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Abstract
Celebrated figures in a variety of intellectual fields have profited from paying attention to their dreams. Can a historian also gain something from dreaming? In my research into the significance of the automaton in the Western imagination, I tried to explicate the reason the object has been such a potent and ambivalent symbol from ancient times to today. I felt there was a connection between its function and that of funeral effigies in the Roman-Medieval-Renaissance context. But it was only through a dream I had that I was able to understand that correlation. Perhaps a coherent methodology of Morphic history can be built.