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shame in the dreamer on waking.
    If, when asleep, the conscious, rational mind is incapacitated, then any experiences (such as dreams) must reflect activity in the unconscious mind. In De Quincey’s case, his consciousness, made inert by a powerful narcotic, was forced to bear mute witness to a completely unregulated eruption of unconscious material. A similar explanation could also be employed to account for bizarre hallucinations – which might be produced by the same process but then projected on to the ‘screen’ of the external world.
    In 1861, Karl Albert Schemer published
The Life of the Dream
further evidence of romanticism’s continuing influence on works of an academic nature. Schemer believed that the language of dreams was symbolic. Moreover, he agreed that dreams were influenced by mystical or spiritual forces; however, he also recognised the influence of more mundane factors, such as physical stimulation of the sleeping body or illness. Again, like von Schubert, Schemer was an advocate of dream interpretation, but his method was somewhat prescriptive. For example, he suggested that objects such as a clarinet or knife represented the penis while narrow courtyards and staircases represented the vagina. Schemer’s account of sexual symbolism is of considerable interest, as it foreshadows psychoanalytic thinking.
    Exploration of the dream world continued (more in the tradition of Coleridge and De Quincey than von Schubert and Schemer) with the publication of
Dreams and the Means to Direct Them
(1867). The author was Marie-Jean Hervey de Saint-Denis, a teacher of Chinese language and literature at the Collège de France, His book contained instructions for individuals wishing to control their dreams – a skill he had acquired through systematic self-experimentation. Initially, Hervey de Saint-Denis kept detailed records of his dreams, which helped him to remember them. He then discovered that he could interrupt a dream, waking himself up in order to record unusual or particularly interesting events. As his research progressed, Hervey de Saint-Denis became increasingly self-aware during dreams. He recognised that he was dreaming and practised turning his attention towards the most interesting features of the dream environment. Finally, Hervey de Saint-Denis was able to influence the narrative of his dreams, although this degree of control was never complete. From 1896, techniques for the conscious control of dreams were refined by the Dutch psychiatrist and poet Frederick van Eaden, who coined the term
lucid dreaming
to describe the experience.
    As the concept of the unconscious became consolidated, attention settled on the theoretical line dividing the mind into upper and lower chambers – the
limen
or threshold of consciousness. One of the first to consider the exact nature of this horizontal partition was the German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart, who discussed it at length in a two-volume work,
Knowledge Newly Founded on Experience, Metaphysics, and Mathematics
(1824-25).
    In some ways, Herbart’s ideas show an outmoded loyalty to the traditions of Enlightenment thinking. His model of the mind was based on principles borrowed from the physical sciences. Thus, he compared mental events (such as thoughts and perceptions) to interacting particles and sought to describe their dynamic relations using Newtonian-style mathematics; however, unlike a true representative of the Enlightenment, Herbart fully accepted the existence of the unconscious.
    For Herbart, the threshold of awareness was not a smooth surface, disturbed only by the graceful ascent of memories. The limen was a plane of perpetual conflict – seething with activity. Thoughts and perceptions jostled each other, vying for a place in awareness. Stronger thoughts and impressions pushed the weaker ones below the threshold, from where they immediately fought to recover their former position. This account is peculiarly Darwinian. Animated