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"Mood" refers to state of mind or feeling, "emotion" the agitation
of mind and feeling, the "tone" prevailing character of sentiments,
and "atmosphere" mental or moral environment, especially artistic or
2
emotional
They are important keywords in this paper because if a person has a
fearful dream, not only the elements and symbols that constitute the
dream are important, it is of greater importance that the dream is
fearful. The mood tells the reader where he stands.
III DREAMS IN DAVID COPPERFIELD
In DAVID COPPERFIELD a number of dreams are to be found which all
deal with David's relationships to other people, notably Dora, Agnes,
Steerforth ans Uriah Heep, dreams expressing fear, hope, longing, love,
friendship and disgust. Naturally these are feelings that can easily
be understood when one thinks of the explanations offered by modern
-nology.
t it is also interesting to see how the dreams function in the novel.
Lucretius whose ultimate view of dreams was rather bleak, says: "Man
is a creature who seeks oblivion in sleep as part of a general flight
from himself but who never satisfies his quest because of the presence
of anxiety dreams.This is clearly to be seen in the first example,
David goes to sleep in Chapter 35 after his conversation with Aunt
Betsey about his love for Dora Spenlow and in his dream he seems to try
and escape from his every day cares but does not succeed.
The elements that play a part in his dream, all coming from his day-to
day experiences, are very telling but more inportant is the mood that
the dream creates. It is the mood in the first place that makes the
reader feel, hear and see the deep frustrations and fears that
David has. They are working in his soul and he cannot escape from them
in his sleep:
"As to sleep, I had dreams of poverty in all sorts of shapes,
but I seemed to dream without the previous ceremony of going
to sleep. Now I was ragged, wanting to sell Dora matches, six
bundles for a halfpenny; now I was at the office in a night-
