The Interpretation of Dreams

by Sigmund Freud

Aristotle asserts that the dream is of demoniacal, though not of divine nature, which indeed contains deep meaning, if it be correctly interpreted. He was also acquainted with some of the characteristics of dream life, e.g., he knew that the dream turns slight sensations perceived during sleep into great ones ("one imagines that one walks through fire and feels hot, if this or that part of the body becomes slightly warmed"),

knows, 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 symbolizes reality."

"He who dreams turns his back upon the world of waking consciousness"

"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."

However strange the dream may seem, it can never detach itself from reality, and its most sublime as well as its most farcical structures must always borrow their elementary material either from what we have seen with our eyes in the outer world, or from what has previously found a place somewhere in our waking

thoughts; in other words, it must be taken from what we had already experienced either objectively or subjectively."

"Hypermnesic Dreams."

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.

"nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost"

manifold,

dream inciters.

Wherever the enumeration of dream sources is complete we ultimately find four forms, which are also utilized for the division of dreams:— I. External (objective) sensory stimuli. II. Internal (subjective) sensory stimuli. III. Internal (organic) physical excitations. IV. Purely psychical exciting sources.

"that the mind has remained in constant communication with the material world even during sleep."

The sensory stimuli which reach us during sleep may easily become the source of dreams.

induced

Napoleon I., while sleeping in a carriage, was awakened from a dream by an explosion which brought back to him the crossing of the Tagliamento and the bombarding of the Austrians, so that he started up crying, "We are undermined!"

He was sick, and remained in bed; his mother sat beside him. He then dreamed of the reign of terror at the time of the Revolution. He took part in

etiology

Here the luminous dust in the dark field of vision has taken on fantastic figures, and the many luminous points of which it consists are embodied by the dream in as many single pictures, which are looked upon as moving objects owing to the mobility of the luminous chaos.

" The subjective sensory stimuli as a source of the dream have the obvious advantage that unlike the objective stimuli they are independent of external accidents.

hypnogogic

Finally, the influence of sexual excitement on the dream content is perceptible enough in every one's experience, and lends the strongest support to the entire theory of the dream excitation through organic sensation.

indispensable

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

propounded

Our conception of the universe originates through the fact that our intellect recasts the impressions coming to it from without in the molds of time, space, and causality.

In what other way, then, could the intellect react upon these stimuli than by performing its characteristic function? It will transform the stimuli into figures, filling space and time, which move at the beginning of causality; and thus the dream originates.

K

Krauss39 found the origin of the dream as well as of deliria and delusions in the same element, viz.

the organically determined sensation.

Now organically determined sensations "may be divided into two classes: (1) those of the total feeling (general sensations), (2) specific sensations which are inherent in the principal systems of the vegetative organism, which may be divided into five groups: (a) the muscular, (b) the pneumatic, (c) the gastric, (d) the sexual, (e) the peripheral sensations (p. 33 of the second article)."

The awakened sensation evokes a presentation related to it in accordance with some law of association, and combines with this, thus forming an organic structure, towards which, however, consciousness does not maintain its normal attitude. For it does not bestow any attention on the sensation itself, but concerns itself entirely with the accompanying presentation; this is likewise the reason why the state of affairs in question should have been so long misunderstood

"transubstantiation of the feeling into dream pictures"

Scherner,58

organic exciting source reveals itself in the content of

the dream...

Strümpell,66

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.

The weakness of these plausible attempts at explanation evidently lies in the fact that without any further elucidation they allow this or that group of organic sensations to disappear from psychic perception or to obtrude themselves upon it until the constellation favorable for the explanation has been established.

impeded.