ABSTRACT
There has long been an assumption that there is an intimate relationship between dreams and mental disorders. Epigrammatic statements that ‘the madman is a waking dreamer’,1 that ‘dreams [are] a brief madness and madness a long dream’,2 that if we ‘let the dreamer walk about and act like a person awake …, we [would] have the clinical picture of dementia praecox [schizophrenia]’,3 and that if ‘we could find out about dreams, we would find out about insanity’4 reflect the conviction about the close relationship between dreams and profound emotional disturbance. This view enlivened efforts to study dreaming to gain insights into the problems of the mentally ill.
