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Dreams & Fairytales: A Psychoanalytical Study

A Study of the Dream Reality as Depicted in Fairy Studied from the Lens of
Parental Desire and Childhood Trauma.

The Beauty of Sleep

The Irrational Rationale of Fairy Tales

In life it does not do well to get lost in the serene utopianism of fairy tales;
however, the act of reading them is one that enables the reader to be found
amid that wilderness of desire. The desire to be lost so that our parents will find
us is one of childhood’s most violently suppressed desires. This is because our
parents are always reassuring us of their love, protection and hospitality while
sometimes (which are the times that matter the most to the child) committing
actions that prove the opposite, staining the glass by which we see them as our
heroes whom we would want to imitate. But when we realize that our parents
are not whom we want to mimic, we begin to look around for those who feel like
us and in whom we see ourselves. It's then that we see those castaways,
runaways, orphaned siblings and adopted children with whom the fairy tale
landscape is teeming that the child finds as if he’s finally found a place to call
home.
The child then feels confident about being lost because s/he knows that by dint
of the same magic with which those in the stories were saved, their parents too
will rescue them. Fairy tales, like our dreams, give us the ‘good things of life’.
Pursuing this goal, the tales begin with a relatively happy state which is quickly
threatened by the onset of the dire circumstance in which the protagonists finds
themselves (through no fault of their own, but due to a mysterious curse) and
which inaugurates the period of change via deprivation which intensifies the
nostalgia for the lost paradise of home. The child, while listening to the tale,
followed by the adult later in life, is attracted to this uncanny feeling of
homelessness which is what a mixture of pain (of the loss of something) and
pleasure (of being able to compensate for it via art) produces. Thus for Jung, the
characters and the conflicts of the fairy-tale are symbols of our (spiritual) inner
development and thus, it is of little wonder then, that they segue so well with
what we call our dream-selves/ archetypes.
In one of his papers dealing with fairy tales and dreams, Freud says that ‘adults
have made their recollections of fairy tales into screen memories’, making two
detailed studies of his patients, one of whom was the famous ‘Wolf Man’ who
dreamed about ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in which disturbing dream it was he
whom the wolf was about to devour. Freud later found out that this association
was made due to the fact that Wolf Man’s father would sometimes threaten to
eat him up for fun; which is a tendency he termed as ‘affectionate abuse’
especially on the part of male relatives.

The Rational Irrationality of Dreams

Another insight of Freud from his unpublished paper Dreams in Folklore (1909)
comes when he equates the neurosis found in myths (and, by extension in folk
and fairy tales) with that neurosis (he) discovered in individual minds. Further on
in the book, both Freud and his collaborator, the classicist and mythologist, Ernst
Oppenheim, reveal that in analyzing the stories of folklore gathered from the
masses the method of employing the same language as the one used by Freud
to decipher dreams yielded successful results. This language is of course the one
long known to the poets and philosophers as they have been interpreting human
experience (which is the same task the fairytale sets itself to do, albeit in a
manner much less sophisticated in form and content as it is meant to cater to
the populace-and what make them so irresistible to children). This is what Erich
Fromm in the book entitled The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to
Understanding Dreams, Myths, Fairytales (1961) calls the ‘symbolic language’
which is when an inner experience (that is inexpressible in ordinary language) is
rendered as a sensory experience (one that can be communicated with words)
using the language of symbols. These objects of implied, latent, oblique, elliptical
and psychoanalytically fetishistic meanings abound in the fairy tale just as they
do in the dream. When Fromm tells us that ‘there is no ‘as if’ in the fairy tale’, he
means exactly what the child desiring to be found back in his home knows he
(his desire) means: the fairy tale is the dream come true; it is the time-less,
space-less zone where transgression is not only permitted but also encouraged
so that freedom (from the lost self) may be found. There is only one fact that can
accommodate this fantasy, only one plane where the sweet sensation of
fulfillment is allowed and only one truth which is only available in fiction, for it
survives in the spaces between the two.
This ‘only one’ is of course the fairytale-ish realms of dreams (notice how natural
the adjective here sounds). Dreams are the most natural element of fairy tales
and those that make the unnatural seem part of the structure, so well are they
stitched into the simplistic plot. The defamiliarizing quality possessed by the best
tales is what makes them mirrors that reflect our most precious and private
dreams. Both fairy tales as well as the dream use the apparatus of symbolic
language to veil the most shocking truths about ourselves as individuals
possessing desires that should never see the light of day, but are nonetheless
revealed in the dusky aura of these liminal spaces which occupy the individual
(dream) and collective (myths, tales) unconscious. Sleep functions as the veil
beyond whose opaque walls the dangerous process of wish-fulfillment takes
place. For if we could remember all that we wished for, what would we dream?
And in the absence of dreams which would be followed by the redundancy of
fairytales, where would the forgotten language be used? Just like Sleeping
Beauty’s destiny is fulfilled by the overcoming of the curse of the ‘sleep of death’,
sleep as a trope in stories is exploited as a means to a desirable end i.e. to our
re-birth as acceptable, even celebrated members of our family/society. It is the
continual falling asleep of Snow White (who is every time only mistaken dead by
the dwarfs) that enables her wicked stepmother to be emptied out of her evil
tricks. The literal transfiguration that takes place via the ‘function of sleep’ which
is to invite dreams that reveal the innermost essence of a character and which in
turn enacts as the bearer of that latent truth that is to be extracted out of the
fairy tale-work or its interpretation.
Hence, believing in fairy tales as we might in our own dreams means to accept
that the reality of our lives is not only stranger than fiction, but it is also disguised
through the liberating guise of that which we like to think of as fiction’s
fabrications.