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"With the cessation of the objectively active outlook and of the normal consciousness, the psyche loses the foundation in which were rooted the feelings, desires, interests, and actions.
none of these brings along its psychic value. The latter is removed from them, and hence they float about in the mind dependent upon their own resources...."
The dream is disconnected, it unites without hesitation the worst contradictions, it allows impossibilities, it disregards our authoritative knowledge from the day, and evinces ethical and moral dulness. He who would behave in the waking state as the dream does in its situations would be considered insane. He who in the waking state would speak in such manner or report such things as occur in the dream content, would impress us as confused and weak-minded.
higher intellectual activities are suspended or at least much impaired in the dream.
"It is as if the psychological activity were transferred from the brain of a reasonable being into the brain of a fool."
Having withdrawn itself from the strict police of the rational will guiding the waking presentation life, and of the attention, the dream whirls everything about kaleidoscopically in mad play."
overstraining of the nonsense brings an awakening!
"all forms of conscious activity occur in the dream, but they are imperfect, inhibited, and isolated from one another."
it is the emotional life of the psyche that is not overtaken by sleep and that then directs the dream.
Spitta, however, believes that only consciousness is retained in the dream, and not self-consciousness.
"In the dream, the ideas chase and hunt each other on the strength of accidental similarities and barely perceptible connections.
It views the world under the guise of a peculiar idealisation, and often raises the effect of its manifestations into the most ingenious understanding of the essence lying at its basis.
"It is to be noticed that in the dream the associations terminate and the ideas unite without being influenced by reflection and reason, aesthetic taste, and moral judgment; the judgment is extremely weak, and ethical indifference reigns supreme."
Concerning this original impulse we must say that the dream has not discovered it—it has only imitated and extended it, it has only elaborated a bit of historical material which it has found in us, into dramatic form; it enacts the words of the apostle: He who hates his brother is a murderer.
It is the same thoughts and the same estimation of these thoughts, which, as we know, have caused devout and holy men of all times to lament that they are evil sinners.
"The mind is rarely so happily organised as to possess at all times power enough not to be disturbed, not only by unessential but also by perfectly ridiculous ideas running counter to the usual clear trend of thought; indeed, the greatest thinkers have had cause to complain of this dreamlike disturbing and painful rabble of ideas, as it destroys their profoundest reflection and their most sacred and earnest mental work."
glance into the deep and inmost recesses of our being,
lay bare for us our hidden dispositions and to reveal to us not what we are, but what we might have been
reveals to us what we do not wish to admit to ourselves,
"Even presentations which have entered into our consciousness almost unnoticed, and have never perhaps been brought out from oblivion, often announce through the dream their presence in the mind
the occurrence of which excites our wonder in immoral as well as in absurd dreams.
The dream thus shows the real, if not the entire nature of man, and is a means of making the hidden psychic life accessible to our understanding.
in fever and other deliria,
"the character of a voluntary activity put to rest and a somewhat mechanical process of pictures and presentations produced by inner impulses"
An immoral dream proves nothing for the psychic life of the dreamer except that he has in some way become cognizant of the ideas in question; it is...
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He then mentions as an example that his dreams often show him as a victim of just those superstitions which he most violently combats in his writing.
one very often dreams about the insignificant impressions of the day, and that one rarely carries over into the dream the absorbing interests of the day.
things which have been fully settled never become dream inciters, but only such things as are incomplete in the mind or touch it fleetingly
The dream acts as a safety-valve for the overburdened brain.
"what cannot be eliminated from the undigested thought material lying in the mind becomes connected by threads of thought borrowed from the phantasy into a finished whole, and thus enrolled in the memory as a harmless phantasy picture "
It lies in the overcharging which demands discharge,
To be sure, it is not a psychic process, and has no place among the psychic processes of the waking state; it is a nocturnal somatic process in the apparatus devoted to mental activity, and has a function to perform, viz. to guard this apparatus against overstraining, or, if the comparison may be changed, to cleanse the mind.
"souvenir inconscient.
The less conscious, and at the same time the stronger the impression, the more prospect it has of playing a part in the next dream.
the insignificant and the unadjusted,
The psychic energy accumulated during the day through inhibition or suppression becomes the main-spring of the dream at night.
dream "is the natural activity of the mind, which is not limited by the force of the individuality, not disturbed by self-consciousness and not directed by self-determination, but is the state of life of the sensible central point indulging in free play"
"The dream is a bulwark against the regularity and commonness of life, a free recreation of the fettered phantasy, in which it mixes together all the pictures of life and interrupts the continued earnestness of grown-up men with a joyous children's play. Without the dream we should surely age earlier, and thus the dream may be considered perhaps not a gift directly from above, but a delightful task, a friendly companion, on our pilgrimage to the grave."
The mind does not wish to continue the tension of the waking life, but to release it and recuperate from it.
an almost intoxicated enthusiasm for the subject, which must repel us unless it can carry us away with it,
no true mental character, but only the nature of a mechanism, belongs to the remnants of these psychic forces.
It shows a preference for the unlimited, exaggerated, and prodigious, but because freed from the impeding thought categories, it gains a greater flexibility and agility and new pleasure; it is extremely sensitive to the delicate emotional stimuli of the mind and to the agitating affects, and it rapidly recasts the inner life into the outer plastic clearness.
Its language, however simple it may be, thus becomes circumstantial, cumbersome, and heavy.
The phantasy plays a tantalising game with them, and represents the organic source which gives origin to the stimuli in the correspondent dream, in any plastic symbolism.
One might presume that it plays in an improper manner.
first attack of insanity frequently originates in an anxious and terrifying dream, and that the ruling idea has connection with this dream.
"The lunatic is a dreamer in the waking state."
"Insanity is a dream with the senses awake."
the dream a short insanity, and insanity...
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"As a matter of fact we may in the dream ourselves live through almost all symptoms which we meet in the insane asylums."
