Part 11

(b) A little girl of three and a quarter years went for the first time for a trip on the lake. When they came to land, she did not wish to leave the boat and cried bitterly; the time on the water had evidently gone too quickly for her. Next morning she said: “Last night I was sailing on the lake.” We may probably infer that this trip lasted longer.

(c) A boy five and a quarter years old was taken on an excursion to the Escherntal near Hallstatt. He had heard that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the Dachstein and had shown great interest in that mountain. From the lodgings in Aussee there was a fine view of the Dachstein, and with a telescope it was possible to make out the Simony Hut on top. The child had repeatedly endeavoured to see the hut through the telescope, but nobody knew whether he had succeeded. The excursion began in a mood of joyful expectation. Whenever a new mountain came into sight, the little boy asked: “Is that the Dachstein?” Every time his question was answered in the negative he grew more out of spirits and presently became silent and refused to climb a little way up to the waterfall with the others. He was thought to be overtired, but the next morning he said quite happily: “Last night I dreamt that we were in the Simony Hut.” So it was with this expectation that he had taken part in the excursion. The only detail he gave was one he had heard before: “You have to climb up steps for six hours.”

These three dreams will be enough to give us all the information we need at this point.

2. We see that these childhood dreams are not meaningless; they are complete, comprehensible mental acts. Remember the medical verdict about dreams, which I told you, and the comparison with unskilled fingers wandering over the keys of the piano. You cannot fail to notice how sharply this conception is contradicted by the children’s dreams I have quoted. Now it would surely be most extraordinary if a child were able to achieve the performance of complete mental acts during sleep, and the grown-up person in the same situation contented himself with spasmodic reactions. Besides, we have every reason for attributing better and deeper sleep to a child.

3. In these dreams there is no distortion and therefore they need no interpretation: the manifest and the latent content is here identical. From this we conclude that distortion is not essential to the nature of the dream. I expect that this statement will take a weight off your minds. Nevertheless, closer consideration forces us to admit that even in these dreams distortion is present, though in a very slight degree, that there is a certain difference between the manifest content and the latent dream-thought.

4. The child’s dream is a reaction to an experience of the previous day, which has left behind a regret, a longing, or an unsatisfied wish. In the dream we have the direct, undisguised fulfilment of this wish. Now consider our discussion as to the part played by the external or internal somatic stimuli as disturbers of sleep and begetters of dreams. We learnt certain quite definite facts on this point, but this explanation only held good in a small number of dreams. In these children’s dreams there is nothing to indicate the influence of such somatic stimuli; we can make no mistake about it, for the dreams are perfectly comprehensible and each can easily be grasped as a whole. But we need not on that account give up our notion of the stimulus as causing the dream. We can only ask why we forget from the outset that there are mental as well as bodily sleep-disturbing stimuli; surely we know that it is these which are mainly responsible for disturbing the sleep of the grown-up person, in that they hinder him from bringing about in himself the mental condition essential for sleep, i.e. the withdrawal of interest from the outside world. He wishes not to have any interruption in his life; he would prefer to continue working at whatever occupies him, and that is the reason why he does not sleep. The mental stimulus which disturbs sleep is therefore for a child the unsatisfied wish, and his reaction to this is a dream.

5. This takes us by a very short step to a conclusion about the function of dreams. If dreams are the reaction to a mental stimulus their value must lie in effecting a discharge of the excitation so that the stimulus is removed and sleep can continue. We do not yet know how this discharge through the dream is effected dynamically, but we notice already that dreams are not disturbers of sleep (the accusation commonly brought against them), but are guardians and deliverers of it from disturbing influences. True, we are apt to think we should have slept better if we had not dreamed, but there we are wrong: the truth is that without the help of the dream we should not have slept at all, and we owe it to the dream that we slept as well as we did. It could not help disturbing us a little, just as a policeman often cannot avoid making a noise when driving off disturbers of the peace who would wake us.

6. That dreams are brought about by a wish and that the content of the dream expresses this wish is one main characteristic of dreams. The other equally constant feature is that the dream does not merely give expression to a thought, but represents this wish as fulfilled, in the form of an hallucinatory experience. “I should like to sail on the lake,” runs the wish which gives rise to the dream; the content of the dream itself is: “I am sailing on the lake.” So that even in these simple dreams belonging to childhood there is still a difference between the latent and the manifest dream, and still a distortion of the latent dream-thought, in the translation of the thought into an experience. In interpreting a dream, we must first of all undo this process of alteration. If this is to be regarded as one of the most universal characteristics of all dreams, we then know how to translate the dream-fragment I quoted before: “I see my brother digging” does not mean “my brother is retrenching,” but “I wish my brother would retrench, he is to retrench.” Of the two universal characteristics here mentioned the second is obviously more likely to be acknowledged without opposition than the first. It is only by extensive investigations that we can make sure that what produces the dream must always be a wish and cannot sometimes be a preoccupation, a purpose, or reproach; but the other characteristic remains unaffected, namely, that the dream does not merely reproduce this stimulus, but, by a kind of living it through, removes it, sets it aside, relieves it.

7. In connection with these characteristics of dreams we may take up again our comparison between dreams and errors. In the latter we distinguished between a disturbing tendency and one which is disturbed, the error being a compromise between the two. Dreams fall into the same category; the disturbed tendency can only, of course, be the tendency to sleep, while the disturbing tendency resolves itself into the mental stimulus which we may call the wish (clamouring for gratification), since at present we know of no other mental stimulus disturbing sleep. Here again the dream is the result of a compromise; we sleep, and yet we experience the satisfaction of a wish; we gratify a wish and at the same time continue to sleep. Each achieves part-success and part-failure.

8. You will remember that at one point we hoped to find a path to an understanding of the problems presented by dreams in the fact that certain very transparent phantasy-formations are called “day-dreams.” Now these day-dreams are literally wish-fulfilments, fulfilments of ambitious or erotic wishes, which we recognize as such; they are, however, carried out in thought, and, however vividly imagined, they never take the form of hallucinatory experiences. Here, therefore, the less certain of the two main characteristics of the dream is retained, whereas the other, to which the condition of sleep is essential and which cannot be realized in waking life, is entirely lacking. So in language we find a hint that a wish-fulfilment is a main characteristic of dreams. And further, if the experience we have in dreams is only another form of imaginative representation, a form which becomes possible under the peculiar conditions of the sleeping state—“a nocturnal day-dream,” as we might call it—we understand at once how it is that the process of dream-formation can abrogate the stimulus operating at night and can bring gratification; for day-dreaming also is a mode of activity closely linked up with gratification, which is in fact the only reason why people practise it.

Again, there are other linguistic expressions, besides this, which imply the same thing. We are familiar with the proverbs: “The pig dreams of acorns and the goose of maize.” “What do chickens dream of? Of millet.” The proverb, you see, goes even lower in the scale than we do, beyond the child to the animal, and asserts that the content of dreams is the satisfaction of a want. And there are many phrases which seem to point to the same thing: we say “as beautiful as a dream.” “I should never have dreamt of such a thing.” “I never imagined that in my wildest dreams.” Here colloquial speech is clearly partial in its judgement. Of course there are also anxiety-dreams, and dreams the content of which is painful or indifferent, but these have not given rise to any special phrases. We do indeed speak of “bad” dreams, but by a “dream” pure and simple common usage always understands some sort of exquisite wish-fulfilment. Nor is there any proverb which attempts to assert that pigs or geese dream of being slaughtered!

It is, of course, inconceivable that this wish-fulfilling character of dreams should have escaped the notice of writers on the subject. On the contrary, they have very often remarked upon it; but it has not occurred to any of them to recognize this characteristic as universal, and to take it as the key to the explanation of dreams. We can easily imagine what may have deterred them, and later we will discuss the question.

Now see how much information we have gained, and that with hardly any trouble, from our study of children’s dreams! We have learnt that the function of dreams is to protect sleep; that they arise out of two conflicting tendencies, of which the one, the desire for sleep, remains constant, whilst the other endeavours to satisfy some mental stimulus; that dreams are proved to be mental acts, rich in meaning; that they have two main characteristics, i.e., they are wish-fulfilments and hallucinatory experiences. And meanwhile we could almost have forgotten that we were studying psycho-analysis. Apart from the connection we have made between dreams and errors our work has not borne any specific stamp. Any psychologist knowing nothing of the assumptions of psycho-analysis could have given this explanation of children’s dreams. Why has no one done so?

If only all dreams were of the infantile type the problem would be solved and our task already achieved, and that without questioning the dreamer, referring to the unconscious or having recourse to the process of free association. Clearly it is in this direction that we must continue our work. We have already repeatedly found that characteristics alleged to be universally valid have afterwards proved to hold good only for a certain kind and a limited number of dreams. So the question we now have to decide is whether the common characteristics revealed by children’s dreams are any more stable than these, and whether they hold also for those dreams whose meaning is not obvious and in whose manifest content we can recognize no reference to a wish remaining from the day before. Our idea is that these other dreams have undergone a good deal of distortion and on that account we must refrain from immediate judgement. We suspect too that to unravel this distortion we shall need the help of psycho-analytic technique, which we could dispense with while learning, as we have just now done, the meaning of children’s dreams.

There is yet one other class of dreams at least in which no distortion is present and which, like children’s dreams, we easily recognize to be wish-fulfilments. These are dreams which are occasioned all through life by imperative physical needs—hunger, thirst, sexual desire—and are wish-fulfilments in the sense of being reactions to internal somatic stimuli. Thus I have on record the dream of a little girl, one year and seven months old, which consisted of a kind of menu, together with her name (Anna F ..., strawberries, bilberries, egg, pap), the dream being a reaction to a day of fasting, enforced on account of indigestion due to eating the fruit which appeared twice in the dream. At the same time her grandmother—their combined ages totalled seventy—was obliged, owing to a floating kidney, to go without food for a day and dreamt that night that she had been invited out and had had the most tempting delicacies set before her. Observations on prisoners who are left to go hungry, and on people who suffer privations whilst travelling or on expeditions, show that in these circumstances they regularly dream about the satisfaction of their wants. Thus Otto Nordenskjöld in his book on the Antarctic (1904) tells us of the band of men in whose company he spent the winter (Vol. I, p. 336): “Our dreams showed very clearly the direction our thoughts were taking. Never had we dreamt so frequently and so vividly as at that time. Even those of our comrades who usually dreamt but rarely had now long stories to tell in the mornings when we exchanged our latest experiences in this realm of phantasy. All the dreams were about that outside world now so far away, but often they included a reference to our condition at the time ... eating and drinking were, incidentally, the pivot on which our dreams most often turned. One of us, who was particularly good at going out to large dinners in his sleep, was delighted when he could tell us in the morning that he had had a three-course dinner. Another dreamt of tobacco, whole mountains of tobacco; another of a ship which came full sail over the water, at last clear of ice. Yet another dream deserves mention: the postman came with the letters and gave a long explanation of why they were so late; he said he had made a mistake in delivering them, and had had great trouble in getting them back again. Of course, things even more impossible occupied our minds in sleep, but the lack of imagination in almost all the dreams which I dreamt myself or heard the others tell was quite striking. It would certainly be of great psychological interest if we had a record of all these dreams. You can imagine how we longed for sleep, when it offered each one of us all that he most eagerly desired.” Another quotation, this time from Du Prel: “Mungo Park, when nearly dying of thirst on a journey in Africa, dreamt continually of the well-watered hills and valleys of his home. So Trenck, tormented with hunger in the redoubt at Magdebourg, saw himself in his dreams surrounded by sumptuous meals; and George Back, who took part in Franklin’s first expedition, when on the point of dying of hunger owing to their terrible privations, dreamt regularly of abundant food to eat.”

Anyone who has made himself thirsty at night by eating highly-seasoned dishes at supper is likely to dream of drinking. Of course it is not possible to relieve acute hunger or thirst by dreaming; in that case we awake thirsty and are obliged to drink real water. The service of the dream is here of little practical account, but it is none the less clear that it was called up for the purpose of protecting sleep from the stimulus impelling us to wake up and act. Where the intensity of the desire is less, ‘satisfaction’-dreams do often answer the purpose.

In the same way, when the stimulus is that of sexual desire the dream provides satisfaction, but of a kind which shows peculiarities worthy of mention. Since it is a characteristic of the sexual impulse that it is a degree less dependent on its object than are hunger and thirst, the satisfaction in a pollution-dream can be real; and, in consequence of certain difficulties in the relation to the object (which will be discussed later), it particularly often happens that the real satisfaction is yet connected with a vague or distorted dream-content. This peculiarity of pollution-dreams makes them, as O. Rank has observed, suitable objects for the study of dream-distortion. Moreover, with adults, dreams of desire usually contain besides the satisfaction something else, springing from a purely mental source and requiring interpretation if it is to be understood.

We do not maintain, by the way, that wish-fulfilment dreams of the infantile type occur in adults solely as reactions to the imperative desires I have mentioned. We are equally familiar with short clear dreams of this type, occasioned by certain dominating situations and unquestionably produced by mental stimuli. For example, there are ‘impatience’-dreams in which someone making preparations for a journey, for a theatrical performance in which he is specially interested, or for a lecture or a visit, has his expectations prematurely realized in a dream, and finds himself the night before the actual experience already at his journey’s end, at the theatre, or talking to the friend he is going to visit. Or again, there is the ‘comfort’-dream, rightly so-called, in which someone who wants to go on sleeping dreams that he has already got up, that he is washing, or is at school, while all the time he is really continuing his sleep, meaning that he would rather dream of getting up than do so in reality. In these dreams the desire for sleep, which we have recognized as regularly participating in dream-formation, expresses itself plainly and appears as their actual originator. The need for sleep ranks itself quite rightly with the other great physical needs.

I would refer you at this point to the reproduction of a picture by Schwind in the Schack Gallery at Munich and would ask you to notice how correctly the artist has realized the way in which a dream arises out of a dominating situation. The picture is called The Prisoner’s Dream, and the subject of the dream must undoubtedly be his escape. It is a happy thought that the prisoner is to escape by the window, for it is through the window that the ray of light has entered and roused him from sleep. The gnomes standing one above the other no doubt represent the successive positions he would have to assume in climbing up to the window; and, if I am not mistaken and do not attribute too much intentional design to the artist, the features of the gnome at the top, who is filing the grating through (the very thing the prisoner himself would like to do), resemble the man’s own.

I have said that in all dreams, other than those of children and such as conform to the infantile type, we encounter the obstacle of distortion. We cannot immediately say whether they too are wish-fulfilments, as we are inclined to suppose, nor can we guess from their manifest content in what mental stimulus they originate, or prove that they, like the others, endeavour to remove or relieve the stimulus. They must, in fact, be interpreted, i.e. translated; the process of distortion must be reversed, and the manifest content replaced by the latent thought, before we can make any definite pronouncement whether what we have found out about infantile dreams may claim to hold good for all dreams alike.

NINTH LECTURE THE DREAM-CENSORSHIP

Our study of children’s dreams has taught us how dreams originate, what their essential character is, and what their function. Dreams are the means of removing, by hallucinatory satisfaction, mental stimuli that disturb sleep. It is true that with the dreams of adults we have been able to explain one group only, those which we termed dreams of the infantile type. We do not yet know how it may be with the others, neither do we understand them. The result we have arrived at already is one, however, of which the significance is not to be under-estimated. Every time that we fully understand a dream it proves to be a wish-fulfilment; and this coincidence cannot be accidental or unimportant.

Dreams of another type are assumed by us to be distorted substitutes for an unknown content, which first of all has to be traced; we have various grounds for this assumption, amongst others the analogy to our conception of errors. Our next task is to investigate and understand this dream-distortion.

It is dream-distortion which makes dreams seem strange and incomprehensible. There are several things we want to know about it: first, whence it comes (its dynamics), secondly, what it does, and finally, how it does it. Further, we can say that distortion is the production of the dream-work. Let us describe the dream-work and trace out the forces in it.

Now let me tell you a dream recorded by a lady well-known in psycho-analytical circles, who said that the dreamer was an elderly woman, highly cultivated and held in great esteem. The dream was not analysed and our informant observed that for psycho-analysts it needed no interpreting. Nor did the dreamer herself interpret it, but she criticized it and condemned it in such a way as though she knew what it meant. “Imagine,” she said, “such abominable nonsense being dreamt by a woman of fifty, whose only thought day and night is concern for her child.”

I will now tell you the dream, which is about “love service in war-time.” ‘She went to the First Military Hospital and said to the sentinel at the gate that she must speak to the physician-in-chief (giving a name which she did not know), as she wished to offer herself for service in the hospital. In saying this, she emphasized the word service in such a way that the sergeant at once perceived that she was speaking of “love service.” As she was an old lady, he let her pass after some hesitation, but instead of finding the chief physician, she came to a large gloomy room, where a number of officers and army doctors were standing or sitting around a long table. She turned to a staff doctor and told him her proposal; he soon understood her meaning. The words she said in her dream were: “I and countless other women and girls of Vienna are ready for the soldiers, officers or men, to....” This ended in a murmur. She saw, however, by the half-embarrassed, half-malicious expressions of the officers that all of them grasped her meaning. The lady continued: “I know our decision sounds odd, but we are in bitter earnest. The soldier on the battlefield is not asked whether he wishes to die or not.” There followed a minute of painful silence; then the staff doctor put his arm round her waist and said: “Madam, supposing it really came to this, that ... (murmur.)” She withdrew herself from his arm, thinking: “They are all alike,” and replied: “Good heavens, I am an old woman and perhaps it won’t happen to me. And one condition must be observed: age must be taken into account, so that an old woman and a young lad may not ... (murmur); that would be horrible.” The staff doctor said: “I quite understand”; but some of the officers, amongst them one who as a young man had made love to her, laughed loudly, and the lady asked to be taken to the physician-in-chief, whom she knew, so that everything might be put straight. It then struck her, to her great consternation, that she did not know his name. The staff doctor, however, with the utmost respect and courtesy, showed her the way to the second floor, up a very narrow iron spiral staircase leading direct from the room where they were to the upper storeys. As she went up, she heard an officer say: “That is a tremendous decision, no matter whether she is young or old; all honour to her!” With the feeling that she was simply doing her duty, she went up an endless staircase.’

This dream was repeated twice within a few weeks, with alterations here and there which, as the lady remarked, were quite unimportant and entirely meaningless.

The way in which this dream progresses corresponds to the course of a day-dream; there are only a few places where an interruption occurs, and many individual points in its content might have been cleared up by enquiry: this, however, as you know, was not undertaken. But the most striking and to us the most interesting thing about it is the occurrence of many gaps, not in the recollection, but in the content. In three places the latter is, as it were, blotted out; where these gaps occur the speeches are interrupted by a murmur. As we did not analyse the dream, we have, strictly speaking, no right to say anything about its meaning; but there are certain indications from which we may draw conclusions, e.g. the words “love service”; and, above all, the broken speeches immediately preceding the murmurs require completion of a kind which admits of only one construction. If we do so complete them a phantasy results, in which the content is that the dreamer is ready at the call of duty to offer herself to gratify the sexual needs of the troops, irrespective of rank. This is certainly shocking, a model of a shamelessly libidinous phantasy, but—the dream says nothing about this. Just where the context demands this confession, there is in the manifest dream an indistinct murmur: something has been lost or suppressed.