Using the Logic of Dreams to Unpin the World

Abstract

“Using the Logic of Dreams” interrogates fiction through a nonfictive lens, whether that be Angel in the Forest, Marguerite Young’s 1945 account of two historical attempts to establish utopia in New Harmony, Indiana; Robert Dale Owen’s 1860 Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, a collection of prophetic dreams and dreamlike occurrences; Anaïs Nin’s Novel of the Future, essays in which she argues for a psychoanalytic approach to fiction; and Sigmund Freud’s “Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” wherein he endeavors to uncover the meaning of his young patient’s recurrent dreams. Interwoven with excerpts from “The Brutality of Fact,” David Sylvester’s series of interviews with artist Francis Bacon, this paper aims to uncover the elusive qualities that make a work feel alive. More specifically, I interrogate how the subconscious (that is, dreams) can creep into the conscious world, allowing reality to take on the quality of a mirage. Ultimately, my goal is to explore realities in which logic has been sacrificed—exemplified by nineteenth-century New Harmony, which abandoned all standard social mores for the sake of ‘transcendence’—and to apply these case studies to fiction, which can possess a similarly illusory boundary between the real and dreamlike.