Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury was born at Meaux on 23 March 1817 and died in Paris on 11 February 1892. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica calls him a French scholar who studied archaeology, ancient and modern languages, medicine and law. He is remembered today mostly for his work on sleep, which tied the content of dreams to what the body senses during the night, decades before Sigmund Freud took up the subject.
A Life in Libraries and Academies
After finishing school, Maury joined the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1836 and moved to the library of the Institut in 1844. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres elected him a member in 1857. Napoleon III used him as a researcher for the Histoire de César, and posts followed: librarian of the Tuileries in 1860, professor at the Collège de France in 1862 and director general of the Archives in 1868. The same encyclopedia credits him, together with Victor Duruy, as one of the founders of the École des Hautes Études, and notes that his death came four years after he retired from the Archives.
Sleep and Dreams
In Le Sommeil et les rêves (1861) Maury gathered observations he had first printed in the Annales médico-psychologiques, starting with a January 1848 paper titled “Des hallucinations hypnagogiques”. That paper gave the name hypnagogic hallucinations to the images that appear while a person drifts off. In the book he says he was well placed to study dreams because he fell asleep easily, dreamed often and remembered his dreams for months.
Chapter VI reports tests in which a helper disturbed him while he slept and then woke him. A feather drawn over his lips and nose became a dream of torture, in which a mask of pitch was pressed on his face and torn away. A whiff of eau de Cologne put him in a perfume shop, and from there in a shop in Cairo.
The best known case came without any helper. Ill in bed, with his mother beside him, Maury dreamed of the Terror. He stood before the revolutionary tribunal, faced Robespierre, Marat and Fouquier-Tinville, was condemned and was taken to the scaffold. As the blade fell he woke and found that the rod at the top of his bed had dropped onto his neck, which his mother said had just happened (pp. 133 to 134). He took this to show how fast thought can run in a dream.
Freud retold the episode at length in The Interpretation of Dreams and used it to frame the question of how much a dream can hold in a moment.
Freud on how Maury’s dream seemed to compress time
Dreams like the guillotine dream of Maury … seem to show that the dream can crowd together more perception content in a very short space of time than can be controlled by our psychic activity in the waking mind.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill
Not every contemporary agreed with Maury. The Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, in Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger (1867), praised many of his observations but called his theories largely conjectural and rather openly materialist, since they explained dreams through movements of the brain’s fibres. Hervey also doubted that hypnagogic images were a special state that only some people experience, saying he met them nightly himself.
Dalí’s Bee
Salvador Dalí painted Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking in 1944. It now hangs in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. In it a bee’s buzzing turns, in Gala’s sleeping mind, into tigers and a bayonet about to sting her arm. The museum cites the artist’s own account from 1962, which points straight back to Maury’s falling bed rod.
Dalí naming the guillotine dream as his model
Just as the dropping of a rod on the neck of a sleeper gives rise simultaneously to his awakening and to a very long dream ending with the descent of the guillotine blade
Salvador Dalí, 1962, quoted by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (short excerpt for review and study)
Sebastian Faulks also mentions Maury in his novel Human Traces (2005).
For more on how other cultures read the night, see Dreams: Sent by the Gods, Dreamed into Being.
Selected Works
The 1911 Britannica lists these among his many books:
- Les Fées au Moyen Âge and Histoire des légendes pieuses au Moyen Âge (1843, reissued with additions after his death as Croyances et légendes du Moyen Âge, 1896)
- Histoire des grandes forêts de la Gaule et de l’ancienne France (1850, revised in 1867 as Les Forêts de la Gaule et de l’ancienne France)
- La Terre et l’homme (1854), written as the introduction to Victor Duruy’s Histoire universelle
- Histoire des religions de la Grèce antique (3 vols., 1857 to 1859)
- La Magie et l’astrologie dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge (1860)
- Le Sommeil et les rêves (1861)
- Histoire de l’ancienne Académie des sciences (1864)
- Histoire de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (1865)
- Articles for the Encyclopédie moderne (1846 to 1851), Michaud’s Biographie universelle, the Journal des savants and the Revue des deux mondes
