Although it is true that their past love affairs may have ruled them for life, neither Dante nor Petrarch were the faithful lovers they would have us believe they were.
CHAPTER III
DREAMS AND LITERATURE
I
Freud discovered that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, in that they portrayed our most daring and immoral wishes as actually fulfilled. It is not necessary that we actually have those wishes in our waking life; it is sufficient if they merely intruded themselves upon us against our wills sometime in the past. The dream will express our inmost thoughts. It will use symbolical language to let us still remain in the dark about our painful desires; but the psychoanalyst can learn what these are. As a result, when we have revealed to us what unconscious emotions are at the bottom of our nervous disturbances, we may be eased of them.
Many writers on dreams, in the past, understood that they referred to events of our daily life, but the exact relation was not seen. The ancients were especially interested in the phenomena of dreams. Many ancient histories and fairy tales abound in narrations and interpretations of dreams.
Modern literary men also have paid a great deal of attention to them. There are essays on dreams by Locke, Hobbes, Thomas Browne, Addison, Leigh Hunt, Dickens, Emerson and Lafcadio Hearn.