Freud - Complete Works (526 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3191

   If this is what sleep is, dreams
cannot possibly form part of its programme, but seem on the
contrary to be an unwelcome addition to it. In our opinion too, a
dreamless sleep is the best, the only proper one. There ought to be
no mental activity in sleep; if it begins to stir, we have not
succeeded in establishing the foetal state of rest: we have not
been able entirely to avoid residues of mental activity. Dreaming
would consist in these residues. But if so, it would really seem
that there is no need for dreams to have any sense. It was
different with parapraxes; they, after all, were activities during
waking life. But if I am asleep and have stopped mental activity
completely and have merely failed to suppress some residues of it,
then there is no need whatever for these residues to have any
sense. I cannot even make use of any such sense, since the rest of
my mental life is asleep. So it really can only be a matter of
reactions, in the nature of ‘twitchings’, of mental
phenomena such as result directly from a somatic stimulus. Dreams
would accordingly be residues of waking mental activity which were
disturbing sleep, and we might well decide to drop the subject at
once, as not being suited to psycho-analysis.

   Even if dreams are superfluous,
however, they do exist, and we can try to account for their
existence. Why does mental life fail to go to sleep? Probably
because there is something that will not allow the mind any peace.
Stimuli impinge upon it and it must react to them. A dream, then,
is the manner in which the mind reacts to stimuli that impinge upon
it in the state of sleep. And here we see a way of access to an
understanding of dreams. We can take various dreams and try to
discover what the stimulus was which was seeking to disturb sleep
and to which the reaction was a dream. Our examination of the first
thing common to all dreams seems to have taken us so far.

   Is there anything else common to
them? Yes, something unmistakable but much harder to grasp and to
describe. Mental processes in sleep have a quite different
character from those of waking life. We experience every sort of
thing in dreams and believe in it, whereas nevertheless we
experience nothing, except, perhaps, the single disturbing
stimulus. We experience it predominantly in visual images; feelings
may be present too, and thoughts interwoven in it as well; the
other senses may also experience something, but nonetheless it is
predominantly a question of images. Part of the difficulty of
giving an account of dreams is due to our having to translate these
images into words. ‘I could draw it’, a dreamer often
says to us, ‘but I don’t know how to say it.’
This is not, however, a
reduced
mental activity, like that
of a feeble-minded person as compared to that of a genius: it is
qualitatively
different, though it is hard to say where the
difference lies. G. T. Fechner once voiced a suspicion that the
scene of action of dreams (in the mind) is different from that of
waking ideational life. Though we do not understand this and do not
know what we are to make of it, it does in fact reproduce the
impression of strangeness which most dreams make on us. The
comparison between dream-activity and the effects of an unmusical
hand on the piano does not help us here. The piano will after all
respond with the same sounds, though not with tunes, to any chance
pressure on its keys. Let us carefully bear this second thing
common to all dreams in mind, even though we may not have
understood it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3192

   Are there any other things common
to them? I cannot discover any; I can see nothing anywhere but
differences, and differences in all kinds of ways: in their
apparent duration, as well as in their clarity, in the amount of
affect accompanying them, in the possibility of retaining them, and
so on. This variety is not in fact what we might expect to find in
a mere defensive reaction to a stimulus, something mechanically
imposed, an empty thing, like the twitchings of St. Vitus’s
dance. As regards the dimensions of dreams, some are very short and
comprise only a single image or a few, a single thought, or even a
single word; others are uncommonly rich in their content, present
whole novels and seem to last a long time. There are dreams which
are as clear as experience, so clear that quite a time after waking
we do not realize that they were dreams; and there are others which
are indescribably dim, shadowy and blurred. Indeed in one and the
same dream excessively definite portions may alternate with others
of scarcely discernible vagueness. Dreams may be entirely sensible
or at least coherent, witty even, or fantastically beautiful;
others, again, are confused, feeble-minded as it were, absurd,
often positively crazy. There are dreams that leave us quite cold
and others in which affects of all kinds are manifest - pain to the
point of tears, anxiety to the point of waking us up, astonishment,
delight, and so on. Dreams are usually quickly forgotten after
waking, or they may last through the day, remembered more and more
dimly and incompletely till evening; others, again - for instance,
childhood dreams - are so well preserved that after thirty years
they remain in the memory like some fresh experience. Dreams may
appear, like individuals, on a single occasion only and never
again, or they may recur in the same person unchanged or with small
divergences. In short, this fragment of mental activity during the
night has an immense repertory at its disposal; it is capable, in
fact, of all that the mind creates in daytime - yet it is never the
same thing.

   We might try to account for these
many variations in dreams by supposing that they correspond to
different intermediate stages between sleeping and waking,
different degrees of in complete sleep. Yes, but if this were so,
the value, content and clarity of a dream’s product - and the
awareness, too, of its being a dream - would have to increase in
dreams in which the mind was coming near to waking; and it would
not be possible for a clear and rational fragment of dream to be
immediately followed by one that was senseless and obscure and for
this in turn to be followed by another good piece. The mind could
certainly not alter the depth of its sleep so quickly as that. So
this explanation is of no help: there can be no short cut out of
the difficulty.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3193

   We will for the moment leave on
one side the ‘sense’ of dreams, and try to make our way
to a better understanding of them from what we have found is common
to them. We inferred from the relation of dreams to the state of
sleep that dreams are the reaction to a stimulus which disturbs
sleep. We have learnt that this too is the single point on which
exact experimental psychology is able to come to our assistance: it
brings us evidence that stimuli which impinge during sleep make
their appearance in dreams. Many investigations of this kind have
been made, most recently those by Mourly Vold which I have already
mentioned; and each of us, no doubt, has been in a position to
confirm this finding from personal observation. I will select a few
of the earlier experiments. Maury had some experiments performed on
himself. He was given some eau-de-cologne to smell in his sleep. He
dreamt he was in Cairo, in Johann Maria Farina’s shop, and
some further absurd adventures followed. Or, he was pinched lighdy
on the neck; he dreamt of a mustard plaster being applied to him
and of a doctor who had treated him as a child. Or again, a drop of
water was dropped on his forehead; he was in Italy, was sweating
violently and was drinking white Orvieto wine.

   The striking thing about these
experimentally produced dreams will perhaps be even more plainly
visible in another series of stimulus-dreams. They are three dreams
reported by an intelligent observer, Hildebrandt, all of them
reactions to the ringing of an alarm-clock:

   ‘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 church
yard 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.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3194

   ‘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 kitchenmaid, 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.’

   These are very nice dreams,
entirely sensible and by no means as incoherent as dreams are
usually apt to be. I am not objecting to them on that account. What
they have in common is that in each case the situation ends in a
noise, which, when the dreamer wakes up, is recognized as being
made by the alarm-clock. So we see here how a dream is produced;
but we learn something more than this. The dream does not recognize
the alarm-clock - nor does it appear in the dream - but it replaces
the noise of the alarm-clock by another; it interprets the stimulus
which is bringing sleep to an end, but it interprets it differently
each time. Why does it do that? There is no answer to this; it
seems a matter of caprice. Understanding the dream would mean being
able to say why this particular noise and none other was chosen for
the interpretation of the stimulus from the alarm-clock. We may
make an analogous objection to Maury’s experiments: we can
see quite clearly that the impinging stimulus appears in the dream;
but why it should take this particular form we are not told, and it
does not seem by any means to follow from the nature of the
stimulus that disturbed sleep. In Maury’s experiments, too, a
quantity of other dream material usually appears in addition to the
direct effect of the stimulus - for instance, the ‘absurd
adventures’ in the eau-de-cologne dream -, which cannot be
accounted for.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3195

   And now consider that
arousal
dreams offer the best chance of establishing the
influence of external sleep-disturbing stimuli. In most other cases
it will become more difficult. We do not wake out of every dream,
and if we remember a dream of the past night in the morning, how
are we to discover a disturbing stimulus which may perhaps have
made its impact on us during the night? I once succeeded in
identifying a sound-stimulus of that kind retrospectively, but
only, of course, owing to special circumstances. I woke up one
morning in a mountain resort in the Tyrol, knowing I had had a
dream that the Pope was dead. I could not explain the dream to
myself; but later on my wife asked me if I had heard the fearful
noise made by the pealing of bells towards morning which had broken
out from all the churches and chapels. No, I had heard nothing, my
sleep is more resistant than hers; but thanks to her information I
understood my dream. How often may stimuli of this kind instigate
dreams in a sleeper without his getting news of them afterwards?
Perhaps very often, but perhaps not. If the stimulus can no longer
be pointed to, we cannot be convinced of its existence. And in any
case we have changed our view of the importance of external stimuli
that disturb sleep since we learnt that they can explain only a
small portion of the dream and not the whole dream-reaction.

   There is no need to give up this
theory entirely on that account. Moreover it is capable of
extension. It is obviously a matter of indifference what it is that
disturbs sleep or instigates the mind to dream. If it cannot
invariably be a sensory stimulus coming from outside, there may
instead be what is called a somatic stimulus, arising from the
internal organs. This is a very plausible notion and agrees with
the most popular view of the origin of dreams: ‘dreams come
from indigestion’, people often say. Here too unluckily we
must often suspect that there are cases when a somatic stimulus
which has impinged on a sleeper during the night is no longer
manifest after waking and can therefore not be proved to have
occurred. But we shall not overlook the number of clear experiences
which support the origin of dreams from somatic stimuli. In
general, there can be no doubt that the condition of the internal
organs can influence dreams. The relation of the content of some
dreams to an over full bladder or to a state of excitation of the
genital organs is too plain to be mistaken. These clear cases lead
to others in which the content of the dreams give rise to a
justifiable suspicion that there has been an impact from somatic
stimuli because there is something in the content which can be
regarded as a working over, a representation or an interpretation
of such stimuli. Scherner (1861), who made researches into dreams,
argued particularly strongly in favour of the derivation of dreams
from organic stimuli and brought forward some good examples of it.
For instance, in one dream he saw ‘two rows of pretty boys
with fair hair and delicate complexions facing one another in
pugnacious array, making an onset and attacking one another, and
then drawing back and taking up their old position again, and then
starting the whole business once more.’ His interpretation of
these two rows of boys as teeth is plausible in itself and seems
fully confirmed when we learn that after this scene the dreamer
‘pulled a long tooth out of his jaw.’ Similarly, the
interpretation of ‘long, narrow, winding passages’ as
derived from an intestinal stimulus seems valid, and confirms the
assertion by Scherner that dreams seek above all to represent the
organ that sends out the stimulus by objects resembling it.