#Psychology of dreams and nightmares series#

The uninvited, uncontrollable and nonsensical nature of dreams disturbed our modern championing of rationality and reason, causing them to be dismissed as mere unconscious mental play. These popular publications, intended as a form of entertainment, provided an A-Z of dream images that helped dreamers interpret their dreams and foretell their future. Oneiromancy persisted and was updated for an increasingly urban and literate population in the 19th- and 20th-century development of dream books. Such ideas are put to dramatic use in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Many ancient civilisations credited oneiromancy, the interpretation of dreams in order to foretell the future as a form of supernatural power. These personifications of dream and nightmare encourage the unsettling sense that such things come from outside us. A figure committed to protecting dreamers and The Dreaming, the place where we go in dreams, he also holds grudges and punishes dream creations who challenge his benignly authoritarian rule. Gaiman’s Sandman combines both caring and threatening aspects. This more malevolent embodiment of nightmare was updated in the character of Freddy Krueger, star of the Nightmare on Elm Street horror film franchise.

He then puts them in a bag and takes them to his owl-beaked children who peck out their eyes as food. Hoffman’s disturbing story, The Sandman (1816), the titular bogeyman is said to throw sand in the eyes of children who won’t go to sleep, causing them to bleed. Yet the Sandman has also taken on menacing aspects. The Chordettes 1954 hit Mr Sandman asked him to send them a dream lover before they got too old. Such sentiments are found in Alexander Pushkin’s poem, Morpheus, and in Roy Orbison’s song In Dreams, where the Sandman becomes “a candy-coloured clown” who sprinkles stardust. No longer a servant of the gods, he was frequently evoked as someone who could reunite lost lovers in dreams. Morpheus reveals the psychological sophistication of classical mythology, a rich body of stories that not only accounted for the operation of the natural world but also the interior workings of the human mind.īy the 19th and 20th centuries, Morpheus, or The Sandman, had become a more benevolent character. In Ovid’s Metamorphosis he is one of Somnus’s thousand children, a shapeshifting dream and “master mimic” who moved “on noiseless wings”. In Roman mythology, Morpheus served Somnus, the god of sleep.Īlthough a relatively minor figure, Morpheus appealed to classical poets. In Hesiod’s The Theogony the oneiroi are the dream children of Nyx or Night. In Homer’s The Iliad, Zeus sends an onieros, a personified dream, to the Greek camp at Troy to encourage Agamemnon to fight. As befits an entity who rules the shifting realm of dreams, he too is unfixed, referred to as Morpheus, Onieros, Dream King, and the Sandman, among others.Īncient Greek and Roman civilisations understood dreams to be both the messengers and messages. Personifications of dream go back far in history. While seemingly at odds with modernity’s emphasis on rationalism, dreams and works of dreamlike fantasy such as The Sandman continue to provide a much-needed sense of enchantment in our modern age. Dreaming has been associated with supernatural messages, divinatory arts and psychotherapeutic insights. These conflicting personifications of dream (and nightmare) reflect our ambiguous cultural ideas of dreaming.

The embodiment of dream as a mythological or literary character has variously been presented as benevolent or sinister, and these contradictory representations reflect our uneasy relationship with the nature and meaning of dreams and nightmares.

#Psychology of dreams and nightmares series#

He is also the centre of Neil Gaiman’s popular comic book series (1989-96), which the new series is based on. In popular culture, The Sandman is a folkloric being who helps us drift off to the land of nod where he controls whether we have nightmares or dreams. As Netflix’s new series, The Sandman, notes, we spend a third of our lives in sleep and dream.