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Charles Dickens seems to have known this or to have felt this as will
be shown in many cases in the following chapters.
The Romantic concepts on dreams were that they were a revelation of
reality, that they could form and influence waking life, and that the
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dream process is parallel to and model of the process of poetic creation
The Romentic writers thought that there was a strong link between dreams
and the processes of literary creation.
Martin Esslin in his Theatre of the Absurd comes to the same conclusion
in the twentieth century as the Romantics did in their day: for there
is a close connection between myth ana dream; myths have been called
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the collective dream images of mankind.
Wallace Stevens too sees this link between the myth and the processes of
literary creation: "There was a muddy centre before we breathed, there
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was a myth before the myth began... From this the poem springs.
That there is a close connection and an important one between the dream
and the creative mind may have spurred Charles Dickens on to using the
dream at significant moments in his novels. He knew that this was very
wellknown to his reading public, they had obviously seen it in the Bible.
In an essay "Myth and Dream in Hebrew Scripture",
J.F. Priest makes the following distinction. According to him there are
three types of dreams, the message dream, the symbolic dream and the
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prophetic dream
It is interesting to see that most of these types are to be found in
literature of all ages. In the Bible there are a number of examples to
be found. These may not be actual dreams, dreamed at night but they
are a useful device of plot, necessary in the framework of the story
to make the appearance of God logical and natural, and in the structure
of the story they serve as an omen, as a warning or as a prediction
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of things to come God appears in a visionary or prophetic dream
- usually at the culminating point of the story - a number of times
to communicate with the "dreamer" to give him guidance or advice.
In this way the "dream" is for the poet a ready way to arrange the
events of his story, to present things that can not take place in
reality or to explain supernatural phenomena. The popular superstition
that the dream predicts the future is clearly based in these examples
from the Bible. This type is not to be found in Charles Dickens's novels,