What history can teach us about sleep and dreams

Sleep and dreams are often treated as biological necessities or as private experiences that don’t tell us much beyond our own psychology. But for Nicole Bauer, a historian of early modern Europe and a Center for the Study of World Religions visiting scholar, they are also cultural and historical experiences — shaped by belief, ritual, social life, and changing ideas about human nature and consciousness. In a conversation with Gosia Sklodowska, CSWR executive director, Bauer reflected on how attitudes toward sleep and dreams have changed over time, why lucid dreaming is drawing new interest, and what may be lost when sleep is reduced to mere maintenance.

What first drew you to sleep and dreams?
I’m an early modern and cultural historian, so I’m interested in practices, belief systems, values, ritual, religion — the ways people make meaning. Sleep and dreams fit very naturally into that. They’re part of how people understand themselves and the world around them. I’m also fascinated by altered states of consciousness. I have a vivid dream life, and I take sleep very seriously. But I’m from a culture that values efficiency and productivity and treats sleep like an inconvenience—as if it would be better if we didn’t need it. Sleep is not wasted time.

How have cultural and spiritual attitudes toward dreams changed over time?
In the early modern period, dreams were taken seriously, often understood within a religious or spiritual framework. After the Scientific Revolution, skepticism increased. But there’s a cultural shift. People seem open to the idea that dreams have meaning — not just in a psychoanalytic sense, but in a spiritual sense. People are more likely to treat them as something internal — a path into the self. There’s more willingness to talk about dreams as messages, or encounters with ancestors or guides, or something beyond the rational.

What does dreaming reveal about the nature of consciousness?
We tend to imagine only two states: waking and sleeping, as if it’s an on-off switch. But dreaming is a liminal state, and suggests that consciousness may be more of a spectrum, a way of entering an inner world. Dreams can also be understood as openings onto other worlds — the realm of ancestors, angels, divine beings, other planes of existence, where space and time feel fluid or irrelevant, blurring boundaries: inner and outer, self and world.

Where does lucid dreaming fit in?
Lucid dreaming is when you realize, while dreaming, that you are dreaming. It doesn’t mean trying to control the dream. You may choose to open a door in the dream, but what’s behind it can surprise you. For a long time, people assumed lucid dreaming was imaginary. But both historical and scientific research suggest otherwise.

Why do you think lucid dreaming appeals to people?
It gives people a sense of freedom and possibility that they don’t encounter in ordinary life. In some religious traditions, lucid dreaming teaches that dream reality is malleable and responsive to the mind, implying that reality may be less fixed than we assume. Lucid dreaming becomes tied to mindfulnes — paying closer attention to experience itself. As a historian, I’m aware that what people take as fixed is often historically contingent. So lucid dreaming interests me as a way to loosen rigid assumptions about reality.

What does the history of segmented sleep reveal about modern assumptions around rest and health?
In modern industrial society, sleep became more utilitarian. People slept in two phases: first sleep and second sleep. They went to bed earlier, woke in the middle of the night for some time, and then went back to sleep. It suited a society where people slept efficiently and worked long hours. Today, if people wake in the night, they assume something is wrong and have anxiety that uninterrupted sleep is the only healthy pattern. We think of the body as a machine: sleep, recharge, go to work. But that strips sleep of its healing, creative, and mysterious dimensions. It reduces us to batteries. There is richness in sleep and dreams, and people have lost touch with that.

What might we recover by taking dreams more seriously?
Dreams are a free resource. They can offer ideas, creativity, insight, and healing. In academic life, I find dreams very helpful in writing and thinking. But many academics have a fraught relationship with sleep, and they don’t see dreams as part of intellectual life. Yet that richness is already there. We don’t need to invent it. We just need to notice it.