The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud
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bubbles;" but still for colloquial usage the dream is the gracious fulfiller of wishes. "I should never have fancied that in the wildest dream," exclaims one who finds his expectations surpassed in reality.
1. The facts about dreams of thirst were known also to Weygandt,75 who expresses himself about them (p. 11) as follows: "It is just the sensation of thirst which is most accurately registered of all; it always causes a representation of thirst quenching. The manner in which the dream pictures the act of thirst quenching is manifold, and is especially apt to be formed according to a recent reminiscence. Here also a universal phenomenon is that disappointment in the slight efficacy of the supposed refreshments sets in immediately after the idea that thirst has been quenched." But he overlooks the fact that the reaction of the dream to the stimulus is universal. If other persons who are troubled by thirst at night awake without dreaming beforehand, this does not constitute an objection to my experiment, but characterises those others as persons who sleep poorly.
2. The dream afterwards accomplished the same purpose in the case of the grandmother, who is older than the child by about seventy years, as it did in the case of the granddaughter. After she had been forced to go hungry for several days on account of the restlessness of her floating kidney, she dreamed, apparently with a transference into the happy time of her flowering maidenhood, that she had been "asked out," invited as a guest for both the important meals, and each time had been served with the most delicious morsels.
3. A more searching investigation into the psychic life of the child teaches us, to be sure, that sexual motive powers in infantile forms, which have been too long overlooked, play a sufficiently great part in the psychic activity of the child. This raises some doubt as to the happiness of the child, as imagined later by the adults. Cf. the author's "Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory," translated by A. A. Brill, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Company.
4. It should not be left unmentioned that children sometimes show complex and more obscure dreams, while, on the other hand, adults will often under certain conditions show dreams of an infantile character. How rich in unsuspected material the dreams of children of from four to five years might be is shown by examples in my "Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjahrigen Knaben" (Jahrbuch, ed. by Bleuler & Freud, 1909), and in Jung's "Ueber Konflikte der kindlichen Seele" (ebda. ii. vol., 1910). On the other hand, it seems that dreams of an infantile type reappear especially often in adults if they are transferred to unusual conditions of life. Thus Otto Nordenskjold, in his book Antarctic (1904), writes as follows about the crew who passed the winter with him. "Very characteristic for the trend of our inmost thoughts were our dreams, which were never more vivid and numerous than at present. Even those of our comrades with whom dreaming had formerly been an exception had long stories to tell in the morning when we exchanged our experiences in the world of phantasies. They all referred to that outer world which was now so far from us, but they often fitted into our present relations. An especially characteristic dream was the one in which one of our comrades believed himself back on the bench at school, where the task was assigned him of skinning miniature seals which were especially made for the purposes of instruction. Eating and drinking formed the central point around which most of our dreams were grouped. One of us, who was fond of going to big dinner parties at night, was exceedingly glad if he could report in the morning 'that he had had a dinner consisting of three courses.' Another dreamed of tobacco—of whole mountains of tobacco; still another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea under full sail. Still another dream deserves to be mentioned. The letter carrier brought the mail, and gave a long explanation of why he had had to wait so long for it; he had delivered it at the wrong place, and only after great effort had been able to get it back. To be sure, we occupied ourselves in sleep with still more impossible things, but the lack of phantasy in almost all the dreams which I myself dreamed or heard others relate was quite striking. It would surely have been of great psychological interest if all the dreams could have been noted. But one can readily understand how we longed for sleep. It alone could afford us everything that we all most ardently desired."
5. A Hungarian proverb referred to by Ferenczi87 states more explicitly that "the pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize."
IV
DISTORTION IN DREAMS
If I make the assertion that wish fulfilment is the meaning of every dream, that, accordingly, there can be no dreams except wish dreams, I am sure at the outset to meet with the most emphatic contradiction. Objections will be made to this effect: "The fact that there are dreams which must be understood as fulfilments of wishes is not new, but, on the contrary, has long since been recognised by the authors. Cf. Radestock54 (pp. 137–138), Volkelt72 (pp. 110–111), Tissié68 (p. 70), M. Simon63 (p. 42) on the hunger dreams of the imprisoned Baron Trenck), and the passage in Griesinger31 (p. 11). The assumption that there can be nothing but dreams of wish fulfilment, however, is another of those unjustified generalisations by which you have been pleased to distinguish yourself of late. Indeed dreams which exhibit the most painful content, but not a trace of wish fulfilment, occur plentifully enough. The pessimistic philosopher, Edward von Hartman, perhaps stands furthest from the theory of wish fulfilment. He expresses himself in his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Part II. (stereotyped edition, p. 34), to the following effect:—
"'As regards the dream, all the troubles of waking life are transferred by it to the sleeping state; only the one thing, which can in some measure reconcile a cultured person to life-scientific and artistic enjoyment is not transferred....' But even less discontented observers have laid emphasis on the fact that in dreams pain and disgust are more frequent than pleasure; so Scholz59 (p. 39), Volkelt72 (p. 80), and others. Indeed two ladies, Sarah Weed and Florence Hallam,33 have found from the elaboration of their dreams a mathematical expression for the preponderance of displeasure in dreams. They designate 58 per cent. of the dreams as disagreeable, and only 28.6 per cent. as positively pleasant. Besides those dreams which continue the painful sensations of life during sleep, there are also dreams of fear, in which this most terrible of all disagreeable sensations tortures us until we awake, and it is with just these dreams of fear that children are so often persecuted (Cf. Debacker17 concerning the Pavor Nocturnus), though it is in the case of children that you have found dreams of wishing undisguised."
Indeed it is the anxiety dreams which seem to prevent a generalisation of the thesis that the dream is a wish-fulfilment, which we have established by means of the examples in the last section; they seem even to brand this thesis as an absurdity.
It is not difficult, however, to escape these apparently conclusive objections. Please observe that our doctrine does not rest upon an acceptance of the manifest dream content, but has reference to the thought content which is found to He behind the dream by the process of interpretation. Let us contrast the manifest and the latent dream content. It is true that there are dreams whose content is of the most painful nature. But has anyone ever tried to interpret these dreams, to disclose their latent thought content? If not, the two objections are no longer valid against us; there always remains the possibility that even painful and fearful dreams may be discovered to be wish fulfilments upon interpretation.1
In scientific work it is often advantageous, when the solution of one problem presents difficulties, to take up a second problem, just as it is easier to crack two nuts together instead of separately. Accordingly we are confronted not merely with the problem: How can painful and fearful dreams be the fulfilments of wishes? but we may also, from our discussion so far, raise the question: Why do not the dreams which show an indifferent content, but turn out to be wish-fulfilments, show this meaning undisguised? Take the