The work of Edgar Allan Poe presents similarities among its short stories and

poems in terms of words, structure and narrative. Poe’s stories are full of characters
corrupted by vices and madness, decaying houses and families and interestingly,
references to the oneiric and to sleep. In The Fall of The House of Usher, the narrator
describes his feelings towards the vision of the house as “the after-dream of the reveller
upon opium”. In The Oval Portrait, before reading the story of the painting the narrator
had been observing, the character mentions a “dreamy stupor” which was “stealing his
senses” and later on he lays in the bed. Poe has even a poem dedicated to the theme of: in
A Dream within a Dream he escapes from reality by affirming that “all that we see or
seem Is but a dream within a dream”. When Poe is not mentioning such theme directly,
he uses words such as “vortex” as Richard Wilbour stated in his essay “House of Poe”.
The recurrence of repeated patterns in an author’s work is not to be ignored, mainly when
it comes to an author whose work is full of symbolism. Taking this into account, the main
objective that leads this project is to analyse what role the oneiric could possibly have in
Poe’s stories to deserve so many occurrences.
One hypothesis for the author’s persistence on the theme is that the dream works
as the return of repressed desires that are not acceptable in our society. Whatever hidden
wishes we have, when we dream, we cannot refrain from facing them when we are asleep,
however, they do not usually come in a one to one relation and are more commonly
decoded in symbols and representations. Poe’s work is in its essence allegorical. If we
read it and interpret the occurrences of dreams within his work, it gets easier to understand
why his characters are usually so depraved - in every meaning of the word. In Willian
Wilson the main character says to himself “Have I not indeed been living in a dream?”
before telling his story and admitting to have vices from all kinds - gambling, lying,
drinking – which are so rooted in his personality that they result in the character’s self
scission: he has a double. The Fall of The House of Usher is filled with references to sleep
and dreams, from direct ones such as quotes - “Shaking off from my spirit what must
have been a dream – to more indirect ones, such as the reference to demons of sleep like
the incubus. In The Fall of The House of Usher the dream seems to be the character’s way
out from his incestuous feelings for his sister. Incest seems to be the prerogative in
Morella as well, a short story in which the death of the narrator’s wife results in the birth
of their daughter who also ends up dead and allows the reader to find that the father finds
“no traces of the first where he laid the second.” It is worth mentioning that the two
previous mentioned stories also present occurrences of the double, which seem to be a
symptom common to characters with serious deviations in Poe’s works.
Another interesting factor which is common to the above-mentioned works is the
fact that they are narrated in first person. First person narrators are not seen as a reliable
one, given that they are likely to distort the narrative or disguise their own intentions. On
the other hand, precisely because of the empty spaces they leave behind, first person
narrators give the readers a clue of the meaning that the text has underneath its surface.
There is actually a link that we can make between the unreliable narrator and the neurotic
patient: both use means to rebuild their past in a way to erase moments of sadness or even
inconceivable acts. (KOFMAN, Sarah:1934).