Yorkshire dreams

“Do you ever dream queer dreams?” asks Catherine to Nelly Dean at a crucial moment of Wuthering Heights. Nelly startles and doesn’t want Cathy to proceed, because she is convinced that dreams may foreshadow some imminent catastrophe. But it won’t be that kind of dreams. The way Emily Bronte will use the dream effect on the story is innovative. In her sister’s masterpiece Jane Eyre, dreams give the novel a gothic flavour, in fact they are usually in the form of presentiments, warnings for the future or sometimes symbolize the complex representations for the events in Jane’s life. Emily will dare more, she will anticipate somehow  Freud‘s Interpretation of Dreams. Let’s try to make it in simple words: dreams for Freud are unconscious wishes. As they are not accessible to the ego, they emerge from the psyche during the sleep when conscience weaken its control. Dreams for Freud are highly symbolic. They contain both overt meanings (manifest content) as well as underlying, unconscious thoughts (latent content),this is because dreams may represent the fulfillment of a wish often unacceptable to the ego,so the latent content undergoes a transformation that doesn’t allow the super ego of “the dreamer” to recognize it, thus escaping  its censorship. Dreams are our unconscious wishes in disguise. Cathy tells Nelly that she often dreams to be in heaven. But she is unhappy there and when the angels, worn out by her desperation, send her back on the earth she wakes up “sobbing for joy”. Cathy won’t need many sessions with a psychologyst to decipher the metaphors of her dream. She knows exactly its meaning. That heaven isThrushcross Grange, the grand house where the Lintons’ live, and she, as the future Mrs Linton, will have to join them very soon. Respectability, society , money are part of that heaven but ,as Nelly jockingly will say, Cathy “is not fit to be there”,she belongs to the earth, to Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff may be beside her. In another dream she sees her image reflected in a mirror but  she doesn’t seem to recognize it. All her dreams seem to warn that she is about to do the wrong choice, a choice that will make her betray her true nature, her true self.

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