This paper investigates the debate on the nature of dreams that took place in
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dreaming that developed alongside the conceptualization of dreams as instances of
mental derangement. At the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke had likened
dreaming to madness and drunkenness, and characterized it as a disturbance of the
self. In the course of the eighteenth century, physicians, religious preachers,
champions of politeness and moral philosophers all provided competing accounts of
the doubling of consciousness which was incidental to dreaming. This paper situates
their attempts in the context of a re-assessment of the authorities that defined
what constituted credible and reliable thinking. It does so by drawing attention to
the body as one of the crucial sites in which changing attitudes towards dreaming
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