31 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 19 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 20 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 21 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 22 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 23 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,

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The Dutch Dickensian | 1985 | | pagina 33