I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way

'Lights Out', Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Sleeping is one of mankind's most fundamental needs; our physical survival and mental wellbeing depends upon regular periods of rest. This mysterious state of unconsciousness and its accompaniment - dreaming - has exercised fascination for scientists, philosophers, artists and writers alike for millennia. Sleeping and dreaming have historically been perceived as a dark, often disturbing, even supernatural sphere of human experience. The Wellcome Library contains rich materials devoted to this shadowy and haunting realm.

The interpretation of dreams is most commonly associated with 20th-century psychoanalysis and its most eminent early practitioners, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They regarded dreams as the intermediary between the unconscious and conscious mind, a tool to unlock the secrets of the human psyche. However, some 1800 years before psychoanalysis, dreams were interpreted as supernatural or divine communication with oracular potency. Among the Wellcome Library's holdings is a late-16th-century Latin manuscript of the earliest major work about dreams, 'Oneirocritica' or 'The Interpretation of Dreams', written by the Greek diviner Artemidorus in the 2nd century CE. The association of dreams with divine revelation and other occult phenomena such as spiritual and visionary apparitions continued to be widespread for centuries. The early-17th-century 'Traité de la Physionomie, de la Chyromancie, de la Métoposcopie, et de l'Onirodytique', attributed to the physician Maurice Froger, deals with several types of divination, including dream interpretation, chiromancy (palm-reading) and metoscopy (divination by reading the lines of the forehead). A later 17th-century treatise on dreams and visions by Thomas Tryon (published under his pseudonym Philotheos Physiologus), in the Rare Books Collection, examines “nocturnal representations” and “communications both of good and evil angels as also departed souls”. Tryon argues that dreams are affected by the dreamer's constitution, the diet and the flux of the planets, and derive from evil spirits, good spirits or extraordinary visions from God. An 18th-century work in the Rare Books Collection, 'Visits from the world of spirits, or, Interesting anecdotes of the dead ... Being an impartial survey of the most remarkable accounts of apparitions, dreams, ghosts, spectres, and visions', discusses apparitions in dreams and cites well-known biblical examples of prophetic dreams as incontrovertible evidence of the phenomenon. By way of unfortunate anecdotes, such as an army soldier who dismissed his dream-apparition and later died in consequence, the author warns us to ignore “the notices of the invisible world” at our peril.

However, some notes of scepticism were sounded about the claims of dreams' revelatory power, perhaps none more vociferous than by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton (1540-1614). In the early 17th century, he wrote an attack on astrology and false prophesying entitled 'A defensative against the poyson of supposed prophecies…'. He attacked the notion that dreams might contain revelations and condemned those that “mistake the shadows of the night, which last no longer than the print of our faces in a glass, for the tables of divine intelligence”.

A number of the Library's archives relate to the modern psychoanalytic practice of dream interpretation. The papers of renowned therapist Melanie Klein include dream analysis from numerous case studies as well as notes on the dreams of depressive patients. The extensive archive of Edward Fyfe Griffith, a general practitioner and analytical psychologist, contains a wealth of material on dream symbolism. In 1947 he underwent Jungian psychoanalysis, during which he kept a 'dream diary' that was subsequently written up in narrative form and published as 'Thraxis'. His archive includes the original annotated typescript notes of those dreams, as well as extensive material for a project entitled 'For Studies in the Symbolism of Dreams', including interpretation of dream motifs, patients' case studies and material from his unpublished dictionary of dream symbolism.

The urge to represent dreams in visual form has acted as a rich source of inspiration to artists, and many such examples can be seen in the Library's Paintings, Prints and Drawing collection. These include a nightmarish etching by Francesco Goya from his series 'Los Caprichos', entitled 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'; Albrecht Dürer's engraving 'The Sleeping Doctor', seemingly warning against the dangers of idleness; and Jean-Pierre Simon's early-19th-century engraving of a young woman asleep with a grotesque devil sitting on her chest, symbolising her nightmare. Well-known biblical dream-visions also number in the collection: a delightful 16th-century woodcut and an early 18th-century etching by Joseph Goupy represent Jacob's dream of the ladder of angels; Abraham's nightmarish vision of fire described in Genesis is depicted in a late-17th-century etching by Michael Van der Gucht; and in an exquisite late-18th-century engraving by François Morel, an angel is depicted speaking to Joseph in a dream, warning him to flee to Egypt.