Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams, and the Medical Imagination (review)

Coleridge, when asked if he believed in the existence of ghosts, replied on more than one occasion that he had seen far too many to believe in them. Jennifer Ford asks if Coleridge was implying that he did believe in ghosts, and that his experience proved his belief, or if he was instead “mocking the existence of ghosts per se” (p. 92). He could, of course, have been questioning the objective existence of the apparitions he had seen, while nonetheless believing in ghosts. He certainly believed in the action of spirit and will beyond the physical body in which they normally resided, finding in such action a possible explanation for the operations of animal magnetism. The interactions of corporeal phenomena with mental and spiritual ones held a lifelong fascination for him, in sleep and in waking, and he was his own most thoroughly examined subject. Dreams, reverie, mesmerism, and daydreams, allied to poetic imagination, were all subjects of inquiry for Coleridge, whose imagination was wonderfully self-conscious. He was a courageous self-analyst, and dreams offered fertile ground for probing the psyche.

He was also fascinated by his bodily ills, by their effect on his imaginative and dreaming states, and by the medical controversies of his own day and of the previous generation. He had a remarkably large acquaintance among medical men, a wide if uneven knowledge of medical science, and a lively interest in the physiological and medical nature of the imagination. Mind and body, in waking or in sleeping and dreaming, exerted a reciprocal influence on one another. Bodily causes could produce mental effects, and vice versa. Physical illness could result from mental illness, and mental illness from physical. Coleridge was especially interested in the pathologies of mind and body, and how they interacted. His coinage of that most useful word, “psychosomatic,” is one fruit of that interest. The frequency of his nightmares reinforced his interest in the pathology of dreaming, and in its physical causes and accompaniments.

Ford concentrates on Coleridge’s notebooks, but also makes sensitive use of his marginalia, poems, and letters in order to explore his intellectual engagement with the interpretation of sleep and dreaming. She argues convincingly that his medical understanding of dreams challenged and enriched his notion of poetic imagination; and she explores the ways in which he articulated what he saw as the physiological and medical nature of the imagination. She is at pains to place Coleridge’s interests in these areas in the context of eighteenth-century medical and physiological theorizing, and makes it clear that his approach to dreams was in good and numerous company.

Generally, Ford’s interpretations are well supported and convincing, but there are lapses. She offers a detailed examination of the development of Coleridge’s ideas about the complex and fascinating psychological territory of what he called single and double vision and touch, then observes of one notebook entry that Kathleen Coburn made no note of Coleridge’s “curious instance of single & double vision”; she concludes that Coburn’s silence suggests that “perhaps she thought it another illustration of opium-related sensory experience” (p. 114). Who knows what silence implies? Later on, Ford looks at Coleridge’s use of another word, “corporific,” and makes considerable play of its analogy with and difference from “soporific.” I am doubtful. There were other words where he might have sought analogies, including acidific, chlyific, and morbific, but it seems more probable that he derived it (if, as Ford suggests, it was his coinage) from “corporification,” a good seventeenth-century word. Kenelm Digby wrote of “a corporification of the universal spirit” (OED).

These are, however, minor problems with what is a fascinating and comprehensive study, joining the history of medicine with literary criticism to admirable effect. Dreams were of great interest to many Romantic poets, including Southey, Shelley, and Keats. Similarly, medical men and physiologists—including Erasmus Darwin, Albrecht von Hailer, and John Brown—tackled the topic of dreams as a scientific...