Freud - Complete Works (645 page)

Dreams And Telepathy

3884

   ‘It is not the first time
that distant events have become known to me before I received the
actual news. To give one instance among many. In October I had a
visit from my three brothers. We had not all been together for
thirty years, except for quite a short time, once at my
father’s funeral and once at my mother’s. Both deaths
were expected, and I had had no ‘presentiments’ in
either case. But about twenty-five years ago my youngest brother
died quite suddenly and unexpectedly when he was ten. As the
postman handed me the postcard with the news of his death, before I
had glanced at it, the thought came to me at once, "It is to
say that your brother is dead." He was the only one left at
home, a strong healthy lad, while we four elder brothers were
already fully fledged and had left our parents’ house. At the
time of my brothers’ visit the talk by chance came round to
this experience of mine, and, as if at the word of command, all
three brothers came out with the declaration that exactly the same
thing had happened to them. Whether it happened in exactly the same
manner I cannot say; at all events each one said that he had felt
perfectly certain of the death just before the quite unexpected
news had arrived. We are all from the mother’s side of a
sensitive disposition, though tall, strong men, but not one of us
is in the least inclined towards spiritualism or occultism; on the
contrary, we disclaim adherence to either. My brothers are all
three University men, two are schoolmasters, one a surveyor, all
rather pedants than visionaries. - That is all I can tell you in
regard to the dream. If you can turn it to literary account, I am
delighted to place it at your disposal.’

Dreams And Telepathy

3885

   I am afraid that you may behave
like the writer of these two letters. You, too, will be primarily
interested in the question whether this dream can really be
regarded as a telepathic notification of the unexpected birth of
the twin children, and you will not be disposed to submit this
dream to analysis like any other. I foresee that it will always be
so when psycho-analysis and occultism encounter each other. The
former has, so to speak, all our mental instincts against it; the
latter is met half-way by powerful and mysterious sympathies. I am
not, however, going to take up the position that I am nothing but a
psycho-analyst, that the problems of occultism do not concern me:
you would rightly judge that to be only an evasion of a problem. On
the contrary, I may say that it would be a great satisfaction to me
if I could convince myself and others on unimpeachable evidence of
the existence of telepathic processes, but I also consider that the
information provided about this dream is altogether inadequate to
justify any such pronouncement. You will observe that it does not
once occur to this intelligent man, deeply interested as he is in
the problem of his dream, to tell us when he had last seen his
daughter or what news he had lately had from her. He writes in the
first letter that the birth was a month too soon; in the second,
however, the month has become three weeks only, and in neither are
we told whether the birth was really premature, or whether, as so
often happens, those concerned were out in their reckoning. But we
should have to consider these and other details of the occurrence
if we are to weigh the probability of the dreamer having made
unconscious estimates and guesses. I felt too that it would be of
no use even if I succeeded in getting answers to such questions. In
the course of arriving at the information new doubts would
constantly arise, which could only be set at rest if one had the
man in front of one and could revive all the relevant memories
which he had perhaps dismissed as unessential. He is certainly
right in what he says at the beginning of his second letter that
more would have come out in talking.

   Consider another and similar
case, in which the disturbing interest of occultism has no part.
You must often have been in a position to compare the anamnesis and
the information about the illness given during the first session by
any neurotic with what you have gained from him after some months
of psycho-analysis. Apart from inevitable abbreviations, how many
essentials were left out or suppressed, how many connections were
displaced - in fact, how much that was incorrect or untrue was told
you on that first occasion! You will not call me hyper-critical if
I refuse in the circumstances to make any pronouncement whether the
dream in question is a telepathic event or a particularly subtle
achievement on the part of the dreamer’s unconscious or
whether it is simply to be taken as a striking coincidence. Our
curiosity must be satisfied with the hope of some later occasion on
which it may be possible to make a detailed oral examination of the
dreamer. But you cannot say that this outcome of our investigation
has disappointed you, for I prepared you for it; I said you would
hear nothing which would throw any light on the problem of
telepathy.

Dreams And Telepathy

3886

   If we now pass on to the analytic
treatment of this dream, we are obliged once more to express
dissatisfaction. The thoughts that the dreamer associates with the
manifest content of the dream are again insufficient; they do not
enable us to make any analysis of the dream. For instance, the
dream goes into great detail over the likeness of the children to
the parents, discusses the colour of their hair and the probable
change of colour at a later age, and as an explanation of these
elaborate details we only have the dry piece of information from
the dreamer that he has always been interested in questions of
likeness and heredity. We are accustomed to expect rather more
material than this! But at
one
point the dream does admit of
an analytic interpretation, and precisely at this point analysis,
which has otherwise no connection with occultism, comes to the aid
of telepathy in a remarkable way. It is only on account of this
single point that I am asking for your attention to this dream at
all.

   Correctly speaking, this dream
has no right whatever to be called ‘telepathic’. It did
not inform the dreamer of anything which (outside his normal
knowledge) was taking place elsewhere. What the dream did relate
was something quite different from the event reported in the
telegram received on the second day after the night of the dream.
The dream and the actual occurrence diverge at a particularly
important point; but they agree, apart from the coincidence of
time, in another very interesting element. In the dream the
dreamer’s
wife
had twins. The occurrence, however, was
that his
daughter
had given birth to twins in her distant
home. The dreamer did not overlook this difference; he did not seem
to know any way of getting over it and, as according to his own
account he had no leaning towards the occult, he only asked quite
tentatively whether the coincidence between dream and occurrence on
the point of the twin-birth could be more than an accident. The
psycho-analytic interpretation of dreams, however, does away with
this difference between the dream and the event, and gives both the
same content. If we consult the associative material to this dream,
it shows, in spite of its sparseness, that an intimate bond of
feeling existed between the father and daughter, a bond of feeling
which is so usual and so natural that we ought to cease to be
ashamed of it, one that in daily life merely finds expression as a
tender interest and is only pushed to its logical conclusion in
dreams. The father knew that his daughter clung to him, he was
convinced that she often thought of him during her labour. In his
heart I think he grudged her to his son-in-law, to whom in one
letter he makes a few disparaging references. On the occasion of
her confinement (whether expected or communicated by telepathy) the
unconscious wish became active in the repressed part of his mind:
‘she ought to be my (second) wife instead’; it was this
wish that had distorted the dream-thoughts and was the cause of the
difference between the manifest content of the dream and the event.
We are entitled to replace the second wife in the dream by the
daughter. If we possessed more associations to the dream, we could
undoubtedly verify and deepen this interpretation.

   And now I have reached the point
I wish to put before you. We have endeavoured to maintain the
strictest impartiality and have allowed two conceptions of the
dream to rank as equally probable and equally unproved. According
to the first the dream is a reaction to a telepathic message:
‘your daughter has just brought twins into the world.’
According to the second an unconscious process of thought underlies
the dream, which may be reproduced somewhat as follows:
‘To-day is the day the confinement should take place if the
young people in Berlin are really out in their reckoning by a
month, as I suspect. And if my (first) wife were still alive, she
certainly would not be content with one grandchild. To please her
there would have to be at least twins!’ If this second view
is right, no new problems arise. It is simply a dream like any
other. The (preconscious) dream-thoughts as outlined above are
reinforced by the (unconscious) wish that no other than the
daughter should be the dreamer’s second wife, and thus the
manifest dream as described to us arises.

Dreams And Telepathy

3887

   If you prefer to assume that a
telepathic message about the daughter’s confinement reached
the sleeper, further questions arise of the relation of a message
such as this to a dream and of its influence on the formation of
dreams. The answer is not far to seek and is quite unambiguous. A
telepathic message will be treated as a portion of the material
that goes to the formation of a dream, like any other external or
internal stimulus, like a disturbing noise in the street or an
insistent organic sensation in the sleeper’s own body. In our
example it is evident how the message, with the help of a lurking
repressed wish, became remodelled into a wish-fulfilment; it is
unfortunately less easy to show that it combined with other
material that had become active at the same time and was blended
into a dream. Telepathic messages - if we are justified in
recognizing their existence - can thus make no alteration in the
process of forming a dream; telepathy has nothing to do with the
nature of dreams. And in order to avoid the impression that I am
trying to conceal a vague notion behind abstract and fine-sounding
words, I am willing to repeat: the essential nature of dreams
consists in the peculiar process of ‘dream-work’ which,
with the help of an unconscious wish, carries the preconscious
thoughts (day’s residues) over into the manifest content of
the dream. The problem of telepathy concerns dreams as little as
does the problem of anxiety.

   I am hoping that you will grant
this, but that you will raise the objection that there are,
nevertheless, other telepathic dreams in which there is no
difference between the event and the dream, and in which there is
nothing else to be found but an undistorted reproduction of the
event. I have no knowledge of such dreams from my own experience,
but I know they have often been reported. If we assume that we have
such an undisguised and unadulterated telepathic dream to deal
with, another question arises. Ought we to call such a telepathic
experience a ‘dream’ at all? You will certainly do so
as long as you keep to popular usage, in which everything that
takes place in mental life during sleep is called a dream. You,
too, perhaps say, ‘I tossed about in my dream’, and
still less are you conscious of anything incorrect when you say,
‘I shed tears in my dream’ or ‘I felt
apprehensive in my dream’. But you will no doubt notice that
in all these cases you are using ‘dream’ and
‘sleep’ and ‘state of being asleep’
interchangeably, as if there were no distinction between them. I
think it would be in the interests of scientific accuracy to keep
‘dream’ and ‘state of sleep’ more
distinctly separate. Why should we provide a counterpart to the
confusion evoked by Maeder who, by refusing to distinguish between
the dream-work and the latent dream-thoughts, has discovered a new
function for dreams? Supposing, then, that we are brought face to
face with a pure telepathic ‘dream’, let us rather call
it instead a telepathic experience in a state of sleep. A dream
without condensation, distortion, dramatization, above all, without
wish-fulfilment, surely does not deserve the name. You will remind
me that, if so, there are
other
mental products in sleep to
which the right to be called ‘dreams’ would have to be
refused. Actual experiences of the day are sometimes simply
repeated in sleep; reproductions of traumatic scenes in
‘dreams’ have led us only lately to revise the theory
of dreams. There are dreams which are to be distinguished from the
usual type by certain special qualities, which are, properly
speaking, nothing but night-phantasies, not having undergone
additions or alterations of any kind and being in all other ways
similar to the familiar day-dreams. It would be awkward, no doubt,
to exclude these structures from the domain of
‘dreams’. But still they all come from within, are
products of our mental life, whereas the very conception of the
purely ‘telepathic dream’ lies in its being a
perception of something external, in relation to which the mind
remains passive and receptive.

Dreams And Telepathy

3888

II

   The second case which I shall
bring before your notice in fact follows along other lines. This is
not a telepathic dream, but a dream that has recurred from
childhood onwards, in a person who has had many telepathic
experiences. Her letter, which I reproduce here, contains some
remarkable things, about which we cannot form any judgement. A part
of it is of interest in connection with the problem of the relation
of telepathy to dreams.