Dreams In Colonial American Diaries

Colonial New England produced an unusual archive: private journals in which people recorded their dreams while being deeply uncertain whether they should. The tension shaped what got written down.

Why the diaries exist at all

Puritan practice encouraged sustained self-examination, and many households kept journals recording spiritual condition, providences and matters of conscience.

Dreams entered these records as evidence about the writer's inner state, alongside illnesses, weather and public events understood as bearing meaning.

The result is a body of dream material collected for religious reasons rather than curiosity, which makes it different in kind from later dream diaries.

The theological problem

Protestant thought inherited the position that God had spoken through dreams in scripture, which made it difficult to dismiss dreams entirely as meaningless.

At the same time, ministers warned against treating ordinary dreams as revelation, since the age of prophecy was widely held to have ended.

Diarists therefore recorded dreams and then argued with themselves on the page about what weight to give them, which is why the entries are so often hedged.

What the recorded dreams contain

Death appears constantly, which is unsurprising in communities with high mortality where the spiritual state of the dying was a central concern.

Dreams of the dead returning are recorded with particular care, sometimes as consolation and sometimes as a source of alarm about the visitor's fate.

Anxiety about salvation, about failing in a public role, and about the security of the settlement itself all appear in ways that track the writers' documented waking concerns.

Dreams as evidence in public matters

Dreams and visionary experience occasionally entered legal and ecclesiastical proceedings, where testimony about what someone saw at night could carry weight.

The witchcraft prosecutions of the period are the best-known instance in which nighttime experience, including sleep paralysis by later descriptions, was treated as evidence about other people.

Reading those episodes requires care, because the categories the participants used did not distinguish dreaming, waking vision and physical event the way modern accounts do.

What the archive is useful for now

The diaries offer dream reports written before any psychological theory of dreaming existed, which makes them a check on how much interpretation shapes what people record.

Historians use them to trace how understandings of the self changed, since the questions a diarist asks about a dream reveal what they believed a mind to be.

They are historical documents rather than data, filtered by religious purpose and by what a writer considered fit to preserve, and that filtering is part of what they record.