Dreams

What states of mind feed creative historical work? I'm curious about the force of imagination that goes into doing history: the mental operations which allow historians to grasp at the past-ness of a particular past, the cognitive tension that allows us both radical estrangement from the material and empathy. What is that second sight, so weird to everyone else, that leads us to peer into dead people's lives and read their mail? What happens as the mind sinks into the evidence and spies elements that were invisible at the start? It is very strange, the combination of monotony and alertness, sluggishness and disciplined reading which accumulates into an apprehension of something new in the past, some pattern or development or connection that no one else has seen.

Thinking about these encounters with evidence, advising students about how to go beyond readings that are merely derivative, I've found myself turning to a version of Keats's ‘negative capability’. Keats was fascinated with how the senses absorbed impressions and then some other capacity took over to organize those impressions into thoughts. Negative capability he famously described in a letter of 1817 as a state of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.¹ Something similar happens to scholars in the archives, I think, a suspended state of impressionability. Critics may accuse me of positivism, but the positivist accretion of hard little facts couldn't be farther from Keats's description of a fluid, receptive mental state, a temporary deferral of one's usual preoccupations while waiting for the mind to arrange things anew.

Negative capability came to mind when recently I had reason to think about varieties of sleep and dreams – historians’ dreams of the past, writers’ dreams of their subject, dreamers in the past. The occasion was a conference that included sleep researchers in neuroscience; and the inspiration was a marvellous essay on the history of sleep by the early modern historian A. Roger Ekirch. It's not a subject that comes naturally. Ekirch points out historians’ generic preference for vigorous actors: ‘our entire history is only the history of waking men’. We write about fully cognizant people in the mise-en-scène of daylight. My own subjects in nineteenth-century America aren't ever sleepy and they don't take naps.² Ekirch links our lack of interest to our own assumptions that sleep is time taken away from life. In actuality, sleep was for centuries an eventful experience, woven into periods of wakefulness and packed with sex, socializing, visitations by the supernatural and of course dreams. I took Ekirch's argument as a challenge and the scientists’ work as a goad and discovered a dream culture I'd never suspected in not-quite modern, not-quite pre-modern nineteenth-century America. In the process I came back round to Keats's negative capability, which is after all a kind of reverie, and to the prospects of finding deeper truths when one is drowsy.

Taking off from Ekirch's claims, you note that few history books even evoke a setting after nightfall. You can think of exceptions: studies of the nightriders of the post-Reconstruction South, military histories of manoeuvres after dark, Wolfgang Schivelbusch's book on gaslight and night in nineteenth-century Europe, but they are few. In fact Schivelbusch is probably the only historian working in the modern period who takes the prevalence of pre-electricity darkness and sleep as salient social facts. Ekrich explicates this historical ‘bias’ in favour of active, animated protagonists and against dull sleepers: ‘Whereas our waking hours are animated, volatile, and highly differentiated, sleep appears, by contrast, passive, monotonous, and uneventful’.³

Even modern life is inhabited by dreams. But historians of modern societies are devout ratiocinators, with little interest in the unconscious, or at least an unconscious so wildly out of line (as dreams always are) with our linear narrative trajectories. In fact, History Workshop Journal is the rare venue that's given sustained attention to dreams.⁴ On the few occasions when we do allow our subjects to dream, it is in a socially...