Item Condition: Used; Very Good
Modern man, post-Freud, has good cause to
remember the content of his dreams. But the
imaginings of the unconscious have held a
fascination for man long before the word
'psychoanalysis was invented, and dreams
have been transcribed and interpreted for as
long as man has been able to write. This
anthology explores the dreamn experience in
literature, from preChristian times to the
present day.
Wonderful descriptions of dreams,
recorded by such avid dream collectors as
Ruskin and Southey, A. C. Benson and Franz
Kafka, share these pages with their fictional
and poetic counterparts. The dream as a
literary device, whether used as form or
content, gives the inventive writer free rein,
and authors as diverse as Coleridge and Yeats,
Dostoevsky and Proust, Tolstoy and Joseph
Heller, have exploited it to the full. Variety of
author is matched by variety of content: from
the realism of dreams about friends and
family, love and sex, to the fantasy world of
nightmare and metamorphosis, from the
horrific to the ridiculous, and ridiculously
funny, the anecdotes, poems, and stories in
this book are a fascinating reminder of the
power of dreams. They can be prophetic or
reminiscent, or they can be the inspiration for
memorable artistic achievement.