How ‘Dreams Became Lies’ for the Good of the Republic

With help from the LSU Second Book Institute, Associate Professor of History Leslie Tuttle is finalizing her second monograph, which is about the changing ideas people had about sleep and dreams in Early Modern France, and how those changes enabled the creation of a new, democratic nation-state.

 Awake yet? Read on, as we catch up with her.

How did you get started on this topic?

I took a sharp turn after my first book, which was about pronatalist policies in France in the early modern period. I wanted to work on something more familiar, where I could have conversations with living human beings about my research, and they would know what I was talking about. Dreams seemed like a good option because they’re experiences nearly everyone has. I was also lucky to be funded for this project by the Louisiana Board of Regents and, early on, by a National Humanities Center grant.

So, dreams? How do you even study dreams in a historical context?

I joke with my materialist historian friends that I’m working on establishing a history of things that never happened in real life. But it’s not the history of the content of people’s dreams—it’s the history of how culture shaped people’s understanding of what is happening to them when they dream, and how Early Modern France instilled new norms about what to do with these individualized kinds of experiences.

Tell me more?

I’m interested in how people redrew boundaries between what they perceive as natural and supernatural worlds. Historically, dreams were positioned right at that boundary. In most cultures throughout most of history, people have believed that in the course of a dream, you might access knowledge you can’t access in your waking life: from God, or in a trip across time or space, or in a conversation with the dead. I was interested in seeing how this view changed over the centuries that included the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

How did people start thinking about dreams differently at that time?

The rules of civility and etiquette in my story have come to be very important. I was not prepared for that going in. Dreams happen naturally, but what you do as a result of dreaming is learned behavior. People restrained their discussion of their dreams because they did not wish to appear foolish or vulgar.

Another big surprise is the overwhelming significance of John Locke. Not the John Locke that Americans know, Locke of the Second Treatise, but the Locke of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding who defined consciousness. He excised dreams from the category of thought by making consciousness the center of human identity. For John Locke, you’re not even the same person when you’re dreaming. You’re another person who doesn’t even know your waking self.

“ Giovanni de la Casa, the Renaissance etiquette writer, said talking about your dreams is a no-no. Not because dreams are too personal, but because most don’t mean anything at all. It’s like showing your mental trash to people. Hide your trash! ”

So, in the early modern period from about 1550 to 1750, dreams were rejected as a source of knowledge. It was no longer polite to have those kinds of conversations. And meanwhile, dreams were repurposed in 17th century France as material for intimate conversation, like in courtship and parlor games, like prediction and fortune-telling games.

One of the most popular books at the time was a manual for fortune-telling and interpreting dreams, the 17th century version of the Magic 8-ball. But the editor was explicit, ‘This is just a game. Don’t take it seriously.’ And meanwhile, many of the questions in the manual are quite serious. Like, will my marriage turn out well? What will be the outcome of my lawsuit? Scholars have different interpretations here. Some say the editor was trying to hide a continuing occult practice in a leisure-like wrapper, but my research suggests these fortune-telling books diffused a new skepticism about the very possibility of fortune-telling and dream interpretation by teaching people not to take their dreams seriously. Often, even when the question was serious, the answer was irreverent. Playing the game led you toward skepticism.

What about sleep?

In 16th century France, people were very much still influenced by the Hippocratic medical tradition, the scientific understanding of what sleep is: one of the things a person has control over that contributes greatly to their health.

Doctors were trained to think of sleep as this kind of magical moment when the soul, not being distracted by external information from the senses, can drill down into the body and fix all the things that are wrong with it, and attend to its health in a more focused way. A regime of sleep for the ill, and so forth. Well into the 17th century, doctors would ask patients about their dreams to help diagnose their illnesses.

But there were other forces pressing in a different direction. During the Reformation, there was a sense of urgency about the vulnerability of people’s minds to demonic intervention during sleep, and as a result of that, both Catholics and Protestants advised great caution about “believing in” dreams and about sharing them with others.

That flows right alongside the whole civility kind of argument: both religious and social pressure not to share your dreams with others. And by the 17th century, that became the norm and we can see from correspondence that people generally respected it. There’s a French proverb that shows up all the time in my work: songes sont mensonges or “dreams are lies.”

What about your own dreams? Do you think about your sleep and dreams differently because of your research?

I would love to say I have an exciting dream life, but I don’t. I dream about work, and the only thing worth mentioning is that my academic work is represented in my dream life as baking. Don’t ask me why. I’m always in the process of making cakes or baking pastries or whatever it is. I wish a book could be finished in the time it takes to bake a cake.

Interesting! And what do others tell you about their dreams?

Dreams demand our respect, because even if they’re not real, they’re real experiences for the dreamer, right? They have emotional resonance for the individual who’s dreaming. Many still believe their dreams are messages from another world or from their own subconscious. It’s now a sign of intimacy and trust when people talk about their dreams with you.

In 17th century France, even as people were cautioned, they continued talking about dreams as windows into selfhood. Dreams became part of intimate conversation and were made more personal by being a register of the dreamer’s hidden passions. You could talk about them, and what they said about your desires and fears, with your close friends, family, and lovers, just not on the world stage. It’s in some ways a Freudian way of thinking about dreams long before Freud.

How are these changing ideas about dreams historically significant?

Yes, that’s the question! I argue the changes are part of the creation of a new, shared notion of the boundaries of reason, of reasonable things, of what we count as truth, what is evidence, what exists. Increasingly, dreams are not in that category, because they don’t exist in the material world and seem to challenge it. John Locke, for example, thought of dreaming as a kind of mental pathology, saying dreams were “little conformable to the perfection and order of a rational being.”

“ This new way of defining truth was essential for the creation of modern, democratic nation-states. Reason was considered a necessity for self-government. When we can’t agree on what’s true and not true, democracies are in serious trouble. ”

In 17th century France, excluding dreams from public discourse was part of the process of creating an agreed-upon reality that isn’t reliant on one person’s claims about the significance of an experience they may really have had, but wasn’t shared with anybody else.

My book tries to trace how that happened. The question at the center is, what were people entitled by their culture to do with their dream experiences, and how did that change over time? During the construction of modern nation-states and the Scientific Revolution, people were increasingly not allowed to claim their dream was anything but a fantasy.

Finally, what about the LSU Second Book Institute? How did it help you?

The institute allowed me to get amazing feedback from people outside my discipline who are also working on second book projects. It was enormously helpful, and I feel so lucky to have been a part of it. Not all research universities have this resource.

 

Leslie Tuttle is the author of Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2010) and “French Jesuits and Indian Dreams” in Dreams, Dreamers and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), a volume she co-edited with Ann Marie Plane.