The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud
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When after passing a defile one has reached an eminence where the ways part and where the view opens out broadly in different directions, it is permissible to stop for a moment and to consider where one is to turn next. Something like this happens to us after we have mastered this first dream interpretation. We find ourselves in the open light of a sudden cognition. The dream is not comparable to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being touched by the hand of the musician, is struck by some outside force; the dream is not senseless, not absurd, does not presuppose that a part of our store of ideas is dormant while another part begins to awaken. It is a psychic phenomenon of full value, and indeed the fulfilment of a wish; it takes its place in the concatenation of the waking psychic actions which are intelligible to us, and it has been built up by a highly complicated intellectual activity. But at the very moment when we are inclined to rejoice in this discovery, a crowd of questions overwhelms us. If the dream, according to the interpretation, represents a wish fulfilled, what is the cause of the peculiar and unfamiliar manner in which this fulfilment is expressed? What changes have occurred in the dream thoughts before they are transformed into the manifest dream which we remember upon awaking? In what manner has this transformation taken place? Whence comes the material which has been worked over into the dream? What causes the peculiarities which we observe in the dream thoughts, for example, that they may contradict one another? (The analogy of the kettle, p. 87). Is the dream capable of teaching us something new about our inner psychic processes, and can its content correct opinions which we have held during the day? I suggest that for the present all these questions be laid aside, and that a single path be pursued. We have found that the dream represents a wish as fulfilled. It will be our next interest to ascertain whether this is a universal characteristic of the dream, or only the accidental content of the dream ("of Irma's injection") with which we have begun our analysis, for even if we make up our minds that every dream has a meaning and psychic value, we must nevertheless allow for the possibility that this meaning is not the same in every dream. The first dream we have considered was the fulfilment of a wish; another may turn out to be a realised apprehension; a third may have a reflection as to its content; a fourth may simply reproduce a reminiscence. Are there then other wish dreams; or are there possibly nothing but wish dreams?
It is easy to show that the character of wish-fulfilment in dreams is often undisguised and recognisable, so that one may wonder why the language of dreams has not long since been understood. There is, for example, a dream which I can cause as often as I like, as it were experimentally. If in the evening I eat anchovies, olives, or other strongly salted foods, I become thirsty at night, whereupon I waken. The awakening, however, is preceded by a dream, which each time has the same content, namely, that I am drinking. I quaff water in long draughts, it tastes as sweet as only a cool drink can taste when one's throat is parched, and then I awake and have an actual desire to drink. The occasion for this dream is thirst, which I perceive when I awake. The wish to drink originates from this sensation, and the dream shows me this wish as fulfilled. It thereby serves a function the nature of which I soon guess. I sleep well, and am not accustomed to be awakened by a bodily need. If I succeed in assuaging my thirst by means of the dream that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy it. It is thus a dream of convenience. The dream substitutes itself for action, as elsewhere in life. Unfortunately the need of water for quenching thirst cannot be satisfied with a dream, like my thirst for revenge upon Otto and Dr. M., but the intention is the same. This same dream recently appeared in modified form. On this occasion I became thirsty before going to bed, and emptied the glass of water which stood on the little chest next to my bed. Several hours later in the night came a new attack of thirst, accompanied by discomfort. In order to obtain water, I should have had to get up and fetch the glass which stood on the night-chest of my wife. I thus quite appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me a drink from a vase; this vase was an Etruscan cinerary urn which I had brought home from an Italian journey and had since given away. But the water in it tasted so salty (apparently from the ashes) that I had to wake. It may be seen how conveniently the dream is capable of arranging matters; since the fulfilment of a wish is its only purpose, it may be perfectly egotistic. Love of comfort is really not compatible with consideration for others. The introduction of the cinerary urn is probably again the fulfilment of a wish; I am sorry that I no longer possess this vase; it, like the glass of water at my wife's side, is inaccessible to me. The cinerary urn is also appropriate to the sensation of a salty taste which has now grown stronger, and which I know will force me to wake up.1
Such convenience dreams were very frequent with me in the years of my youth. Accustomed as I had always been to work until late at night, early awakening was always a matter of difficulty for me. I used then to dream that I was out of bed and was standing at the wash-stand. After a while I could not make myself admit that I have not yet got up, but meanwhile I had slept for a time. I am acquainted with the same dream of laziness as dreamt by a young colleague of mine, who seems to share my propensity for sleep. The lodging-house keeper with whom he was living in the neighbourhood of the hospital had strict orders to wake him on time every morning, but she certainly had a lot of trouble when she tried to carry out his orders. One morning sleep was particularly sweet. The woman called into the room: " Mr. Joe, get up; you must go to the hospital." Whereupon the sleeper dreamt of a room in the hospital, a bed in which he was lying, and a chart pinned over his head reading: "Joe H.... cand. med. 22 years old." He said to himself in the dream: "If I am already at the hospital, I don't have to go there," turned over and slept on. He had thus frankly admitted to himself his motive for dreaming.
Here is another dream, the stimulus for which acts during sleep itself: One of my women patients, who had had to undergo an unsuccessful operation on the jaw, was to wear a cooling apparatus on the affected cheek, according to the orders of the physicians. But she was in the habit of throwing it off as soon as she had got to sleep. One day I was asked to reprove her for doing so; for she had again thrown the apparatus on the floor. The patient defended herself as follows: "This time I really couldn't help it; it was the result of a dream which I had in the night. In the dream, I was in a box at the opera and was taking a lively interest in the performance. But Mr. Karl Meyer was lying in the sanatorium and complaining pitifully on account of pains in his jaw. I said to myself, 'Since I haven't the pains, I don't need the apparatus either,' that's why I threw it away." This dream of the poor sufferer is similar to the idea in the expression which comes to our lips when we are in a disagreeable situation: "I know something that's a great deal more fun." The dream presents this great deal more fun. Mr. Karl Meyer, to whom the dreamer attributed her pains, was the most indifferent young man of her acquaintance whom she could recall.
It is no more difficult to discover the fulfilment of wishes in several dreams which I have collected from healthy persons. A friend who knew my theory of dreams and had imparted it to his wife, said to me one day: "My wife asked me to tell you that she dreamt yesterday that she was having her menses. You will know what that means." Of course I know: if the young wife dreams that she is having her menses, the menses have stopped. I can understand that she would have liked to enjoy her freedom for a time longer before the discomforts of motherhood began. It was a clever way of giving notice of her first pregnancy. Another friend writes that his wife had recently dreamt that she noticed milk stains on the bosom of her waist. This is also an indication of pregnancy, but this time not of the first one; the young mother wishes to have more nourishment for the second child than she had for the first.
A young woman, who for weeks had been cut off from company because she was nursing a child that was suffering from an infectious disease, dreams, after its safe termination, of a company of people in which A. Daudet, Bourget, M. Prevost, and others are present, all of whom are very pleasant to her and entertain her admirably. The different authors in the dream also have the features which their pictures give them. M. Prevost, with whose picture she is not familiar, looks like—the disinfecting man who on the previous day had cleaned the sick rooms and had entered them as the first visitor after a long period. Apparently the dream might be perfectly translated thus: "It is about time now for something more entertaining than this eternal nursing."
Perhaps this selection will suffice to prove that often and under the most complex conditions dreams are