30 12 In general medieval opinion seems to have been that dreams are either divinely (always true or diabollically (always false) caused. These dreams may show the future or impart knowledge in a super natural way. Dreams were thought to have purely physical, purely psychological or supernatural causes**^. Many interesting remarks have been made about the dream throughout the centuries. Some of these seem to lead directly to modern dream theory, others have been included to show that examples of dreams can be compared to reflections in distorting mirrors**. Gerard de Nerval said "Our dreams are a second life." Manfred Weidhorn reached the conclusion that certain types of dreams occurred in certain types of litarary works, heuristic dreams in dream vision works, love dreams in lyrics, ominous man tic dreams in drama and supernatural monitory dreams in narratives*"^. The hallucination or daydream is not mentioned in medieval literature. Interesting is Nashe's definition of the dream "A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or a froath of the fancie, which the day hath left undigested; or an afterfeast made of the fragments of idle imaginations Our thoughts, intensively fixed all the daytime upon a mark we are to hit, are now and then overdrawne with such force, that they flye beyond the mark of day into the confines of the night. When all is said, melancholy is the mother of dreams and of all terrors of the night whatsoever. 14)" Here we find the foundation of the modern view that dreams can function as an outlet for reality. As Freud said "Dreams refer to those past experiences that the individual is unable to accept in the light of his conscious attitudes. 15)" He considered the dream a symbolic representation of every repressed wish or desire that lives on in the unconscious after having been banished from the conscious*^. Werner Wolff reaches the same conclusion "We synthesize our experience in sleep, asking for solutions of various sorts." and continues to say "Any dream is either a reduction or an elaboration of its underlying thoughts."**7 This is the same as what Aristotle says: "What we plan to do the next day is likely to 18 occupy our minds beforehand." Every dream provides us with an active picture of our situation in life at that moment. Our soul says this is what it is like.

Krantenviewer Noord-Hollands Archief

The Dutch Dickensian | 1985 | | pagina 32