Primary Texts
Aeneid
The story of how Aeneas came to Italy and conquered the Latins, this epic poem serves as a founding myth that ties Rome to ancient Troy and legitimizes the rule of the Roman emperors. Among several famous passages, the poem includes a description of the two gates of dream, through which Aeneas must pass upon leaving the underworld:
Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro' transparent horn arise;
Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies.
--(John Dryden’s translation)
Check out a Print Version:
Virgil. Aeneid. Trans. John Dryden. Ed. Frederick M. Keener. London: Penguin, 1997.
Dracula
Mina Murray wonders if her friend Lucy is suffering from some sort of sleepwalking illness when she finds her asleep in a churchyard in the middle of the night. We later learn that control of sleep is one of the ways that Count Dracula is able to lure and manipulate his victims. Stoker’s epistolary novel uses the vampire to explore numerous cultural anxieties of the fin de siècle dealing with sexuality, technology and science, moral and social degradation, and foreign invasion.
Check out a Print Version:
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Penguin, 1993.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Four young lovers experience a fantastical night in the forest, thanks to the influence of faeries, and decide that it must have been a dream.
Check out a Print Version:
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Washington Square Press, 2004.
Macbeth
This is a wonderfully dark play, touching upon the relationship of desire to deed. In addition to the famous supernatural elements of the story, the play is full of references to sleep and dream. After murdering Duncan in his bed, Macbeth loses the ability to sleep, and his wife takes up a peculiar kind of somnambulism.
Check out a Print Version:
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Washington Square Press, 2003.
Traumnovelle [Dream Story]
After his wife relates a dream that betrays her sexual fantasies, a doctor embarks upon a two-day trip into his own psyche. Kubrick adapted this 1926 novella for his 1999 “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Schnitzler, Arthur. Dream Story. Trans. J.M.Q. Davies. Penguin Books, 1999.
(German) Schnitzler, Arthur. Traumnovelle. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998.
Lélia
An exploration of the life of a woman who believes that God has abandoned her, Lélia is more like a prose poem than a novel: lyrical, brooding, and sometimes difficult. There are numerous references to sleep in Lélia, including two prominent scenes of sleep voyeurism, in which the observer intensely desires the sleeping figure, but is ultimately unable to satisfy that desire.
READ THE NOVEL ONLINE (IN FRENCH)
Check out a Print Version:
(French) Sand, George. Lélia. Ed. Pierre Reboul. Paris: Garnier, 1960.
(English) Sand, George. Lélia. Trans. Maria Espinosa. Indiana UP, 1978.
The Captive
The first book of A la Recherche du temps perdu to be published after Proust’s death, La Prisonnière deals with the narrator’s relationship with Albertine, who has just moved in with him in Paris. Marcel’s “I only want you when you’re not around” infatuation for Albertine is exemplified in the scene where he masturbates while watching her sleep.
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Proust, Marcel. The Captive & The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Modern Library, 1999.
(French) Proust, Marcel. La Prisonnière. [The Captive]. A la Recherche du temps perdu. [In Search of Lost Time]. Ed. Pierre-Edmond Robert. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
Swann's Way
“Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure” [For a long time I used to go to bed early]. The famous first line of Proust’s 8-volume novel presents the narrator as a sleeper, albeit a troubled one. Indeed, much of the first book (Combray) centers around the bedtime drama of the boy narrator who is loathe to go to sleep without his mother’s goodnight kiss. Author Proust did most of his writing in bed, at night, making the site of his childhood trauma his preferred work space.
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Trans. Lydia Davis. Penguin, 2004.
(French) Proust, Marcel. Du Côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way]. Gallimard, 1988.
Woman on the Edge of Time
Connie has been wrongly committed to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue hospital. As she faces the horror and meanness of the asylum, she finds refuge in a future utopia. Are Connie’s periodic forays into this world an instance of time-traveling? Or is she really insane?
Check out a Print Version:
Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. Women’s Press, 2000.
The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood
A baby princess cursed to die is saved by a fairy who transforms the curse into 100 years’ enchanted sleep. Rather than conclude with the awakening of the princess, Perrault’s version of the tale gives her a flesh-hungry ogress mother-in-law to contend with as well.
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Perrault, Charles. “La Belle au bois dormant. [The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood].” The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. Ed. Jack Zipes. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
(French) Perrault, Charles. “La Belle au bois dormant. [The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood].” Contes. Paris: Bookking International, 1993. 89-105.
Perceforest
Perceforest
This 14th-century romance includes an episode which appears to be the earliest version of the sleeping beauty tale. In the “Histoire de Troïlus et de Zellandine,” Troïlus rapes Zellandine while she sleeps, and she delivers a child without waking.
Check out a Print Version:
(French) Perceforest. Ed. Gilles Roussineau. Vol. 3. Geneva: Droz, 1993. 3 vols. 1979-1993.
Fight Club
A white-collar worker-drone suffering from insomnia meets a man named Tyler Durden. Suddenly he’s getting his face beaten to a pulp in illicit after-hours fight clubs, making homemade soap with stolen fat, and peeing in restaurant soup. The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club. So I will not reveal here what is really going on.
Check out a Print Version:
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. W.W. Norton, 1996.
Metamorphoses
Roman poet Ovid provides a vivid portrait of the god of Sleep’s domain in his 15-book account of the creation and history of the world. “In the midst of the cavern stands a lofty couch of ebony wood, dark in colour, covered with black draperies, feather-soft, where the god himself lies, his limbs relaxed in luxurious weariness” (11:592-632).
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A.D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Trilby
An homage to the romances of Walter Scott, “Trilby” is the tale of an elf who haunts the dreams of Jeannie, the wife of a Scottish fisherman. When Jeannie’s husband has Trilby exorcised, disaster strikes the family, and in Jeannie’s dreams Trilby takes the form of John Mac-Farlane, a banished clan-chief.
READ THE NOVEL ONLINE (IN FRENCH)
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Nodier, Charles. Smarra & Trilby. Trans. Judith Landry. Dedalus, 1994.
(French) Nodier, Charles. Trilby. Smarra, Trilby et autres contes. [Smarra, Trilby and Other Tales]. Ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980. 135-208.
Smarra
A gruesome tale in the Fantastic genre, “Smarra” plunges the reader into the mind of a man trapped in someone else’s nightmare. The demon Smarra, controlled by a sorceress named Méroé, is a kind of proto-vampire who rips out the hearts of sleeping men and devours them.
READ THE STORY ONLINE (IN FRENCH)
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Nodier, Charles. “Smarra.” Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France. Ed. Joan Kessler. U Chicago P, 1995.
(French) Nodier, Charles. “Smarra.” Smarra, Trilby et autres contes. [Smarra, Trilby and Other Tales]. Ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980. 69-134.
La Fée aux miettes [The Crumb Fairy]
Part fantasy, part fairy tale, this novel chronicles the adventures of Michel, a young man under the protection of the crumb fairy, an ugly old woman with two long teeth. Once Michel and the fairy are married, however, he finds that in his dreams she appears as the beautiful and youthful Queen of Sheba. To restore the crumb fairy to her former state, Michel sets off to find the singing Mandragore flower.
READ THE NOVEL ONLINE (IN FRENCH)
Check out a Print Version:
(French) Nodier, Charles. La Fée aux miettes. [The Crumb Fairy]. Smarra, Trilby et autres contes. [Smarra, Trilby and Other Tales]. Ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980. 209-407.
Aurélia
Shortly before he committed suicide, Nerval wrote the story of his own madness, his incarceration in an asylum, and his subsequent recovery. Although the illness itself is characterized by the overflowing of dream into reality, Nerval believes that the key to his cure lies in the signs and symbols in his dreams.
READ THE NOVEL ONLINE (in FRENCH)
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Nerval, Gérard de. Aurélia or Dream and Life. Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France. Ed. Joan Kessler. U Chicago P, 1995.
(French) Nerval, Gérard de. Aurélia ou le rêve et la vie. [Aurélia or Dream and Life]. Paris: Pocket, 1994.
Finder
This intricate comic book world includes a fascinating storyline, “Dream Sequence” in which people spend much of their waking and sleeping hours in virtual worlds. The most famous of these is “Elsewhere,” a world that exists in the mind of one man. A delight to the senses, “Elsewhere” is completely safe until one day people start getting maimed.
Check out the Print Version:
McNeil, Carla Speed. Finder. Lightspeed Press, 1996-2007.
Le Horla
A man wonders if he is going insane when he begins to suspect that an invisible presence is stalking him. The creature attacks him in his sleep, then slowly takes over the man’s life. Maupassant wrote two versions of this horror tale. The 1887 one, written as a journal, is by far the more chilling, and the more intriguing in the way that it makes the narrator question his own identity.
Check out a Print Version:
(English) Maupassant, Guy de. "The Horla." Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France. Ed. Joan Kessler. U Chicago P, 1995.
(French) Maupassant, Guy de. “Le Horla” (1887). Le Horla. Paris: Flammarion, 1984. 55-82.
The Odyssey
This epic poem includes a marvelous example of the way the ancient Greeks thought about dreams: as messages, either true or false, delivered from the gods. Penelope relates a dream to her husband Odysseus, who is disguised as a beggar. Although Odysseus proclaims that the dream is false (from the gates of ivory) events unfold to suggest a true dream (from the gates of horn).
Check out a Print Version:
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1974.
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