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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Dreams have a privileged status among all the images. They do not depend on our will and appear to give evidence of the spontaneous eruption in our life of a power that is beyond us. Their most remarkable characteristic is that they make us believe they contain a mystery, that they open a door onto the reverse side of things, revealing to us an enigma to which we must find the key. The interpretations of dreams may differ, but everyone concedes that they have a power of transcendence with regard to the world of the wake. It is through dreams that the divine power has most frequently chosen to appear to its elected. The signs of dreams (if not of the other images of night, the stars) were considered when the future was to be foretold. But dreams, certainly also, restore to us a past long since effaced from our memory, dreams betray our most secret desires, ignored even by our conscience, and it is hence on dreams that we rely to discover the hidden motivations of our aberrant behaviour. In dreams things speak to us from a distance, people absent or even dead communicate with us; how many friends and lovers, whom life has separated, find each other every night and experience what Gérard de Nerval calls a second life? We pronounce the word “dream” when we want to describe an event that has astonished us, delighted us, and fulfilled us beyond what we would have dared to hope.
1 We refer, for example, to The Science of Dreams, by Freud and to the numerous authors quoted by him, particularly in chapter I.
2 We insist in fact on the point that we do not have in view here the discovery of the causes of these remarkable characteristics of the dream. Whether they are attributable, according to the authors, to a diminution of the superior functions of the mind, to a detachment vis-à-vis the exterior world, to a cleavage between the images and their effective burden, to the displacement and psycho analytical condensation, or finally to the fascination resulting from a structural simplification of the consciousness, these hypotheses have little to do with our argument, which is to consider the dream as a spectacle, which is given to us, and to understand why it moves us.
3 L'imaginaire: l'objet irréel.
4 "Notes sur le rêve," in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, spring 1949: see also Variété II.
5 As demonstrated by Roger Caillois, in L'incertitude qui vient des rêves, N.R.F., 1956.
6 Quoted by Albert Béguin in L'âme romantique et le rêve.
7 Except, it is understood (and this is one more proof of our contention), when it is a photograph of a painting, because this reproduces a flat image, an object with a structure identical to its own.
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