“The Sleep of Reason": The Dream State and Polemics over the Self in Eighteenth-Century France

The aim of this paper is to identity two distinct stances toward the dreaming self as imagined by theologians, philosophes, and physicians in eighteenth-century. Practitioners in all three fields described dreaming in terms of a broader continuum of experiences that ranged from simple distraction to the complete alienation of one’s hold on his or her senses. For advocates of the Enlightenment and traditional Catholicism alike, the dream state ran afoul of their respective orthodoxies because it mitigated the human person’s conscious command over its ideas and actions. These factions, despite their differences on other fronts, both contributed to what I will refer to as a “culture of self-ownership,” defined by discourses and practices that affirmed the subject’s possessive relationship to its thoughts, words, deeds, and worldly goods. Yet the ensuing ideals were contested at every turn by partisans of an oppositional “culture of dispossession” that valorized the suspension and even surrender of one’s capacity to appropriate existential and material goods to oneself. I will argue that the recurring clashes between these cultures of personhood form the most illuminating context for examining eighteenth-century polemics over the dream state and its effects on the self. The body of the paper will read articles from the Encyclopédie on dreaming, sleeping, and related states as intervening in controversies surrounding mysticism and materialism. My analysis will focus on the depictions of radical spiritualists and radical philosophes who sought in the dream state a mode of access to altered states of consciousness in which the mind could more directly experience the passivity that characterized its relationship to God or nature. I will then address Diderot’s appropriation, in his articles on aesthetics and philosophy, of the dispossessive language of Christian mysticism as a means of developing an alternative to the Enlightenment ideals of wakefulness and self-governance.