Freudian and Jungian Literary Analysis: Under Milk Wood

Freudian and Jungian Literary Analysis nether milk woodsExploration of imagines, symbols and archetypes in Dylan discrediting Thomas pass for vocalisms Under Milk timberThis paper tests to assert that Dylan Thomas work on Under Milk timber locoweed be successfully viewed using Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical techniques. It pass on attack to non yet isolate and highlight or so another(prenominal) display cases of typical psychic symbolism in the fiddle exclusively overly what could be thought of as psychoanalytic mechanisms especially as they disturb to Freuds notions of the Dream lap up in his The interlingual r closingition of Dreams (1997) or Jungs archetypes and collective unconscious(p)(p)(p).By doing this I believe to not plainly subject Thomas work to a morose psychoanalytical exegesis, exposeing hidden person-to-person symbols, structures and depicts, unless in any case highlight the psychosocial depth of Under Milk woods a depth tha t has besides been overlooked by well-nigh critics. Through this I hope to survey the notion that Thomas was e really bit as influenced by Freud and Jung as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were a generation before.I will begin, in my Introduction, to submit an come out of the closetline of the importance of Freud and analytic thinking to post-World War integrity literature and what Dylan Thomas place within that was paying particular attention to Thomas take assertions on the importance of psycho compend in his work and the government agencys that it was greeted by the literati of the 1930s and 40s.The first chapter will be dedicated to a countersign of Under Milk Wood and its creation, looking at such(prenominal) aras as mend verbal expression, the structural disposition of the piece and its creative aetiology.From present I will go on to discuss the notion of the Freudian imaginework and its manifestations in Under Milk Wood. The conceive ofwork, exemplified by suc h concepts as condensation, displacement and vicarious re imaging, is a profound concept in the Freudian idlernon and, as such, has be amount an classic interpretive tool for both psycho psychoanalysts and literary critics.It is with this in mind that I shall attempt to isolate exercises of all four of the major(ip) mechanisms of the dreamwork in Thomas play whilst relating them to the wider issues of poeticalal creativity and narrative structure. I will to a fault put forward a brief discussion of how Jungs commentary of dreams differed from Freuds before going on to examine how both poop be accustomd to inform us of Thomas play.The third chapter will be dedicated to Jungian archetypes. I will isolate and discuss the many a(prenominal) instances of archetypal imagery in the play, paying special attention to the delegacy in which they fit in with Thomas over all poetic sense as it is displayed in his use of language, narrative and plot. This chapter will a worry exami ne the power of the collective unconscious and relate it to the Modernist technique of the close of consciousness novel and the industrial plant of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.My conclusion will attempt to answer the main hypothesis of this paper, that indeed psychoanalytic techniques and knowledge idler be use to to a lower placestand Dylan Tho thr sensation play and also what that says about the playwrights role as a modern day bard.Introduction The Analytic divine revelationThomas Manns paper The Signifi firece of Freud published in 1936 gives us some indications as to the importance of be clock psychoanalysis on the literary biography of Europe and AmericaThe analytic revelation is a extremist force. With it a blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our protest souls. Once roused and on alert, it domiciliatenot be do to sleep once again. It infiltrates deportment sentence, undermines its raw navet, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance (Mann, 1965 591)As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane assert in their skand so forth Modernism A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (1991), this revolutionary force was a large constituent of early twentieth hundred notions of, not only Modernism in literature and the arts notwithstanding also, what it meant to be a modern man or woman.The early Modernist writers of the inter-war period not only embraced Freud and psychoanalysis as heralding a new range of self-sufficiency and ontological autonomy n forevertheless also, as a journal entry by Andre Gide exposes, thought themselves part of an existing groundswell of thought that was, to a higher place all, quintessentially newFreudFreudianismFor the last ten years, or fifteen, I have been tomfoolery in it without knowing. (Gide, 1967 349)The connection between psychoanalysis and literature has always been problematic. Freud, himself asserts in the opening paragraphs to his ess ay The Uncanny (2005) that only r arly (does) a psycho-analyst (feel) impel to investigate the subject of aesthetics (Freud, 2000 1), n startheless writers, critics and crimson Freud himself have make extensive use of the interpretive similarities between the 2 disciplines . Not only are t here(predicate) are a holy host of studies devote to the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism exactly in the Introduction to his novel The White Hotel (1999), D.M. Thomas draws attention to the extraordinarily literary shade of Freuds case studies each containing many of the anatomys and leitmotifs hotshot would commonly associate with a creative work. For Freud, the psychical mechanisms of creative writing and pipe dream are in, some senses at least, inextricably linked. Both are strand in a tripartite arranging of ideational fantasy brass consisting of a current situational issue or concern that provokes the memory of a childhood incident or trauma which, in turn, shape s some early action in the guise of a wish fulfilment. Freud sets out the family kin between this system and literature in his essay Creative Writers and twenty-four hour period Dreaming (Freud, 1986)We are perfectly aware that actually many imaginative writings are far removed from the standard of the nave castle in Spain and yet I cannot suppress the suspicions that even the near extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it by means of an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. (Freud, 1986 150)Freud continues to cond atomic number 53 the disparity between the mind of the creative writer and the ordinary day- dreamer, maintain that whereas the latter results in a self-conscious repression of desire (the wishes of the day-dreamer being high hat left unspoken) the former revels in and promulgates such desire, translated as it is by delicate skill and temperamentThe writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by mending and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal that is aesthetic birth of pleasure which he digests us in the presentation of his phantasies. (Freud, 1986 153)This essay, perhaps to a greater extent than any other work of Freuds, highlights for us the love of psychoanalysis to early twentieth century writers. Metaphysically and spiritually sceptical after the mass slaughter of the First World War and the alienation engendered by heave of the industrial paradigm, Freudian theory offered (as testified by Manns essay) a clearly tender, non-metaphysical and all scientific explanation for the place of the artist within society. For Freud, the artist was distinct from the rest of the populous but this had a purely psychical aetiology, go away no imperative for notions of religious or supra-human inspiration.This is undoubtedly some of the attraction of Freudianism for Dylan Thomas who, through with(predicate)out his letters and early work makes both use and reference to writers and crit ics that were, themselves, heavily influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. Francis Scarfe, in the essay Dylan Thomas A Pioneer (1960) cites Freud as a major influence on the brass of Thomas early poetic voice, derived in the main from his experiences with what Scarfe calls Sitwellism (Scarfe, 1960 96)The dominant details of mop up findms to be James Joyce, the Bible and Freud. The face-to-face habits of language and mythology of Dylan Thomas can readily be identified through these three sources. (Scarfe, 1960 96)If Joyce lent the small poet some of the lyricism and sense of narrative and the Bible some of the complete cadence and verbal poetics, Freud enabled Thomas to look within his own unconscious and find images and leitmotifs that would find resonance with the rest of humanity as, firstly, personal thusly increasingly Bardic and archetypal symbols formed the bottom of his work.An early metrical composition of Thomas clearly mirrors the hyperbole of Freuds first lectur es on psychoanalysis the poet and the analyst both evoking the image of the journey into an unknown by an antonymous but courageous individualThe mid night road, though young man tread unknowking. Harbouring some thought of heaven, or haven hoping. Yields peace and plenty at the end. (Thomas, 1990 119)We can compare this to Freuds famous analogy that is evoked throughout his workThe reading material of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious it is the securest foundation of psycho-analysis and the field in which evey worker must acquire his convictions and go tok his training. If I am asked how one can become a psycho-analyst, I reply By studying ones own dreams (Freud, 1957 60)Interestingly, Thomas himself was reluctant to acknowledge his debt to Freud, choosing instead to suggest a notion that we have already posited here that Freuds influence is paradigmatic. He says in the collection of interviews Notes on the Art of verse line (1963) that his w riting is influenced by Freud only through the work others , itself a volition to the extent that Freudian theory and, indeed, the whole of psychoanalytic thought has permeated the very fabric of modern literature.Thomas notebooks poems, his earliest poetic statements, are flushd with what we shall tick off are Freudian images, inspired perhaps not by psychoanalysis itself but by the poets interest in Surrealism and their early antecedents the 18th century Metaphysical poets.Works such asWhere once the waters of your searchSpun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,The dead turns up its eye (Thomas, 1990 217)AndIn withering one lay from the hearts honey cells.One precious drop that, for the moment, quellsDesires pain (Thomas, 1990 133)Clearly reflect the artistic tenants set out in Bretons Manifestoes of Surrealism (1972) that sought to combine Freudian concepts of the dreamwork with aesthetic creation . As we shall await in the first chapter of this paper, this delight in the s urreal as it relates to the Freudian image remained with Thomas throughout all of his working life and, most certainly, manifests itself in Under Milk Wood.The analytic revelations then, of Freud , have not only influenced those writers such as Breton, Auden and Woolf who are were intimately acquainted with his writing but also writers like Dylan Thomas who, by his own admission, came to psychoanalysis through other creative writers works.This paper, like many others, uses psychoanalytic theory as a methodology with which to uncover possible symbols, patterns and structures within Thomas work. It will not only relate such symbols to the poets own poetic vision but will, through Jungian theory, expand these so that they encompass frequent archetypes and concepts such as the collective unconscious that structures the unconscious and, inevitably finds its way into works of a creative character .Chapter One To Begin at the BeginningDylan Thomas play for voices Under Milk Wood began li fe as a small radio broadcast Quiet archaean One Morning (Sinclair, 1975, Jones, 1963) and this short piece is easy recognisable as the genesis for the larger work. There are, for instance, many of the said(prenominal) basic characters the milkman gloss over lost in the clangour and music of Welsh-spoken dreams (Thomas, 1992), the sea captain, the lonely dame Miss May Hughes and even the tragic-comic Mrs Ogmore Pritchard. There is the identical sense of poetic cadence that aeonianly adds to the somatic quality of the writing, lulling the reader into a melodic trance as sibilance and assonance is combined with Thomas particular cozy rhythms, such as in this extractThe sun lit the sea- townsfolk, not as a whole, from trespassmost down reproving zinc-roofed chapel to empty-but-for-rats-and-whispers colorize warehouse on the harbour, but in separate bright pieces. (Thomas, 1978 15)The story, recited by Thomas himself in 1944 on the BBC, describes the still sleeping town of brand-new Quay in Cardiganshire (Maud, 1992) and weaves external description with internal monologue as the cashier flits in and out of the dreaming consciousnesses of the towns inhabitants. In the story, each paragraph brings a new image or a new perspective but what we are ultimately presented with is the stream of consciousness of the narrator in the story, inappropriate in Under Milk Wood, an impersonal but al unitedly discernible Isooner early one sunup in the overwinter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and parking area as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a cold amiss(p) holiday Thomas, 1978 15)It is this point, this appearance of the personal pronoun that, as we shall see, makes Quite Early One Morning markedly polar to Under Milk Wood. Thomas, however, retains the sense of moony absurdity, as images are juxtaposed for comic effect amid the repeated cease of The town was not yet awake.Under Milk Wood grew out of this humble beginning and is both markedly similar and amazingly unalike . Both works reflect, as Derek Stanford (1954) suggests, the cadences, characterisation and plot construction of Joyces Ulysses (1979), being as they are the collective narratives of a whole town in the same time period. Both works, however, are also embryonic, Quite Early One Morning obviously being a radiation diagram for Under Milk Wood but this also being exactly now a fragmentary snapshot of a larger planned work that was never finished (Jones, 1986 ix).Under Milk Wood also resembles the circular structure of Joyces other great work Finnegans Wake (1992). Thomas play abounds with references to beginnings and commencements we have, for instance, the famous first linesTo begin at the beginningIt is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starlessAnd bible-black (Thomas, 2000 1)That not only evokes the biblical In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Gen , 11) but also the creational sense of Joyces reference to the beginnings of mankind in the opening lines of his novelriverrun, knightly Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth castle and Environs. (Joyce, 1992 3)In Under Milk Wood, the cyclical spirit of the day is metonymous with the seasonal nature of the year and this with the life of a human being as Thomas juxtaposes images of beginnings, babies and births with ageing, infirmity and death as in this passageAll over town, babies and old men are cleanedand put into their broken prams and wheeled on tothe sunlit cockled cobbles or out into the backyardsunder the dancing underclothes, and left. A baby cries.(Thomas, 2000 27)As we shall see, this notion of the circle, of repeating is important to both Freud and Jung Freud through his insistence on the importance of the rejoin in notions such as repression and the death drive and Jung, through his concept o f the mandala as a recurring symbol. care Joyce, Thomas displays circles within circles, as the plot and structure of the work as a whole mirrors the framework of the characters lives and psyches. We see this reflected in many of the plays most successful characters, witness for instance the constant iteration of Mrs Ogmore Pritchard, as she repeats her life over and over again with different husbands, only to have them revisit her after their deathsMr Ogmore, linoleum, retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker, who maddened by besoming, swob and scrubbing, the voice of the vacuum cleaner and the fume of the polish, ironically swallowed disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a dream and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr Pritchard, ghostly on any side. (Thomas, 2000 10)The same can be said, of course, for passkey Cat, whose dreams and waking life are characterised not by the dead per se, but by their contain as he witnesses the phantasmatic manifestations of either his repression or the collective unconscious (whether one is citing Freud or Jung). The sense, in Under Milk Wood, is that of a blithe borrowing of the passing of time and the knowledge that things return the sunrise, the Spring and the dead. This is reflected in many of Thomas poems, for instance in the closing lines of I See the Boys of summertimeI am the man your father was.We are the sons of flint and pitch.Oh see the poles are kissing as they cross(Thomas, 1990 219)In this, also, as Karl Jay Shapiro asserts in his study In Defense of Ignorance (1960), Thomas work clearly reflects what was a seminal poem for the young poets generation W.B. Yeats The punt Coming (1987) which contains images of both beginnings and circles within circles. In the next chapter I will look at how these aspects of Under Milk Wood can be interpreted through the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung, paying attention specifically to their concepts of dreams and dreaming again another leitm otif of Thomas play that can be seen to come from Joyces Finnegans Wake.Chapter Two The Dreamwork, the Symbol and headmaster CatFreud On Dreams As Richard Wollheim suggests, Freuds theories on dreams are the most remarkable single element (Wollheim, 1971 66) of his psychoanalytical frame and Freud himself in his essay On Dreams (1991) stresses the primacy of dream interpretation in his systemThe transformation of the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream-content deserves all out attention, since it is the first instance known to us of psychical material being changed over from one mode of expression to another. (Freud, 1991 89)For Freud, dreams serve as symptoms of unconscious repression in the same way as parapraxes (slips of the tongue) and instances of forgetfulness. The content of dreams can, he said, be split into the latent and the manifest the one providing a shield for the other as the unconscious mind gives up its fissures and problems that have been repressed by the Ego during waking hours. Freuds work The Interpretation of Dreams attempts to provide a full scale, largely scientific study of not save the symbolism of dreams but also their mechanism a mechanism that he termed the dreamwork.The dreamwork can be thought of as a process (Wollheim, 1971) that transcribes the latent content of dreams into the language of the manifest. Freud is clear in The Interpretation of Dreams that psychoanalysis does not deal with the simple translation of images or blunt notions of symbol exchange that sees dreams as merely scripts that can be easily interpreted using a universal dictionary, although he does acquiesce to the point that some symbols recur on a universal level.Instead, Freud sees dreams as the return of repressed desires and their attendant wishes that find a voice in the psychical parsimony through a process of disguise. The desire, as Richard Stevens (1983) suggests, will be fused with experiences and thoughts from the previous day or e ven events occurring during the course of the night (Stevens, 1983 30). The dreamwork, in the Freudian system, is both the mechanism of disguise and the tool of interpretation because it contains an internal logic that can be used by the analyst to trace the source of repression and, through the process of transference, brought into the conscious and rendered harmless (Freud, 1997). by chance the most important concept within The Interpretation of Dreams is the four-fold dreamwork mechanism that can be used, not only in dream interpretation but as we shall see, in the critical appreciation of literature. Freud termed these mechanisms condensation, displacement, representation and secondary rewrite and before I go to look at how each one fits into Under Milk Wood specifically I would like to, briefly, offer up an explanation as to how each effects the manifest dream-content and ergo the literary image or trope.CondensationThis is, perhaps, the most common dream feature and is what g ives dreams their sparse, confusing quality. For Freud, dream-thoughts are many and varied, each bombarding the dreamwork simultaneouslyThe dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts. The dream, when scripted down fills half a page the analysis, which contains the dream-thoughts requires six, eight, twelve times as oftentimes space. (Freud, 1997 170)Condensation manifests itself as images laden with means, as the unconscious overlays and condenses two or more dream-thoughts into one motif. Part of the skill of the analyst consort to Freud is the extent that such condensation can be unravelled and successive layers of unconscious meaning and repression peeled back and revealed (Freud, 1965 313).Whereas Freud was dubious as to the possibility of ever reaching a definitive dream interpretation because of the very nature of condensation, he also asserted that the ways in which dream-thoughts are condensed gives the analyst a clue as to their psychical meaning. Freud cites his own dream of the botanic Monograph as an example of the way in which different dream-thoughts can be condensed into one dream-image the latent meaning only becoming apparent when this relationship is exposed .DisplacementDisplacement refers to the substituting of elements within dreams. Due to the nature of the unconscious, elements and images that have a similar psychical economy invariably end up being displaced, one for the other. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud characterises displacement as constituting a de-centring of the dream-thoughtsWe may have noticed that these elements which obtrude themselves in the dream-content as its essential components do not by any means play this same part in the dream-thoughts. ( Freud, 1997 190)Displacement, like condensation, arises from the synchronous nature of the unconscious and manifests itself in two ways firstly, through the substituting of dream-thoughts, so that dreams can app ear absurd and illogical and, secondly through shifting meanings an image may possess one meaning in one nights dream and another on a different night. Melanie Klein, for instance, in her essay psychological Principles of Early Analysis(1991) offers us some interesting insights into how displacement works in something other than the dream the child at play.My analyses again and again reveal how many different things, dolls for example, can mean in play. sometimes they stand for the penis, sometimes for the child stolen from the mother, sometimes for the little patient itself etc. (Klein, 1991 134)Both condensation and displacement have been used as the basis for theories of Surrealist aesthetics, as Carrouges and Prendergast assert in their study Andre Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism (1974 192) which uses seemingly disparate images juxtaposed in sanctify to create an illogical, dream-like tableaux.RepresentationRepresentation refers to the dreamworks drift to present feelings, repressions and notions as images and symbols. Unlike many pre-Freudian systems of dream interpretation such symbolisation is centred, to a very large extent, around the dreamers own personal history and psychology. However as I have already give tongue to there are, due to the inter-subjective nature of the psyche, recurring symbols and motifs that can be found in a great many peoples dreams.Richard Stevens in his Freud and Psychoanalysis (1983) mentions just a few of themsmall boxes, chests, cupboards and ovens correspond to the female organ also cavities, ships and all kinds of vessels. The actions of climbing ladders, stairs, inclines or flying may be used to symbolise sexual intercourse having a haircut, tooth pulled or being beheaded, castration. (Stevens, 1983 33) secondary coil RevisionSecondary adjustment refers to the mental processes that occur after the dreamer awakes and that organises and places the otherwise absurd and disparate images and themes into a, r elatively, cohesive narrative. Wollheim points to there being doubt in Freuds later work as to the place of secondary revision within the dreamwork (Wollhein, 1971 69) but, as a concept, it has been important in many neo-Freudian systems of aesthetics especially, as Charles Altman points out in his essay Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1986 526), by the French school of film critics who saw it as, not so much an integral part of the dreamwork, but as the main constituent in narrative formation and the audience/film dialectic.Jung On DreamsDreams play as important a role in the work of Carl Jung as Sigmund Freud (Fordham, 1964) however the former not only sees their place in the psychical economy differently but has, as he explains in Man and his Symbols (1964), created an in all separate process of interpretation and translation.Jung disagreed with Freuds notion of the dreamwork and his method of free standstill whereby the analysand recalls a dream and lets their mind wander through t he myriad of different unconscious connections only to be unravelled and assessed by the analyst. For Jung, this process is likely to uncover neuroses and repression but is unlikely to uncover them connected with the dream. For Jung, the further away from the central motifs of the dream-image one gets the further away one travels from the locus of their meaning.Therefore, under a Jungian system, dreams consist not of personal motifs of repression returning through the dreamwork but as expressions of either the personal or collective unconscious. The method of extracting the meaning from dreams is centred around the correct reading of such symbols and an evaluation of how they relate to either the dreamers personal or their phyllogenetic background, as Jung himself assertsDreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, away(p) the control of the will. They are pure nature, they show us unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an positioning that accords with our basic human nature. (Jung, 1989 55)Jung viewed the waking, conscious perceptions as having a penumbra of associated psychical meanings (Jung, 1964 28), even the very simplest of actions, for instance seeing or hearing, can involve a gamut of other ideational and experiential relations and it is this that we witness in dreams the whole of our unconscious unfettered by the ordering, the siphoning and the categorisation of the conscious mind.For Jung, then, the absurd quality of dreams, their surreal nature comes not from intervention of the dreamwork but from the cultural and personal associations attached to perceptions and experiences.Thomas On DreamsBoth Freuds and Jungs systems of dream interpretation offer us important critical tools with which to view Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood both in terms of the images and symbols the playwright uses in order to convey the sense of the somatic and the dream-like and his use of surrealism a s a semi-comic trope throughout the piece.The play begins in the collective dream of the town. Just like the short story Quite Early One Morning, the audience is interpreted on a journey through the consciousnesses of the sleeping townsfolk as they dream their separate dreams, shaped (as both Freud and Jung assert) by their individual consciousnesses and personalities. Captain Cat, for example, experiences the return of the repressed guilt he feels towards his long dead shipmatesCaptain Cat, the retired blind sea-captain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape silk hat cabin of Schooner House dreams ofSecond Voice never such seas as any that swamped the decks of the S.S. Kidwelly bellying over bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery sucking him down flavor deep into the Davy dark (Thomas, 2000 2)Thomas, here, reflects both Freudian and Jungian dream analysis as Captain Cats dreams abound with symbols of his past and are unmistakably suffuse with the characters own visual lexicon, what Jung calls the dream language (Jung, 1986 33). The same can be said of Dai Bread who dreams of harems, Polly Garter who dreams of babies and even Nogood Boyo who dreams of nothing.However, within the very text of Under Milk Wood we notice each one of the four elements of the Freudian dreamwork. The dense language is a clear instance of condensation the vital elements of the imagistic leitmotifs are extracted and pile one on top of another, as adjective combines with adjective to form the quintessentially Thomasian poetics, such as here where the playwright draws a finely tuned portrait of Mrs Dai Bread One, the wife of the bread makerMe, Mrs Dai Bread One, capped and shawled and no old corset, comely to be comfy, nice to be nice, clogging on the cobbles to stir up a neighbour. Oh, Mrs Sarah, can you spare a loaf, love? Dai Bread forgot the bread. Theres a lovely morning Hows your boils this morning? (Thomas, 2000 22)Thomas both describes the sense of a drea m here and, through condensation, utilizes its mechanism. Words and phrases are juxtaposed and their meaning condensed in a way that mirrors almost exactly the workings of Freuds dreamwork. We see this reflected many times throughout the narrative of Under Milk Wood, as the author evokes in a linguistic sense what Freud saw in a psychoanalytic sense.We see, for example a clear literary rendering of displacement in the absurd portrait of Cherry Owen as described by the Second VoiceCherry Owen, next door, lifts a tankard to his lips but nothing flows out of it. He shakes the tankard. It turns into a fish. He drinks the fish. (Thomas, 2000 13)Here the incongruous image of a fish replaces or displaces the tankard that Cherry Owen drinks from adding to the dreamy quality of the early passages of the play. As a cultural symbol, the fish also mirrors the third of the Freudian mechanisms, representation, whereby a linguistic notion He drinks like a fish is rendered in a quasi-comic symbolic form.Of course, the ultimate use of dreams and dreaming in Under Milk Wood is the plot itself. Both Freud and Jung rely heavily on the concept of the return within their respective dream philosophies (Stevens, 1983 Fordham, 1964) and this is reflected in the very structure of the play that could, after all, be thought of as merely the manifest dream-content of the First Voice, or perhaps even Thomas himself.Like a dream, the text iterates, as we shall see in the next chapter, the same basic images and archetypes the symbols are at once full of meaning in themselves and signifiers for other things. The First Voice can be seen as the voice of God but also of secondary revision, knitting disparate elements together to form a narrative that can be followed and engaged with.As the characters awake, their lives, as they are described by the First and Second voice, are shown to be no less absurd than the irrationality of their dreams. This is perhaps because the entire play can itself be seen as a dream of the authors in which he creates, as he states in a letter to A.G. Prys Jones, a never-never Wales (Thomas, 1985 848) that, like its Peter Pan counterpart, is as much a manifest wish of its author as anything else.Chapter Three The Shadow, T