Freud - Complete Works (88 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

533

   Strümpell (1877, 39):
‘There are cases in which the analysis of a dream shows that
some of its components are indeed derived from experiences of the
previous day or its predecessor, but experiences so unimportant and
trivial from the point of view of waking consciousness that they
were forgotten soon after they occurred. Experiences of this kind
include, for instance, remarks accidentally overheard, or another
person’s actions inattentively observed, or passing glimpses
of people or things, or odd fragments of what one has read, and so
on.’

   Havelock Ellis (1899, 727):
‘The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and
problems on which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are
not those which usually present themselves at once to dream
consciousness. It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned,
mostly the trifling, the incidental, the "forgotten"
impressions of daily life which reappear in our dreams. The psychic
activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most
profoundly.’

   Binz (1878, 44-5) actually makes
this particular peculiarity of memory in dreams the occasion for
expressing his dissatisfaction with the explanations of dreams
which he himself has supported: ‘And the natural dream raises
similar problems. Why do we not always dream of the mnemic
impressions of the day we have just lived through? Why do we often,
without any apparent motive, plunge instead into the remote and
almost extinct past? Why does consciousness so often in dreams
receive the impression of
indifferent
mnemic images, while
the brain cells, just where they carry the most sensitive marks of
what has been experienced, lie for the most part silent and still,
unless they have been stirred into fresh activity shortly before,
during waking life?’

   It is easy to see how the
remarkable preference shown by the memory in dreams for
indifferent, and consequently unnoticed, elements in waking
experience is bound to lead people to overlook in general the
dependence of dreams upon waking life and at all events to make it
difficult in any particular instance to prove that dependence. Thus
Miss Whiton Galkins (1893, 315), in her statistical study of her
own and her collaborator’s dreams, found that in eleven per
cent of the total there was no visible connection with waking life.
Hildebrandt (1875, ) is unquestionably right in asserting that we
should be able to explain the genesis of every dream-image if we
devoted enough time and trouble to tracing its origin. He speaks of
this as ‘an exceedingly laborious and thankless task. For as
a rule it ends in hunting out every kind of utterly worthless
psychical event from the remotest corners of the chambers of
one’s memory, and in dragging to light once again every kind
of completely indifferent moment of the past from the oblivion in
which it was buried in the very hour, perhaps, after it
occurred.’ I can only regret that this keen-sighted author
allowed himself to be deterred from following the path which had
this inauspicious beginning; if he had followed it, it would have
led him to the very heart of the explanation of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

534

   The way in which the memory
behaves in dreams is undoubtedly of the greatest importance for any
theory of memory in general. It teaches us that ‘nothing
which we have once mentally possessed can be entirely lost’
(Scholz, 1893, 59); or, as Delboeuf puts it, ‘que toute
impression même la plus insignifiante, laisse une trace
inaltérable, indéfiniment susceptible de
reparâitre au jour.’ This is a conclusion to which we
are also driven by many pathological phenomena of mental life.
Certain theories about dreams which we shall mention later seek to
account for their absurdity and incoherence by a partial forgetting
of what we know during the day. When we bear in mind the
extraordinary efficiency that we have just seen exhibited by memory
in dreams we shall have a lively sense of the contradiction which
these theories involve.

   It might perhaps occur to us that
the phenomenon of dreaming could be reduced entirely to that of
memory: dreams, it might be supposed, are a manifestation of a
reproductive activity which is at work even in the night and which
is an end in itself. This would tally with statements such as those
made by Pilcz (1899), according to which there is a fixed relation
observable between the time at which a dream occurs and its
content-impressions from the remotest past being reproduced in
dreams during deep sleep, while more recent impressions appear
towards morning. But views of this sort are inherently improbable
owing to the manner in which dreams deal with the material that is
to be remembered. Strümpell rightly points out that dreams do
not reproduce experiences. They take one step forward, but the next
step in the chain is omitted, or appears in an altered form, or is
replaced by something entirely extraneous. Dreams yield no more
than
fragments
of reproductions; and this is so general a
rule that theoretical conclusions may be based on it. It is true
that there are exceptional cases in which a dream repeats an
experience with as much completeness as is attainable by our waking
memory. Delboeuf tells how one of his university colleagues had a
dream which reproduced in all its details a dangerous carriage
accident he had had, with an almost miraculous escape. Miss Calkins
(1893) mentions two dreams whose content was an exact reproduction
of an event of the previous day, and I shall myself have occasion
later to report an example I came across of a childhood experience
re-appearing in a dream without modification.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] Subsequent
experience leads me to add that it by no means rarely happens that
innocent and unimportant actions of the previous day are repeated
in a dream: such, for instance, as packing a trunk, preparing food
in the kitchen, and so on. What the dreamer is himself stressing in
dreams of this kind is not, however, the content of the memory but
the fact of its being ‘real’: ‘I really
did
do all that yesterday.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

535

(C)

THE STIMULI AND SOURCES OF
DREAMS

   There is a popular saying that
‘dreams come from indigestion’ and this helps us to see
what is meant by the stimuli and sources of dreams. Behind these
concepts lies a theory according to which dreams are a result of a
disturbance of sleep: we should not have had a dream unless
something disturbing had happened during our sleep, and the dream
was a reaction to that disturbance.

   Discussions upon the exciting
causes of dreams occupy a very large space in the literature of the
subject. The problem could obviously only arise after dreams had
become a subject of biological investigation. The ancients, who
believed that dreams were inspired by the gods, had no need to look
around for their stimulus: dreams emanated from the will of divine
or daemonic powers and their content arose from the knowledge or
purpose of those powers. Science was immediately faced by the
question of whether the stimulus to dreaming was always the same or
whether there could be many kinds of such stimuli; and this
involved the consideration of whether the explanation of the
causation of dreams fell within the province of psychology or
rather of physiology. Most authorities seem to agree in assuming
that the causes that disturb sleep - that is, the sources of
dreaming - may be of many kinds and that somatic stimuli and mental
excitations alike may come to act as instigators of dreams.
Opinions differ widely, however, in the preference they show for
one or the other source of dreams and in the order of importance
which they assign to them as factors in the production of
dreams.

   Any complete enumeration of the
sources of dreams leads to a recognition of four kinds of source;
and these have also been used for the classification of dreams
themselves. They are: (1) external (objective) sensory excitations;
(2) internal (subjective) sensory excitations; (3) internal
(organic) somatic stimuli; and (4) purely psychical sources of
stimulation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

536

1.  EXTERNAL SENSORY
STIMULI

   The younger Strümpell, the
son of the philosopher whose book on dreams has already given us
several hints upon their problems, published a well-known account
of his observations upon one of his patients who was afflicted with
general anaesthesia of the surface of his body and paralysis of
several of his higher sense organs. If the few of this man’s
sensory channels which remained open to the external world were
closed, he would fall asleep. Now when we ourselves wish to go to
sleep we are in the habit of trying to produce a situation similar
to that of Strümpell’s experiment. We close our most
important sensory channels, our eyes, and try to protect the other
senses from all stimuli or from any modification of the stimuli
acting on them. We then fall asleep, even though our plan is never
completely realized. We cannot keep stimuli completely away from
our sense organs nor can we completely suspend the excitability of
our sense organs. The fact that a fairly powerful stimulus will
awaken us at any time is evidence that ‘even in sleep the
soul is in constant contact with the extracorporeal world’.
The sensory stimuli that reach us during sleep may very well become
sources of dreams.

   Now there are a great number of
such stimuli, ranging from the unavoidable ones which the state of
sleep itself necessarily involves or must tolerate from time to
time, to the accidental, rousing stimuli which may or do put an end
to sleep. A bright light may force its way into our eyes, or a
noise may make itself heard, or some strong-smelling substance may
stimulate the mucous membrane of our nose. By unintentional
movements during our sleep we may uncover some part of our body and
expose it to sensations of chill, or by a change in posture we may
ourselves bring about sensations of pressure or contact. We may be
stung by a gnat, or some small mishap during the night may impinge
upon several of our senses at once. Attentive observers have
collected a whole series of dreams in which there has been such a
far-reaching correspondence between a stimulus noticed on waking
and a portion of the content of the dream that it has been possible
to identify the stimulus as the source of the dream .

The Interpretation Of Dreams

537

   I will quote from Jessen (1855,
527 f.) a collection of dreams of this kind which may be traced
back to objective, and more or less accidental, sensory
stimulation.

   ‘Every noise that is
indistinctly perceived arouses corresponding dream-images. A peal
of thunder will set us in the midst of a battle; the crowing of a
cock may turn into a man’s cry of terror; the creaking of a
door may produce a dream of burglars. If our bed-clothes fall off
in the night, we may dream, perhaps, of walking about naked or of
falling into water. If we are lying cross-wise in bed and push our
feet over the edge, we may dream that we are standing on the brink
of a frightful precipice or that we are falling over a cliff. If
our head happens to get under the pillow, we dream of being beneath
a huge overhanging rock which is on the point of burying us under
its weight. Accumulations of semen lead to lascivious dreams, local
pains produce ideas of being ill-treated, attacked or injured. . .
.’

   ‘Meier (1758, 33) once
dreamt that he was overpowered by some men who stretched him out on
his back on the ground and drove a stake into the earth between his
big toe and the next one. While he was imagining this in the dream
he woke up and found that a straw was sticking between his toes. On
another occasion, according to Hennings (1784, 258), when Meier had
fastened his shirt rather tight round his neck, he dreamt that he
was being hanged. Hoffbauer dreamt when he was a young man of
falling down from a high wall, and when he woke up found that his
bedstead had collapsed and that he had really fallen on to the
floor. . . . Gregory reports that once, when he was
lying with his feet on a hot-water bottle, he dreamt he had climbed
to the top of Mount Etna and that the ground there was intolerably
hot. Another man, who was sleeping with a hot poultice on his head,
dreamt that he was being scalped by a band of Red Indians; while a
third, who was wearing a damp night-shirt, imagined that he was
being dragged through a stream. An attack of gout that came on
suddenly during sleep caused the patient to believe he was in the
hands of the Inquisition and being tortured on the rack.
(Macnish.)'

The Interpretation Of Dreams

538

   The argument based on the
similarity between the stimulus and the content of the dream gains
in strength if it is possible deliberately to convey a sensory
stimulus to the sleeper and produce in him a dream corresponding to
that stimulus. According to Macnish (loc. cit.), quoted by Jessen
(1855, 529), experiments of this sort had already been made by
Girou de Buzareingues. ‘He left his knee uncovered and dreamt
that he was travelling at night in a mail coach. He remarks upon
this that travellers will no doubt be aware how cold one’s
knees become at night in a coach. Another time he left his head
uncovered at the back and dreamt that he was taking part in a
religious ceremony in the open air. It must be explained that in
the country in which he lived it was the custom always to keep the
head covered except in circumstances such as these.’