This groundbreaking study is a history of the dream as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture from the mid-nineteenth century, to the late twentieth century. Drawing on a complex and diverse archive, including popular dream books, lectures, novels, poems, visual media, diaries, letters, scholarly texts, and newspaper and journal articles, Dreams and Modernity analyses how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject. The unauthorized nature of dream material and its formulation as a "history from below" makes it singularly illuminating for a broader cultural history of this period.