This chapter historicizes Shakespeare's Richard III by investigating Renaissance dream theories in relation to notions of conscience. Its basic argument is that it is an increasingly ambiguous status of conscience at the time that pushes dreams in the direction of a psychologizing approach: dreams as revealing truths about the human self after the Reformation. Hence, the chapter claims, the nightmares of Richard III anticipate the irresolution between supernatural and psychological causes that was also to characterize Gothic fiction in the 18th century.