The Interpretation of Dreams

by Sigmund Freud

"First of all the dream is the continuation of the waking state. Our dreams always unite themselves with those ideas which have shortly before been in our consciousness.

"series of contrasts which apparently shade off into contradictions"

It frees us from reality, extinguishes normal recollection of reality, and places us in another world and in a totally different life, which at bottom has nothing in common with reality...."

However strange the dream may seem, it can never detach itself from reality,

It often happens that matter appears in the dream content which one cannot recognise later in the waking state as belonging to one's knowledge and experience.

The dreamer is therefore in the dark as to the source from which the dream has been drawing,

In this case the superior knowledge of the dream is confirmed, but the forgotten source of this knowledge has not been traced.

dream gives proof of knowing and recollecting matters unknown to the waking person.

"It is essentially noteworthy how easily infantile and youthful reminiscences enter into the dream. What we have long ceased to think about, what has long since lost for us all importance, is constantly recalled by the dream."

old impressions should be pushed back, and the recent ones brought to the front.

we do not dream of a dead beloved person while we are still overwhelmed with sorrow.

"For it is a remarkable fact that dreams do not, as a rule, take their elements from great and deep-rooted events or from the powerful and urgent interests of the preceding day, but from unimportant matters, from the most worthless fragments of recent experience or of a more remote past.

repetitions of experiences do not occur in the dream. To be sure the dream makes an effort in that direction, but the next link is wanting, or appears in changed form, or it is replaced by something entirely novel.

Still there are exceptions

That we may at any time be awakened by stronger stimuli should prove to us "that the mind has remained in constant communication with the material world even during sleep."

"Every indistinctly perceived noise gives rise to corresponding dream pictures;

they give rise to illusions because the impression evokes a greater or lesser number of memory pictures through which the impression receives its psychic value.

the experiment really explains the origin of only one of the dream elements, and that the rest of the dream content appears in fact too independent, too much determined in detail, to be explained by the one demand, viz. that it must agree with the element experimentally introduced.

"An important part is played in dream illusions," says Wundt36 (p. 363), "by those subjective sensations of seeing and hearing which are familiar to us in the waking state as a luminous chaos in the dark field of vision, ringing, buzzing, &c., of the ears, and especially irritation of the retina.

a certain psychic passivity is necessary for their origin;

auditory hallucinations of words, names, &c., may also appear hypnogogically, and then repeat themselves in the dream, like an overture announcing the principal motive of the opera which is to follow.

"during sleep the mind becomes far more deeply and broadly conscious of its connection with the body than in the waking state, and it is compelled to receive and be influenced by stimulating impressions originating in parts and changes of the body of which it is unconscious in the waking state."

from our knowledge and the obscurity of the origin of the dream correspond too well not to be brought into relation with each other.

"transubstantiation of the feeling into dream pictures"

"If an organic apparatus is in a state of activity, excitation, or disturbance during sleep, the dream will bring ideas which are related to the exercise of the organic function which is performed by that apparatus."

The characteristic quality of the pure association dream is also found wanting.

The ideation which is already set free from reason and intellect is here no longer held together by the more important psychical and mental stimuli, but is left to its own aimless shifting and complete confusion."

"phantasms of the dream certainly are unjustly regarded as pure hallucinations, and that probably most dream presentations are really illusions, inasmuch as they emanate from slight sensory impressions which are never extinguished during sleep"

everything that might prove an independence of the psychic life from the demonstrable organic changes, or a spontaneity in its manifestations, is alarming to the psychiatrist nowadays,

The distrust of the psychiatrist has placed the psyche under a guardian, so to speak, and now demands that none of its feelings shall divulge any of its own faculties;

we often know that we have been dreaming, but we do not know what;

In order that feelings, presentations, thoughts and the like, should attain a certain degree of memory, it is important that they should not remain isolated, but that they should enter into connections and associations of a suitable kind.

dream (almost) never takes over successive memories from the waking state, but only certain details of these memories which it tears away from the habitual psychic connections in which they are recalled while we are awake.

the dream structure rises, as it were, from the soil of our psychic life, and floats in psychic space like a cloud in the sky, which the next breath of air soon dispels"

"It therefore easily happens that the active consciousness involuntarily inserts much in recollection of the dream; one imagines one has dreamt all sorts of things which the actual dream did not contain."

we start with the assumption that the dream is an occurrence of our own psychic activity; nevertheless the finished dream appears to us as something strange,

the characteristic part of the waking state is the fact that the psychic activity occurs in ideas rather than in pictures.

The dream therefore thinks preponderately, but not exclusively, in visual pictures. It also makes use of auditory pictures, and to a lesser extent of the impressions of the other senses.

dream hallucinates, that is, replaces thoughts through hallucinations.

The transformation of an idea into an hallucination is not the only deviation of the dream from a waking thought which perhaps corresponds to it. From these pictures the dream forms a situation, it presents something in the present, it dramatises an idea,

while dreaming we do not—as a rule; the exceptions require a special explanation—imagine that we are thinking, but that we are living through an experience, i.e., we accept the hallucination with full belief.

the subjective activity of our mind appears as objective,

The dream elements are by no means mere presentations, but true and real experiences of the mind,

in the dream it represents and thinks in real tangible pictures

it lacks in sleep the criticism which alone can distinguish between the sensory perceptions emanating from within or from without.

It furthermore neglects to differentiate between pictures that are arbitrarily interchanged and others where there is no free choice.

its alienation from the outer world contains also the reason for its belief in th...

The dream may delude us with all these tests, it may make us believe that we may touch the rose that we see in the dream, and still we only dream.

"I declare delusional everything that is experienced between the period of falling asleep and awakening, if I notice on awakening that I lie in my bed undressed"

it is not the lack of sensory stimuli that conditions sleep, but rather a lack of interest for the same; some sensory impressions are even necessary in so far as they serve to calm the mind;