In “On Dreams”, Freud asserted that feelings of guilt, if repressed from consciousness, inevitably surface in unconscious symptoms, such as nightmares or madness. Even though a person can repress their conscience, the guilt is simply moved to another part of the mind and, eventually, this repressed matter must return. In Dostoyevsky's works, a character's guilt often manifests itself in dreams by presenting the character's purely evil self or worst fears. Not only does the character himself assume a totally diabolical nature in his dreams, but so do the beings he meets. Whether the devil appears literally, as in the case of Ivan Karamazov, or in the form of the character's victim, as in the cases of Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, the mere fact of the devil's emergence reveals that the character has no unable to escape guilt, a universal human feeling. , despite what he consciously thinks or says. To the extent that the character is himself responsible for his nightmare, to the extent that he is incapable of escaping the guilt that torments him, the character constitutes his own devil. Because he is human, he suffers from guilt and therefore cannot escape his crime. He's not as good at being bad as he thinks he is. What do these dreams mean, knowing that they are the literary creations of an author? How does guilt effectively temper pride? We will attempt to answer these questions by examining the crimes, dreams and demons of Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov. It is important, when discussing a dream in a novel, to distinguish between the literary and psychological implications of the dream. The dream is obviously the functional product of the author's imagination and must therefore serve a specific purpose in the work. If exam...... middle of paper ......ious. Guilt is universal in all humanity and only completes the psychological equation born from excessive pride: if one dares to suppose that he can transcend his humanity and enter the divine sphere, and commits a crime in Consequently, guilt, emerging unconsciously in dreams, will end up reminding him of his human roots. Works Cited Anderson, Roger B. Dostoevsky: Myths of Duality. Gainesvilled, University of Florida Press, 1986. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Karamazov brothers. Trans. Constance Garnett. Ed. Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: WW Norton & Co., 1976.---. Crime and punishment. Trans. Jessie Coulson. Ed. Georges Gibian. New York: WW Norton & Co., 1989.---. The devils. Trans. and Ed. Michael R. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: school book services, 1970.