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Essay / In The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud says that “a dream is the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish.” What he means is that every dream represents the fulfillment of a wish. Dreams represent the imaginary fulfillment of a wish or impulse in early childhood, before those wishes were repressed. Dream images represent unconscious wishes or thoughts disguised by symbolization and other distorting mechanisms. Freud concluded that a dream is the conscious expression of an unconscious fantasy or wish that is not accessible to individual existence. Here is an example that can relate to Freud's dream theory and is found in a short story "An Event at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The story was set during the Civil War era and begins with an unidentified man preparing to be hanged by a company of Union soldiers on a railroad bridge spanning a river. He is later identified as Peyton Farquhar, a man who attempted to destroy the bridge they are on, based on information given to him by a Federal scout posing as a Confederate soldier. Although he is aware that it could cost him his life and at the cost of sacrificing his family members he was willing to do it, Peyton is hanged for attempting to burn the bridge. The narrator gives us a vivid picture of the dilemma Peyton faces, which symbolically shows us how he escaped death and was born again just before he died. The author evokes the reader's sympathy for Peyton by showing the ultimate punishment he received. Ambrose Bierce uses time as a way to manipulate the reader's point of view. This distortion of the continuous movement of time disrupts the perception of reality. When the reader can no longer distinguish actual reality from perceived reality, other judgments of character are also called into question. The disruption of time helps present the story's sequence of events in a way that forces the reader to question all assumptions made about Peyton Farquhar's true character. By taking the reader into the mind of Peyton Farquhar during the moments before her death, miraculous escape, and sudden return to the present, the reader questions the true nature of time and the effect it has on life. awareness. of reality. Now returning to Freud's theory, repression is a process of continuous rearrangement of latent dream thoughts to distort them or make them unrecognizable. The darkness of dreams is due to the censorship between the unconscious and consciousness. This is why repression exists. “What is rejected by censorship is in a state of repression” (Freud), so dreams can be seen as the fulfillment of an undisguised wish. In Freud's theory, two ideas develop in our brain, the first is in the unconscious and the second is free access to consciousness. In the middle of the first and the second, there is control, which is a power that confronts and contradicts itself. It acts as a safeguard preventing certain repressed emotions or thoughts from rising to the surface. Ambrose Bierce continually foreshadows the upheaval of time and the approaching death of Peyton Farquhar. In the moments leading up to her hanging, Peyton's reality begins to distort. “He became aware of a new disorder.” (Bierce 63) “A sound he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp metallic percussion, distinct as the blow of a sledgehammer on the anvil.” (Bierce 64). What should be a sound.