Enlightenment Dreams: Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This paper analyzes problems of selfhood and epistemology among religious dissenters in 18^th century England by focusing on their dreams. Unlike other, more demonstrative modes of unconscious behavior, dreaming was an internal experience whose physical and verbal manifestations were virtually nonexistent but whose emotional impact was extraordinarily intense. For religious dissenters, who viewed themselves as both spiritual seekers and participants in the culture of the Enlightenment, dreaming was virtually the only credible means of experiencing a feeling of connection to the divine or perceptible inspiration in a culture where “enthusiasm” had become a dirty word and where to be modern was to be skeptical, even contemptuous, of the outer reaches of spiritual experience. Perhaps even more important, the emotions generated by dreams were of great importance in the individual’s attempts to shape her/his own emotional development and spiritual identity.

The paper will analyze issues of emotion, ethics, agency and passivity in the dream interpretation and autobiographical writings of the Irish Quaker physician John Rutty and the Methodist leader Mary Bosanquet Fletcher. I argue that, within Quaker and Methodist communities, where individuals displayed widely varying aptitudes for visionary experience, dream interpretation constituted an absolutely vital unifying discourse. I further argue that the liminality of dreams was a source of creativity rather than anxiety. Far from rendering the dream less reliable as a source of inspiration and education, the perception of an image or message that seemed to come from both inside and outside the self exactly mirrored the fusion of agency and self-transcendence that was the central principle of Quaker and Methodist psychology and the goal of their religious discipline.