SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “The Policing of Dreams: Nineteenth-Century Detection.” In Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, pp. 193-253. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Thomas illustrates the similarities and connections between the investigative techniques employed by detectives in nineteenth-century literature and Freudian methods and theories of dreams and the unconscious.

Upon the winding up of the tragedy involved in the deaths of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, the Chevalier dismissed the affair at once from his attention, and relapsed into his old habit of moody revery. Prone, at all times, to abstraction, I readily fell in with his humour; and continuing to occupy our chambers in the Faubourg Saint Germain, we gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget...