Freud - Complete Works (123 page)

   The dreams quoted in earlier
chapters included several which might serve as instances of the
working-over of such so-called nervous stimuli. My dream of
drinking water in great gulps is an example. The somatic stimulus
was apparently its only source, and the wish derived from the
sensation (the thirst, that is) was apparently its only motive. The
case is similar with other simple dreams in which a somatic
stimulus seems able by itself to construct a wish. The dream of the
woman patient who threw off the cooling apparatus from her cheek
during the night presents an unusual method of reacting to a
painful stimulus with a wish-fulfilment: it appears as though the
patient succeeded temporarily in making herself analgesic, while
ascribing her pains to someone else.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

712

   My dream of the three Fates was
clearly a hunger dream. But it succeeded in shifting the craving
for nourishment back to a child’s longing for his
mother’s breast, and it made use of an innocent desire as a
screen for a more serious one which could not be so openly
displayed. My dream about Count Thun showed how an accidental
physical need can be linked up with the most intense (but at the
same time the most intensely suppressed) mental impulses. And a
case such as that related by Garnier (1872, 1, 476) of how the
First Consul wove the noise of an exploding bomb into a battle
dream before he woke up from it reveals with quite special clarity
the nature of the sole motive that leads mental activity to concern
itself with sensations during sleep. A young barrister, fresh from
his first important bankruptcy proceedings, who dropped asleep one
afternoon, behaved in just the same way as the great Napoleon. He
had a dream of a certain G. Reich of
Husyatin
whom he had
come across during a bankruptcy case; the name
‘Husyatin’ kept on forcing itself on his notice, till
he woke up and found that his wife (who was suffering from a
bronchial catarrh) was having a violent fit of coughing [in German
‘
husten
’].

   Let us compare this dream of the
first Napoleon (who, incidentally, was an extremely sound sleeper)
with that of the sleepy student who was roused by his landlady and
told that it was time to go to the hospital, and who proceeded to
dream that he was in bed at the hospital and then slept on, under
the pretext that as he was already in the hospital there was no
need for him to get up and go there. This latter dream was clearly
a dream of convenience. The dreamer admitted his motive for
dreaming without any disguise; but at the same time he gave away
one of the secrets of dreaming in general. All dreams are in a
sense dreams of convenience: they serve the purpose of prolonging
sleep instead of waking up.
Dreams are the
GUARDIANS
of sleep and not its
disturbers
. We shall have occasion elsewhere to justify this
view of them in relation to awakening factors of a
psychical
kind; but we are already in a position to show that it is
applicable to the part played by objective external stimuli. Either
the mind pays no attention at all to occasions for sensation during
sleep - if it is able to do this despite the intensity of the
stimuli and the significance which it knows attaches to them; or it
makes use of a dream in order to deny the stimuli; or, thirdly, if
it is obliged to recognize them, it seeks for an interpretation of
them which will make the currently active sensation into a
component part of a situation which is wished for and which is
consistent with sleeping. The currently active sensation is woven
into a dream
in order to rob it of reality
. Napoleon could
sleep on - with a conviction that what was trying to disturb him
was only a dream-memory of the thunder of the guns at
Arcole.¹

  
¹
The two sources from which I know this
dream do not agree in their account of it.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

713

  
Thus the wish to sleep (which
the conscious ego is concentrated upon, and which, together with
the dream-censorship and the ‘secondary revision’ which
I shall mention later, constitute the conscious ego’s share
in dreaming) must in every case be reckoned as one of the motives
for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a
fulfilment of that wish
. We shall discuss elsewhere the
relations subsisting between this universal, invariably present and
unchanging wish to sleep and the other wishes, of which now one and
now another is fulfilled by the content of the dream. But we have
found in the wish to sleep the factor that is able to fill the gap
in the theory of Strümpell and Wundt and to explain the
perverse and capricious manner in which external stimuli are
interpreted. The correct interpretation, which the sleeping mind is
perfectly capable of making, would involve an active interest and
would require that sleep should be brought to an end; for that
reason, of all the possible interpretations, only those are
admitted which are consistent with the absolute censorship
exercised by the wish to sleep. ‘It is the nightingale and
not the lark.’ For if it were the lark it would mean the end
of the lovers’ night. Among the interpretations of the
stimulus which are accordingly admissible, that one is then
selected which can provide the best link with the wishful impulses
lurking in the mind. Thus everything is unambiguously determined
and nothing is left to arbitrary decision. The misinterpretation is
not an illusion but, as one might say, an evasion. Here once again,
however, just as when, in obedience to the dream-censorship, a
substitution is effected by displacement, we have to admit that we
are faced by an act which deviates from normal psychical
processes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

714

   When external nervous stimuli and
internal somatic stimuli are intense enough to force psychical
attention to themselves, then - provided that their outcome is
dreaming and not waking up - they serve as a fixed point for the
formation of a dream, a nucleus in its material; a wish-fulfilment
is then looked for that shall correspond to this nucleus, just as
(see above) intermediate ideas are looked for between two psychical
dream stimuli. To that extent it is true that in a number of dreams
the content of the dream is dictated by the somatic element. In
this extreme instance it may even happen that a wish which is not
actually a currently active one is called up for the sake of
constructing a dream. A dream, however, has no alternative but to
represent a wish in the situation of having been fulfilled; it is,
as it were, faced with the problem of looking for a wish which can
be represented as fulfilled by the currently active sensation. If
this immediate material is of a painful or distressing kind, that
does not necessarily mean that it cannot be used for the
construction of a dream. The mind has wishes at its disposal whose
fulfilment produces unpleasure. This seems self-contradictory; but
it becomes intelligible when we take into account the presence of
two psychical agencies and a censorship between them.

   As we have seen, there are
‘repressed’ wishes in the mind, which belong to the
first system and whose fulfilment is opposed by the second system.
In saying that there are such wishes I am not making a historical
statement to the effect that they once existed and were later
abolished. The theory of repression, which is essential to the
study of the psychoneuroses, asserts that these repressed wishes
still
exist - though there is a simultaneous inhibition
which holds them down. Linguistic usage hits the mark in speaking
of the ‘suppression’ of these impulses. The psychical
arrangements that make it possible for such impulses to force their
way to realization remain in being and in working order. Should it
happen, however, that a suppressed wish of this kind is carried
into effect, and that its inhibition by the second system 
(the system that is admissible to consciousness) is defeated, this
defeat finds expression as unpleasure. In conclusion: if sensations
of an unpleasurable nature arising from somatic sources occur
during sleep, the dream-work makes use of that event in order to
represent - subject to the continuance of the censorship to a
greater or less degree - the fulfilment of some wish which is
normally suppressed.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

715

   This state of affairs is what
makes possible one group of anxiety-dreams - dream-structures
unpropitious from the point of view of the wish-theory. A second
group of them reveal a different mechanism; for anxiety in dreams
may be psychoneurotic anxiety: it may originate from psychosexual
excitations - in which case the anxiety corresponds to repressed
libido. Where this is so, the anxiety, like the whole
anxiety-dream, has the significance of a neurotic symptom, and we
come near the limit at which the wish-fulfilling purpose of dreams
breaks down. But there are some anxiety dreams in which the feeling
of anxiety is determined somatically - where, for instance, there
happens to be difficulty in breathing owing to disease of the lungs
or heart - and in such cases the anxiety is exploited in order to
assist the fulfilment in the form of dreams of energetically
suppressed wishes which, if they had been dreamt about for
psychical
reasons, would have led to a similar release of
anxiety. But there is no difficulty in reconciling these two
apparently different groups. In both groups of dreams two psychical
factors are involved: an inclination towards an affect and an
ideational content; and these are intimately related to each other.
If one of them is currently active, it calls up the other even in a
dream; in the one case the somatically determined anxiety calls up
the suppressed ideational content, and in the other the ideational
content with its accompanying sexual excitation, having been set
free from repression, calls up a release of anxiety. We can put it
that in the first case a somatically determined affect is given a
psychical interpretation; while in the other case, though the whole
is psychically determined, the content which had been suppressed is
easily replaced by a somatic interpretation appropriate to anxiety.
The difficulties which all this offers to our understanding have
little to do with dreams: they arise from the fact that we are here
touching on the problem of the generation of anxiety and on the
problem of repression.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

716

   There can be no doubt that
physical coenaesthesia is among the internal somatic stimuli which
can dictate the content of dreams. It can do so, not in the sense
that it can provide the dream’s content, but in the sense
that it can force upon the dream-thoughts a choice of the material
to be represented in the content by putting forward one part of the
material as being appropriate to its own character and by holding
back another part. Apart from this, the coenaesthetic feelings left
over from the preceding day link themselves up, no doubt, with the
psychical residues which have such an important influence on
dreams. This general mood may persist unchanged in the dream or it
may be mastered, and thus, if it is unpleasurable, may be changed
into its opposite.

   Thus, in my opinion, somatic
sources of stimulation during sleep (that is to say, sensations
during sleep), unless they are of unusual intensity, play a similar
part in the formation of dreams to that played by recent but
indifferent impressions left over from the previous day. I believe,
that is, that they are brought in to help in the formation of a
dream if they fit in appropriately with the ideational content
derived from the dream’s psychical sources, but otherwise
not. They are treated like some cheap material always ready to
hand, which is employed whenever it is needed, in contrast to a
precious material which itself prescribes the way in which it shall
be employed. If, to take a simile, a patron of the arts brings an
artist some rare stone, such as a piece of onyx, and asks him to
create a work of art from it, then the size of the stone, its
colour and markings, help to decide what head or what scene shall
be represented in it. Whereas in the case of a uniform and
plentiful material such as marble or sandstone, the artist merely
follows some idea that is present in his own mind. It is only in
this way, so it seems to me, that we can explain the fact that
dream-content provided by somatic stimuli of no unusual intensity
fails to appear in every dream or every night.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Rank has
shown in a number of papers that certain arousal dreams produced by
organic stimuli (dreams with a urinary stimulus and dreams of
emission or orgasm) are especially suited to demonstrate the
struggle between the need to sleep and the claims of organic needs,
as well as the influence of the latter upon the content of
dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

717

   I can perhaps best illustrate my
meaning by an example, which, moreover, will bring us back to
dream-interpretation.

   One day I had been trying to
discover what might be the meaning of the feelings of being
inhibited, of being glued to the spot, of not being able to get
something done, and so on, which occur so often in dreams and are
so closely akin to feelings of anxiety. That night I had the
following dream:

  
I was very incompletely
dressed and was going upstairs from a flat on the ground floor to a
higher storey. I was going up three steps at a time and was
delighted at my agility. Suddenly I saw a maid-servant coming down
the stairs - coming towards me, that is. I felt ashamed and tried
to hurry, and at this point the feeling of being inhibited set in:
I was glued to the steps and unable to budge from the spot
.