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the closest we get to it is the "wishful thinking" of various characters
which often inspires a dream.
Freud is quoted as saying "The dream is the royal road to the
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unconscious. It is widely known in modern times that we may learn
something about our inner selves from our dreams. This too is clearly
demonstrated in literature. In Dickens we see it a number of times,
he must intuitively have felt what Freud was going to say about the
subject of dreaming much later on. Yet Owen Feltham said almost the
same: "Dreams are a notable means of discovering our own inclinations.
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In sleep we have the naked and natural thoughts of our souls.
Modern psychoanalists have always pointed out the importance of dreams
and their interpretation. In ancient times the interpretation of dreams
seems to have been forbidden because it was meddling with divine
things, not because dreams had no meaning. Even so, in many cases the
intention of the dream was so obvious that an explanation was not
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necessary or the dream would explain itself later on. Kierkegaard
said more or less the same thing much later: "We live forward, we under-
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stand backward. To account for the unknown is an important use
of the dream in ancient culture. In Dickens's novels, as I hope to
show, this is quite different.
English literature of all periods has always made use of dreams as a
mechanism - a device of plot - to announce or allegorize the theme, to
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create atmosphere and suspense and dramatic irony. This holds good
for various dreams in the novels of Charles Dickens as well.
In The Holly Tree Inn and in A Christmas Carol Dickens uses dreams
throughout just as in Chaucer's works the dream is used as a structural
framework. In David Copperfield and Great Expectations, however this
is not so. The dream is used to give the reader insight into the
character of the hero and his state of mind at that moment in life.
This is why I consider dreams a very helpful device to get to know
and understand a character. The dream creates the mood, not only in
the chapter but also in the mood in which the reader comes to regard
a character. It has been said that the mood, the emotion, the tone,
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the atmosphere are the most important part of the dream.
It may be necessary to define the terms "mood", "emotion", "tone" and
"atmosphere" as I use them here and elsewhere in this paper.
