Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, published in 1847, may be considered as emblematic of the relationship between dreams and literary creation, if only because of the oneiric quality of many sections of the novel. Despite her outward placidity and Victorian rationality, the eponymous heroine believes in the paranormal, in ‘presentiments […], sympathies […] and signs’ (Brontë 2001, 187) and has a very rich dream life. She never shies away from recounting her dreams to the ‘reader’ she addresses directly many times in the novel or to Rochester. In addition to Jane's diegetic dreams, biographies of or essays on Charlotte Brontë make it clear that the novelist's real dreams influenced the writing of whole segments of the story and that they were also the source of Jane's diegetic, or literary, dreams. In other words, in Jane Eyre as in Frankenstein, both literary and real dreams are an integral part of the diegetic substance of the novel, the second category being essential to the writing process.

This chapter will thus attempt to identify the links between Charlotte Brontë's dreams and the types of creative process at work in the writing of Jane Eyre. I will first focus on one of Brontë's real dreams which seems to have determined the tenor of several distinct fictional sequences not oneiric in essence. My discussion will extend to the dream scenes found in Jane Eyre, also intimately related to another one of Brontë's dreams. Critics have of course sought motives for the insertion of dream sequences in the narrative; but I would like to show how these apparently very simple diegetic segments resist any convincing interpretation. Their tone is as intense as that of the rest of the narrative, but the story they tell can never quite be explained. Finally, I will examine Brontë's divergent approaches to the inclusion of real dreams in the novel. The first dream in question is used to structure the story of Jane's life itself, whereas the second is barely transformed and appears in the guise of a series of diegetic dreams. I wish to suggest that the two approaches are in fact closely connected, and that the nature of that link comes to light in a close analysis of the novelistic segments in question.