The traumas, anxieties and nightmares of the colonizer : oneiric motives in Rudyard Kipling’s early short stories

The paper focuses on the presentation of three early short stories by Rudyard Kipling (The Phantom Rickshaw, The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes and The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows) in the context of oneiric visions that influence the main characters. The general role of the motif is to show the British Empire’s weaknesses and the coloniser’s anxieties connected with the duties performed in the British India as well as the constraint of living in the inconvenient environment of masculinised society, that deals with distorted interracial and intergender relations, and other social pathologies.