Interpreting Dreams (Modern Classics Translated Texts)

by Sigmund Freud

Dream is incoherent; it unhesitatingly combines the most blatant contradictions and contemplates utter impossibilities, disregarding the knowledge that so influences us by day and portraying us as ethically and morally stupid persons. If anyone behaved in the waking state as dream with its situations suggests, we should judge him mad; if in the waking state a person spoke or sought to communicate such things as occur in dream-content, that person would strike us as confused or feeble-minded. In other words, we believe we are only expressing the way things are when we rate psychical activity in dream as being at a very low level and in particular when we say that the higher intellectual functions are suspended in dream or at least seriously impaired.