• 15 • David Brodbeck Chopin’s Oneiric Soundscapes and the Role of Dreams in Romantic Culture HALINA GOLDBERG [A composer’s] logic . . . is the dreamlike logic that combines the most daring and contradictory visions, and yokes them together. To understand it, one must be dreaming oneself. —Józef Sikorski The notion of dreaming in music immediately brings to mind Chopin’s nocturnes. 1 Indeed, this genre’s explicit association with the night invokes the oneiric realm, the domain of dreams. Yet, as we investigate listeners’ responses to Chopin’s music more closely, we discover that they repeat- edly refer to dreamlike episodes in his compositions in other genres, and that in addition to timbral representations of nocturnal haziness Chopin employs other compositional techniques that bring about the experience of dreaming. Modern-day scholars’ responses to the perceived dreamscapes in Chopin’s compositions follow on the heels of a long tradition of hearing his music as a dream, a tradition that originated with his friends and con- temporaries. 2 While other modern scholars, for example James Parakilas in this volume, highlight the compositional and stylistic language of Chopin’s dream world and seek to interpret the experience of hearing it, my task in this essay is to explore the cultural milieu that shaped the composer’s penchant for oneiric soundscapes and his contemporaries’ responses to it. What were the cultural reasons for the increased interest in oneiric visions? Under what circumstances would Chopin have been exposed to these cultural trends? What was music’s role in portraying oneiric experiences? What qualities of Chopin’s music evoked dream images for his audiences? What significance might dreams and dreaming have held for Chopin and his audiences?