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Don't know if either of you have read Flieger's A Question of Time, but in that work she devotes a great deal of time examining Tolkien's use of dreams in his stories. They seem to be of two kinds: there are 'symbolic' dreams - like Sam's in the 'Crossroads' chapter we've recently been discussing, & then there are dreams in which the dreamer enters another 'deeper' kind of reality - like Frodo's dream in the House of Bombadil, or Merry's dream in the Barrow. The first kind are 'subjective', what Jung would call 'little' dreams, the others are 'objective', 'big' dreams.
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You may be interested,
davem, that
this thread has been experimenting with precisely the objective, big dreams. An example would be posts # 689 & 690. Really, they are just idle attempts, but you may find them mildly worth the distraction.
Lalwendė, you are pointing, I think, to the technique that I call "transitional fantasy"; i.e., starting in our world and moving to Faerie. Except that you're saying that the "our world" Tolkien describes is already at one remove. The remove, which I think is late medieval European life, is nevertheless somehow "home". You say that stepping into dream is a world away from our conscious thoughts. I submit to you that our conscious thoughts are not true "home". When we move into sleep, we are more in touch with our real selves than when wakeful; that's how it feels to me when reading Smith; thus, when we move with Smith into Faerie, it feels just, barely just, out of reach. As if, could I just find a star somehow, some way, I could get there.