“Fluminense” Nightmares: Machado de Assis
and the Oneiric
Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos
I know ‘tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish
Than if ‘twere Truth. It has been often so:
Must I die under it? Is no one near?
Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In his X-ray of social life and mores in Rio de Janeiro in the second half
of the nineteenth century, while depicting everyday events, Machado de
Assis (1839–1908) often delved into the inner recesses of the human
psyche. Snapshots of perfectly ordinary incidents, of clear-cut, realistic
situations though his short stories are, they explore what lies beneath the
surface of his characters’ banal and apparently normal existence—their
obsessions, monomanias, driving ambitions, unreason, idiosyncrasies,
misanthropy—, treading on those chiaroscuro territories of the soul. Not
infrequently are his men and women haunted by bad dreams and night-
mares, those windows or gateways to the unconscious mind. The most
commonplace circumstances may plunge them into the oneiric world,
S. G. Vasconcelos (B)
University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
e-mail: sgtvasco@usp.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
F. Clemente and G. Colombani (eds.), Nightmares in the Long
Nineteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81164-7_5
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