Morphean Space and the metaphysics of nightmare: Gothic theories of dreaming in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Notebooks

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was haunted by nightmares, which he extensively documented in his private notebooks. This chapter argues that Coleridge’s nightmare writings should not only be considered narrative texts in their own right, and therefore as extensions of his literary oeuvre, but also that they can best be understood through the language, architecture and impulses of the Gothic. Despite Coleridge’s conscious attempts to distance himself from the Gothic in his literary criticism, his notebook writings about nightmares and his attempts to scientifically theorise them are unsettlingly infused with and informed by this same mode. In particular, this chapter examines the Gothic nature of Coleridge’s concept of ‘Morphean Space,’ which he developed through extensive engagement with contemporary theories on the causes of dreaming, ranging from the medical and biological to the supernatural. ‘Morphean Space’ was the unique space within which dreams occurred, but it also overlapped with both the material, waking world and the immaterial realm of the supernatural. In this model, nightmares were caused by demonic entities invading the body via Morphean Space and taking possession of the mind. This chapter asserts that Morphean Space can be mapped onto the similar spatial constructions of the haunted labyrinths and subterranean crypts within earlier Gothic novels. It argues further that this similarity empowers Coleridge to draw on the Gothic mode when writing about his own nightmares, allowing him to employ Gothic literary techniques to express, theorise, and ultimately to regain authorial control over the nightmare forces that threatened to possess his mind.