Sigmund Freud - The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud

L. Strümpell 66expresses himself to the same effect in his Nature and Origin of Dreams (p. 16), a study which is everywhere justly held in high respect: "He who dreams turns his back upon the world of waking consciousness" (p. 17). "In the dream the memory of the orderly content of the waking consciousness and its normal behaviour is as good as entirely lost" (p. 19). "The almost complete isolation of the mind in the dream from the regular normal content and course of the waking state..."

But the overwhelming majority of the authors have assumed a contrary view of the relation of the dream to waking life. Thus Haffner 32(p. 19): "First of all the dream is the continuation of the waking state. Our dreams always unite themselves with those ideas which have shortly before been in our consciousness. Careful examination will nearly always find a thread by which the dream has connected itself with the experience of the previous day." Weygandt 75(p. 6), flatly contradicts the above cited statement of Burdach: "For it may often be observed, apparently in the great majority of dreams, that they lead us directly back into everyday life, instead of releasing us from it." Maury 48(p. 56), says in a concise formula: "Nous rêvons de ce que nous avons vu, dit, desiré ou fait." Jessen, 36in his Psychology , published in 1855 (p. 530), is somewhat more explicit: "The content of dreams is more or less determined by the individual personality, by age, sex, station in life, education, habits, and by events and experiences of the whole past life."

The ancients had the same idea about the dependence of the dream content upon life. I cite Radestock 54(p. 139): "When Xerxes, before his march against Greece, was dissuaded from this resolution by good counsel, but was again and again incited by dreams to undertake it, one of the old rational dream-interpreters of the Persians, Artabanus, told him very appropriately that dream pictures mostly contain that of which one has been thinking while awake."

In the didactic poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (IV, v. 959), occurs this passage:—

"Et quo quisque fere studio devinctus adhaeret,

aut quibus in rebus multum sumus ante morati

atque in ea ratione fuit contenta magis mens,

in somnis eadem plerumque videmur obire;

causidici causas agere et componere leges,

induperatores pugnare ac proelia obire," &c., &c.

Cicero ( De Divinatione , II) says quite similarly, as does also Maury much later:—

"Maximeque reliquiae earum rerum moventur in animis et agitantur, de quibus vigilantes aut cogitavimus aut egimus."

The contradiction expressed in these two views as to the relation between dream life and waking life seems indeed insoluble. It will therefore not be out of place to mention the description of F. W. Hildebrandt 35(1875), who believes that the peculiarities of the dream can generally be described only by calling them a "series of contrasts which apparently shade off into contradictions" (p. 8). "The first of these contrasts is formed on the one hand by the strict isolation or seclusion of the dream from true and actual life, and on the other hand by the continuous encroachment of the one upon the other, and the constant dependency of one upon the other. The dream is something absolutely separated from the reality experienced during the waking state; one may call it an existence hermetically sealed up and separated from real life by an unsurmountable chasm. It frees us from reality, extinguishes normal recollection of reality, and places us in another world and in a totally different life, which at bottom has nothing in common with reality...." Hildebrandt then asserts that in falling asleep our whole being, with all its forms of existence, disappears "as through an invisible trap door." In the dream one is perhaps making a voyage to St. Helena in order to offer the imprisoned Napoleon something exquisite in the way of Moselle wine. One is most amicably received by the ex-emperor, and feels almost sorry when the interesting illusion is destroyed on awakening. But let us now compare the situation of the dream with reality. The dreamer has never been a wine merchant, and has no desire to become one. He has never made a sea voyage, and St. Helena is the last place he would take as destination for such a voyage. The dreamer entertains no sympathetic feeling for Napoleon, but on the contrary a strong patriotic hatred. And finally the dreamer was not yet among the living when Napoleon died on the island; so that it was beyond the reach of possibility for him to have had any personal relations with Napoleon. The dream experience thus appears as something strange, inserted between two perfectly harmonising and succeeding periods.

"Nevertheless," continues Hildebrandt, "the opposite is seemingly just as true and correct. I believe that hand in hand with this seclusion and isolation there can still exist the most intimate relation and connection. We may justly say that no matter what the dream offers, it finds its material in reality and in the psychic life arrayed around this reality. However strange the dream may seem, it can never detach itself from reality, and its most sublime as well as its most farcical structures must always borrow their elementary material either from what we have seen with our eyes in the outer world, or from what has previously found a place somewhere in our waking thoughts; in other words, it must be taken from what we had already experienced either objectively or subjectively."

(b) The Material of the Dream.—Memory in the Dream.— That all the material composing the content of the dream in some way originates in experience, that it is reproduced in the dream, or recalled,—this at least may be taken as an indisputable truth. Yet it would be wrong to assume that such connection between dream content and reality will be readily disclosed as an obvious product of the instituted comparison. On the contrary, the connection must be carefully sought, and in many cases it succeeds in eluding discovery for a long time. The reason for this is to be found in a number of peculiarities evinced by the memory in dreams, which, though universally known, have hitherto entirely eluded explanation. It will be worth while to investigate exhaustively these characteristics.

It often happens that matter appears in the dream content which one cannot recognise later in the waking state as belonging to one's knowledge and experience. One remembers well enough having dreamed about the subject in question, but cannot recall the fact or time of the experience. The dreamer is therefore in the dark as to the source from which the dream has been drawing, and is even tempted to believe an independently productive activity on the part of the dream, until, often long afterwards, a new episode brings back to recollection a former experience given up as lost, and thus reveals the source of the dream. One is thus forced to admit that something has been known and remembered in the dream that has been withdrawn from memory during the waking state.

Delbœuf 16narrates from his own experience an especially impressive example of this kind. He saw in his dream the courtyard of his house covered with snow, and found two little lizards half-frozen and buried in the snow. Being a lover of animals, he picked them up, warmed them, and put them back into a crevice in the wall which was reserved for them. He also gave them some small fern leaves that had been growing on the wall, which he knew they were fond of. In the dream he knew the name of the plant: Asplenium ruta muralis . The dream then continued, returning after a digression to the lizards, and to his astonishment Delbœuf saw two other little animals falling upon what was left of the ferns. On turning his eyes to the open field he saw a fifth and a sixth lizard running into the hole in the wall, and finally the street was covered with a procession of lizards, all wandering in the same direction, &c.