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There is a long-standing distinction between trivial and significant (often prophetic) dreams, which Freud annuls. For him, all dreams are meaningful but what they signify is bodily desire. This approach to dreams goes back to the Enlightenment and was developed by Heine, whose importance for Freud's theory of dreams is argued here. The other approach, crediting at least some dreams with the power of revelation, was favoured in various versions, by the Romantics and by Schopenhauer. Despite Freud's scepticism about the truth-content of dreams, he restores their imaginative fascination through his own interpretations, as is demonstrated from the Dream of the Three Fates.

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the Lock and Samuel Garth's The Dispensary (1699), a mock-heroic poem which satirizes apothecaries as Boileau's Le Lutrin satirizes the clergy.5 By mock epic, rather, I mean a group of poems, written over a period from the 1720s to the 1840s, which derive from mock heroic (as well as other sources) but engage in imaginative explorations that burst the bounds of mock heroic.Can mock epic properly be described as a genre? There is an obvious diYculty in applying a genre term retrospectively, for genre deWnitions are closely connected with the conscious intentions of authors. The genre of a literary work consists in those textual signals placed by the writer in order to match and guide the expectations of readers. In the eighteenth century, which inherited from the Renaissance self-conscious and elaborate systems of poetics, we Wnd critics working with the basic concept of mock-heroic poetry (under various names) which is generally explained as a parody of the epic. Thus, for August Wilhelm Schlegel, the 'jocular heroic poem' is 'a limited variety, whose essence can be fully explained as the application of the concept of parody to that of epic'.6 Within this framework we Wnd a somewhat unproWtable dispute over deWnitions of parody, but also, in a neglected essay by Johann Jakob Dusch, a more interesting distinction among various ways in which the narrator can treat his materialwith irony (tongue-in-cheek), with open satire, or jocularly.7 However, these nuances remain within the conWnes of the mock-heroic genre. They do not help us to understand how the poems I discuss go beyond mock heroic.The diYculty of calling mock epic a genre is reduced if one recognizes, with E. D. Hirsch, that genres are not Wxed and immutable, and that a genre term is not 'a type concept that can adequately deWne and subsume all the individuals that are called by the same generic name'.8 To call Tristram Shandy, Middlemarch, and The Waves 'novels' is to say something true, but so general as to be almost vacuous. Similarly, to adopt Hirsch's convenient example, when Byron says of Don Juan, 'My poem's epic', he has-even if we take his assertion at face value-done no more than indicate the broad type to which his poem belongs. He has given us a provisional schema within which we can orient ourselves, and given himself licence to innovate, improvise, and take the humorous epic in new directions.

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