Freud - Complete Works (193 page)

On Dreams

1091

XI

   When once we have recognized that
the content of a dream is the representation of a fulfilled wish
and that its obscurity is due to alterations in repressed material
made by the censorship, we shall no longer have any difficulty in
discovering the
function
of dreams. It is commonly said that
sleep is disturbed by dreams; strangely enough, we are led to a
contrary view and must regard dreams as
the guardians of
sleep
.

   In the case of children’s
dreams there should be no difficulty in accepting this statement.
The state of sleep or the psychical modification involved in sleep,
whatever that may be, is brought about by a resolve to sleep which
is either imposed upon the child or is reached on the basis of
sensations of fatigue; and it is only made possible by the
withholding of stimuli which might suggest to the psychical
apparatus aims other than that of sleeping. The means by which
external
stimuli can be kept off are familiar to us; but
what are the means available for controlling
internal
mental
stimuli which set themselves against falling asleep? Let us observe
a mother putting her child to sleep. The child gives vent to an
unceasing stream of desires: he wants one more kiss, he wants to go
on playing. His mother satisfies some of these desires, but uses
her authority to postpone others of them to the next day. It is
clear that any wishes or needs that may arise have an inhibiting
effect upon falling asleep. We all know the amusing story told by
Balduin Groller of the bad little boy who woke up in the middle of
the night and shouted across the night nursery: ‘I want the
rhino!’ A better behaved child, instead of shouting, would
have
dreamt
that he was playing with the rhino. Since a
dream that shows a wish as fulfilled is
believed
during
sleep, it does away with the wish and makes sleep possible. It
cannot be disputed that dream-images are believed in this way, for
they are clothed in the psychical appearance of perceptions, and
children have not yet acquired the later faculty of distinguishing
hallucinations or phantasies from reality.

On Dreams

1092

   Adults have learnt to make this
distinction; they have also grasped the uselessness of wishing, and
after lengthy practice know how to postpone their desires until
they can find satisfaction by the long and roundabout path of
altering the external world. In their case, accordingly,
wish-fulfilments along the short psychical path are rare in sleep
too; it is even possible, indeed, that they never occur at all, and
that anything that may seem to us to be constructed on the pattern
of a child’s dream in fact requires a far more complicated
solution. On the other hand, in the case of adults - and this no
doubt applies without exception to everyone in full possession of
his senses - a differentiation has occurred in the psychical
material, which was not present in children. A psychical agency has
come into being, which, taught by experience of life, exercises a
dominating and inhibiting influence upon mental impulses and
maintains that influence with jealous severity, and which, owing to
its relation to consciousness and to voluntary movement, is armed
with the strongest instruments of psychical power. A portion of the
impulses of childhood has been suppressed by this agency as being
useless to life, and any thought-material derived from those
impulses is in a state of repression.

   Now while this agency, in which
we recognize our normal ego, is concentrated on the wish to sleep,
it appears to be compelled by the psycho-physiological conditions
of sleep to relax the energy with which it is accustomed to hold
down the repressed material during the day. In itself, no doubt,
this relaxation does no harm; however much the suppressed impulses
of the childish mind may prance around, their access to
consciousness is still difficult and their access to movement is
barred as the result of this same state of sleep. The danger of
sleep being disturbed by them must, however, be guarded against. We
must in any case suppose that even during deep sleep a certain
amount of free attention is on duty as a guard against sensory
stimuli, and that this guard may sometimes consider waking more
advisable than a continuation of sleep. Otherwise there would be no
explanation of how it is that we can be woken up at any moment by
sensory stimuli of some particular
quality
. As the
physiologist Burdach insisted long ago, a mother, for instance,
will be roused by the whimpering of her baby, or a miller if his
mill comes to a stop, or most people if they are called softly by
their own name. Now the attention which is thus on guard is also
directed towards internal wishful stimuli arising from the
repressed material, and combines with them to form the dream which,
as a compromise, simultaneously satisfies both of the two agencies.
The dream provides a kind of psychical consummation for the wish
that has been suppressed (or formed with the help of repressed
material) by representing it as fulfilled; but it also satisfies
the other agency by allowing sleep to continue. In this respect our
ego is ready to behave like a child; it gives credence to the dream
images, as though what it wanted to say was: ‘Yes, yes!
you’re quite right, but let me go on sleeping!’ The low
estimate which we form of dreams when we are awake, and which we
relate to their confused and apparently illogical character, is
probably nothing other than the judgement passed by our sleeping
ego upon the repressed impulses, a judgement based, with better
right, upon the motor impotence of these disturbers of sleep. We
are sometimes aware in our sleep of this contemptuous judgement. If
the content of a dream goes too far in overstepping the censorship,
we think: ‘After all, it’s only a dream!’ - and
go on sleeping.

On Dreams

1093

   This view is not traversed by the
fact that there are marginal cases in which the dream - as happens
with anxiety-dreams - can no longer perform its function of
preventing an interruption of sleep, but assumes instead the other
function of promptly bringing sleep to an end. In doing so it is
merely behaving like a conscientious night-watchman, who first
carries out his duty by suppressing disturbances so that the
townsmen may not be woken up, but afterwards continues to do his
duty by himself waking the townsmen up, if the causes of the
disturbance seem to him serious and of a kind that he cannot cope
with alone.

   The function of the dream as a
guardian of sleep becomes particularly evident when an external
stimulus impinges upon the senses of a sleeper. It is generally
recognized that sensory stimuli arising during sleep influence the
content of dreams; this can be proved experimentally and is among
the few certain (but, incidentally, greatly overvalued) findings of
medical investigation into dreams. But this finding involves a
puzzle which has hitherto proved insoluble. For the sensory
stimulus which the experimenter causes to impinge upon the sleeper
is not correctly recognized in the dream; it is subjected to one of
an indefinite number of possible interpretations, the choice being
apparently left to an arbitrary psychical determination. But there
is, of course, no such thing as arbitrary determination in the
mind. There are several ways in which a sleeper may react to an
external sensory stimulus. He may wake up or he may succeed in
continuing his sleep in spite of it. In the latter case he may make
use of a dream in order to get rid of the external stimulus, and
here again there is more than one method open to him. For instance,
he may get rid of the stimulus by dreaming that he is in a
situation which is absolutely incompatible with the stimulus. Such
was the line taken by a sleeper who was subject to disturbance by a
painful abscess on the perineum. He dreamt that he was riding on a
horse, making use of the poultice that was intended to mitigate his
pain as a saddle, and in this way he avoided being disturbed. Or,
as happens more frequently, the external stimulus is given an
interpretation which brings it into the context of a repressed wish
which is at the moment awaiting fulfilment; in this way the
external stimulus is robbed of its reality and is treated as though
it were a portion of the psychical material. Thus someone dreamt
that he had written a comedy with a particular plot; it was
produced in a theatre, the first act was over, and there were
thunders of applause; the clapping was
terrific. . . . The dreamer must have succeeded in
prolonging his sleep till after the interference had ceased; for
when he woke up he no longer heard the noise, but rightly concluded
that someone must have been beating a carpet or mattress. Every
dream which occurs immediately before the sleeper is woken by a
loud noise has made an attempt at explaining away the arousing
stimulus by providing another explanation of it and has thus sought
to prolong sleep, even if only for a moment.

On Dreams

1094

XII

   No one who accepts the view that
the censorship is the chief reason for dream-distortion will be
surprised to learn from the results of dream-interpretation that
most of the dreams of adults are traced back by analysis to
erotic wishes
. This assertion is not aimed at dreams with an
undisguised
sexual content, which are no doubt familiar to
all dreamers from their own experience and are as a rule the only
ones to be described as ‘sexual dreams.’ Even dreams of
this latter kind offer enough surprises in their choice of the
people whom they make into sexual objects, in their disregard of
all the limitations which the dreamer imposes in his waking life
upon his sexual desires, and by their many strange details, hinting
at what are commonly known as ‘perversions.’ A great
many other dreams, however, which show no sign of being erotic in
their manifest content, are revealed by the work of interpretation
in analysis as sexual wish-fulfilments; and, on the other hand,
analysis proves that a great many of the thoughts left over from
the activity of waking life as ‘residues of the previous
day’ only find their way to representation in dreams through
the assistance of repressed erotic wishes.

   There is no theoretical necessity
why this should be so; but to explain the fact it may be pointed
out that no other group of instincts has been submitted to such
far-reaching suppression by the demands of cultural education,
while at the same time the sexual instincts are also the ones
which, in most people, find it easiest to escape from the control
of the highest mental agencies. Since we have become acquainted
with infantile sexuality: which is often so unobtrusive in its
manifestations and is always overlooked and misunderstood, we are
justified in saying that almost every civilized man retains the
infantile forms of sexual life in some respect or other. We can
thus understand how it is that repressed infantile sexual wishes
provide the most frequent and strongest motive-forces for the
construction of dreams.¹

 
 
¹
See my
Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905
d
).

On Dreams

1095

   There is only one method by which
a dream which expresses erotic wishes can succeed in appearing
innocently non-sexual in its manifest content. The material of the
sexual ideas must not be represented as such, but must be replaced
in the content of the dream by hints, allusions and similar forms
of indirect representation. But, unlike other forms of indirect
representation, that which is employed in dreams must not be
immediately intelligible. The modes of representation which fulfil
these conditions are usually described as ‘symbols’ of
the things which they represent. Particular interest has been
directed to them since it has been noticed that dreamers speaking
the same language make use of the same symbols, and that in some
cases, indeed, the use of the same symbols extends beyond the use
of the same language. Since dreamers themselves are unaware of the
meaning of the symbols they use, it is difficult at first sight to
discover the source of the connection between the symbols and what
they replace and represent. The fact itself, however, is beyond
doubt, and it is important for the technique of
dream-interpretation. For, with the help of a knowledge of
dream-symbolism, it is possible to understand the meaning of
separate elements of the content of a dream or separate pieces of a
dream or in some cases even whole dreams, without having to ask the
dreamer for his associations. Here we are approaching the popular
ideal of translating dreams and on the other hand are returning to
the technique of interpretation used by the ancients, to whom
dream-interpretation was identical with interpretation by means of
symbols.

   Although the study of
dream-symbols is far from being complete, we are in a position to
lay down with certainty a number of general statements and a
quantity of special information on the subject. There are some
symbols which bear a single meaning almost universally: thus the
Emperor and Empress (or the King and Queen) stand for the parents,
rooms represent women¹ and their entrances and exits the
openings of the body. The majority of dream-symbols serve to
represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested with
erotic interest; in particular, the genitals are represented by a
number of often very surprising symbols, and the greatest variety
of objects are employed to denote them symbolically. Sharp weapons,
long and stiff objects, such as tree-trunks and sticks, stand for
the male genital; while cupboards, boxes, carriages or ovens may
represent the uterus. In such cases as these the
tertium
comparationis
, the common element in these substitutions, is
immediately intelligible; but there are other symbols in which it
is not so easy to grasp the connection. Symbols such as a staircase
or going upstairs to represent sexual intercourse, a tie or cravat
for the male organ, or wood for the female one, provoke our
unbelief until we can arrive at an understanding of the symbolic
relation underlying them by some other means. Moreover a whole
number of dream-symbols are bisexual and can relate to the male or
female genitals according to the context.