The Unconscious terrain: Unveiling the interplay of Memory and Dream in Pauline Hopkins' of One Blood

International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 45 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 The Unconscious terrain: Unveiling the interplay of Memory and Dream in Pauline Hopkins’ of One Blood 1Bhagya V J & 2Rukmini Sarma 1 & 2 Research Scholar, Dept. of English, Bharath Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai ABSTRACT Memories serve as conduits between us and the past, which in turn influences the present and future. Dreams, like ephemeral threads woven through the tapestry of consciousness, unveil hidden landscapes of the mind, offering a gateway to explore desires, fears and untold possibilities. Intricately tying together memory and dream, Pauline Hopkins' novel, Of One Blood reveals a multi-layered narrative that explores one's own identity, cultural history, and historical revisionism. By analysing the characters who are driven by an insatiable need for self-discovery and access to memories that connect their contemporary life with their ancestral past, the paper examines the narrative's central theme of memory as a repository of hidden histories and suppressed realities. These memories are not mere recollections but serve as portals to dreams, vividly evoking landscapes of Africa and offering glimpses into a shared cultural heritage. The paper further investigates how the dreamscape becomes a canvas upon which the characters' innermost struggles with racial identity, societal prejudice, and personal agency are vividly painted. With the application of Freudian psychoanalysis, the paper navigates how this theory unveils a mosaic of characters' dreams that hint at their concealed memories, unspoken yearnings, and past traumas tied to their racial identity and cultural heritage. These dreams become a backdrop upon which the characters' subconscious wrestles with the complexities of their own existence, casting a light on the intricate threads of dream-reality confusion. With dreams materialising as the prime focus of the novel, the paper endeavours to explore the concept of false memory, wherein the subconscious mind misconstrues fabricated or imagined occurrences as actuality. Moreover, the theory of false memories offers a complementary perspective on the interplay between memory and dreams, as it attempts to ensconce the hollowness of distorted memories. The paper further explores how memory and dreams are explored in the novel as they reflect the complexity of human experience through a synthesis of the Freudian psychoanalytic lens. Keywords: Memories, Dreams, Freudian psychoanalysis, Identity, Cultural heritage, Narrative. International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 46 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 Early African American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was greatly influenced by Pauline Hopkins, a significant African American novelist and journalist. Her writings are known for their investigation of race, identity and contemporary social challenges, and they have had a significant impact on African American literary history. Hopkins‟ works frequently explore the complex interactions between memory, dreams and racial identity and Of One Blood stands out as a particularly strong example of this thematic investigation. As a writer of mixed race in a segregated society, Hopkins drew on her personal experiences and observations to craft stories that contested conventional racial ideas and pushed for a more complex understanding of racial identity. Life cannot be lived backwards, but memories serve as bridges to the past, thereby connecting it to the present. These unscripted moments of timeless treasure tell a story. Errant memory is an interrogation of a specific mechanics of remembering acted out through the act of writing from what many Enlightenment philosophers and authors of African descent call Fancy, or the memory of experience. It stands apart from existing theories of memory dominated by the rhetoric of trauma, forgetting, and memorialization in that these conversations frame memory as a concept that defines the subject. Errant memory, as a sustained literary practice and theoretical fascination, is perhaps best described by Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory. What stands out about Bergson‟s analysis of memory is that he bases his theory of fugitive memory on what philosophers from Hobbes to Hume called Fancy, or the memory that does not rest. Like the Enlightenment philosophers that preceded him, Bergson believes “good” and “practical sense” lie between” what he refers to as “dream” and “impulse” (198). Bergson usefully summarizes the consensus among Cartesian thinkers in that he defines impulse as lack of memory (belonging to animals that live only in the present) and dreaming as “living in the past” exclusively. What authors of African descent prove through the act of writing errant memory is that this memory, without rest, the memory of experience which constantly supplies the unconscious with images, can in fact be harnessed, and that writing is that harnessing made manifest materially. The theme of the dream is a central motif of Langston Hughes‟s poetry that establishes the continuity between the depictions of simple African Americans and their “deferred” expectations. Hughes made poetic use of the African-American folklore to bond individuals into a community sharing the same oral tradition. He thus created an art form vested in the International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 47 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 African-American experience: “Dreams have always figured prominently in the works of Langston Hughes. Hughes‟s work is devoted to outlining, celebrating, and agitating on behalf of the dreams of oppressed and marginalised peoples worldwide, with particular focus on the dreams of African Americans” (Tracy 223). The protagonist, Reuel Briggs, suffers from amnesia and experiences vivid, symbolic dreams that gradually unveil his African heritage and familial truths. These dreams act as psychic gateways, granting access to a buried past that remains inaccessible to his conscious mind. In this framework, memory is not merely a recollection of lived experiences but a dynamic, often unconscious process that manifests symbolically through dreams. As Freud posits in his analysis of trauma and dream-work, dreams serve as coded messages from the unconscious, carrying fragments of truth that the conscious mind cannot fully articulate (Sprengnether 219). Hopkins‟ use of dreams, therefore, functions as a means of accessing cultural and historical memory, particularly that which has been erased or repressed by systemic forces like slavery and racial passing. The novel‟s engagement with dream states also resonates with Paul Ricoeur‟s hermeneutics of memory, which emphasises the narrative reconstruction of identity through the interplay of remembered, forgotten, and imagined experiences (Osorio, 2019). Reuel‟s journey is not just a physical or genealogical quest but a psychic excavation; each dream vision deepens his connection to a forgotten lineage and ancestral homeland. These visionary episodes transcend the boundary between the real and the fantastic, echoing Serrano-Muñoz‟s (2021) assertion that imagined memories in dystopian or speculative fiction can serve as a response to cultural crisis and historical silencing. Hopkins prefigures this mode by envisioning Ethiopia as a utopian space encoded in memory and accessed through dreams, offering an Afrocentric reimagining of history and belonging. Here, dreams operate not only as a psychological phenomenon but as a literary strategy to restore collective memory and resist erasure. Of One Blood exemplifies how literature can function as a space where personal trauma intersects with cultural remembrance. Reuel‟s fragmented identity and the recurring dream motifs reflect a larger historical trauma, one born from the violence of enslavement and cultural dislocation. These dreams are not passive illusions but active agents in the narrative, allowing the protagonist to piece together his fractured sense of self. The novel‟s phantasmagoric quality, reminiscent of Clifford Simak‟s Out of Their Minds (Malpezzi 737; Paranyuk & Tychinina, 2022), illustrates how dreamscapes can visualise the unconscious, expressing what International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 48 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 is otherwise incommunicable. By aligning individual memory with a collective African diasporic history, Hopkins offers a radical rethinking of identity formation through the unconscious terrain of dreams. In doing so, she underscores literature‟s role as a vessel for both emotional truth and historical reclamation, enriching the broader discourse on memory and dreaming in fiction. Scholars have analysed how African American authors, such as Langston Hughes, have portrayed the aspirations and struggles of black individuals to achieve the American Dream, despite societal challenges. As early as 1932, in The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Hughes wrote poems about his people and for his people on hopes, dreams, aspirations, life and love. In this first collection of poems, Hughes‟s message was universal, and he wrote about the expectations of Black people. Hughes‟s poems in The Dream Keeper did not translate the bitterness and disillusions of the 1940s and 1950s as they appeared in Montage. The poems were optimistic and full of hope for the future of African Americans. The novel explores how race is a social construct and the complexity of racial identity. Reuel Briggs, the protagonist and a mixed-race medical student, travels to Ethiopia in search of treasure, which causes him to reflect on and learn more about his own racial identity. Reuel discovers a hidden city in Ethiopia whose residents have advanced technologies and mysterious abilities as he travels there. His connection to his cultural past is sparked by this finding, which calls into question Eurocentric civilizational notions. The story chronicles Reuel's personal development and self-discovery as he travels and comes into contact with mystical forces, betrayal, and love. Reuel develops a stronger awareness of himself and his position in the world as a result of his experiences. The ripples that flit the burnished surface of the long, undulating billows tinkled continually on the sides of the vessel. He was aware of a low-lying spectral-pale band of shore. That portion of Africa whose nudity is only covered by the fallow mantle of the desert gave a most sad impression to the gazer. The Moors call it “Bled el Ateusch,” the Country of Thirst; and, as there is an intimate relation between the character of a country and that of its people, Reuel realised vividly that the race who dwelt here must be different from those of the rest of the world (Hopkins 265). International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 49 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 As Reuel interacts with different environments and people, memories of his past interactions, family, and lineage gradually come back to the surface. For instance, his self-identification as a person of mixed ancestry is greatly influenced by his memory of his family history. Reconnecting with his roots through memories, both personal and ancestral, allows him to address issues of race, belonging, and self-identity. Reuel's memories help him comprehend and value a different cultural background as he learns more about Ethiopian culture. He can put his own identity and the rich cultural fabric of the world into context thanks to the detailed depictions of Ethiopian life and traditions that evoke memories. Reuel develops a deeper understanding of the cultural quirks that influence his experiences thanks to these memories. Freud, still beholden to Charcot‟s hypnotic method, did not grasp the full implications of Breuer‟s experience until a decade later, when he developed the technique of free association. In part an extrapolation of the automatic writing promoted by the German Jewish writer Ludwig Börne a century before, a result of his own clinical experience with other hysterics, this revolutionary method was announced in the work Freud published jointly with Breuer in 1895, Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria). By encouraging the patient to express any random thoughts that came associatively to mind, the technique aimed at uncovering hitherto unarticulated material from the realm of the psyche that Freud, following a long tradition, called the unconscious. Because of its incompatibility with conscious thoughts or conflicts with other unconscious ones, this material was normally hidden, forgotten, or unavailable to conscious reflection. Difficulty in freely associating, sudden silences, stuttering, or the like, suggested to Freud the importance of the material struggling to be expressed, as well as the power of what he called the patient‟s defences against that expression. Such blockages Freud dubbed resistance, which had to be broken down to reveal hidden conflicts. Unlike Charcot and Breuer, Freud concluded, based on his clinical experience with female hysterics, that the most insistent source of resisted material was sexual in nature. And even more momentously, he linked the aetiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual feeling or urge and the psychic defences against it. Being able to bring that conflict to consciousness through free association and then probing its implications was thus a crucial step, he reasoned, on the road to relieving the symptom, which was best understood as an unwitting compromise formation between the wish and the defence. International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 50 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 Freud's psychoanalytic theory provides a valuable lens through which one can interpret the characters' inner conflicts and the influence of repressed memories on their perceptions of self and race. The foundation of Reuel's persona is his identity as a person of mixed races. According to Freud's thesis, his irrational battles with self-acceptance and belonging are influenced by formative experiences and cultural norms. His internal struggle to pass for white symbolises the conflict between his genetic roots and the superego of social expectations. Another character whose unspoken thoughts and recollections are revealed throughout the novel is Candace. According to Freud's view, suppressed urges frequently find covert ways to come to light. Despite her initial resistance, Candace finds herself drawn to Reuel more and more, which suggests that her attraction to him is a result of suppressed feelings and wants tied to her ethnic identity. From profound unconsciousness, deep, merciful, oblivious to pain and the flight of time, from the gulf of the mysterious shadows wherein earth and heaven are alike forgotten, Reuel awoke at the close of the fourth day after his entrance into the Great Pyramid. That Lethean calm induced by narcotic odours saved his reason. Great pain, whether physical or mental, cannot last long, and human anguish must find relief or take it (Hopkins 423). Ruel's dreams are extremely important in revealing the buried memories of his mixed origin when he travels to Ethiopia. Telassar, an underground metropolis that appears in his recurring dreams, represents his unconscious longing to be in touch with his African ancestors. Reuel's dreams indicate his internal conflict about his racial identity, which is in line with Freud's notion that dreams act as a conduit for repressed thoughts and emotions. Yet another theory discernible in Of One Blood is that of False Memory Syndrome, which is a distorted recollection of an event. Contrary to the prevalent assumption that working memory is perceived to be similar to that of a recorder documenting all the events with perfect accuracy and clarity, the novel underlines the fallacious nature of memory. A recollection of events that never occurred, false memory can be as minute as a mundane routine habit of mistakenly believing the door locked, to facing difficulty in recollecting details of a sexual assault or a major accident. The malleable nature of memory makes it unreliable, so much so that even what one believes to be an accurate memory might emerge as a false memory. Thus, the functioning of false memory is such that the mind develops imaginative occurrences in lieu of facing difficulty in recollecting real-life experiences. The process of false memory International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 51 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 commences during the resting state of the conscious mind, which is during sleep, when there occurs a transition of events to the permanent stage from the temporary one. Inaccurate perceptions, suggestions, and misattribution can also result in false memory syndrome, fabricating a reality around a memory that is totally inaccurate. Experiences with a negative impact escalate the possibility of false memory syndrome, as trauma and repressed memories intensify false memories, as suggested in a research article titled What Drives False Memories in Psychopathology? A Case for Associative Activation. Memory aberrations are notable characteristics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression. For example, individuals with these disorders tend to recollect emotionally negative experiences better than emotionally positive events (Mathews & MacLeod, 2005) and can exhibit overgeneral memories (Ono, Devilly, & Shum, 2016). It is not surprising that many studies have focused on the links among PTSD, depression, and memory. The bulk of this research has been concerned with the amount of information that can be correctly remembered (Koriat, Goldsmith, & Pansky, 2000), thereby neglecting false memories (Hertel & Brozovich, 2010). This gap in the literature is peculiar, given that the mechanisms that affect correct remembering can, in principle, also affect susceptibility to false memories. For example, the fact that people with depression are most likely to retrieve emotionally negative experiences may reflect an elaborated underlying memory network. Such a network may contain densely intertwined and well-integrated negative memories that are strongly connected and easily activated and retrieved. Spreading activation theorists would argue not only that this network will produce true negative memories more easily than neutral or positive memories, but also that it will more readily generate false negative memories (Howe, Wimmer, Gagnon, & Plumpton, 2009). Many mental health professionals asserted that they treated patients in their clinical practice who, after extensive treatment, remembered a traumatic childhood incident, which had remained suppressed for a long time. In response to these clinical observations, many memory researchers argued that psychotherapeutic interventions often involve inherently suggestive prompts, ones that might have led patients to falsely remember entire episodes of trauma. In the false memory literature, two general classes of false memory can be distinguished and different paradigms have been invented to experimentally evoke these false memories (Brainerd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008; Otgaar, Howe, Brackmann, & Smeets, 2016). On International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 52 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 the one hand, false memories can be induced by using suggestive pressure, which we will call suggestion-induced false memories. On the other hand, false memories can occur spontaneously, without any external pressure, arising predominantly because of the automatic and nonconscious operation of internal memory mechanisms such as spreading activation. This latter type of false memory has been referred to as spontaneous false memories. Both types of false memories can arise in legal cases and in clinical settings (Brackmann, Otgaar, Sauerland, & Jelicic, 2016; Howe et al., 2018). Suppressed memories are, in most cases, traumatic. Hence, hypnosis and other psychiatric practices serve as a tool for the outlet of such traumatic memories. When a traumatic memory surfaces its way to the conscious mind of a person, it is often fragmented, leaving incomprehensible gaps in between the occurrence of an event. The fabrication of an alternate so-called reality aids in pervading the gaps of these memories. The major flaw of this syndrome is that it raises the question of the authenticity of an event recalled in memory, as it poses the problem of separating imagination from reality. Of One Blood Or; The Hidden Self (1902), with its idiosyncratic illustration of characters could be closely associated with the concept of confabulation. Supernatural elements are monumental in Pauline Hopkins' novel, visions and dreams, navigating the action of characters. From the instance where Ruel Briggs (an African-American man) has visions of a black woman to the climax of the plot that prompts Aubrey to return to the estate, the supernatural power attributed to visions plays a crucial role in the novel. The visions experienced by each character could be drawn parallel with the operation of false memory; the fabrication emanated from the brains of characters in disguise as visions and dreams. The suspended animation of Dianthe Lusk, which causes the rest to assume she is dead, presents yet another instance of a vision. With all her memories erased, she awakes from her trance to discover that the man she is gazing at is the same person she dreamt of. Dianthe remarks, "Oh, it is you; I dreamed of you while I slept." Bearing in mind the convoluted nature of memory, one cannot deny the possibility of Dianthe and Reuel's previous night's encounter, which might have propelled her to dream of Reuel while in her trance, the last person she stumbled upon before falling into her deep mesmeric trance. The visions, the later appearance of ghost Mira could be interpreted as realities that never occurred, but were merely constructed in the minds of the characters. The fabricated experiences, which are difficult to separate from real-life experiences, may present International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 53 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502078 themselves as visions and dreams. The elements of supernatural and dreams that the novel depicts might be regarded as a masquerade of the malleability of memory. Such is the power of memory that it can contribute to making reality inseparable from imagination. The novel delves deep into the themes of identity, mystery and racial trauma. Reuel Briggs, belonging to a mixed race of African-American, prefers to choose American cultural roots over the African, the latter being more challenging and complicated. In the initial parts of the novel, he attempts to evade the fact that he is half African, thoroughly engrossing himself in the roots of American culture. The instance where he employs his skill to save Dianthe, while she is believed to be dead, Reuel conceals the truth of her identity, under the pretext that she can easily pass for a white. This highlights the convolution and challenges associated with racial identity. At another instance of the novel, when Dianthe regains her memory of the past, she is perturbed about her real identity. She resolves to confide in Aubrey, whose immediate response is that he is inclined to marry her despite the shame of being a black woman. Aubrey's response further spotlights the racial disparities ingrained in society. Being black was associated with the idea of shame, stripping away from them any privileges and alleviations experienced by white men. Pauline Hopkins, through the illustration of an Ethiopian society, emphasises the significance of African culture. The mystic powers and treasures possessed by the Ethiopian city could be denoted as being symbolic of the richness of African culture. Hopkins attempts to highlight the trauma inflicted by racial disparities. She asserts, no man can draw the dividing line between the two races, for they are both of one blood. Ethiopian society presented in the novel is supreme in establishing the notion that no particular culture or race is superior to others and that every culture is equally rich and unique in its own way. Pauline Hopkins‟ Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self (1902) intricately blends memory and dream to explore the psychic and historical consequences of racial dislocation. The novel‟s protagonist, Reuel Briggs, suffers from amnesia and frequently experiences dreamlike visions that gradually reveal his suppressed ancestral ties to Africa. These episodes are not incidental; they function as literary portals through which buried histories resurface. Dreams in this context do not merely provide psychological insight; they become vehicles for epistemological recovery. As Sprengnether (2012) notes in her exploration of trauma and dream in Freud‟s writings, dreams serve as coded messages from the unconscious, pointing