ABSTRACT
Many writers on dreams, in the past, understood that they referred to events of our daily life, but the exact relation was not seen. Many ancient histories and fairy tales abound in narrations and interpretations of dreams. Modem literary men also have paid a great deal of attention to them. This chapter examines a few dreams, actual and artificial, in literature, and notes that they show method in their madness, that they are ways of expressing the person's unconscious desires. Freud first applied his theory of dream interpretation to fiction in 1907 in his study of Jensen's Gradiva (1903). There are thousands of dreams, actual and artificial, reported in literature and history. The dreams recorded in ancient and mediaeval literature are in many cases actual ones. Dreams were formerly regarded as being prophetic of the future, but they only rarely have such value.
