Freud - Complete Works (89 page)

   Maury (1878) brings forward some
new observations of dreams produced in himself. (A number of other
experiments were unsuccessful.)

   (1) His lips and the tip of his
nose were tickled with a feather. - He dreamt of a frightful form
of torture: a mask made of pitch was placed on his face and then
pulled off, so that it took his skin off with it,

   (2) A pair of scissors was
sharpened on a pair of pliers. -He heard bells pealing, followed by
alarm-bells, and he was back in the June days of 1848.

   (3) He was given some
eau-de-cologne to smell. -He was in Cairo, in Johann Maria
Farina’s shop. Some absurd adventures followed, which he
could not reproduce.

   (4) He was pinched lightly on the
neck. - He dreamt he was being given a mustard plaster and thought
of the doctor who had treated him as a child.

   (5) A hot iron was brought close
to his face. - He dreamt that the
‘
chauffeurs
’¹ had made their way into the
house and were forcing its inhabitants to give up their money by
sticking their feet into braziers of hot coal. The Duchess of
Abrantes, whose secretary he was in the dream, then appeared.

   (8) A drop of water was dropped
on his forehead. - He was in Italy, was sweating violently and was
drinking white Orvieto wine.

   (9) Light from a candle was
repeatedly shone upon him through a sheet of red paper. - He dreamt
of the weather and of the heat, and was once again in a storm he
had experienced in the English Channel.

  
¹
The ‘
chauffeurs
’ were
bands of robbers in La Vendée, who made use of the method of
torture described above.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

539

   Other attempts at producing dreams
experimentally have been reported by Hervey de Saint-Denys,
Weygandt (1893), and others.

   Many writers have commented upon
‘the striking facility with which dreams are able to weave a
sudden impression from the world of the senses into their own
structure so that it comes as what appears to be a pre-arranged
catastrophe that his been gradually led up to.’ (Hildebrandt,
1875,.) ‘In my youth’, the author goes on, ‘I
used to make use of an alarm-clock in order to be up regularly at a
fixed hour. It must have happened hundreds of times that the noise
produced by this instrument fitted into an ostensibly lengthy and
connected dream as though the whole dream had been leading up to
that one event and had reached its appointed end in what was a
logically indispensable climax.’

   I shall quote three of these
alarm-clock dreams presently in another connection.

   Volkelt (1875, 108 f.) writes:
‘A composer once dreamt that he was giving a class and was
trying to make a point clear to his pupils. When he had done, he
turned to one of the boys and asked him if he had followed. The boy
shouted back like a lunatic: "Oh ja! " He began to
reprove the boy angrily for shouting, but the whole class broke out
into cries first of "Orja!", then of "Eurjo!"
and finally of "Feuerjo!" At this point he was woken up
by actual cries of "Feuerjo!" in the street.’

   Garnier (1865) tells how Napoleon
I was woken by a bomb-explosion while he was asleep in his
carriage. He had a dream that he was once more crossing the
Tagliamento under the Austrian bombardment, and at last started up
with a cry: ‘We are undermined!’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

540

   A dream dreamt by Maury (1878,
161) has become famous. He was ill and lying in his room in bed,
with his mother sitting beside him, and dreamt that it was during
the Reign of Terror. After witnessing a number of frightful scenes
of murder, he was finally himself brought before the revolutionary
tribunal. There he saw Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville and
the rest of the grim heroes of those terrible days. He was
questioned by them, and, after a number of incidents which were not
retained in his memory, was condemned, and led to the place of
execution surrounded by an immense mob. He climbed on to the
scaffold and was bound to the plank by the executioner. It was
tipped up. The blade of the guillotine fell. He felt his head being
separated from his body, woke up in extreme anxiety and found that
the top of the bed had fallen down and had struck his cervical
vertebrae just in the way in which the blade of the guillotine
would actually have struck them.

   This dream was the basis of an
interesting discussion between Le Lorrain (1894) and Egger (1895)
in the
Revue philosophique
. The question raised was whether
and how it was possible for a dreamer to compress such an
apparently superabundant quantity of material into the short period
elapsing between his perceiving the rousing stimulus and his
waking.

   Examples of this kind leave an
impression that of all the sources of dreams the best confirmed are
objective sensory stimuli during sleep. Moreover they are the only
sources whatever taken into account by laymen. If an educated man,
who is unacquainted with the literature of dreams, is asked how
dreams arise, he will infallibly answer with a reference to some
instance he has come across in which a dream was explained by an
objective sensory stimulus discovered after waking. Scientific
enquiry, however, cannot stop there. It finds an occasion for
further questions in the observed fact that the stimulus which
impinges on the senses during sleep does not appear in the dream in
its
real
shape but is replaced by another image in some way
related to it. But the relation connecting the stimulus of the
dream to the dream which is its result is, to quote Maury’s
words (1854, 72); ‘une affinité quelconque, mais qui
n’est pas unique et exclusive.’ ¹ Let us consider
in this connection three of Hildebrandt’s alarm-clock dreams
(1875, 37 f.). The question they raise is why the same stimulus
should have provoked three such different dreams and why it should
have provoked these rather than any other.

  
¹
[‘An affinity of some kind, but one
which is not unique and exclusive.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

541

   ‘I dreamt, then, that one
spring morning I was going for a walk and was strolling through the
green fields till I came to a neighbouring village, where I saw the
villagers in their best clothes, with hymn-books under their arms,
flocking to the church. Of course! It was Sunday, and early morning
service would soon be beginning. I decided I would attend it; but
first, as I was rather hot from walking, I went into the churchyard
which surrounded the church, to cool down. While I was reading some
of the tombstones, I heard the bell-ringer climbing up the church
tower and at the top of it I now saw the little village bell which
would presently give the signal for the beginning of devotions. For
quite a while it hung there motionless, then it began to swing, and
suddenly its peal began to ring out clear and piercing - so clear
and piercing that it put an end to my sleep. But what was ringing
was the alarm-clock.

   ‘Here is another instance.
It was a bright winter’s day and the streets were covered
with deep snow. I had agreed to join a party for a sleigh-ride; but
I had to wait a long time before news came that the sleigh was at
the door. Now followed the preparations for getting in - the fur
rug spread out, the foot muff put ready- and at last I was sitting
in my seat. But even then the moment of departure was delayed till
a pull at the reins gave the waiting horses the signal. Then off
they started, and, with a violent shake, the sleigh bells broke
into their familiar jingle - with such violence, in fact, that in a
moment the cobweb of my dream was torn through. And once again it
was only the shrill sound of the alarm-clock.

   ‘And now yet a third
example. I saw a kitchen-maid, carrying several dozen plates piled
on one another, walking along the passage to the dining-room. The
column of china in her arms seemed to me in danger of losing its
balance. "Take care," I exclaimed, "or you’ll
drop the whole load." The inevitable rejoinder duly followed:
she was quite accustomed to that kind of job, and so on. And
meanwhile my anxious looks followed the advancing figure. Then -
just as I expected -she stumbled at the threshold and the fragile
crockery slipped and rattled and clattered in a hundred pieces on
the floor. But the noise continued without ceasing, and soon it
seemed no longer to be a clattering; it was turning into a ringing
- and the ringing, as my waking self now became aware, was only the
alarm-clock doing its duty.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

542

   The question of why the mind
mistakes the nature of objective sensory stimuli in dreams receives
almost the same answer from Strümpell (1877) as from Wundt
(1874): the mind receives stimuli that reach it during sleep under
conditions favourable to the formation of illusions. A sense
impression is recognized by us and correctly interpreted - that is,
it is placed in the group of memories to which, in accordance with
all our previous experiences, it belongs - provided the impression
is sufficiently strong, clear and lasting and provided we have
sufficient time at our disposal for considering the matter. If
these conditions are not fulfilled, we mistake the object which is
the source of the impression: we form an illusion about it.
‘If someone goes for a walk in the open country and has in
indeterminate perception of a distant object, he may at first
believe it to be a horse.’ On a closer view he may be led to
interpret it as a cow lying down, and the image may finally resolve
itself definitely into a group of people sitting on the ground. The
impressions received by the mind from external stimuli during sleep
are of a similarly indeterminate nature; and on their basis the
mind forms illusions, since a greater or smaller number of mnemic
images are aroused by the impression and it is through them that it
acquires its psychical value. From
which
of the many groups
of memories concerned the related images shall be aroused and
which
of the possible associative connections shall
accordingly be put into action - these questions too, on
Strümpell’s theory, are indeterminable and are, as it
were, left open to the arbitrary decision of the mind.

   At this point we are faced with a
choice between two alternatives. We may admit it as a fact that it
is impossible to follow the laws governing the formation of dreams
any further; and we may accordingly refrain from enquiring whether
there may not be other determinants governing the interpretation
put by the dreamer upon the illusion called up by the
sense-impression. Or, on the other hand, we may have a suspicion
that the sensory stimulus which impinges on the sleeper plays only
a modest part in generating his dream and that other factors
determine the choice of the mnemic images which are to be aroused
in him. In fact, if we examine Maury’s experimentally
produced dreams (which I have related in such detail for this very
reason), we shall be tempted to say that the experiment in fact
accounts for the origin of only one element of the dreams; the rest
of their content seems too self-contained, too definite in its
details, to be explicable solely by the necessity for fitting in
with the element experimentally introduced from outside. Indeed,
one begins to have doubts about the illusion theory and about the
power of objective impressions to give a shape to dreams when one
finds that those impressions are sometimes subjected in dreams to
the most peculiar and far-fetched interpretations. Thus Simon
(1888) tells us of a dream in which he saw some gigantic figures
seated at table and clearly heard the frightful snapping noise made
by their jaws coming together as they chewed. When he awoke he
heard the beat of a horse’s hooves galloping past his window.
The noise made by the horse’s hooves may have suggested ideas
from a group of memories connected with
Gulliver’s
Travels
- the giants of Brobdingnag and the virtuous Houyhnhnms
- if I may venture on an interpretation without the dreamer’s
assistance. Is it not probable, then, that the choice of such an
unusual group of memories as these was facilitated by motives other
than the objective stimulus alone!¹

   ¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] The
appearance of gigantic figures in a dream gives grounds for
supposing that some scene from the dreamer’s childhood is
involved. - [
Added
1925:] Incidentally, the interpretation
given in the text, pointing to a reminiscence of
Gulliver’s Travels
, is a good example of what an
interpretation ought
not
to be. The interpreter of a dream
should not give free play to his own ingenuity and neglect the
dreamer’s associations.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

543

2.  INTERNAL (SUBJECTIVE) SENSORY
EXCITATIONS

   In spite of any objections to the
contrary, it has to be admitted that the part played by objective
sensory excitations during sleep in provoking dreams remains
indisputable. And if such stimuli may appear, from their nature and
frequency, insufficient to explain
every
dream-image, we
shall be encouraged to seek for other sources of dreams analogous
to them in their operation. I cannot say when the idea first
cropped up of taking
internal
(subjective) excitations of
the sense organs into account alongside of the
external
sensory stimuli. It is, however, the case that this is done, more
or less explicitly, in all the more recent discussions of the
aetiology of dreams. ‘An essential part is also played, I
believe’, writes Wundt (1874, 657), ‘in the production
of the illusions that occur in dreams by the subjective visual and
auditory sensations which are familiar to us in the waking state as
the formless areas of luminosity which become visible to us when
our field of vision is darkened, as ringing or buzzing in the ears,
and so on. Especially important among these are the subjective
excitations of the retina. It is in this way that is to be
explained the remarkable tendency of dreams to conjure up before
the eyes similar or identical objects in large numbers. We see
before us innumerable birds or butterflies or fishes or coloured
beads or flowers, etc. Here the luminous dust in the darkened field
of vision has taken on a fantastic shape, and the numerous specks
of which it consists are incorporated into the dream as an equal
number of separate images; and these, on account of their mobility,
are regarded as
moving
objects. -This is no doubt also the
basis of the great fondness shown by dreams for animal figures of
every sort; for the immense variety of such forms can adjust itself
easily to the particular form assumed by the subjective luminous
images.’