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Robert Louis StevensonAutumn 1885, Bournemouth

The dream that gave Stevenson Mr Hyde

Short of money and short of a plot, Stevenson dreamed two scenes, and wrote one of the most famous novellas in English in a matter of days.

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El sueño

Narrado con nuestras propias palabras a partir de las fuentes indicadas abajo, sin citas textuales.

Stevenson had been trying for a long time to write a story about a person's double nature. In his own words, he racked his brains for a plot for two days. On the second night he dreamed the scene at the window, and then a scene in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and changed in front of his pursuers.

His family later remembered that his wife Fanny, hearing him cry out in his sleep, woke him, and that he complained she had interrupted a fine nightmare.

De dónde viene la historia

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in January 1886. Stevenson described its origin himself in "A Chapter on Dreams", an essay in Scribner's Magazine in 1888, where he credits much of his storytelling to the little people, his "Brownies", who acted out plots for him while he slept.

He is careful to say that the dream gave him only those scenes; the rest, including the moral meaning, was his waking work. The detail about Fanny waking him comes from family recollections published later, not from the essay.

Cómo se ha interpretado

Investigación

Stevenson's essay is one of the earliest detailed descriptions by a writer of using dreams deliberately. Modern research on creativity and sleep agrees with his modest version: dreams supply vivid fragments tied to a problem the dreamer has been working on, and waking judgement does the building.

Psicoanálisis

A respectable man who turns into his hidden other is almost a textbook image for what psychoanalysis would later call the repressed, and for what Jung would call the shadow. The dream staged it as a chase, which is how many people still dream about the parts of themselves they run from.

Preguntas para tus propios sueños

  1. Is there a side of yourself that shows up in dreams more than in daylight?
  2. When you are chased in a dream, do you ever see who is chasing you?
  3. What problem have you been working on long enough that a dream might finish it?

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Fuentes

Todas las interpretaciones de esta página se basan en estas obras. Aún no se han comprobado todas las referencias a páginas; las pendientes están marcadas.

  1. Robert Louis Stevenson (1888). A Chapter on Dreams. Scribner's Magazine 3(1).

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    • Ubicación de la cita: A Chapter on Dreams (referencia aún sin comprobar)

    Reprinted in Across the Plains (1892).

  2. Deirdre Barrett (2001). The Committee of Sleep. New York: Crown.

    citado, no reproducido

    • Ubicación de la cita: chapters on writers (referencia aún sin comprobar)

    Harvard psychologist on dreams and creative problem solving, with historical examples.

  3. Antonio Zadra, Robert Stickgold (2021). When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep. New York: W. W. Norton.

    citado, no reproducido

    • Ubicación de la cita: the NEXTUP model (referencia aún sin comprobar)

    NEXTUP model: dreaming explores weak, unexpected associations between memories.