DREAM AND MADNESS

Interesting read, the comparison between dream and madness:

The dream-like character of madness is one of the constant themes of the classical age. Melancholy and dreams have the same origin, and have equal value in relation to truth. There are ‘natural dreams’ that represent, in the waking state, things that have passed through the senses or through the understanding, but which are altered by the subject’s temperament. A different form of melancholy has its origins in supernatural intervention, the same force that brings dreams that foretell the future to the mind of the dreams, announcing events and causing him to see strange things.

Dreams and madness reveal themselves to be made of the same substance.

In the first moments of sleep, the vapors that rise up from the body to the head are multiple, turbulent and dense. They are so dark that they provoke no images in the mind, but their turbulence brings disorder to the nerves and muscles. The vapors rising up to the brain begins to clear and at this point fantastical dreams begin, containing miracles and countless impossible things.  Finally the agitation of the vapors is calmed entirely and the sleeper begins to see things more clearly. Through the transparent, now limpid vapors, memories of the previous day appear, representing the world as is really was, with perhaps a small number of metamorphoses. There is a constant analogy to be found between the progressive developments of sleep, and what each stage brings to the quality of the imagination, and different forms of madness, because the mechanisms are shared. Both involve the same movement of vapors and the animal spirits, the dame liberation of images, the same correspondence between the physical qualities of phenomena and the psychological or moral value of sentiments. What is important in Zacchias’* analysis is that madness is not compared to dreams in their positive phenomena, but rather to the totality formed by sleep and dreams, i.e. to an ensemble that includes images, fantasies, memories and predictions, as well as the great void of sleep, the night of the senses, and the whole negativity that separates man from his waking state and the concomitant truth of the senses. While tradition was content to compare the delirium of the man and the vividness of dream images, the classical age assimilates delirium to the indissoluble nexus of the image and the night of the spirit against which it gains its freedom. That whole, transported in its entirely to the waking state, is what constituted madness. That is the manner in which the definitions of madness that obstinately return in the classical age should be understood. The dream, as a complex figure of the image and of sleep, is almost invariable present. Either in a negative manner, as when the notion of waking is all that distinguishes a madman from a man asleep, or in a positive manner, as when delirium is defined as a modality of dream, with waking being the specific difference: ‘Delirium' is the dream of waking persons. The ancient idea that dreams are a transitory form of madness is reversed. It is no longer dreams that borrow their worrying power from madness, thereby showing how much reason is fragile or limited, but madness that takes is fundamental nature from dream, demonstrating by that similarity that is a liberation of the image in the night of the real.  

Michel Foucault, 1961 (pg. 238 – 240)

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* Zacchias - an Italian physician, teacher of medical science, medio-legal jurist, philosopher, and poet.


Foucault M, History of Madness 1961, Routledge