ABSTRACT
The terrors of the night - dreams, nightmares and sleep disorders - plagued men, women and children throughout the early modern period. This chapter demonstrates that writings on the nightmare reveal a complex spectrum of theories that incorporate fragments of classical lore, traditional beliefs and contemporary medical understandings of the body and mind. The inability to sleep and chronic terrifying dreams were noted symptoms of illness in early modern England, much earlier than the period outlined by Roger Schmidt. The frequency with which recipes to procure sleep appears in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century unpublished recipe books suggests that insomnia or disruptions to sleep were commonly experienced in the period. In medical writings the nightmare itself was traditionally conceptualized as a disease symptomatic of humoral excess and the strange effects of the body on the mind and faculty of the imagination.
