SOURCE: Hanlon, Lindley. “Cocteau, Cauchemar, Cinema.” In The Anxious Subject: Nightmares and Daymares in Literature and Film, edited and introduced by Moshe Lazar, pp. 107-20. Lancaster: Undena Publications, 1983.

In the following essay, Hanlon examines the influence of nightmares, somnambulism, and an obsession with death on Cocteau's films.

Extending the analogy between the individual and the epoch, one can say that a literary trend is to its time what a dream is to man: an activity propelled by an unconscious design, which rebels against limits imposed by the conscience only in order to enlarge the scope of the conscience and the literature that inspires it. …

[Literature drawing on the orphic tradition] is diametrically opposed to realism. … These works therefore take advantage of everything in the dream that is undefined, ambiguous, in the sense that, just as it is difficult to find out whether the content of a dream is...