Revisiting the semantic history of dream An analysis of the semantic development of dream and its place in the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition.

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the theories concerning the semantic shift of dream from the Old English period, in which it is attested as ‘joy, mirth, noisy merriment or music’, to the Middle English period, when it is also attested with its present day meaning. It shows that the essentially Christian Anglo-Saxon literary tradition might have concealed the more neutral, unattested sense of ‘sleeping vision’, instead of it being a case of semantic displacement because of Old Norse. It does this by carrying out a thorough analysis of the contexts in which dream was used during the Old and Middle English time periods.