At the beginning of Animal Farm, the animals gather to hear Old Major's dream. It is a dream of what the world would be like if humans were no longer the masters. He uses that dream to stir up the longings of the animals to be free of the oppression brought on by humans. He conjures up a waking, revolutionary dream of animal utopia:
Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! I do not know when that Rebellion will come, it might be in a week or in a hundred years, but I know, as surely as I see this straw beneath my feet, that sooner or later justice will be done ...
The animals are greatly moved by Old Major's vision of animals in unity, living in freedom and justice, according to a different set of rules than the humans. These rules will become the Seven Commandments of Animalism.
In chapter seven, we meet a different sort of dream in the confession of the three hens, who say that Snowball came to them in a dream and told them to disobey Napoleon's orders. They are killed for this confession.
By chapter ten, the old dreams have died:
But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally ...
Yet Napoleon's propaganda insists that the dreams of the Rebellion are still operative, despite the fact that only the pigs and the dogs are benefitting from the animals running the farm.
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