52
Populär Culture Review
noctumal and diumal fight against the demanding stranger who blames him of
plagiarism—his unconscious.
Tulane University, New Orleans
Alexandra Reuber
Notes
1 ' According to Sigmund Freud’s understanding of dreams, we have to
distinguish between dream-thoughts and dream-content. In The Interpretation o f
Dreams (1900) Freud explains that “dream-thoughts are immediately
comprehensible, as soon as we have become aware of them. The dream-content,
on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters
of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dreamthoughts” (277). As a result, dream-thoughts “convey the obvious meaning of
the dreams, whereas the dream-content focuses on the discovery and explanation
of ‘hidden fields’ within the dream thoughts (Reuber, Pop-Screen 30).
2 " Nightmares are ffightening dreams, which usually only occur during the
second half of the night. Due to their threatening content, the dreamer fully
awakes and becomes “aware of his or her surrounding” (EMD on-line). In
contrast to nightmares, the dreamer experiencing night terrors suffers from total
amnesia regarding the noctumal event, does not awake fully, and, thus, is not
aware of his environment. Whereas the dreamer usually is incapable of going
back to sleep after the experience of a nightmare, the dreamer suffering from
night terrors goes back to sleep easily.
3 ' The phrasing of this particular sentence has been strongly influenced by
Danny’s description of his mentally ill father Jack Torrance in The Shining. For
further information, see King, The Shining, 639.
4' The medical term “insomnia” refers to an overall poor quality of sleep, which
is characterized for example by the difficulty falling asleep, night restlessness,
or frequent awakening during the night or too early in the moming. The different
types of insomnia are classified as transient (acute, short term) intermittent (on
and off), and chronic (constant).
5 ' Whe &V2