Dickens's nightmare: dreams, memory and trauma

Area of Science:

• Literary Studies
• Cultural History
• Psychology

Background:

• Stress significantly impacted 19th-century literature and culture.
• Troubled sleep was both a cause and effect of this stress.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the role of stress in 19th-century literature, using Charles Dickens as a case study.
• To explore how literary works depict sleep as a site for processing trauma, grief, and loss.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of fictional and non-fictional works by Charles Dickens.
• Examination of literary representations of sleep and its connection to psychological states.

Main Results:

• Dickens's works portray sleep as a space for reliving trauma and articulating grief.
• Stress-induced sleep disturbances were linked to psychological fragility and mortality.
• Sleep facilitated transitions between temporalities and states of being.

Conclusions:

• The study argues that for Dickens, the state of emerging from sleep was intrinsically linked to human mortality and consciousness.
• Sleep served as a threshold to past, future, and the realm of the dead, influenced by psychological stress.