction 
of historical discourse, such as internal/external, subjective/objective, 
supernatural/natural, and others, have never been completely accepted, 
and challenges to them constitute a substantial discourse throughout 
history.
Returning to the question of how to define the “dream,” to con-
clude in a post-postmodern way, instead of taking the contingencies 
of the “dream” as indicative of the relativism of knowledge, we might 
say that these different constructs are suggestive of ontological multi-
plicity or, meta-analytically, that the ontologically multiple construct is 
self-reflexively suggestive of post-postmodernism. The plural dream is a 
prism, relationally existing and evolving in creative tension with various 
“others” from philosophical locales and imagined spaces to theoretical 
paradigms or even to the epistemes themselves. 
55  Hacking, Historical Ontology, 227–254, explores some of these.
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