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the fact that a dream occurs without the contents being told - in which
Dickens makes use of all sorts of animals to take Pip in the coach
to London - anything rather than the usual picture the reader knows so
well, of a stagecoach drawn by horses in the lovely English scenery.
"Never horses" Pip says. And anyway the coach does not even go to
London as Pip says "Fantastic failures.." where the alliteration draws
extra attention to Pip's worried night thoughts - "..until the day dawned.."
How does the coach go then? It is drawn by dogs - not so surprising and
not all that ridiculous - by cats - slightly more odd if visualized, dogs
were and still are occasionally used as draught-animals, but never cats.
Still, these animals are domestic animals and convey some civilized notion
to the reader. But the next step of this enumeration puts a stop to that,
it is pigs that are in the traces now, smelly pigs that otherwise roll
around in the mud and the dung and flourish in an atmousphere as filthy
as possible. What can be expected as the next step of this climax,
certainly not men. Yet this is what Pip sees in his dream. Apparently
he ranks his fellow human beings lower than dogs, cats, even pigs.
Fortunately he is checked by his alter ego who realizes that he goes to
far and wakes him up. The whole night Pip goes from one extreme to another
- when he dreams of being in a coach drawn by men he feels miles above
other people - but then he wakes up time and again - "broken sleep" -
only to go back to more dreams in the same vein.
His unconscious thoughts have sent a mutilated message to the conscious
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by means of the dream. This dream is not only a fine example of Dickens's
natural gift of making us laugh, it goes deeper than that. In the dream
Pip is shown as the snob he is turning into, setting out to London where
he will spend his fortune rather than make it. The dream can therefore
be taken as an indicater of this change in development of the novel and
determines the feelings of the reader to a great extend.
That the next example of a dream should occur towards the end of a
chapter and at the end of an instalment - Chapter 31, the final paragraph -
is exactly in keeping with what we have seen so far
"Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of Estella,
and miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and
that I had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert's Clara, or play
Hamlet to Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty thousand people,
without knowing twenty words of it."
Pip and Herbert have dined with Mr. Wopsle - an entertainment that leaves
