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Our Dreams: Our Selves: Episode 4: Dark Romantics and Opium Dreams

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Dark Romantics and Opium Dreams

Episode 4

Episode 4: Dark Romantics and Opium Dreams

BBC Radio 4 - Our Dreams: Our Selves, Dark Romantics and Opium Dreams

Lucy Powell explores the fear and loathing, as Romantic dreams turn to nightmares.

Lucy Powell explores the history of dreams and what we think they mean. Fear and loathing as Romantic dreams turn to nightmares.

Over the course of this week, Lucy Powell explores the history of dreams and what we think they mean, a hundred years after Sigmund Freud's great work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' appeared in English. She traces the shadowy, circuitous and often surprising history of dreams, from the oldest works of western literature to the very forefront of neuroscience, and finds out where dreams have taken us in the past, and where they might transport us next.

In this programme, she explores the dreams of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this new, Enlightened era, the age-old notion that dreams might be divine emissaries or the dark nocturnal work of devilish spirits, would no longer hold cultural currency. All the demons that our dreams revealed would be our own. And yet, the Enlightenment also precipitated a scientific revolution that would see extremely powerful, psychomorphic drugs being routinely prescribed for a whole host of ailments. Crucially for dreamers, one of these was opium, which bore very particular, poetic fruits. From Coleridge's Kubla Khan to the nightmares of de Quincey and the dream which led to Frankenstein, dreams in this era proved to be both creatively inspiring and personally terrifying.

Producer: Jane Greenwood.
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4.

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Exploring the vast archive of Chaplin's unfinished scripts, letters and press cuttings

Lucy Powell explores the history of dreams

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