Freud - Complete Works (165 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

935

   If we return for a moment to the
point that the dream-work is glad to make use of a ready-made
phantasy instead of putting one together out of the material of the
dream-thoughts, we may perhaps find ourselves in a position to
solve one of the most interesting puzzles connected with dreams. On
pp. 568 f.
I told the well-known
anecdote of how Maury, having been struck in his sleep on the back
of his neck by a piece of wood, woke up from a long dream which was
like a full-length story set in the days of the French Revolution.
Since the dream, as reported, was a coherent one and was planned
entirely with an eye to providing an explanation of the stimulus
which woke him and whose occurrence he could not have anticipated,
the only possible hypothesis seems to be that the whole elaborate
dream must have been composed and must have taken place in the
short period of time between the contact of the board with
Maury’s cervical vertebrae and his consequent awakening. We
should never dare to attribute such rapidity to thought-activity in
waking life, and we should therefore be driven to conclude that the
dream-work possesses the advantage of accelerating our
thought-processes to a remarkable degree.

   Strong objections have been
raised to what quickly became a popular conclusion by some more
recent writers (Le Lorrain, 1894 and 1895, Egger, 1895, and
others). On the one hand they throw doubts upon the accuracy of
Maury’s account of his dream; and on the other hand they
attempt to show that the rapidity of the operations of our waking
thoughts is no less than in this dream when exaggerations have been
discounted. The discussion raised questions of principle which do
not seem to me immediately soluble. But I must confess that the
arguments brought forward (by Egger, for instance), particularly
against Maury’s guillotine dream, leave me unconvinced. I
myself would propose the following explanation of this dream. Is it
so highly improbable that Maury’s dream represents a phantasy
which had been stored up ready-made in his memory for many years
and which was aroused - or I would rather say ‘alluded
to’ - at the moment at which he became aware of the stimulus
which woke him? If this were so, we should have escaped the whole
difficulty of understanding how such a long story with all its
details could have been composed in the extremely short period of
time which was at the dreamer’s disposal - for the story
would have been composed already. If the piece of wood had struck
the back of Maury’s neck while he was awake, there would have
been an opportunity for some such thought as: ‘That’s
just like being guillotined.’ But since it was in his sleep
that he was struck by the board, the dream-work made use of the
impinging stimulus in order rapidly to produce a wish-fulfilment;
it was
as though
it thought (this is to he taken purely
figuratively): ‘Here’s a good opportunity of realizing
a wishful phantasy which was formed at such and such a time in the
course of reading.’ It can hardly be disputed, I think, that
the dream-story was precisely of a sort likely to be constructed by
a young man under the influence of powerfully exciting impressions.
Who - least of all what Frenchman or student of the history of
civilization - could fail to be gripped by narratives of the Reign
of Terror, when the men and women of the aristocracy, the flower of
the nation, showed that they could die with a cheerful mind and
could retain the liveliness of their wit and the elegance of their
manners till the very moment of the fatal summons? How tempting for
a young man to plunge into all this in his imagination - to picture
himself bidding a lady farewell - kissing her hand and mounting the
scaffold unafraid! Or, if ambition were the prime motive of the
phantasy, how tempting for him to take the place of one of those
formidable figures who, by the power alone of their thoughts and
flaming eloquence, ruled the city in which the heart of humanity
beat convulsively in those days - who were led by their convictions
to send thousands of men to their death and who prepared the way
for the transformation of Europe, while all the time their own
heads were insecure and destined to fall one day beneath the knife
of the guillotine - how tempting to picture himself as one of the
Girondists, perhaps, or as the heroic Danton! There is one feature
in Maury’s recollection of the dream, his being ‘led to
the place of execution, surrounded by an immense mob’, which
seems to suggest that his phantasy was in fact of this ambitious
type.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

936

   Nor is it necessary that this
long-prepared phantasy should have been gone through during sleep;
it would have been sufficient for it to be merely touched on. What
I mean is this. If a few bars of music are played and someone
comments that it is from Mozart’s
Figaro
(as happens
in
Don Giovanni
) a number of recollections are roused in me
all at once, none of which can enter my consciousness singly at the
first moment. The key-phrase serves as a port of entry through
which the whole network is simultaneously put in a state of
excitation. It may well be the same in the case of unconscious
thinking. The rousing stimulus excites the psychical port of entry
which allows access to the whole guillotine phantasy. But the
phantasy is not gone through during sleep but only in the
recollection of the sleeper after his awakening. After waking he
remembers in all its details the phantasy which was stirred up as a
whole in his dream. One has no means of assuring oneself in such a
case that one is really remembering something one has dreamt. This
same explanation - that it is a question of ready-made phantasies
which are brought into excitation as a whole by the rousing
stimulus - can be applied to other dreams which are focused upon a
rousing stimulus, such, for instance, as Napoleon’s battle
dream before the explosion of the infernal machine.

   Among the dreams collected by
Justine Tobowolska in her dissertation on the apparent passage of
time in dreams, the most informative seems to me to be the one
reported by Macario (1857 ) as having been dreamt by a dramatic
author, Casimir Bonjour. One evening Bonjour wanted to attend the
first performance of one of his pieces; but he was so fatigued that
as he was sitting behind the scenes he dozed off just at the moment
the curtain went up. During his sleep he went through the whole
five acts of the play, and observed all the various signs of
emotion shown by the audience during the different scenes. At the
end of the performance he was delighted to hear his name being
shouted with the liveliest demonstrations of applause. Suddenly he
woke up. He could not believe either his eyes or his ears, for the
performance had not gone beyond the first few lines of the first
scene; he could not have been asleep for longer than two minutes.
It is surely not too rash to suppose in the case of this dream that
the dreamer’s going through all five acts of the play and
observing the attitude of the public to different passages in it
need not have arisen from any fresh production of material during
his sleep, but may have reproduced a piece of phantasy-activity (in
the sense I have described) which had already been completed.
Tobowolska, like other writers, emphasizes the fact that dreams
with an accelerated passage of ideas have the common characteristic
of seeming specially coherent, quite unlike other dreams, and that
the recollection of them is summary far more than detailed. This
would indeed be a characteristic which ready-made phantasies of
this kind, touched upon by the dream-work, would be bound to
possess, though this is a conclusion which the writers in question
fail to draw. I do not assert, however, that
all
arousal
dreams admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the
accelerated passage of ideas in dreams can be entirely dismissed in
this fashion.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

937

   At this point it is impossible to
avoid considering the relation between this secondary revision of
the content of dreams and the remaining factors of the dream-work.
Are we to suppose that what happens is that in the first instance
the dream-constructing factors - the tendency towards condensation,
the necessity for evading the censorship, and considerations of
representability by the psychical means open to dreams - put
together a provisional dream-content out of the material provided,
and that this content is subsequently re-cast so as to conform so
far as possible to the demands of a second agency! This is scarcely
probable. We must assume rather that from the very first the
demands of this second factor constitute one of the conditions
which the dream must satisfy and that this condition, like those
laid down by condensation, the censorship imposed by resistance,
and representability, operates simultaneously in a conducive and
selective sense upon the mass of material present in the
dream-thoughts. In any case, however, of the four conditions for
the formation of dreams, the one we have come to know last is the
one whose demands appear to have the least cogent influence on
dreams.

   The following consideration makes
it highly probable that the psychical function which carries out
what we have described as the secondary revision of the content of
dreams is to be identified with the activity of our waking thought.
Our waking (preconscious) thinking behaves towards any perceptual
material with which it meets in just the same way in which the
function we are considering behaves towards the content of dreams.
It is the nature of our waking thought to establish order in
material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it
conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole. In fact, we
go too far in that direction. An adept in sleight of hand can trick
us by relying upon this intellectual habit of ours. In our efforts
at making an intelligible pattern of the sense-impressions that are
offered to us, we often fall into the strangest errors or even
falsify the truth about the material before us.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

938

   The evidences of this are too
universally known for there to be any need to insist upon them
further. In our reading we pass over misprints which destroy the
sense, and have the illusion that what we are reading is correct.
The editor of a popular French periodical is said to have made a
bet that he would have the words ‘in front’ or
‘behind’ inserted by the printer in every sentence of a
long article without a single one of his readers noticing it. He
won his bet. Many years ago I read in a newspaper a comic instance
of a false connection. On one occasion during a sitting of the
French Chamber a bomb thrown by an anarchist exploded in the
Chamber itself and Dupuy subdued the consequent panic with the
courageous words: ‘
La séance continue
.’
The visitors in the gallery were asked to give their impressions as
witnesses of the outrage. Among them were two men from the
provinces. One of these said that it was true that he had heard a
detonation at the close of one of the speeches but had assumed that
it was a parliamentary usage to fire a shot each time a speaker sat
down. The second one, who had probably already heard
several
speeches, had come to the same conclusion, except that he supposed
that a shot was only fired as a tribute to a particularly
successful speech.

   There is no doubt, then, that it
is our normal thinking that is the psychical agency which
approaches the content of dreams with a demand that it must be
intelligible, which subjects it to a first interpretation and which
consequently produces a complete misunderstanding of it. For the
purposes of
our
interpretation it remains an essential rule
invariably to leave out of account the ostensible continuity of a
dream as being of suspect origin, and to follow the same path back
to the material of the dream-thoughts, no matter whether the dream
itself is clear or confused.

   We now perceive, incidentally, on
what it is that the range in the quality of dreams between
confusion and clarity which was discussed on
p. 779 f.
depends. Those parts of a
dream on which the secondary revision has been able to produce some
effect are clear, while those parts on which its efforts have
failed are confused. Since the confused parts of a dream are so
often at the same time the less vivid parts, we may conclude that
the secondary dream-work is also to be held responsible for a
contribution to the plastic intensity of the different
dream-elements.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

939

   If I look around for something
with which to compare the final form assumed by a dream as it
appears after normal thought has made its contribution, I can think
of nothing better than the enigmatic inscriptions with which
Fliegende Blätter
has for so long entertained its
readers. They are intended to make the reader believe that a
certain sentence - for the sake of contrast, a sentence in dialect
and as scurrilous as possible - is a Latin inscription. For this
purpose the letters contained in the words are torn out of their
combination into syllables and arranged in a new order. Here and
there a genuine Latin word appears; at other points we seem to see
abbreviations of Latin words before us; and at still other points
in the inscription we may allow ourselves to be deceived into
overlooking the senselessness of isolated letters by parts of the
inscription seeming to be defaced or showing lacunae. If we are to
avoid being taken in by the joke, we must disregard everything that
makes it seem like an inscription, look firmly at the letters, pay
no attention to their ostensible arrangement, and so combine them
into words belonging to our own mother tongue.