What Are Your Day-Dreams About?

Radio Record, Volume VII, Issue 14, 13 October 1933, Page 45

What Are Your Day-Dreams About?

Man’s Unconscious Mind Reveals Itself-The Modern Novel is Concerned With Thoughts Rather Than Actions-Art and Fiction in Literature.

N discussions of the modern novel a distinction must: be made between the fiction that is merely literature of escape and the fiction that is definitely art. Itis not suggested that the lighter novels are not often extremely entertaining and that we cannot enjoy them immensely, and thereby escape, as they say, from ourselves, when we are tired or worried. It is not suggested that they may not be excellent in their way. But it must be emphasised that there is this other literature also, art no less because it is in the form of fiction.

which is great because it represents a real experience, and is able to increase our awareness of life. It is much the same distinction as that between. dinner music and classical music. In its place dinuer music may be enjoyable and indeed is often very excellent, but some of us at all events have need on ocycastons for another kind of musie also T is characteristic of the modern novel that it is not so much interested in what the hero does, as in what he fhinks; the operations of his mind have come to have more signifieance than the movements of his body. In achieving this result the novel assumes a number of new forms, some of them remarkable and many of them surprising enough. The modern novel then is reyolutionary, as is indeed the world we live in. What then are precisely these changes, we might say, in ourselves? It is largely that in the last 20 or 30 years we have achieved a much

greater knowledge of the manner in which our minds work, and also there has been a greatly improved mental honesty. This to a large extent is due to the discoveries of the new psychology, and in particular the theory of psycho-analysis. There are possibly still left some old-fashioned individuals who think that psycho-analysis is just 2 probing into people’s minds and the dragging out of everything that is nasty and unpleasant. It is true that its laws were discovered with reference to neurotic nersonalities, but the genius of its founder showed that these laws were completely applicatble to normal behaviour. The everyday life

of each one of us, our likes and dislikes, our slips of the tongue, our jokes and pleasantries, our sudden bursts of anger, our enthusiasms, and not least our loves, our daydreams and dreams, all conform to a comparatively simple set of rules. "THE unconscious mind of man reveals itself especially in his dreams and daydreams. In the daydream our attention wavers and we are suddenly worlds away; we fall into a brown study, we slip into a deep reverie, we have been dreaming, we say as we come back to the ordinary realities with Continued on Page 46).

Daydreaming- Healthy and Normal

(Continued from page 45.) a start. This daydreaming is characteristic of children, and is normal and healthy enough, and we note it also its artists, but it is within the power of us all. And further we are so constituted that our mental activity is composed of what we consciously ‘think and do at the same time and ‘our unconscious thoughts. . "THE whole progressive flow ..of thoughts, conscious and unconscious, as they alternate and intermingle with the movement and stir of the external world, as we perceive it about us, has been called the stream of consciousness. It has been used more and more as part of the technique of modern literature. This stream of consciousness gives a complete psychic picture of the man, whereas a mere record of his spoken words and actions, however carefully elucidated, reveals only indirectly. the uneonscious motivations, without an understanding of which our knowledge must be. partial and incomplete. ‘ [HIS is characteristic of the modern novel, and you can understand it requires a certain relaxation on the part of the reader to be carried along by the flowing stream; and indeed each reader will have his preferences. It appears that the stream. of consciousness may be very characteristic of the man or woman; but it requires the artist to apprehend and reveal it, and more especially the novelist ‘to fit it into a suitable and acceptable form. ©