Interpreting Dreams (Modern Classics Translated Texts)

by Sigmund Freud

three distinguishing features of dream-memory that have been so frequently remarked upon but never explained: 1) that dream has a clear preference for the impressions of the last few days (Robert [1886], Strümpell [1877], Hildebrandt [1875], and also Weed and Hallam [1896]); 2) that dream makes its selection according to different principles than those used by our waking memory in that it remembers not what is essential and significant but what is peripheral and disregarded; 3) that dream has access to our earliest childhood impressions and even fetches out details from that period in our lives that once again seem trivial to us and that in the waking state we deemed long forgotten.1