Wandering Between Conscious And Subconscious Worlds

Origin of the Issue:Almost everyone in the world has dream experiences during sleeping. We can nearly say that dream is also a way of human existence. Meanwhile, freedom is something that almost everyone is pursuing. Some people even are willing to dedicate their lives to fight for freedom. There must be some relationship between dreams, reality and freedom. The three works I chose in this thesis:two literary works—James Thurber's the Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Susan Santag's the Benefactor and a film—Christopher Nolan's Inception are all contemporary American works and are all related to dream, reality and freedom. Doing this research is a good way to understand the relationship between dream and freedom in contemporary American civilization and further understand the ways of human existence in the whole human society.Rationale and Methodology:The exploration on dream and freedom respectively has already aroused the interest of many scholars in different fields such as philosophy, psychology, medicine, social work, cultural anthropology, ethics, sociology, physiology in addition to literature. Yet an integrative exploration on the relationship between dream and freedom has rarely been done before, still less than saying to investigate the issue on both textual, conceptual level and rational, empirical level. Therefore, it is significant and valuable to carry out such a research. There are many theories of dreams and thoughts of freedom both in western and oriental civilization, so contrastive and comparative research methods are adopted in this thesis. What's more, three works are used as examples to analyze and demonstrate the relationship between dreams and freedom specifically. A multidimensional research on this issue serves to unite different subjects such as psychology, philosophy, literature and so on. Therefore, Freud and Jung's psychological theories, Aristotle and Sartre's philosophical thoughts and James Thurber and Susan Santag's literary works are combined and integrated in this thesis.Organization and Conclusion:The organization and the major contents of the thesis are planned as follows:The first chapter is an introduction to my thesis, introducing the issue and thesis statement and explaining the rationale and approach of this research. Chapter two is devoted to the universal discussion of the nature, forms, manifests, causes and effects of dreams in chronological order; Chapter three focuses on the issues of freedom and will discuss the understandings of freedom in western civilization and in oriental civilization respectively. Chapter four determines the relationship between dream and freedom, and will find out the manifest of it in the three works; Chapter five is a conclusion of the research, covering a summery and evaluation of the findings in terms of its enlightenment on our understanding of human existence as well as its guidance to our real life and the possibilities for further exploration. In conclusion, dreams and freedom are integral parts of human existence; they both concern human nature and reality.