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For Freud, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, and for psychoanalytic literary critics, fictional dreams have been a source of endless fascination, commentary, and debate. Numerous scholarly books and articles have analyzed the dreams of fictional characters, each trying to decipher the indecipherable. The latest and in my view, one of the best of these studies is Ronald R. Thomas's Dreams of Authority. Thomas's importance as a critic is that he is expert in both literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory, never privileging one over the other. He understands that even as dreams may operate, as Freud believed, according to certain scientific laws, dreams will probably always remain finally inscrutable, defying our best efforts to understand them fully.
Every theory of dreams tells us as much about the theorist—and about the theorist's cultural and ideological assumptions—as it does about the nature of dreams. Thomas thus respects both the scientific and humanistic sides of psychoanalysis, both objective and subjective approaches to the investigation of the self. Other critics have acknowledged literature's debt to Freud and Freud's debt to literature, but Thomas goes beyond this by discussing how Freud's understanding of the novel shaped the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, and how psychoanalysis heightens our understanding of the novel. Using a word popularized by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Thomas explores the “dialogic” relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, tracing the ways in which