| Sumario: | This paper partly discusses Sigmund Freud's seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, and interrogates the underlying thesis that literary works operate like dreams and the unconscious by not making explicit statements. The paper relates Freud's thoughts on dreams to Marcel Proust's involuntary explicit memory in order to explain how creative writers recreate historical events by triggering Proustian effect in their characters, not through somatosensory system but through dream motifs. The paper reiterates the functionality of dream mechanism and how dreaming helps to exhume past experiences and memories stored in the unconscious, which cannot be accessed through conscious efforts, yet influence human agency. Antonio Olinto's The King of Ketu (1987) and Prince Justice's Tutuoba: Salem's Black Shango Slave Queen (2007) are critically examined to demonstrate the operationalization of dream processes, especially how the writers leverage dream mechanism to explore repressed experiences of their characters. While Olinto's characters manifest instances of oneirism, déjà vu, trance, and reverie, Justice's characters exhibit the same dream motifs. Both writers use the motifs to intensify the plots of their narratives and teach Afro-Atlantic history and spirituality.
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