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It seems very hard to ascertain what Charles Dickens's main sources
of inspiration in his usage of dreams were - be they nightmares,
visionary dreams, dreams as an outlet of reality or daydreams. It is
quite probable that the idea was borrowed from the Bible and then
adapted in form to his own purposes.
Freud and his followers have shown a great many thoughts and popular
beliefs about dreams to be true - as we learn from the incident
recounted by Lionel Trilling where Freud gives credit to the
philosophers and poets of having discovered the unconscious when he
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merely found the scientific method of studying it. As quoted before,
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he said "Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. He repeats
an old insight. As Dickens never knew any Freud we must conclude that
he relied on his intuition and imagination to understand the signifi
cance of dreams. If we think of Dickens's hard and dismal youth, it
seems likely enough to conclude that he daydreamed as a means of
escape as some of the characters he created also did.
In Dickens's novels the reader is given more of the atmosphere than the
thoughts of a character. It seems as though Dickens avoided looking his
characters in the face as if he was afraid of what he was going to see
there
In DAVID COPPERFIELD, written in 1850, the dreams are less relevant
to David's inner life and to the novel itself than in GREAT EXPECTATIONS,
written in 1861, where they are very telling indeed of Pip's state of
mind, so the conclusion that in Dickens there was a growing awareness
of the importance of the dream seems legitimate. Whoever loves, lives
and whoever lives, dreams. In their dreams people are shown as they
really are and who dreams seems to me to be a real person.
For a long time poets have continued to be fascinated by the relationship
between waking reality and the dream and many have asked with Poe:
Is all that we see or seem
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But a dream within a dream
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