Dreams by Day and Night: Kant, Freud and Ella Freeman Sharpe

Armstrong questions the discrete separation of dream and waking life, originating with Freud, in current psychoanalytical thinking, and asks, accordingly, 'what is a dream?' Alternative accounts of the relation between dream and waking states can be derived from Ella Freeman Sharpe's poetics of the dream, understood through the workings of metaphor, and through Wilfred Bion's reversal of Freud's categories, as he explored what it would mean to dream during the day. Insights into the nature of dreaming in Romantic poetry, particularly that of Shelley and Wordsworth, illuminate psychoanalytic discourses of dreams.

Keywords:

• Bion
• Dream
• Freud
• Shelley
• Wordsworth