" Along with the haunted castle or tomb like structure, ghosts, darkness, damsels in distress, supernatural events, and other agents of sublimity, dreams and visions are important motifs in Gothic fiction. They are often critical to the plot of a story and are intrinsically demonstrative of a major focus the genre: that which is hidden, or cast off, repressed and defies orthodoxy. Since the realm of the Gothic concerns the world of darkness, it is fitting that the world of dreams and sleeping would play an important role. .
According to Elizabeth MacAndrew, author of The Gothic Tradition in Fiction: Gothic fiction is a literature of nightmare. Among its conventions are found dream landscapes and figures of the subconscious imagination. Its fictional world .
gives form to amorphous fears and impulses common to all mankind, using an amalgam of materials, some torn from the author's own subconscious mind and some stuff of myth, folklore, fairy tale, and romance. It conjures up beings - mad monks, vampires, and demons - and settings - forbidding cliffs and glowering buildings, stormy seas and the dizzying abyss - that have literary significance and the properties of dream symbolism as well. Gothic fiction gives shape to concepts of the place of evil in the human mind (3).
Dreams, by definition, are not subject to the rules of linear, rational, thought, are subjective, happen in the dark and use a kind of "shadow logic", meaning that they sometimes say the opposite of what we think they mean. Maggie Kilgour, author of The Rise of the Gothic Novel, agrees that dreams and nightmares are a "classic source of gothic inspiration. " Interestingly Horace Walpole was said to have found the inspiration for Otranto in a dream that he had. .
Macbeth is a play rich with Gothic images including many references to dreams and sleep. When MacDuff says "Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit" (Act II, 3, 72-73), he is trying to rouse Banquo, Donalbain, and Malcolm to tell them that the king has been murdered in his sleep.
