Freud - Complete Works (188 page)

   The common element in all these
children’s dreams is obvious. All of them fulfilled wishes
which were active during the day but had remained unfulfilled. The
dreams were simple and undisguised
wish-fulfilments
.

On Dreams

1063

   Here is another child’s
dream, which, though at first sight it is not quite easy to
understand, is also nothing more than a wish-fulfilment. A little
girl not quite four years old had been brought to town from the
country because she was suffering from an attack of poliomyelitis.
She spent the night with an aunt who had no children, and was put
to sleep in a large bed - much too large for her, of course. Next
morning she said she had had a dream that
the bed had been far
too small for her, and that there has been no room for her in
it
. It is easy to recognize this dream as a wishful dream if we
remember that children very often express a wish ‘
to be
big
.’ The size of the bed was a disagreeable reminder of
her smallness to the would-be big child; she therefore corrected
the unwelcome relation in her dream, and grew so big that even the
large bed was too small for her.

   Even when the content of
children’s dreams becomes complicated and subtle, there is
never any difficulty in recognizing them as wish-fulfilments. An
eight-year-old boy had a dream that he was driving in a chariot
with Achilles and that Diomede was the charioteer. It was shown
that the day before he had been deep in a book of legends about the
Greek heroes; and it was easy to see that he had taken the heroes
as his models and was sorry not to be living in their days.

   This small collection throws a
direct light on a further characteristic of children’s
dreams: their connection with daytime life. The wishes which are
fulfilled in them are carried over from daytime and as a rule from
the day before, and in waking life they have been accompanied by
intense emotion. Nothing unimportant or indifferent, or nothing
which would strike a child as such, finds its way into the content
of their dreams.

On Dreams

1064

   Numerous examples of dreams of
this infantile type can be found occurring in adults as well,
though, as I have said, they are usually brief in content. Thus a
number of people regularly respond to a stimulus of thirst during
the night with dreams of drinking, which thus endeavour to get rid
of the stimulus and enable sleep to continue. In some people
‘dreams of convenience’ of this kind often occur before
waking, when the necessity for getting up presents itself. They
dream that they are already up and at the washing-stand, or that
they are already at the school or office where they are due at some
particular time. During the night before a journey we not
infrequently dream of having arrived at our destination; so too,
before a visit to the theatre or a party, a dream will often
anticipate the pleasure that lies ahead - out of impatience, as it
were. In other dreams the wish-fulfilment is expressed a stage more
indirectly: some connection or implication must be established -
that is, the work of interpretation must be begun - before the
wish-fulfilment can be recognized. A man told me, for instance,
that his young wife had had a dream that her period had started. I
reflected that if this young woman had missed her period she must
have known that she was faced with a pregnancy. Thus when she
reported her dream she was announcing her pregnancy, and the
meaning of the dream was to represent as fulfilled her wish that
the pregnancy might be postponed for a while. Under unusual or
extreme conditions dreams of this infantile character are
particularly common. Thus the leader of a polar expedition has
recorded that the members of his expedition, while they were
wintering in the ice-field and living on a monotonous diet and
short rations, regularly dreamt like children of large meals, of
mountains of tobacco, and of being back at home.

   It by no means rarely happens
that in the course of a comparatively long, complicated and on the
whole confused dream one particularly clear portion stands out,
which contains an unmistakable wish-fulfilment, but which is bound
up with some other, unintelligible material. But in the case of
adults, anyone with some experience in analysing their dreams will
find to his surprise that even those dreams which have an
appearance of being transparently clear are seldom as simple as
those of children, and that behind the obvious wish-fulfilment some
other meaning may lie concealed.

   It would indeed be a simple and
satisfactory solution of the riddle of dreams if the work of
analysis were to enable us to trace even the meaningless and
confused dreams of adults back to the infantile type of fulfilment
of an intensely felt wish of the previous day. There can be no
doubt, however, that appearances do not speak in favour of such an
expectation. Dreams are usually full of the most indifferent and
strangest material, and there is no sign in their content of the
fulfilment of any wish.

On Dreams

1065

   But before taking leave of
infantile dreams with their undisguised wish-fulfilments, I must
not omit to mention one principal feature of dreams, which has long
been evident and which emerges particularly clearly precisely in
this group. Every one of these dreams can be replaced by an
optative clause: ‘Oh, if only the trip on the lake had lasted
longer!’ - ‘If only I were already washed and
dressed!’ - ‘If only I could have kept the cherries
instead of giving them to Uncle!’ But dreams give us more
than such optative clauses. They show us the wish as already
fulfilled; they represent its fulfilment as real and present; and
the material employed in dream-representation consists principally,
though not exclusively, of situations and of sensory images, mostly
of a visual character. Thus, even in this infantile group, a
species of transformation, which deserves to be described as
dream-work, is not completely absent:
a thought expressed in the
optative has been replaced by a representation in the present
tense
.

On Dreams

1066

IV

   We shall be inclined to suppose
that a transformation of some such kind has occurred even in
confused dreams, though we cannot tell whether what has been
transformed was an optative in their case too. There are, however,
two passages in the specimen dream which I have reported, and with
whose analysis we have made some headway, that give us reason to
suspect something of the kind. The analysis showed that my wife had
concerned herself with some other people at table, and that I had
found this disagreeable; the dream contained precisely the opposite
of this - the person who took the place of my wife was turning her
whole attention to me. But a disagreeable experience can give rise
to no more suitable wish than that its opposite might have occurred
- which was what the dream represented as fulfilled. There was an
exactly similar relation between the bitter thought revealed in the
analysis that I had never had anything free of cost and the remark
made by the woman in the dream - ‘You’ve always had
such beautiful eyes.’ Some part of the opposition between the
manifest and latent content of dreams is thus attributable to
wish-fulfilment.

   But another achievement of the
dream-work, tending as it does to produce incoherent dreams, is
even more striking. If in any particular instance we compare the
number of ideational elements or the space taken up in writing them
down in the case of the dream and of the dream-thoughts to which
the analysis leads us and of which traces are to be found in the
dream itself, we shall be left in no doubt that the dream-work has
carried out a work of compression or
condensation
on a large
scale. It is impossible at first to form any judgement of the
degree of this condensation; but the deeper we plunge into a
dream-analysis the more impressive it seems. From every element in
a dream’s content associative threads branch out in two or
more directions; every situation in a dream seems to be put
together out of two or more impressions or experiences. For
instance, I once had a dream of a sort of swimming-pool, in which
the bathers were scattering in all directions; at one point on the
edge of the pool someone was standing and bending towards one of
the people bathing, as though to help her out of the water. The
situation was put together from a memory of an experience I had had
at puberty and from two paintings, one of which I had seen shortly
before the dream. One was a picture from Schwind’s series
illustrating the legend of Mélusine, which showed the
water-nymphs surprised in their pool (cf. the scattering bathers in
the dream); the other was a picture of the Deluge by an Italian
Master; while the little experience remembered from my puberty was
of having seen the instructor at a swimming-school helping a lady
out of the water who had stopped in until after the time set aside
for men bathers. -In the case of the example which I chose for
interpretation, an analysis of the situation led me to a small
series of recollections each of which contributed something to the
content of the dream. In the first place, there was the episode
from the time of my engagement of which I have already spoken. The
pressure upon my hand under the table, which was a part of that
episode, provided the dream with the detail ‘under the
table’ - a detail which I had to add as an afterthought to my
memory of the dream. In the episode itself there was of course no
question of ‘turning to me’; the analysis showed that
this element was the fulfilment of a wish by presenting the
opposite of an actual event, and that it related to my wife’s
behaviour at the table d’hôte. But behind this recent
recollection there lay concealed an exactly similar and far more
important scene from the time of our engagement, which estranged us
for a whole day. The intimate laying of a hand on my knee belonged
to a quite different context and was concerned with quite other
people. This element in the dream was in turn the starting-point of
two separate sets of memories - and so on.

   The material in the
dream-thoughts which is packed together for the purpose of
constructing a dream-situation must of course in itself be
adaptable for that purpose. There must be one or more
common
elements
in all the components. The dream-work then proceeds
just as Francis Galton did in constructing his family photographs.
It superimposes, as it were, the different components upon one
another. The common element in them then stands out clearly in the
composite picture, while contradictory details more or less wipe
one another out. This method of production also explains to some
extent the varying degrees of characteristic vagueness shown by so
many elements in the content of dreams. Basing itself on this
discovery, dream-interpretation has laid down the following rule:
In analysing a dream, if an uncertainty can be resolved into an
‘either-or’, we must replace it for purposes of
interpretation by an ‘and’, and take each of the
apparent alternatives as an independent starting-point for a series
of associations.

On Dreams

1067

   If a common element of this kind
between the dream-thoughts is not present, the dream-work sets
about
creating
one, so that it may be possible for the
thoughts to be given a common representation in the dream. The most
convenient way of bringing together two dream-thoughts which, to
start with, have nothing in common, is to alter the verbal form of
one of them, and thus bring it half-way to meet the other, which
may be similarly clothed in a new form of words. A parallel process
is involved in hammering out a rhyme, where a similar sound has to
be sought for in the same way as a common element is in our present
case. A large part of the dream-work consists in the creation of
intermediate thoughts of this kind which are often highly
ingenious, though they frequently appear far-fetched; these then
form a link between the composite picture in the manifest content
of the dream and the dream-thoughts, which are themselves diverse
both in form and essence and have been determined by the exciting
factors of the dream. The analysis of our sample dream affords us
an instance of this kind in which a thought has been given a new
form in order to bring it into contact with another which is
essentially foreign to it. In carrying out the analysis I came upon
the following thought: ‘
I should like to get something
sometimes without paying for it
’. But in that form the
thought could not be employed in the dream-content. It was
therefore given a fresh form: ‘
I should like to get some
enjoyment without cost
["
Kosten
"].’¹ Now the word
‘
Kosten
’ in its second sense fits into the
‘table d’hôte’ circle of ideas, and could
thus be represented in the ‘
spinach
’ which was
served in the dream. When a dish appears at our table and the
children refuse it, their mother begins by trying persuasion, and
urges them ‘
just to taste
[‘
kosten
’]
a bit of it
’. It may
seem strange that the dream-work should make such free use of
verbal ambiguity, but further experience will teach us that the
occurrence is quite a common one.

  
¹
[The German word
‘
Kosten
’ means both ‘cost’ and
‘to taste.’]

On Dreams

1068

   The process of condensation
further explains certain constituents of the content of dreams
which are peculiar to them and are not found in waking ideation.
What I have in mind are ‘collective’ and
‘composite figures’ and the strange ‘composite
structures’, which are creations not unlike the composite
animals invented by the folk-imagination of the Orient. The latter,
however, have already assumed stereotyped shapes in our thought,
whereas in dreams fresh composite forms are being perpetually
constructed in an inexhaustible variety. We are all of us familiar
with such structures from our own dreams.