The Interpretation of Dreams (AmazonClassics Edition)

by Sigmund Freud

The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,

Aristotle asserts that the dream is of demoniacal, though not of divine nature, which indeed contains deep meaning, if it be correctly interpreted.

the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.

“The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with one subject, when profound sorrow has torn our hearts or when a task has claimed the whole power of our mentality, the dream either gives us something entirely strange, or it takes for its combinations only a few elements from reality, or it only enters into the strain of our mood and symbolises reality.”

Burdach

“He who dreams turns his back upon the world of waking consciousness.” “In the dream the memory of the orderly content of the waking consciousness and its normal behaviour is as good as entirely lost.” “The almost complete isolation of the mind in the dream from the regular normal content and course of the waking state . . .”

L. Strumpell Nature and Origin of Dreams

Haffner: “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. Careful examination will nearly always find a thread by which the dream has connected itself with the experience of the previous day.”

Weygandt, flatly contradicts the above cited statement of Burdach:

“For it may often be observed, apparently in the great majority of dreams, that they lead us directly back into everyday life...

“We dream of what we have seen, said, des...

Maury

“The content of dreams is more or less determined by the individual personality, by age, sex, station in life, education, habits, and by events and experiences of the whole past life.”

Jessen

Radestock: “When Xerxes, before his march against Greece, was dissuaded from this resolution by good counsel, but was again and again incited by dreams to undertake it, one of the old rational dream-interpreters of the Persians, Artabanus, told him very appropriately that dream pictures mostly contain that of which one has been thinking while awake.”

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (IV, v. 959), occurs this passage:— “And to whatever pursuit We most cling absorbed, or on what affairs We have theretofore tarried much, And mind has strained upon the most, in sleep we seem to go at the same. The lawyers seem to plead and cite laws, Commanders to fight and engage in battles,” etc., etc.

Cicero (De Divinatione, II.) says quite similarly, as does also Maury much later:— “And it is mainly those of which we thought or that we made which, by the traces which they ...

common phenomenon the fact that the dream gives proof of knowing and recollecting matters unknown to the waking person.

One of the sources from which the dream draws material for reproduction—material which in part is not recalled or employed in waking thought—is to be found in childhood.

Strümpell: “The subject becomes more interesting when we remember how the dream sometimes brings forth, as it were, from among the deepest and heaviest strata which later years have piled upon the earliest childhood experiences, the pictures of certain places, things, and persons, quite uninjured and with their original freshness. This is not limited merely to such impressions as have gained vivid consciousness during their origin or have become impressed with strong psychic validity, and then later return in the dream as actual reminiscences, causing pleasure to the awakened consciousness. On the contrary, the depths of the dream memory comprise also such pictures of persons, things, places, and early experiences as either possessed but little consciousness and no psychic value at all, or have long ago lost both, and therefore appear totally strange and unknown both in the dream and in the waking state, until their former origin is revealed.”

Many authors who are convinced of the intimate connection between the dream content and the waking state are impressed by the fact that impressions which have intensely occupied the waking mind appear in the dream only after they have been to some extent pushed aside from the elaboration of the waking thought.

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

Hildebrandt: “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. The most shocking death in our family, the impressions of which keep us awake long into the night, becomes obliterated from our memories, until the first moment of awakening brings it back to us with depressing force. On the other hand, the wart on the forehead of a passing stranger, of whom we did not think for a second after he was out of sight, plays its part in our dreams.”

The behaviour of the memory in dreams is surely most significant for every theory of memory in general. It teaches us that “nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost” (Scholz); or as Delbœuf puts it, “any impression, even the most insignificant, leaves an unalterable trace, indefinitely susceptible to resurface,”

The ancients who conceived the dream as a divine inspiration had no need of looking for its exciting source; to them the dream resulted from the will of the divine or demoniacal powers, and its content was the product of their knowledge or intention.

I. External (objective) sensory stimuli. II. Internal (subjective) sensory stimuli. III. Internal (organic) physical excitations. IV. Purely psychical exciting sources.

sensory stimuli. “Every indistinctly perceived noise gives rise to corresponding dream pictures; the rolling of thunder takes us into the thick of battle, the crowing of a cock may be transformed into human shrieks of terror, and the creaking of a door may conjure up dreams of burglars breaking into the house. When one of our blankets slips off at night we may dream that we are walking about naked or falling into the water. If we lie diagonally across the bed with our feet extending beyond the edge, we may dream of standing on the brink of a terrifying precipice, or of falling from a steep height. Should our head accidentally get under the pillow we may then imagine a big rock hanging over us and about to crush us under its weight. Accumulation of semen produces voluptuous dreams, and local pain the idea of suffering ill treatment, of hostile attacks, or of accidental bodily injuries.”

According to Strümpell, the flying dream is the adequate picture used by the mind to interpret the sum of excitation emanating from the rising and sinking of the pulmonary lobes after the cutaneous sensation of the thorax has been reduced to insensibility. It is this latter circumstance that causes a sensation related to the conception of flying. Falling from a height in a dream is said to have its cause in the fact that when unconsciousness of the sensation of cutaneous pressure has set in, either an arm falls away from the body or a flexed knee is suddenly stretched out, causing the feeling of cutaneous pressure to return to consciousness, and the transition to consciousness embodies itself psychically as a dream of falling (Strümpell).

The forgetfulness of the waking consciousness for dreams is evidently only the counterpart of the fact already mentioned, that the 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.

“In this manner 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.”

This is also aided by the fact that, upon awakening, the attention is immediately seized by the inrushing sensory world, and only very few dream pictures can withstand this power. They fade away before the impressions of the new day like the glow of the stars before the sunlight.

so many dreams are retained in memory.

“Moreover we must not lose sight of the fact, hitherto little heeded, that in the investigation and interpretation of orderly and logical dreams we almost always play with the truth when we recall a dream to memory. Unconsciously and unwittingly we fill up the gaps and supplement the dream pictures. Rarely, and perhaps never, has a connected dream been as connected as it appears to us in memory. Even the most truth-loving person can hardly relate a dream without exaggerating and embellishing it. The tendency of the human mind to conceive everything in connection is so great that it unwittingly supplies the deficiencies of connection if the dream is recalled somewhat disconnectedly.”

“A dream is not irrationality or even pure irreason,”

Dugas

“As for the first, who could not confirm from his own experience that, in the creations and weavings of the genius of the dream, there sometimes comes to light a profundity and sincerity of emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clearness of view, a fineness of observation, and a readiness of wit, all which we should modestly have to deny that we possess as a constant property during the waking life? The dream has a wonderful poetry, an excellent allegory, an incomparable humour, and a charming irony. 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 represents for us earthly beauty in true heavenly radiance, the sublime in the highest majesty, the actually frightful in the most gruesome figure, and the ridiculous in the indescribably drastic comical; and at times we are so full of one of these impressions after awakening that we imagine that such a thing has never been offered to us by the real world.”

Haffner: “With rare exceptions . . . a virtuous person will be virtuous also in his dreams; he will resist temptation, and show no sympathy for hatred, envy, anger, and all other vices; while the sinful person will, as a rule, also find in his dreams the pictures which he has before him while awake.”

Scholz: “In the dream there is truth; despite all masking in pride or humility, we still recognise our own self. . . . The honest man does not commit any dishonourable offence even in the dream, or, if this does occur, he is terrified over it as if over something foreign to his nature. The Roman emperor who ordered one of his subjects to be executed because he dreamed that he cut off the emperor’s head, was not wrong in justifying his action on the ground that he who has such dreams must have similar thoughts while awake. About a thing that can have no place in our mind we therefore say significantly: ‘I would never dream of such a thing.’”

Pfaff,15 varying a familiar proverb, says: “Tell me for a time your dreams, and I will tel...

Haffner says: “We are not responsible for dreams because the basis upon which alone our life has truth and reality is removed from our thoughts. . . . Hence there can be no dream wishing and dream acting, no virtue or sin.”

Still the person is responsible for the sinful dream in so far as he brings it about indirectly. Just as in the waking state, it is his duty to cleanse his moral mind, particularly so before retiring to sleep.

“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.”

When we speak of the relation of the dream to mental disturbances, we may think of three different things: (1) Etiological and clinical relations, as when a dream represents or initiates a psychotic condition, or when it leaves such a condition behind it. (2) Changes to which the dream life is subjected in mental diseases. (3) Inner relations between the dream and the psychoses, analogies indicating an intimate relationship.

The analogy between the dream and the psychosis receives its full value only when, like a family resemblance, it is extended to the finer mimicry and to the individual peculiarities of facial expression.

“To him who is tortured by physical and mental sufferings the dream accords what has been denied him by reality, to wit, physical well-being and happiness; so the insane, too, see the bright pictures of happiness, greatness, sublimity, and riches. The supposed possession of estates and the imaginary fulfilment of wishes, the denial or destruction of which have just served as a psychic cause of the insanity, often form the main content of the delirium. The woman who has lost a dearly beloved child, in her delirium experiences maternal joys; the man who has suffered reverses of fortune deems himself immensely wealthy; and the jilted girl pictures herself in the bliss of tender love.”

Radestock

the scientific theories of the dream leave no room for a problem of dream interpretation, for, in the first place, according to these, the dream is no psychic action, but a somatic process which makes itself known to the psychic apparatus by means of signs.

But this disagreeable sensation, which occurs also in dreams, does not preclude the existence of a wish; everyone has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself. We are, on other grounds, justified in connecting the disagreeable character of all these dreams with the fact of dream disfigurement, and in concluding that these dreams are distorted, and that the wish-fulfilment in them is disguised until recognition is impossible for no other reason than that a repugnance, a will to suppress, exists in relation to the subject-matter of the dream or in relation to the wish which the dream creates. Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor. We shall take into consideration everything which the analysis of disagreeable dreams has brought to light if we reword our formula as follows: The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.

1. That the dream distinctly prefers impressions of the few days preceding (Robert, Strümpell, Hildebrandt, also Weed-Hallam). 2. That it makes its selection according to principles other than those of our waking memory, in that it recalls not what is essential and important, but what is subordinate and disregarded. 3. That it has at its disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood, and brings to light details from this period of life which again seem trivial to us, and which in waking life were considered long ago forgotten.

The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it.

In Andersen’s fairy tale we are told of two impostors who weave a costly garment for the Emperor, which, however, shall be visible only to the good and true. The Emperor goes forth clad in this invisible garment, and, the fabric serving as a sort of touchstone, all the people are frightened into acting as though they did not notice the nakedness of the Emperor. But such is the situation in our dream. It does not require great boldness to assume that the unintelligible dream content has suggested the invention of a state of undress in which the situation that is being remembered becomes significant. This situation has then been deprived of its original meaning, and placed at the service of other purposes.

The impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and the moralising tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of the fact that the latent dream content is occupied with forbidden wishes which have become the victims of repression.

This age of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking seems to our later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself is nothing but a composite phantasy from the childhood of the individual. It is for this reason, too, that in Paradise human beings are naked and are not ashamed until the moment arrives when the sense of shame and of fear are aroused; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin. Into this Paradise the dream can take us back every night;

The Oedipus Tyrannus is a so-called tragedy of fate; its tragic effect is said to be found in the opposition between the powerful will of the gods and the vain resistance of the human beings who are threatened with destruction; resignation to the will of God and confession of one’s own helplessness is the lesson which the deeply-moved spectator is to learn from the tragedy.

“Behold! this Oedipus, who unravelled the famous riddle and who was a man of eminent virtue; a man who trusted neither to popularity nor to the fortune of his citizens; see how great a storm of adversity hath at last overtaken him” (Act v. sc. 4).

This warning applies to ourselves and to our pride, to us, who have grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation since the years of our childhood. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.