The Little People
Robert Louis Stevenson was facing financial ruin when a dream inspired him to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He thought of his dream life as “a small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long.” In this theatre, the dream functions as the stage where images and scenes “echo in the chambers of the brain.”
In Stevenson’s imagination, the theatre of his brain is run by fairylike helpers whom he calls Brownies, or “Little People.” He claims that they “do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself.” In “A Chapter on Dreams,” from his travelogue Across the Plains, Stevenson reveals that two scenes in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were inspired by his dreams. Through a series of misfortunes and writer’s blocks, Stevenson found himself in financial straits. He knew that his only hope was to publish a new story:
“I had long been trying to write a story on this subject [Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde]. For two days I went about wracking my brains for a plot of any sort, and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously."
Stevenson alludes to the scene where Jekyll, after being invited to a walk by Utterson, looks out of the window and becomes horrified. The origin of this scene came from a nightmare in which Stevenson was looking down from a window of a room and saw a big brown dog. The “hellish” beast caught flies with his paws and after eating them, looked up at the dreamer and winked at him. Stevenson was filled with terror at the behavior of the “devilish brown dog,” and it inspired Stevenson to create the persona of the evil Mr. Hyde.
Unfortunately, scientists have yet to discover a committee of Keebler Elves in the brain, but research has uncovered evidence that dreams may be useful in addressing and working through problems.
Read more:
Introduction--The Committee of Sleep
The Little People
Dream Incubation
REM--Making the Connection
REM--The Royal Road to Metaphor
Hypnagogic Dreams
Writer's Block
Suggested Reading
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