Freud - Complete Works (86 page)
The questions raised by a
scientific enquiry into the phenomena of dreams as such may be
grouped under the headings which follow, though a certain amount of
overlapping can not be avoided.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
521
(A)
THE RELATION OF DREAMS TO WAKING
LIFE
The unsophisticated waking
judgement of someone who has just woken from sleep assumes that his
dreams, even if they did not themselves come from another world,
had at all events carried him off into another world. The old
physiologist Burdach (1838, 499), to whom we owe a careful and
shrewd account of the phenomena of dreams, has given expression to
this conviction in a much-quoted passage: ‘In dreams, daily
life, with its labours and pleasures, its joys and pains, is never
repeated. On the contrary, dreams have as their very aim to free us
from it. Even when our whole mind has been filled with something,
when we are torn by some deep sorrow or when all our intellectual
power is absorbed in some problem, a dream will do no more than
enter into the tone of our mood and represent reality in
symbols.’ I. H. Fichte (1864, 1, 541), in the same sense,
actually speaks of ‘complementary dreams’ and describes
them as one of the secret benefactions of the self-healing nature
of the spirit. Strümpell (1877, 16) writes to similar effect
in his study on the nature and origin of dreams a work which is
widely and deservedly held in high esteem: ‘A man who dreams
is removed from the world of waking consciousness.’ So too
(ibid., 17): ‘In dreams our memory of the ordered contents of
waking consciousness and of its normal behaviour is as good as
completely lost.’ And again (ibid., 19) he writes that
‘the mind is cut off in dreams, almost without memory, from
the ordinary content and affairs of waking life.’
The preponderant majority of
writers, however, take a contrary view of the relation of dreams to
waking life. Thus Haffner (1887, 245): ‘In the first place,
dreams carry on waking life. Our dreams regularly attach themselves
to the ideas that have been in our consciousness shortly before.
Accurate observation will almost always find a thread which
connects a dream with the experiences of the previous day.’
Weygandt (1893, 6) specifically contradicts Burdach’s
statement which I have just quoted: ‘For it may often, and
apparently in the majority of dreams, be observed that they
actually lead us back to ordinary life instead of freeing us from
it.’ Maury (1878, 51) advances a concise formula: ‘Nous
rêvons de ce que nous avons vu, dit, désiré ou
fait’ ¹; while Jessen, in his book on psychology (1855,
530), remarks at somewhat greater length: ‘the content of a
dream is invariably more or less determined by the individual
personality of the dreamer, by his age, sex, class, standard of
education and habitual way of living, and by the events and
experiences of his whole previous life.’
¹
[‘We dream of what we have seen,
said, desired or done.’]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
522
The most uncompromising attitude
on this question is adopted by J. G. E. Maass, the philosopher
(1805 ), quoted by Winterstein (1912): ‘Experience confirms
our view that we dream most frequently of the things on which our
warmest passions are centred. And this shows that our passions must
have an influence on the production of our dreams. The ambitious
man dreams of the laurels he has won (or imagines he has won) or of
those he has still to win; while the lover is busied in his dreams
with the object of his sweet hopes. . . . All the
sensual desires and repulsions that slumber in the heart can, if
anything sets them in motion, cause a dream to arise from the ideas
that are associated with them or cause those ideas to intervene in
a dream that is already present.’
The same view was taken in
antiquity on the dependence of the content of dreams upon waking
life. Radestock (1879, 134) tells us how before Xerxes started on
his expedition against Greece, he was given sound advice of a
discouraging kind but was always urged on again by his dreams;
whereupon Artabanus, the sensible old Persian interpreter of
dreams, observed to him pertinently that as a rule dream-pictures
contain what the waking man already thinks.
Lucretius’ didactic poem
De rerum natura
contains the following passage (IV,
962):
Et quo quisque fere studio devinctus adhaeret
aut quibus in rebus multum sumus ante morat
atque in ea ratione fuit contenta magis mens,
in somnis eadem plerumque videmur obire;
causidici causas agere et componere leges,
induperatores pugnare ac proelia obire . . .
¹
¹
[‘And whatever be the pursuit to
which one clings with devotion, whatever the things on which we
have been occupied much in the past, the mind being thus more
intent upon that pursuit, it is generally the same things that we
seem to encounter in dreams: pleaders to plead their cause and
collate laws, generals to contend and engage
battle . . .’]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
523
Cicero (
De divinatione
,
II, lxvii, 140) writes to exactly the same effect as Maury so many
years later: ‘Maximeque reliquiae rerum earum moventur in
animis et agitantur de quibus vigilantes aut cogitavimus aut
egimus.’ ¹
The contradiction between these
two views upon the relation between dream-life and waking life
seems in fact insoluble. It is therefore relevant at this point to
recall the discussion of the subject by Hildebrandt (1875, 8 ff.),
who believes that it is impossible to describe the characteristics
of dreams at all except by means of ‘a series of contrasts
which seem to sharpen into contradictions’. ‘The first
of these contrasts’, he writes, ‘ is afforded on the
one hand by the completeness with which dreams are secluded and
separated from real and actual life and on the other hand by their
constant encroachment upon each other and their constant mutual
dependence. A dream is something completely severed from the
reality experienced in waking life, something, as one might say,
with an hermetically sealed existence of its own, and separated
from real life by an impassable gulf. It sets us free from reality,
extinguishes our normal memory of it and places us in another world
and in a quite other life-story which in essentials has nothing to
do with our real one. . . .’ Hildebrandt goes
on to show how when we fall asleep our whole being with all its
forms of existence ‘disappears, as it were, through an
invisible trap-door’. Then, perhaps, the dreamer may make a
sea-voyage to St. Helena in order to offer Napoleon, who is a
prisoner there, a choice bargain in Moselle wines. He is received
most affably by the ex-Emperor and feels almost sorry when he wakes
and the interesting illusion is destroyed. But let us compare the
situation in the dream, proceeds Hildebrandt, with reality. The
dreamer has never been a wine-merchant and has never wished to be.
He has never gone on a sea-voyage, and if he did, St. Helena would
be the last place he would choose to go to. He nourishes no
sympathetic feelings whatever towards Napoleon, but on the contrary
a fierce patriotic hatred. And, on top of all the rest, the dreamer
was not even born when Napoleon died on the island; so that to have
any personal relations with him was beyond the bounds of
possibility. Thus the dream experience appears as something alien
inserted between two sections of life which are perfectly
continuous and consistent with each other.
¹
[‘Then especially do the remnants of
our waking thoughts and deeds move and stir within the
soul.’]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
524
‘And yet’, continues
Hildebrandt, ‘what appears to be the contrary of this is
equally true and correct. In spite of everything, the most intimate
relationship goes hand in hand, I believe, with the seclusion and
separation. We may even go so far as to say that whatever dreams
may offer, they derive their material from reality and from the
intellectual life that revolves around that
reality. . . . Whatever strange results they may
achieve, they can never in fact get free from the real world; and
their most sublime as well as their most ridiculous structures must
always borrow their basic material either from what has passed
before our eyes in the world of the senses or from what has already
found a place somewhere in the course of our waking thoughts - in
other words from what we have already experienced either externally
or internally.’
The Interpretation Of Dreams
525
(B)
THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS - MEMORY IN
DREAMS
All the material making up the
content of a dream is in some way derived from experience, that is
to say, has been reproduced or remembered in the dream - so much at
least we may regard as an undisputed fact. But it would be a
mistake to suppose that a connection of this kind between the
content of a dream and reality is bound to come to light easily, as
an immediate result of comparing them. The connection requires, on
the contrary, to be looked for diligently, and in a whole quantity
of cases it may long remain hidden. The reason for this lies in a
number of peculiarities which are exhibited by the faculty of
memory in dreams and which, though generally remarked upon, have
hitherto resisted explanation. It will be worth while to examine
these characteristics more closely.
It may happen that a piece of
material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state
we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or
experience. We remember, of course, having dreamt the thing in
question, but we cannot remember whether or when we experienced it
in real life. We are thus left in doubt as to the source which has
been drawn upon by the dream and are tempted to believe that dreams
have a power of independent production. Then at last, often after a
long interval, some fresh experience recalls the lost memory of the
other event and at the same time reveals the source of the dream.
We are thus driven to admit that in the dream we knew and
remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking
memory.¹
A particularly striking example
of this is given by Delboeuf from his own experience. He saw in a
dream the courtyard of his house covered with snow and found two
small lizards half-frozen and buried under it. Being an
animal-lover, he picked them up, warmed them and carried them back
to the little hole in the masonry where they belonged. He further
gave them a few leaves of a small fern which grew on the wall and
of which, as he knew, they were very fond. In the dream he knew the
name of the plant:
Asplenium ruta muralis
. The dream
proceeded and, after a digression, came back to the lizards.
Delboeuf then saw to his astonishment two new ones which were busy
on the remains of the fern. He then looked round him and saw a
fifth and then a sixth lizard making their way to the hole in the
wall, until the whole roadway was filled with a procession of
lizards, all moving in the same direction . . . and
so on.
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Vaschide
(1911) remarks that it has often been observed that in dreams
people speak foreign language more fluently and correctly than in
waking life.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
526
When he was awake, Delbouf knew
the Latin names of very few plants and an
Asplenium
was not
among them. To his great surprise he was able to confirm the fact
that a fern of this name actually exists. Its correct name is
Asplenium ruta muraria
, which had been slightly distorted in
the dream. It was hardly possible that this could be a coincidence;
and it remained a mystery to Delboeuf how he had acquired his
knowledge of the name ‘
Asplenium
’ in his
dream.
The dream occurred in 1862.
Sixteen years later, while the philosopher was on a visit to one of
his friends, he saw a little album of pressed flowers of the sort
that are sold to foreigners as mementoes in some parts of
Switzerland. A recollection began to dawn on him - he opened the
herbarium, found the
Asplenium
of his dream and saw its
Latin name written underneath it in his own handwriting. The facts
could now be established. In 1860 (two years before the lizard
dream) a sister of this same friend had visited Delboeuf on her
honeymoon. She had with her the album, which was to be a gift to
her brother, and Delboeuf took the trouble to write its Latin name
under each dried plant, at the dictation of a botanist.
Good luck, which made this
example so well worth recording, enabled Delboeuf to trace yet
another part of the content of the dream to its forgotten source.
One day in 1877 he happened to take up an old volume of an
illustrated periodical and in it he found a picture of the whole
procession of lizards which he had dreamed of in 1862. The volume
was dated 1861 and Delbouf remembered having been a subscriber to
the paper from its first number.
