Margaret Cavendish on Dreaming

Margaret Cavendish’s (1623–1673) philosophy has been gaining increasing interest in recent years. Untypically to her time, she was a materialist, who denied the existence of immaterial substance. Deviating from other materialists of the period, like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), she likewise considered that matter was not in fact a ‘dead’ thing moved by external motion, but living, sensing, and thinking. Such curious commitments obviously raise questions about her views on human experience like perception, thinking, imagining, and dreaming. Of these, most commentary interest has focused on perception and thinking in Cavendish (e.g. Michaelian 2009; Boyle 2015; Adams 2016; Cunning 2016; 2023; Georgescu 2020; Lascano 2023; Peterman 2025) and Cavendish’s views on fancy and imagination have likewise seen large discussion in recent years (e.g., Hock 2018; Gilman Sherman 2021). However, Cavendish account of dreaming is noticeably less discussed (with Cunning 2016; Lascano 2023; and Manzo 2023 as exceptions). In this paper, I focus on Cavendish’s views on dreaming, arguing that her approach to dreaming evolved between her early works and her later ones. While in the World’s Olio (WO; 1655) and Philosophical and Physical Opinions (PPO; 1655), Cavendish connects dreaming more strongly with memory, by her more systematic natural philosophical works, such as Philosophical Letters (PL; 1664) and Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (OEP; 1666), her account has changed to comparing dreaming more with imagination than with remembering. This change seems to coincide with a larger systematization of her philosophical thinking and genuine interest in skeptical themes in philosophy. Thus, at the end of the paper, I discuss whether her account of dreaming allows for material for a response to a dreaming based skeptical scenarios.