Essay Examples. Dreams are often so vivid, emotional, and bizarre that it is easy to confuse them with reality. Rife with hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities, and incongruities, dreams are easily accepted and quickly forgotten. As a psychologically driven novel, Crime and Punishment contains a number of elaborate dream sequences. Both Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov have very harrowing unconscious experiences in the novel.
For Raskolnikov, one of the most revealing dreams is his dream about the horse, which occurs right before he murders the pawnbroker. In the dream, a young boy and his father are walking by a cemetery when they overhear a drunken man announce that he is going to beat his horse to death.
What ensues is a horrific sequence of violence and commotion. This dream foreshadowed the murder of Alyona Ivanova. The horse in the dream symbolized Alyona. The two main characters, young Raskolnikov and Mikolka, symbolized the conflicting halves of Raskolnikov. He just wants to get the job done. He also felt that society would benefit from the death of the horse. That is how Raskolnikov felt about Alyona. He felt as if the people living in poverty would benefit from her death.
He felt this way because after she was dead, her money was going to poverty and that would help them out a lot. To him, she was just taking up space; so he got rid of her. He sees himself murdering the old woman just as Mikolka beats the horse. After completing the goal of his murder, Raskolnikov begins to have more dreams; this time dealing with guilt. The second dream consists of a parallel to the murder. In the dream, Petrovich is beating an old woman, the landlady, outside of his apartment.
Although these beating were gruesome and filled with cries of agony, opposite of his silent murders, this dream represents his first feeling of guilt. Raskolnikov is not able to comprehend the beating in the dream or even his own murder. After being accused of the murder, Raskolnikov faints and has a very bad fever. Throughout the crime, he is not himself, and his irrational acts can be accredited to his illness.
Ultimately, criminal theories suggest that the criminal is often sick when the crime is committed, and this theory will be used to alleviate Raskolnikov's guilt.
When Raskolnikov goes to sleep in the park, Dostoevsky lets us know that "A sick man's dreams are often extraordinarily distinct and vivid and extremely life-like. A scene may be composed of the most unnatural and incongruous elements, but the setting and the presentation are so plausible, the details so subtle, so unexpected, so artistically in harmony with the whole picture, that the dreamer could not invent them for himself in his waking state. Such morbid dreams always make a strong impression on the dreamer's already disturbed and excited nerves, and are remembered for a long time.
Thus, Dostoevsky is announcing to the reader that Raskolnikov's dream now and later will have special meaning to him and thus all the dreams are symbolic in one way or another. When Raskolnikov awakens, he wonders if he can actually "take an axe.
In the dream, Raskolnikov shows his dual nature at work. He is both the peasant Mikolka who cruelly beats the horse to death and also the boy who feels great compassion for the suffering horse. Thus, the waking Raskolnikov rejects the Mikolka aspect of his nature by renouncing the dream.
Freud's theory of dreams completes the method of psychoanalysis : free association and interpretation when studying the meaning of dreams allow a deeper understanding of the patient. Through his theory's 'dream-work' process, Freud explores the mechanisms of unconsciousness to analyse the process of imaginary wish fulfilment. Bridgette Strand Dr. One way to investigate this question is through the graphic novel Sandman Preludes and Nocturnes. One would tend not to over think our dream process, when yet according to Sandman; dreams are complicated and very involved with the reality world.
Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Some dream theorists believe that studies on dreaming have not conclusively shown that dreams have any real purpose or significance.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are dream experts that find dreaming to be essential to our mental, emotional, and physical health. In the dream world, the events that unfold are not bound by time or space. The freedom from time and space allows for Dostoevsky to introduce information in combinations that would not have made sense if they were featured in the real world of the novel.
A character is able to be resurrected from the dead or transported to the past or future. Dreams also allow for unfiltered content. When a person sleeps their mind is not policed by their conscience; and unpleasant thoughts that a person may successfully repress when they are awake may be able to show up freely in the dream world. In analysing the the If his neighbors are prisoners, then the stairwell must be part of the prison.
His mind is the stairwell and to him it has become a prison. Works Cited Dostoevsky, Fyodor.
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