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Pip recognizes the file as the one he stole from Joe to help the
convict. He is then given
"Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes My sister
put them in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in the
state parlour. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and
many a night and day.
I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of
the strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of
the guilty common and coarse thing it was, to be on secret terms
of conspiracy with convicts - a feature in my low carreer that I
had previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too. A dread
possessed me that when I least axpected it, the file would
reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham's,
next Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out
of a door, without seeing who held it, and screamed myself awake."
On a psychological level this is exactly what a guilty little boy,
having done a thing like that would dream of. It is a common dream
process after all to digest the experiences of that day and earlier
since what occupies us when waking is likely to return to us in dreams.
Pip's guilty feelings overcome him. On a structural level this dream
puts a proper ending to the chapter and is as it were, the part that
determines the colour of our feelings for this part of Pip's life.
It is an interesting fact that Charles Dickens puts this passage
right at the end of a chapter and at the end of an instalment as well^.
One wonders why he did so. Every reader knows he published most of his
works in weekly or monthly instalments, in HOUSEHOLD WORDS, in ALL THE
YEAR ROUND and other periodicals. So the dreams or nightmares that are
placed at the end of a chapter or better still at the end of an
instalment seem to indicate that Charles Dickens planned them as a
point of reflection for the reader, reflection concerning not only the
facts, the things that happened but more important still reflection
concerning the emotional attitude the reader has at the moment of
reading if that passage. Dickens does here as well as later on in the
novel and in other novels. He must have known - probably from examples
from the Bible where dreams play a very significant role indeed - that
those were the passages that lingered in the mind of the reader so he
gave a clear description of the dream, full details, he even takes
care to mention what Pip thinks of to coax himself to sleep, Miss
Havisham. Their dreams coincide. Pip is not only part of Miss Havisham's