Stephen King Dreams

The “Royal Road to the unconscious” is a journey about dreams, interpretating them and questioning their purpose. Dreams occur every night, whether we remember them or not and we still question their true meaning – “it was just a dream”. Writers, poets and artists use daydreams and dreams as a way of expressing themselves, releasing their repressed feelings from their unconscious. This creativity allows psychoanalysis to work with their clients to understand the wish fulfilment and why they were repressed in the first instance. “In fact dreams are works of art, born of a compromise between the conscious and unconscious. They can only be understood by sustained historical investigation into the imaginative life and memory of the dreamer. “ (Freud,

According to Stephen King the novelist, he explores the similarities between writing and dreaming. He considers the role of a daily routine, something many famous creators use to centre themselves “in inducing a state of self-mesmerism that produces the paradoxical alchemy of disciplining our minds into unleashing their unrestrained creative potential”. Something King called ‘creative sleep’. Just like sleep shapes our every waking moment, he argues this dozing of the waking mind, shapes our creative capacity by releasing our repressed imagination.

In Freud essay “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” he analysed how poets are able to write the material they do. He states that as we grow older, instead of playing and expressing our imagination to others, we substitute it with daydreams. We get almost the same experience from daydreaming as we did playing as a child. “Daydreams show that their purpose is wish-fulfilment and the correction of real life, and they have two principal aims, one of the erotic and the other ambitious” (Freud, McLintock & Haughton, p38,

"It was one of the greatest discoveries of my life. I was obsessed by the vice of self-interpretation—not just of my dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it might at first seem" (Dalí, 1942). After this his paintings displayed his instincts and Freud’s ideas to reflect his fears, personality and sexuality. The Oedipal complex is evident in many of his paintings. His sexual failure was symbolised as impotence in many of his most famous paintings that depicted limp watches, melted cheeses and sagging flesh. Freud believed that the sublimation of an unsatisfied libido produced great works of art through the discharging of infantile sexuality into non-instinctual forms. It has been suggested that if Dali did not conquered his phobias on canvas he would have ended up in a lunatic