Freud - Complete Works (532 page)

   These three dreams will give us
all the information we require.

   (2) As we can see, these
children’s dreams are not senseless. They are intelligible,
completely valid mental acts. You will recall what I told you of
the medical view of dreams and of the analogy with unmusical
fingers wandering over the keys of a piano. You cannot fail to
observe how sharply these children’s dreams contradict this
view. It would really be too strange if
children
could
perform complete mental functions in their sleep while
adults
were content under the same conditions with reactions
which were no more than ‘twitchings’. Moreover, we have
every reason to think that children’s sleep is sounder and
deeper.

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   (3) These dreams are without any
dream-distortion, and therefore call for no interpretative
activity. Here the manifest and the latent dream coincide.
Thus
dream-distortion is not part of the essential nature of dreams
.
I expect this will be a weight off your minds. But when we examine
these dreams more closely, we shall recognize a small piece of
dream-distortion even in them, a certain distinction between the
manifest content of the dream and the latent dream-thoughts.

   (4) A child’s dream is a
reaction to an experience of the previous day, which has left
behind it a regret, a longing, a wish that has not been dealt with.
The dream produces a direct, undisguised fulfilment of that
wish
. Let us recall now our discussions on the part played by
somatic stimuli from outside and from within as disturbers of sleep
and instigators of dreams. In that connection we came to know some
quite undoubted facts, but by their means we were only able to
explain a small number of dreams. In these children’s dreams,
however, there is nothing that points to the operation of somatic
stimuli of that kind; we could not be mistaken in this, for the
dreams are completely intelligible and easy to grasp. But this does
not mean that we need abandon the stimulus aetiology of dreams. We
can only ask how it has happened that from the first we have
forgotten that besides somatic stimuli there are
mental
stimuli that disturb sleep. We know, after all, that it is
excitations of this kind that are chiefly responsible for
disturbing the sleep of an adult by preventing him from
establishing the mood required for falling asleep - the withdrawing
of interest from the world. He does not want to interrupt his life
but would rather continue his work on the things he is concerned
with, and for that reason he does not fall asleep. In the case of
children, therefore, the stimulus that disturbs sleep is a mental
one - the wish that has not been dealt with - and it is to this
that they react with the dream.

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   (5) This gives us the most direct
approach to understanding the function of dreams. In so far as a
dream is a reaction to a psychical stimulus, it must be equivalent
to dealing with the stimulus in such a way that it is got rid of
and that sleep can continue. We do not yet know how this dealing
with the stimulus by the dream is made possible dynamically, but we
see already that
dreams are not disturbers of sleep
, as they
are abusively called, but
guardians of sleep which get rid of
disturbances of sleep
. We think we should have slept more
soundly if there had been no dream, but we are wrong; in fact,
without the help of the dream we should not have slept at all. It
is due to it that we have slept as soundly as we have. It could not
avoid disturbing us a little, just as the night-watchman often
cannot help making a little noise while he chases away the
disturbers of the peace who seek to waken us with their noise.

   (6) What instigates a dream is a
wish, and the fulfilment of that wish is the content of the
dream-this is one of the chief characteristics of dreams. The
other, equally constant one, is that a dream does not simply give
expression to a thought, but represents the wish-fulfilled as a
hallucinatory experience. ‘
I should like to go on the
lake
’ is the wish that instigates the dream. The content
of the dream itself is: ‘
I am going on the
lake
.’ Thus even in these simple children’s dreams
a difference remains between the latent and the manifest dream,
there is a distortion of the latent dream-thought:
the
transformation of a thought into an experience
. In the process
of interpreting a dream this alteration must first be undone. If
this turns out to be the most universal characteristic of dreams,
the fragment of dream which I reported to you earlier ‘I saw
my brother in a box [
Kasten
]’ is not to be translated
‘my brother is restricting himself [
schnärkt sich
ein
]’ but ‘I should like my brother to restrict
himself:
my brother must restrict himself
.’ Of the two
general characteristics of dreams which I have here brought
forward, the second clearly has more prospect of being accepted
without contradiction than the first. It is only by means of
far-reaching investigations that we shall be able to establish the
fact that what instigates dreams must always be a wish and cannot
be a worry or an intention or a reproach; but this will not affect
the other characteristic - that the dream does not simply reproduce
this stimulus, but removes it, gets rid of it, deals with it, by
means of a kind of experience.

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   (7) On the basis of these
characteristics of dreams, we can return once more to a comparison
between a dream and a parapraxis. In the latter we distinguished
between a disturbing purpose and a disturbed one, and the
parapraxis was a compromise between them. A dream can be fitted
into the same pattern. The disturbed purpose can only be that of
sleeping. We may replace the disturbing one by the psychical
stimulus, or let us say by the wish which presses to be dealt with,
since we have not learnt so far of any other psychical stimulus
that disturbs sleep. Here the dream, too, is the result of a
compromise. One sleeps, but one nevertheless experiences the
removing of a wish; one satisfies a wish, but at the same time one
continues to sleep. Both purposes are partly achieved and partly
abandoned.

   (8) You will recall that at one
point we hoped to approach an understanding of the problems of
dreams from the fact that certain imaginative structures which are
very transparent to us are known as ‘day-dreams’. Now
these day-dreams are in fact wish-fulfilments, fulfilments of
ambitions and erotic wishes which are well known to us; but they
are
thought
, even though vividly imagined, and never
experienced as hallucinations. Of the two chief characteristics of
dreams, then, the less well assured is preserved here, while the
other, since it depends on the state of sleep and cannot be
realized in waking life, is entirely absent. Linguistic usage,
therefore, has a suspicion of the fact that wish-fulfilment is a
chief characteristic of dreams. Incidentally, if our experience in
dreams is only a modified kind of imagining made possible by the
conditions of the state of sleep - that is, a ‘nocturnal
day-dreaming’ - we can already understand how the process of
constructing a dream can dispose of the nocturnal stimulus and
bring satisfaction, since day dreaming too is an activity bound up
with satisfaction and is only practised, indeed, on that
account.

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   But other usages of language
express the same sense. There are familiar proverbs such as
‘Pigs dream of acorns and geese dream of maize’ or
‘What do hens dream of? - Of millet.’ So proverbs go
even lower than we do - below children to animals - and assert that
the content of dreams is the satisfaction of a need. Numbers of
figures of speech seem to point in the same direction:
‘lovely as a dream’, ‘I shouldn’t have
dreamt of such a thing’, ‘I haven’t imagined it
in my wildest dreams’. In this, linguistic usage is evidently
taking sides. For there are anxiety’. dreams as well, and
dreams with a distressing or indifferent content; but linguistic
usage has been unmoved by them. It is true that it knows of
‘bad dreams’, but a dream pure and simple is only the
sweet fulfilment of a wish. Nor is there any proverb which might
tell us that pigs or geese dream of being slaughtered.

   It is inconceivable, of course,
that the wish-fulfilling characteristic of dreams should not have
been noticed by writers on the subject. On the contrary, it has
often been noticed; but it has not occurred to any of them to
recognize this characteristic as a universal one and to make it
into a corner-stone for the explanation of dreams. We can well
imagine what it is that has held them back from it and we shall go
into the matter later on.

   But consider what a large amount
of light has been thrown on things by our examination of
children’s dreams, and with scarcely any effort: the
functions of dreams as the guardians of sleep; their origin from
two concurrent purposes, one of which, the desire for sleep,
remains constant, while the other strives to satisfy a psychical
stimulus; proof that dreams are psychical acts with a sense; their
two chief characteristics - wish-fulfilment and hallucinatory
experience. And in discovering all this we were al most able to
forget that we were engaged on psycho-analysis. Apart from its
connection with parapraxes, our work has carried no specific mark.
Any psychologist, knowing nothing of the postulates of
psycho-analysis, might have been able to give this explanation of
children’s dreams. Why have they not done so?

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   If dreams of the infantile kind
were the only ones, the problem would be solved and our task
finished, and that without our questioning the dreamer or bringing
in the unconscious or resorting to free association. This is
evidently where a continuation of our task lies ahead. We have
already found repeatedly that characteristics which were claimed as
being of general validity have turned out to apply only to a
particular sort and number of dreams. The question for us is
therefore whether the general characteristics we inferred from
children’s dreams have a firmer footing, whether they also
hold good of dreams which are not transparently clear and whose
manifest content gives no sign of being connected with a wish left
over from the previous day. It is our view that these other dreams
have undergone a far-reaching distortion and for that reason cannot
be judged at a first glance. We suspect too that to explain this
distortion we shall need the psycho-analytic technique which we
have been able to do without in the understanding we have just
gained of children’s dreams.

   In any case, there is yet another
class of dreams which are undistorted and, like children’s
dreams, can easily be recognized as wish-fulfilments. These are the
dreams which all through life are called up by imperative bodily
needs - hunger, thirst, sexual need - that is, they are
wish-fufilments as reactions to internal somatic stimuli. Thus I
have a note of a dream dreamt by a little girl of nineteen months,
which consisted of a
menu
, to which her own name was
attached: ‘
Anna F., stawbewwies, wild stawbewwies, omblet,
pudden!
’ This was a reaction to a day without food, owing
to a digestive upset, which had actually been traced back to the
fruit which appeared twice in the dream. The little girl’s
grandmother - their combined ages came to seventy years - was
simultaneously obliged to go without food for a whole day on
account of a disturbance due to a floating kidney. She dreamt the
same night that she had been ‘asked out’ and had been
served with the most appetizing delicacies.

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   Observations on prisoners who
have been compelled to starve, and on people who have been
subjected to privations on travels and explorations, teach us that
under these conditions the satisfaction of their needs is regularly
dreamt of. Thus Otto Nordenskjöld (1904,
1
, 336 f.)
writes as follows of the members of his expedition while they were
wintering in the Antarctic: ‘The direction taken by our
innermost thoughts was very clearly shown by our dreams, which were
never more vivid or numerous than at this time. Even those of us
who otherwise dreamt but rarely had long stories to tell in the
morning when we exchanged our latest experiences in this world of
the imagination. They were all concerned with the outside world
which was now so remote from us, though they were often adapted to
our actual circumstances. . . . Eating and drinking, however, were
the pivot round which our dreams most often revolved. One of us,
who had a special gift for attending large luncheon parties during
the night, was proud if he was able to report in the morning that
he had "got through a three-course dinner". Another of us
dreamt of tobacco, of whole mountains of tobacco; while a third
dreamt of a ship in full sail coming in across open water. Yet
another dream is worth repeating. The postman brought round the
mail and gave a long explanation of why we had had to wait so long
for it: he had delivered it at the wrong address and had only
succeeded in recovering it with great difficulty. We dreamt, of
course, of still more impossible things. But there was a most
striking lack of imaginativeness shown by almost all the dreams I
dreamt myself or heard described. It would certainly be of great
psychological interest if all these dreams could be recorded. And
it will easily be understood how much we longed for sleep, since it
could offer each one of us everything that he most eagerly
desired.’ So too, according to Du Prel, ‘Mungo Park,
when he was almost dying of thirst on one of his African journeys,
dreamt unceasingly of the well-watered valleys and meadows of his
home. Similarly, Baron Trenck, suffering torments of hunger while
he was a prisoner in the fortress at Magdeburg, dreamt of being
surrounded by sumptuous meals; and George Back, who took part in
Franklin’s first expedition, when he was almost dying of
starvation as a result of his fearful privations, dreamt constantly
and regularly of copious meals.’