Dreaming and literature

Sigmund Freud, was already occupied with the interpretation of literature and culture. In Der Dichter und das Phantasieren (1908) en Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930). Freud sais there was big part of drifts (impulses) in human perception and behavoir. Because of the socialisation, the humans were forced to repress their drifts. Freud saw man as a creature in which nature and culture are bound on a conlfictual basis. He sais: "Das Ich ist nicht Herr in seinem eigenen Hause" He was fighting the common vision people had in the past of a selfconsious and self-controling creature. Freud said that there are two basical drifts, the Eros and the Thanatos. In his vision human phantasie acts like an exhaust valve: an intermediar between the unsatisfied needs and reality, between the 'principle of desire' en the 'principle of reality'. According to Freud an happy person would never phantasies. So I think thats why maybe we phantasies, or while witnessing the happiness of others it can make us happy to. In his vision the creativity of an artist and a writer kan be take as a process that is like a daydreamphantasie. It acts like a kind of defence for an unsatisfied expierienced reality. In this sense art and literature are unthinkable without a conflict. You can take them as a form of conflict control. This vision accords also on what Nietzsche said: "Wir haben die Kunstdamit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehen." But I think Jung had a better approach: The symbols in dreams evoque a big analogy between a dream and a novel. It offers the reader a large framework to interpretating texts.
Ideas about sleep and dreaming have always been central to man's concepts of mind and consiuousness. Thinking about sleep has followd two lines. One characterizes sleep as an analog of death during which mental function ceases-Hesiod called sleep " the brother of death". The other view holds that sleep, like wakefulness, is a special form of mental activity. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, many have viewed sleeping and dreaming less as a suspension of life than as a chance to dream, a chance to engage in a special form of mental activity. In 1900 Freud significally expand the latter view. In the 'traumdeuting' (The interpretations of dreams) he proposed that dreaming might represent an unique avenu by which unconsious motivation could be explored. When waking consiousness is periodically interrupted by sleep, he argued, mental activity is not simply lead to rest; rather, the mental experience of waking is replaced with the even more intense mental experience of dreaming. Freud also sais that, by associating your dreams further, your repressed wish can be reconstructed. Thats why in lireatature you can find many examples of dream scenes.
Liteature is a collective dream: and people find it really interesting.

(What Derrida is saying about speaking in dreams in Papier Machine is also interesting.
Papier machine comes from a dream of Benjamin's in which he declares: "It was about changing a poem into a fichu (some kind of head scarf)"). The idea here is that speaking from the dream isn't damaging, it expands the idea of enlightenment but doesn't (as in Benjamin's fantasy) threaten or destroy it. The possibility of speaking lucidly from within the dream is raised by the fact that its complement happens all the time - we know we commonly sleep while we are awake, sometimes for a lifetime.)