ABSTRACT
Interpreting a literary dream might seem merely an idle exercise. Freud, however, expresses a special interest in “the class of dreams that have never been dreamt at all — dreams created by imaginative writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a story.” Although he acknowledges that “submitting this class of dreams to an investigation might seem a waste of energy and a strange thing to undertake,” he says that “from one point of view it could be considered justifiable” (1907 [1906], SE 9: 7). What is this point of view?
