Dreams and literary works have a lot in common: they are works of fiction, inventions of the mind, based on reality though not literally true, they have a truth to tell but may need to be interpreted so that the truth can be grasped. Not surprisingly, literature, in the wake of Freud but starting with Freud himself, has been interpreted like dreams. The original idea is something like this: much of what is in the unconscious mind has been put there by the consciousness, which acts as a censor, driving thoughts and instincts underground which it deems unacceptable. Censored material emerges only in disguised form: dreams, language, creative works, neurotic behaviour. We can thus read a work of art as if it were a dream. The focus, when doing this, can vary: it can be on the author, it can be on the characters, it can be on the reader. Freud tended to psychoanalyse the individual author, later psychoanalytic critics started to analyze the characters rather than the authors. Later critics, in their turn, focussed more on the way in which authors create works which appeal to our repressed wishes and fantasies. What draws us as readers to a text is the secret expression of what we desire to hear. The disguise must be good enough to fool the censor into believing that the text is respectable but bad enough for us to glimpse the unrespectable. Finally, critics who applied the ideas of Jung see literature not so much as the expression of the author’s repressed wishes but as a manifestation of desires once held by the whole human race but repressed through civilisation. (Schwarz, Daniel R.: James Joyce: The Dead. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994: 85-89)