The inveterate paradox of dreaming

F. Schiller

The paradoxical aspects of dreams have always been interpreted according to prevalent ways of thinking. Dreams as premonitions of disease have been reported since the classical era, and hypnagogic hallucinations, so named by Alfred Maury and viewed as "psychosensory hallucinations" by Baillarger in the 1840s (extending the Kantian definition of the madman as a "waking dreamer"), have been reported since the Renaissance. Maury also linked dreams to a paradoxical "unconscious consciousness"; von Feuchtersleben linked dreaming to Gemeingefuhl or coenesthesis.