The Interpretation of Dreams

by Sigmund Freud

One of the sources from which dreams draw material for reproduction—material of which some part is not recalled or utilized in our waking thoughts—is to be found in childhood.

The behaviour of memory in dreams is surely most significant for any theory of memory whatsoever. It teaches us that “nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost” (Scholz,

We should not have dreamed if some disturbing element had not come into play during our sleep, and the dream is the reaction against this disturbance.

Whenever the sources of dreams are completely enumerated they fall into the following four categories, which have also been employed in the classification of dreams: (1) external (objective) sensory stimuli; (2) internal (subjective) sensory stimuli; (3) internal (organic) physical stimuli; (4) Purely psychical sources of excitation.

According to Lemoine, the incoherence of the dream-images is the sole essential characteristic of the dream. Maury agrees with him (Le Sommeil, p. 163): “Il n’y a pas des reves absolument raisonnables et qui ne contiennent quelque incoherence, quelque absurdite.”26 26 There are no dreams which are absolutely reasonable which do not contain some incoherence, some absurdity.

(This passage from Radestock is an abstract of a brilliant exposition of Griesinger’s (p. 111), which reveals, with the greatest clarity, wish-fulfilment as a characteristic of the imagination common to dreams and to the psychoses. My own investigations have taught me that here is to be found the key to a psychological theory of dreams and of the psychoses.)

At that time I frequently used cocaine in order to suppress distressing swellings in the nose, and I had heard a few days previously that a lady patient who did likewise had contracted an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane. In 1885 it was I who had recommended the use of cocaine, and I had been gravely reproached in consequence. A dear friend, who had died before the date of this dream, had hastened his end by the misuse of this remedy.

The dream represents a certain state of affairs, such as I might wish to exist; the content of the dream is thus the fulfilment of a wish; its motive is a wish.