ABSTRACT
In his essay ‘The Metropolis of Mental Life’, George Simmel mapped the new psychological conditions of modernity as ‘the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’.1
Simmel’s sociology of modernity concentrates on the frenetic sensory experience of metropolitan social life, observing the contradictory psychological experiences of alienation and freedom as a condition of the struggle for individuality against homogenizing cultural and economic institutions. The psychological conditions noted by Simmel were earlier encapsulated in Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur, that quintessential observer of modern life, as ‘a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.’2 In evoking a nineteenthcentury fascination with optical illusion and new forms of mechanized perception, Baudelaire characterized the consciousness of the flâneur in the urban crowd as a receptive surface onto which fleeting patterns and intense sensory stimulation chaotically cling. In describing ‘modernity’ itself as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’, Baudelaire rendered modern consciousness as an intensely dream-like experience, a collision between urban phantasmagoria and a heightened sensory experience (p. 13). The frequency with which nineteenth-century dream theorists employed the analogy of the kaleidoscope is an obvious point of reference for Baudelaire even as he extends that analogy into waking consciousness to account for the intense visual stimulation of urban experience. The speculative and ambitious theories about dream life that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and continued to evolve well into the early decades of the twentieth century coincided with a collective desire to apprehend the experience and culture of modernity. As the experience of modernity began to be mapped through the contra-
dictory forces of alienation and overstimulation, detachment and immersion, the dream, as an object of knowledge, was subject to a new level of plasticity in order to account for the intensity of its stimuli. While some nineteenthcentury dream theorists clung to the theory of somatic stimulation as an explanation of the dream’s etiology, increasingly dream writers turned to the role of memory and repression, as well as recent impressions and events, in
