Dreams—and nightmares—captured the imagination of the May 2021 meeting. Works of fiction and nonfiction were presented; titles ranged from the classics of literature to little-known dream diaries.
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| The Interpretation of Dreams |
Freud, Sigmund. The
Interpretation of Dreams.
Birmingham, Alabama: Gryphon Editions, Inc., 1988. This special edition has been privately
printed for the members of The Classics of Medicine Library. Facsimile of the English translation by A. A.
Brill, published by The Macmillan Company in 1913.
Freud, Sigmund. The
Interpretation of Dreams.
Birmingham, Alabama: Gryphon Editions, Inc., 1988. This special edition has been privately
printed for the members of The Classics of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Library. Facsimile of the English
translation by A. A. Brill, published by The Macmillan Company in 1913.
The Interpretation of Dreams is arguably the most recognizable title in the field of dream theory. Freud theorized that dreams were driven by an unconscious wish fulfillment; he saw dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious" and often explored the dreams of his patients during psychoanalysis. Freud's dream theory has since been discredited and his "dream-work" interpretation strategies have not been found empirically valid; nevertheless, The Interpretation of Dreams remains popular.
The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in
1899, though Freud revised and expanded it at least eight times. It was first translated from German to
English in 1913 by Abraham Brill, an Austrian-born psychiatrist and the first
psychoanalyst to practice in the United States.
Brill's translation of the third edition remains the authoritative English
text and is the one used in these facsimile editions.
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| A Christmas Carol (first edition) |
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. First edition. With illustrations by John Leech.
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| A Christmas Carol (facsimile edition) |
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1920. Facsimile of the 1843 Chapman & Hall edition. With revised illustrations by John Leech, and an introduction by A. Edward Newton.
A Christmas Carol often springs
to mind when asked to recall dreams in literature; the ghost of Jacob Marley
visits Scrooge in a dream, followed by visits from the Ghost of Christmas Past,
the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Only, Dickens does not portray the ghosts'
visits as a dream; he sets the scene, however, for Marley's ghostly visit with:
Thus secured against surprise, he took
off his cravat; put on his dressing gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and
sat down before the fire to take his gruel.
After having a warm meal in one's pajamas beside the
fireplace, who wouldn't nod off and begin to dream? Shaken by Marley's ghost, even Scrooge
questions whether it was a dream:
Marley’s ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he
resolved within himself, after mature inquiry that it was all a dream, his mind
flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and
presented the same problem to be worked all through, “Was it a dream or not?”
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| Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887 |
Bellamy, Edward. Looking
Backward: 2000 – 1887. Norwalk, CT:
Easton Press, 1980. First published
in 1888, Bellamy's Utopian fiction avoids use of the term socialism but
espouses "the elimination of social classes and the ills of society." The story's main character, Julian West, is
an insomniac. He has himself mesmerized
to an induced sleep inside of a tomb-like room in his home's cellar. The house burns down, and he stays in this
induced sleep for 113 years until discovered by the new owners of his now-rebuilt
home. West awakens in the same location
but to a totally changed world in which the United States has been transformed
into a socialist Utopia. Through the
eyes of West and the explanations of Doctor Leete, a resident of Boston in the
year 2000, Bellamy extols a utopian future in which society is ordered for the
smooth production and distribution of commodities to a regimented labor force. In this society, "there would be no
poverty, crime or taxes. Citizens would volunteer to work from the age of 21 to
45 and then retire." (Now, that's the dream!)
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| A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
Twain, Mark. A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1898. First published as A Yankee in King
Arthur's Court by Charles L. Webster and Co. in 1889. Twain uses a frame structure to tell a
medieval story within a contemporary story.
Twain's main character Hank Morgan, an engineer in Hartford, Connecticut,
receives a severe blow to the head and awakens in England during the reign of
King Arthur. He is initially confused
but soon realizes he is living nearly 1300 years in the past. Hank uses his 19th Century knowledge to make
people believe he is a powerful magician.
He initially uses his knowledge of astronomy to outsmart Arthur, then later
uses his engineering skills to help him.
Ultimately, Hank reawakens in his own time and place, and cries out for
the family and friends he left behind in King Arthur's court.
Twain first conceived the story in December 1884, inspired
by a dream in which he was a knight who found himself inconvenienced by the cumbersome,
weighty armor he wore. He started
writing the story in 1885 and completed it in 1889 in Hartford, Connecticut.
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| Vivien Greene's copy of The Man Within |
Greene, Graham. The Man Within. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1952. First volume of the 14-volume Uniform Edition of the works of Graham Greene.
Graham Greene's first novel, The Man Within, has nothing to do with dreams, but this particular copy certainly does. It is Vivien Greene's copy, bearing an autograph inscription to the front free end paper.
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| Vivien Greene's inscription |
1952
This arrived on morning of September 23 Tuesday. On Monday (ie last) night I had dreamed G. appeared, very ill & in great distress saying he had only a week to live.
The Man Within was first published in 1929, two years after Graham and Vivien married; the novel is dedicated to her. Graham left his family in 1947, though Vivien refused to grant him a divorce; they remained married until Graham's death. From 1946, before he and Vivien separated, Graham had carried on a very public affair with Catherine Walston. Walston's husband demanded Catherine and Graham cease their adulterous relation in 1951, after the publication of Greene's The End of the Affair, which is dedicated to Catherine. They did not end the relationship at that time, though they did tone down their appearances in public, causing many to speculate that the relationship had ended. It is in this context in 1952 in which Vivien receives and inscribes this copy of The Man Within.
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| A World of My Own: A Dream Diary |
Greene, Graham. A World of My Own: A Dream Diary. New York: Viking Press, 1994. Selected entries from Greene's dream diary, posthumously published.
Greene began keeping a dream diary as a teenager while
undergoing psychoanalysis. He continued
the practice throughout his life. In the
final months before he died, he returned to his diaries and selected and
arranged entries for publication.
Shortly before he died, Greene gave the annotated diary entries to this
then-mistress, Yvonne Cloetta, entrusting her to see it published.
Greene distinguishes between his dream world, a place which
only he knows—which he calls "A World of My Own"—and the world he
shares and experiences with others—what he calls the "Common
World." The entries, which span a
lifetime, are arranged thematically; unfortunately, they are not dated.
Beyond the entries in his dream journals, Greene spoke often
about how dreams were part of his writing process. In her Foreword, Yvonne Cloetta writes:
It is well known that Graham was always very interested in dreams,
and that he relied a great deal on the role played by the subconscious in
writing. He would sit down to work
straightaway after breakfast, writing until he had five hundred words (which in
the last while he reduced to approximately two hundred). He was in the habit of then rereading, every
evening before going to bed, the section of the novel or story he had written
in the morning, leaving his subconscious to work during the night. Some dreams enabled him to overcome a
"blockage"; others provided him on occasion with material for short
stories or even an idea for a new novel (as with It's a Battlefield and The
Honorary Consul). Sometimes, as he
wrote, "identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his
dream and not one's own"—as happened during the writing of A Burnt-Out
Case, so that he was able to attribute his own dream to his character Querry
and so extricate himself from an impasse in the narrative.
