William Smellie’s Dreams: Character and Consciousness in the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract

There would seem to be little reason to consider dreams as relevant to a discussion of character and sociability. As defined by the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, “character” was a set of qualities and moral values developed and displayed in social relationships, through idioms of politeness, by people imbued with finely tuned sentiments and the capacity for identification with others. Dreaming, on the other hand, is solitary and antisocial, both because the dreamer is often alone and generally unobserved and in the idiosyncratic and anarchic nature of the dreamer’s perceptions and behavior. “It is remarked by Addison [and] Swift,” wrote a contemporary, “that every man while awake is in one common world; but is, while asleep, in a world of his own….[When I dream] I… seldom or never find myself occupied with familiar objects. My brain is always busied about objects which never did, and never can exist.”²

From recollecting our dreams…we may learn to correct many improprieties in our conduct…to resist, in due time, evil habits that are stealing upon us: and to guard against hopes and fears which detach us from our proper concerns, and unfit us for the duties of life.

—William Smellie, Encyclopaedia Britannica¹

Those who follow the beaten tract [sic] of a teacher seldom make any useful discoveries…. Men who think and reason for themselves…bid the fairest for improving any art.

—William Smellie, Prefatory Advertisement to William Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 1769