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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44085 ***
+
+PSYCHOANALYSIS SLEEP and DREAMS
+
+
+
+
+PSYCHOANALYSIS AND BEHAVIOR
+
+BY ANDRÉ TRIDON
+
+
+"Tridon applies the psychoanalytical doctrine to a number of everyday
+problems, a business that ought to be undertaken on a far more extensive
+scale. His chapters on the psychology of war hysteria and of comstockery
+are acute and constructive."--_H. L. Mencken._
+
+"His presentation of psychoanalysis is admirable."--_New York Medical
+Journal._
+
+_$2.50 net at all booksellers_
+
+ALFRED A. KNOPF, PUBLISHER, N.Y.
+
+
+
+
+  PSYCHOANALYSIS SLEEP and DREAMS
+
+
+  BY ANDRÉ TRIDON
+  _Author of "Psychoanalysis, its
+  History, Theory and Practice" and
+  "Psychoanalysis and Behavior"_
+
+
+  "Nothing is more genuinely
+  ourselves than our dreams."
+                        Nietzsche.
+
+
+  NEW YORK
+  ALFRED A. KNOPF
+  1921
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
+  ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
+
+  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+FOR ADÈLE LEWISOHN
+
+
+
+
+I wish to thank Dr. J. W. Brandeis, Dr. N. Philip Norman, and Dr. Gregory
+Stragnell, for valuable data and editorial assistance, and Mr. Carl Dreher
+who lent himself to many experiments.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+St. Augustine was glad that God did not hold him responsible for his
+dreams. From which we may infer that his dreams must have been "human, all
+too human" and that he experienced a certain feeling of guilt on account
+of their nature.
+
+His attitude is one assumed by many people, laymen and scientists, some of
+them concealing it under a general scepticism as to dream interpretation.
+
+Few people are willing to concede as Nietzsche did, that "nothing is more
+genuinely ourselves than our dreams."
+
+This is why the psychoanalytic pronouncement that dreams are the
+fulfilment of wishes meets with so much hostility.
+
+The man who has a dream of gross sex or ego gratification dislikes to have
+others think that the desire for such gross pleasure is a part of his
+personality. He very much prefers to have others believe that some
+extraneous agent, some whimsical power, such as the devil, forced such
+thoughts upon him while the unconsciousness of sleep made him
+irresponsible and defenceless.
+
+This is due in part to the absurd and barbarous idea that it is meet to
+inflict punishment for mere thoughts, an idea which is probably as deeply
+rooted in ignorant minds in our days as it was in the mind of the Roman
+emperor who had a man killed because the poor wretch dreamed of the
+ruler's death.
+
+We must not disclaim the responsibility for our unconscious thoughts as
+they reveal themselves through dreams. They are truly a part of our
+personality. But our responsibility is merely psychological; we should not
+punish people for harbouring in their unconscious the lewd or murderous
+cravings which the caveman probably gratified in his daily life; nor
+should we be burdened with a sense of sin because we cannot drive out of
+our consciousness certain cravings, biologically natural, but socially
+unjustifiable.
+
+The first prerequisite for a normal mental life is the acceptance of all
+biological facts. Biology is ignorant of all delicacy.
+
+The possible presence of broken glass, coupled with the fact that man
+lacks hoofs, makes it imperative for man to wear shoes.
+
+The man who is unconsolable over the fact that his feet are too tender
+in their bare state to tread roads, and the man who decides to ignore
+broken glass and to walk barefoot, are courting mental and physical
+suffering of the most useless type.
+
+He who accepts the fact that his feet are tender and broken glass
+dangerous, and goes forth, shod in the proper footgear, will probably
+remain whole, mentally and physically.
+
+When we realize that our unconscious is ours and ourselves, but not of our
+own making, we shall know our limitations and our potentialities and be
+free from many fears.
+
+No better way has been devised for probing the unconscious than the honest
+and scientific study of dreams, a study which must be conducted with the
+care and the freedom from bias that characterize the chemist's or the
+physicist's laboratory experiments.
+
+Furthermore, dream study and dream study alone, can help us solve a
+problem which scientists have generally disregarded or considered as
+solved, the tremendous problem of sleep.
+
+Algebra and Latin, which are of no earthly use to 999/1000 of those
+studying them, are a part of the curriculum of almost every high school.
+Sleep, in which we spend one-third of our life, is not considered as of
+any importance.
+
+How could we understand sleep unless we understood the phenomena which
+take place in sleep: dreams?
+
+Even Freud, whose research work lifted dream study from the level of
+witchcraft to that of an accurate science, seems to have been little
+concerned with the enigma of sleep and sleeplessness.
+
+This book is an attempt at correlating sleep and dreams and at explaining
+sleep through dreams.
+
+Briefly stated, my thesis is that we sleep in order to dream and to be for
+a number of hours our simpler and unrepressed selves. Sleeplessness is due
+to the fact that, in our fear of incompletely repressed cravings, we do
+not dare to become, through the unconsciousness of sleep, our primitive
+selves. In nightmares, repressed cravings which seek gratification under a
+symbolic cloak, and are therefore unrecognizable, cause us to be tortured
+by fear.
+
+The cure for sleeplessness and nightmares is, accordingly, the acceptance
+of biological facts observable in our unconscious and our willingness to
+grant, through the unconsciousness of sleep, dream gratification to
+conscious and unconscious cravings of a socially objectionable kind which
+we must, however, accept as a part of our personality.
+
+February, 1921.
+
+  121 Madison Avenue
+  New York City
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+
+     I. SLEEP DEFINED                            1
+
+    II. FATIGUE AND REST                        11
+
+   III. THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY                 20
+
+    IV. HYPNOGOGIC AND HYPNOPOMPIC VISIONS      32
+
+     V. WHERE DREAMS COME FROM                  36
+
+    VI. CONVENIENCE DREAMS                      44
+
+   VII. DREAM LIFE                              48
+
+  VIII. WISH FULFILMENT                         58
+
+    IX. NIGHTMARES                              67
+
+     X. TYPICAL DREAMS AND SLEEP WALKING        75
+
+    XI. PROPHETIC DREAMS                        85
+
+   XII. ATTITUDES REFLECTED IN DREAMS           92
+
+  XIII. RECURRENT DREAMS                       102
+
+   XIV. DAY DREAMS                             113
+
+    XV. NEUROSIS AND DREAMS                    118
+
+   XVI. SLEEPLESSNESS                          127
+
+  XVII. DREAM INTERPRETATION                   144
+
+  BIBLIOGRAPHY                                 158
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I: SLEEP DEFINED
+
+
+Literary quotations and time-worn stereotypes exert a deplorable influence
+on our thinking. They lead us to consider certain open questions as
+settled, certain puzzling problems as solved.
+
+From time immemorial, the unthinking and thinking alike, have accepted the
+idea of a kinship between sleep and death. Expressions like "eternal
+sleep" show by the frequency with which they recur, how constantly
+associated the two ideas are in the average mind.
+
+Not only is that association absurd but its consequences are regrettable,
+at least from one point of view: if sleep is a form of death, the psychic
+phenomena connected with it are bound to be misinterpreted and either
+granted a dignity they do not deserve or scornfully ignored.
+
+The superstitious may loose all critical sense and see in sleep and sleep
+thinking something mysterious and mystical. The scientist, on the other
+hand, may consider such phenomena as beneath his notice.
+
+No sober appreciation of sleep and dreams can be expected from any one who
+associates in any way the idea of sleep and the idea of death.
+
+Respiration seems to be the essential feature of life, and its lack, the
+essential feature of death. As long as respiration takes place, the two
+ferments of the body, pepsin and trypsin, break up insoluble food
+molecules into soluble acid molecules which are then absorbed by the blood
+and carried to the cells of the body where they are utilized to build up
+new solid cell matter.
+
+When respiration ceases, a degree of acidity is reached which enables the
+two ferments to digest the body of disintegrating each cell. This is
+according to Jacques Loeb the meaning of death.
+
+No such chemical action is observable in any form of sleep.
+
+From that point of view, sleep is a form of life.
+
+Sleep is even a more normal form of life than the average waking states.
+
+In the normal waking states, the vagotonic nerves of the autonomic system
+which upbuild the body and insure the continuance of the race should
+dominate the organism, being checked in emergencies only by the
+sympathetic nerves which constitute the human safety system.
+
+The vagotonic nerves contract the pupil, make saliva and gastric juice
+flow, slow down the heart beats, decrease the blood pressure, promote
+sexual activities, etc.
+
+The sympathetic nerves on the contrary, dilate the pupil, dry the mouth,
+stop the gastric activities, increase the heart beats, raise the blood
+pressure, decrease or arrest the sexual activities, etc.
+
+In peaceful sleep, we observe that the vagotonic functions hold full sway.
+In sleep, our pupils are contracted. Even when they have been dilated by
+atropine, they become contracted again in sleep.
+
+In sleep, the digestive organs continue to perform their specific work,
+all the popular beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding. Infants and
+animals generally go to sleep as soon as they finish feeding. Animals
+digest infinitely better if allowed to sleep after being fed, than if
+compelled to stay awake, walk or run.
+
+The activity of the sexual organs is as great in sleep as in waking life;
+in certain cases, it is even greater.
+
+At certain times, during sleep, the pressure of the blood in the brain is
+greatly reduced, and certain authors have concluded that sleep was
+characterized by brain anaemia, which some of them consider as the cause
+of sleep.
+
+Indeed, unconsciousness can be induced by producing a temporary brain
+anaemia, for instance by compressing the carotid arteries of the neck for
+a minute or so. Sleepiness almost always appears then and lasts as long
+as the pressure is exerted.
+
+Special manometers show that the fall in the blood pressure invariably
+precedes the appearance of sleep. In dogs whose skulls have been trephined
+for purposes of observation, the brain can be seen to turn pale as soon as
+the animals fall asleep.
+
+But we have here simply one of the vagotonic activities mentioned
+previously. In the normal organism, the blood pressure should be low,
+rising only in emergencies, when the organism is facing some danger and
+must be prepared for fight or flight.
+
+And in fact, the slightest light, noise, pain or smell stimulus, is
+sufficient to bring the blood back to the brain during sleep. Our
+sympathetic nerves are on the watch and even if the subject does not wake
+up, they rush the blood whenever it is needed for emergency action, in
+this case, to the general switchboard of the organism, the brain.
+
+But this so-called brain anaemia is not constant during the entire period
+of sleep. The pressure falls gradually before sleep sets in and only
+reaches its minimum an hour after sleep has begun. Then it increases
+gradually and becomes normal again about the usual waking time. We shall
+see later that attention follows an identical curve.
+
+It has been pointed out that in sleep the respiration becomes slower and
+that the amount of air inspired and consequently of oxygen assimilated is
+lowered. But inaction in the waking states will show exactly the same
+results.
+
+A smaller quantity of carbonic acid is eliminated in sleep, the decrease
+being about sixteen per cent. But that condition is not due to sleep. It
+is due to many other factors such as the absence of light, etc.
+
+The nature of the food taken before retiring has also a notable influence
+on the quantity of carbonic acid eliminated by the sleeper; the quantity
+varies from seventy five per cent after a meat supper to ninety per cent
+after a diet of starches.
+
+The sweat glands of the skin secrete more actively in sleep than in waking
+life, which is also a vagotonic symptom and is also due to the fact that
+the sweat centre is easily affected by carbonic acid.
+
+This increase in the activity of the skin accounts for the decrease we
+notice in the activity of the kidneys. (More urine is produced on cold
+days when the perspiration is scanty than on hot summer days.)
+
+The lowering of the temperature in sleep is simply a result of inactivity,
+not of sleep.
+
+We know that many pains, especially neuralgias, disappear in sleep. Many
+of those ailments, however, are of a neurotic origin and constitute a
+form of escape from reality. When reality has been practically abolished
+by unconsciousness, they are no longer "needed."
+
+Experiments made on instructors of the University of Iowa who were kept
+awake for ninety hours showed that the weight of the subjects increased
+during the experiments, decreasing later when the subjects were allowed to
+resume their natural life and to sleep. The increase was solely due to the
+fact that during the experiments, the subjects were relieved of their
+duties, remained idle in the psychological laboratory and hence consumed
+less organic matter than if they had led an active life, preparing their
+courses and teaching several hours a day.
+
+It has been stated many times that a form of motor paralysis sets in
+during sleep. Yet we all know of the many motions performed by every
+sleeper, turning from side to side, drawing or pushing away the bed
+clothes, removing stimuli applied to the face, talking, not to mention, of
+course, sleep walking.
+
+Sleep does not even mean complete muscular relaxation, for sentinels have
+been observed who could sleep standing; some people sleep sitting up in
+their chairs. Many animals, birds, bats, horses, sleep in positions which
+make muscular relaxation impossible; when their balance is disturbed by
+an observer, they re-establish it without awaking. Sleeping ducks keep on
+paddling in circles to avoid drifting against dangerous shores, etc.
+
+In other words, there is not a part of our body which ceases in sleep to
+perform its specific work. Our lungs continue to breathe, our heart to
+send blood to all parts of the body, our glands secrete various chemicals;
+we hear, smell and to a certain extent, see. The lowering of our eyelids
+is simply a half-conscious effort to remove sight stimuli. Our nails and
+hair continue to grow, although, for that matter, they do so for some time
+even after death.
+
+Finally our mental activity does not cease during sleep. Wake up a sleeper
+at any time and he will awaken _from a dream_. He may not be able to tell
+that dream but he will know for sure that, not only was he dreaming, but
+had been dreaming for a long while before awaking.
+
+Wherein, then, does sleep differ from waking life?
+
+Solely in the form of our mental activities.
+
+Sleep is not as Manacéine, the author of the most complete book on sleep,
+stated: the resting time of consciousness. We do not withdraw our
+attention completely from the environment in sleep.
+
+When we make up our minds, for instance, to wake up at a certain time, we
+seldom fail to carry out our purpose. Which does not mean that we are
+suddenly aroused out of our unconsciousness by something within ourselves,
+but more probably that our attention has been concentrated all night on
+certain stimuli indicating time, distant chimes, activities taking place
+at a definite hour, and which we had noticed unconsciously, although they
+may have escaped our conscious attention. It has even been suggested that
+as respiration and pulse are more or less constant in rest, they are used
+by the organism as unconscious time-registers. This is possibly one of the
+phenomena due to the activity of the pituitary body in which may reside
+the "sense of time" and which controls all the rhythms of the body.
+
+Jouffroy, Manacéine and Kempf have remarked that nursing mothers may sleep
+soundly in spite of the disturbances which take place about them, but that
+the slightest motion of their infant will awaken them. Many nurses not
+only can wake up at regular intervals to administer a drug to their
+patients, but, besides, can be aroused out of a sound sleep by a change in
+the patient's breathing foreboding some danger.
+
+Our withdrawal of attention from reality follows the same curve as that
+followed by the withdrawal of blood from the brain.
+
+Many experiments have been made to determine that curve and to sound the
+depth of sleep. In one case a metallic ball was allowed to fall from
+varying heights until the noise awakened the sleeper; in another case
+electric currents of varying voltage were used to stimulate the subject,
+etc. All experiments have yielded the same results: Sleep reaches its
+lowest depth during the first two or three hours, _the average time being
+shorter during the day than at night_. In the majority of subjects, the
+greatest depth is reached about the end of the first hour. After the third
+hour, sleep is easily disturbed, the more so as the usual awakening time
+approaches.
+
+To conclude, we will say that sleep partakes of all the characteristics of
+normal life, the only essential difference we can establish scientifically
+being a greater withdrawal of attention from reality in normal sleep than
+in normal waking life.
+
+We insist on using the terms _normal waking life_, for there are forms of
+abnormal waking life in which attention is withdrawn as completely from
+reality as it is in normal sleep.
+
+In the disease designated by psychiatrists as _dementia praecox_, the
+patient may become entirely negative, some time regressing to the level
+of the unborn child, and withdraw even more entirely from reality than the
+sleeper who, without awaking, is conscious of certain stimuli and performs
+certain actions showing a comprehension of their nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II: FATIGUE AND REST
+
+
+What causes sleep? What causes us to withdraw partly our attention from
+our environment? The answer: brain anaemia, is unsatisfactory for we may
+ask in turn: what causes brain anaemia?
+
+A study of brain anaemia leads one to conclude that it coincides with the
+usual sleeping period and that it is produced by sleep instead of
+producing sleep.
+
+The large majority of laymen and scientists, however, give a much simpler
+answer: we go to sleep because we are tired and need rest.
+
+Even as sleep and death have been coupled in the literature of all
+nations, fatigue and sleepiness, rest and sleep have come to be generally
+considered as synonymous.
+
+Fatigue, however, is as difficult to define scientifically as sleep.
+Drawing a line between physical fatigue and mental fatigue does not
+simplify the problem; on the contrary, it complicates it by positing it
+wrongly.
+
+We know that there is no purely physical fatigue. Fatigue is only caused
+in a very restricted measure by the accumulation of "fatigue" products or
+the depletion of repair stocks.
+
+Under certain "mental" influences, our muscles can perform much more than
+their usual "stint" without showing fatigue. Hypnotize a man and he will
+do things he could not attempt in the waking state. He can lie rigid,
+reposing on nothing but his neck and heels; he can even support in that
+position the weight of a full-sized man. Men on the march can show
+wonderful endurance provided their "spirits" are kept up by some form of
+cheer, band music, etc. Ergograph observations show that signs of muscular
+fatigue appear and disappear without any obvious "physical" reason.
+Standardized motions which have been made almost automatic, tire us less
+than conscious activity.
+
+We shall not deny that in certain cases fatigue may appear purely
+"physical." When a continued expenditure of energy, walking, carrying
+heavy burdens, has induced muscular soreness, the organism must cease
+exerting itself for a while and recuperate.
+
+But relatively few people perform physical activities which actually wear
+out the organism.
+
+Even then, if that form of exhaustion was conducive to sleep, the more
+complete the exhaustion was, the deeper the sleep should be.
+
+Yet we know that people can be "too tired to sleep."
+
+This is easily explained through a consideration of a phenomenon known as
+the "second wind" and which, before Cannon's observations on the chemistry
+of the emotions, was rather mysterious.
+
+Athletes competing on the running track are often seen to falter and fall
+back, apparently exhausted; after which, they suddenly seem to breathe
+more freely, they overcome their limpness and start out on a fresh spurt
+which may cause them to head off steadier runners.
+
+What happens in such a case is this: great physical exertion causes a form
+of asphyxiation. Asphyxiation and the concomitant fear, liberate adrenin
+which restores the tone of tired muscles and also glycogen (sugar) which
+supplies the body with new fuel.
+
+If the exertion continues long enough to use up all these emergency
+chemicals, the muscular relaxation necessary for sleep may be obtained.
+Otherwise, the organism prepared for a struggle with reality, will not
+lend itself to a flight from it. Although we are "worn out" we toss about
+in our bed, try all possible sleeping positions and only sleep when the
+energy which was supplied for a long struggle has been entirely burnt up.
+
+The majority of people, after all, busy themselves with tasks which do not
+really deplete their stores of energy, but which prove monotonous. That
+monotony is then interpreted as fatigue.
+
+In such cases, rest seems to be more easily attained through a change of
+activity than through mere cessation of activity.
+
+A business man has been closeted in his office attending to many tedious
+details, reading letters and answering them, etc., and by five o'clock he
+feels "tired." He will then go home, change his day suit for evening wear,
+attend a dinner at which he will do perhaps much talking, then watch
+actors for three hours and feel "rested."
+
+Or at the end of a "heavy" week, he will gather up his golf outfit and
+walk miles in the wake of a rubber ball. He returns to his work "rested,"
+although he has only exchanged one form of activity for other forms of
+activity. Of actual "rest" he has had none.
+
+Children "tired" of sitting in a class room will romp wildly, shout at the
+tops of their lungs, jostle and fight one another and return to meet their
+teacher "rested."
+
+Undirected activity in the young, pleasurable activity in the adult do not
+seem to make rest necessary, and in fact are a form of "rest."
+
+Egotistical gratification easily takes the place of rest. Heads of large
+businesses have sometimes mentioned to me that they worked much harder
+than some of their employés. Some of them kept on revolving commercial
+schemes in their heads or attending business meetings long after their
+office workers had left. "And yet," they added, "we are not complaining
+about being tired." Nor were they as tired, after fifteen hours of "free
+labor" as their employés were after six or eight hours of routine work
+allowing them very little initiative and independence of action.
+
+Edison works eighteen hours a day and only "rests" through sleep some four
+hours out of the twenty four. I wager that if he were put at work in his
+own plant, under the direction of a foreman, performing regular,
+monotonous tasks, he would break down under the strain of such long hours
+and would have to "rest" twice as much as he does now. His work satisfies
+him, and every new detail he perfects, every novelty he initiates,
+vouchsafes him a powerful ego gratification.
+
+Napoleon, too, could perform incredible feats of muscular activity and
+endurance after which four hours' sleep were sufficient to rest him. His
+life was for many years a continuous round of ego gratifications, won at
+the cost of great exertions, it is true, but proclaiming to him and the
+world his almost unrestricted power and luck.
+
+One is forced to the conclusion that a desire for rest is a desire, not
+for decreased activity but for increased activity.
+
+I shall make this point clear through a simile. The manufacturer who
+"attends to business" must, in order to succeed, "concentrate" on a few
+subjects and exclude all others from his mind. He may for a few hours
+think of nothing but, let us say, a certain grade of woollens, certain
+machinery, a certain customer and perhaps a certain engineer and some
+financial problem connected with those four thoughts. He must therefore
+exclude from his mind at the time, thoughts of playing golf, buying new
+clothes, going to the theatre, renting an apartment, repairing his motor
+car, thoughts of meals, women, card playing, and many other thoughts which
+are clamouring for admission to consciousness because they all represent
+human cravings.
+
+In his relaxed moments he will let all those other thoughts come to the
+surface. Which means that, what tired him, was the fact that he had to
+keep all those subjects down and allow only the other four to rise to
+consciousness.
+
+Mental rest consists in admitting ideas pell mell into consciousness
+without exercising any censorship on them. It consists in passing from a
+reduced but directed mental activity to an increased but undirected mental
+activity.
+
+In other words, rest is the free, normal, unimpeded functioning of the
+vagotonic nerves which upbuild the body and assure the continuance of the
+race. Ego and sex activities, mental and physical, are constantly
+struggling for admission to consciousness and for their gratification.
+They are held down, however, by the sympathetic nerves which play the part
+of a safety device, moderating or inhibiting the vagotonic activities
+whenever the latter might endanger the personality.
+
+Physical and mental rest, however, being easily attained through a change
+of activities, cannot be entirely synonymous with sleep. Sleep takes place
+mainly while we are resting, although we know of cases when sleep sets in
+regardless of continued muscular activity, but sleep is not exactly
+"rest." We do not sleep because we need rest. In many cases we can or
+could rest very well, although in such cases sleep is an impossibility.
+
+What then induces sleep? The certainty that we can for a time relax our
+watch on our environment; a feeling of perfect safety; the conscious or
+unconscious knowledge that no danger threatens us.
+
+Our receptive contact with reality is attained through the action of our
+vagotonic nerves which, as stated before, upbuild the body and assure the
+continuance of the race. Our defensive contact, on the other hand is
+attained through our sympathetic nerves which interrupt all the activities
+which are not necessary for fight or flight. As long as some stimulus is
+interpreted by those nerves as indicating a possible danger, we cannot
+sleep, although we may, under the influence of terrifying fear, fall into
+unconsciousness.
+
+A light flashed on our closed lids at night causes us to wake up because
+sympathetic activities bid us to prepare for an emergency. A light burning
+evenly in our bedroom and not too bright to cause physical pain, will, on
+the other hand, allow us to sleep soundly because the constant character
+of the stimulus does not cause us to expect any danger therefrom.
+
+A mouse rustling a bit of paper will wake us up, but trains passing in
+front of our window at regular intervals, or the constant rumble of a
+neighbouring power house will not prove a disturbance as soon as our
+nerves have learnt to interpret those stimuli as harmless.
+
+Conversation with a dull, witless person, unlikely to best us in debate,
+puts us to sleep. Argument with keen, sharp-minded people, who keep us on
+the defensive, may lead to sleeplessness for the rest of the night. A dull
+book in which nothing happens or is expected to happen, acts as a
+soporific; we cannot close our eyes before we know the dénouement of a
+thrilling piece of fiction.
+
+In other words, monotony transforms itself into a symbol of safety. Safety
+does not require the muscular tension, the blood stream speed which the
+organism needs in order to cope with possible emergencies. We "let go" and
+no longer pay any close attention to our environment. We sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III: THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY
+
+
+Monotony symbolizing safety _enables_ us to withdraw our attention from
+our environment, from a reality which we no longer fear, but it does not
+_compel_ us to do so. There is in sleep a certain amount of compulsion
+which is not accounted for by the mere monotony of environmental stimuli.
+We go to sleep willingly but not entirely of our own free will. We yield
+to sleep.
+
+A consideration of abnormal sleep states will help us considerably in
+determining the actual cause of sleep.
+
+Abnormal states always throw a flood of light on normal states of which
+they are only an exaggerated variety. The neurosis is the best magnifying
+glass through which to watch normal life, provided of course that we
+afterward reduce our observations to the proper scale.
+
+The average person sleeps from six to ten hours out of the twenty four,
+some time between eight at night and ten in the morning. In abnormal
+cases, on the other hand, we see the duration of sleep considerably
+prolonged and the onset of sleepiness appearing at times when complete
+wakefulness is usually the rule.
+
+The circumstances surrounding those abnormal cases are never pleasant. We
+never hear of any one falling asleep while witnessing a very amusing play,
+while in the company of a very interesting person or while busy with some
+extremely attractive occupation.
+
+One incident from Napoleon's biography will make my meaning clear. During
+his days of glory Napoleon never slept more than four or five hours out of
+the twenty four. His physical and intellectual activities were prodigious.
+He would, at times, ride on horseback for ten hours at a stretch, then
+hold conferences with his staff until late into the night, then dictate
+innumerable letters. Yet he did not feel tired or sleepy and a few hours
+of sleep were sufficient to "relieve his fatigue."
+
+On the other hand, let us remember what happened after the battle of
+Aspern, the first he lost after a series of seventeen victories: He fell
+asleep after a long, unsuccessful struggle with drowsiness and for
+thirty-six hours could not be aroused.
+
+His biographers also mention that when his life dream was shattered at
+Waterloo and he was sent into exile on a remote island, he began to sleep
+as many hours as the average, normal man.
+
+After Aspern and after Waterloo, reality had become such, that an escape
+from it, via the unconsciousness of sleep, must have been welcome. That
+the reaction of defeat must have been more keenly felt by the young man
+who lost Aspern and who presented strong neurotic traits, than by the more
+settled man who lost Waterloo, can be easily understood.
+
+Nansen in his Polar exile slept twenty hours a day. He certainly was not
+in need of rest or recuperation, for his idleness was complete, but the
+reality of ice and snow which kept him a prisoner, was one from which he
+was glad to withdraw his attention.
+
+I personally observed two cases in which sudden fits of sleepiness could
+be interpreted as an escape from reality.
+
+A gambler could go for several days and nights without sleep, _provided he
+was winning_. After a heavy loss or a period during which his earnings
+were offset by his losses, he would go to bed and sleep as much as four
+days and four nights at a time, arising once or twice a day to partake of
+some food and returning at once to his slumbers.
+
+A neurotic with a strong inferiority complex was overwhelmed by
+sleepiness every time he encountered a defeat of a sexual or egotistic
+nature. After a quarrel, or whenever a discussion in which he took part
+turned to his disadvantage, he had to lie down and "sleep it off."
+
+This is probably the key to the enigma of Casper Hauser's case. He was
+born in Germany at the beginning of the last century and brought up in
+complete solitude, in a small dark room. At the age of seventeen, he had
+never seen men, animals or plants, the sun, moon or stars. He then was
+taken out of his cell, and abandoned on the streets of Nuremberg, dazed
+and helpless.
+
+All the efforts made by kind Samaritans to develop his mentality proved
+futile. They had only one result: to make him fall asleep. Accustomed for
+years to the peace, quiet and safety of his cell, he reacted to a new,
+troublesome and complicated environment as newly born infants do, who in
+incredibly long periods of sleep, in no wise explainable through fatigue,
+escape reality and return to the perfect happiness of the fetal state.
+
+In certain forms of the disturbance known as sleeping sickness, people
+merge into a sleep which continues for weeks, months or even years, and
+which sometimes culminates in death. (In many cases, however, the
+sleepiness may be totally lacking.)
+
+The sleeping sickness was first observed some hundred years ago on the
+West Coast of Africa and, since then, in an area of the African continent
+extending from Senegal to the Congo. Negroes are almost the only
+sufferers, although a few whites have been affected by this disease which,
+at times, extends to large numbers of the population.
+
+According to various medical observers, the sleeping sickness usually
+appears among slaves doing _arduous, exhausting work_.
+
+It is the individuals who stand lowest in intelligence who are most
+severely affected. In communities where the mental development has been
+retarded, imitation easily spreads the contagion and this is probably the
+reason why entire villages are decimated by that curious malady.
+
+Whether the sleeping sickness is in certain cases induced by the bite of a
+fly or appears without obvious physical cause is immaterial.[1] Paranoia
+induced by syphilis is in no way different from ordinary paranoia.
+
+Hence we are justified in linking together certain aspects of the African
+sleeping sickness and the lethargic ailment which affects the white races
+in Europe and America.
+
+Both have the appearance of normal sleep, the only striking difference,
+barring certain physical syndromes, being the unusual length of the
+sleeping period or its onset at unusual and unexpected times.
+
+In white subjects, narcolepsy is seldom fatal but has been known to last
+for years.
+
+The most famous case on record is probably that of Karoline Ollson
+reported in a Salpétrière publication for 1912.
+
+Karoline Ollson was born in 1861 in a small town of Sweden. At the age of
+14, at the onset of her menstruation, she once came home complaining of
+toothache, went to bed and remained bedridden till 1908. For thirty-two
+years she slept all day and all night, waking up now and then for a few
+minutes, taking dim notice of happenings in her environment and speaking a
+few words. Two glasses of milk a day seemed to be sufficient to sustain
+her. She was kept for a fortnight in a hospital from which she was
+discharged when her ailment was diagnosed as "hysteria."
+
+When her mother died in 1905 she woke up and wept as long as the corpse
+remained in the house. Then she became quiet again and resumed her
+slumbers. In April, 1908, when her menstruation stopped, she woke up, left
+her bed and has led a normal life since.
+
+Dr. Toedenström who describes the case states that she looked incredibly
+young. Two weeks after she left her bed she had become strong enough to
+take charge of the household.
+
+Stekel, discussing this strange case in one of his lectures, said: "This
+woman spent the entire time of her womanhood in sleep, for she fell asleep
+at the time of her first menstruation period and her awakening coincided
+with her climacteric. She was a child and wished to remain a child. The
+first question she asked on arising, 'Where is mama?' shows that she was
+suffering from psychic infantilism. It is probable that dreams of
+childhood filled her thirty-year sleep and she may even have dreamt that
+she was still an unborn child for whom life had not yet begun."
+
+Medical literature contains many reports of freakish cases in which the
+subject falls asleep suddenly, while attending to duties of an
+uninteresting character; a young waiter, for instance, falling asleep
+while waiting on a table, remaining absolutely motionless for a whole
+minute and then waking up and resuming his work. Manacéine mentions two
+similar cases she observed personally. Both patients were illiterate and
+of slow intellect. One of them, a housemaid of nineteen, was a sound
+sleeper at night and yet, in the day time, one could never be sure of her
+remaining awake. She fell asleep once in the act of announcing a visitor
+and while bringing in a tray loaded with cups of coffee. The other was a
+woman of fifty, who was employed as a nurse until one day, falling asleep
+suddenly, she dropped an infant on the floor and almost killed him. In
+both the pulse was remarkably slow (a vagotonic symptom): in the girl it
+varied from 50 to 70 when awake, in the older woman from 40 to 60.
+
+An epidemic of sleeping fits, lasting only a few minutes at a time, raged
+for several years in a small German town near Würzburg. The attacks took
+place at any moment and were liable to leave the patient immobilized in
+some curious position. It was the weaker part of the population,
+physically and mentally, which was affected by that curious trouble,
+apparently transmitted from parents to children, probably, as all neurotic
+complaints are, through imitation.
+
+Stekel considers hysterical and epileptic fits as forms of morbid sleep
+during which hysterics gratify sexual cravings and epileptics sadistic
+cravings.
+
+This is how Dr. Isador Abrahamson describes, from recent cases observed at
+Mount Sinai Hospital, the course of lethargic encephalitis which is one of
+the scientific names coined to designate the sleeping sickness:
+
+"At the onset of the disease, there is a period of variable duration in
+which the patient experiences increasing difficulty in attending to his
+work. Next a time of yawning ensues, in which there may be also the
+_irritability of the overtired_. Then the eyes close, _chiefly from lack
+of interest_.... (The patient's) pulse, temperature, and respiration may
+all be of a normal character.... From the depth of this seeming slumber,
+he may respond immediately when questioned and his _short but coherent
+answers_ show _no loss either of memory or of orientation_.... His answer
+given, he straightway resumes his seeming sleep.... _His attitude
+expresses a desire to be let alone_, a desire which is sometimes
+articulate in him.... The somnolence may deepen into a stupor from which
+the patient is not easily aroused to conscious repose.... In the night
+watches ... a restless delirium of inconstant severity often appears.
+Spontaneous movements and sounds are made. The movements are purposeful
+graspings and pointings at unseen things, tossings and turnings...."
+
+The author adds in another part of his article that "The depth of the
+somnolence and also its duration are unrelated to the severity of the
+cerebral lesions.... _The extent of the mental disturbance bears no
+correspondence to the extent of the lesions_, the amount of fever or the
+blood picture...." [Italics mine.]
+
+We have a perfect picture of a flight from reality into a somnolence into
+which the unconscious complexes force at times a terrifying presentation
+of the dreaded reality through nightmares.
+
+The few cases of sleeping sickness reported in recent medical literature
+show a decided neurotic trend in the subjects affected and reveal
+circumstances in the patient's life which would make a flight from reality
+highly desirable.
+
+One typical case reported to me by a Boston physician who personally
+considers the sleeping sickness as being "unquestionably an acute organic
+disease of the cerebro-spinal system" has all the earmarks of a neurotic
+affection:
+
+"The patient, a middle aged woman lost a child she loved dearly one year
+and a half before the onset of the disease. The circumstances of the
+child's death were particularly sad as the mother was not allowed to visit
+the little sufferer at the hospital on account of the contagious character
+of his disease. She also felt disturbing doubts as to the competence of
+the first physician who attended her child.
+
+"She had been 'nervous and run down' since the child's death. She is
+married to a cripple twenty years her senior. She had to go to work in
+order to help support the household and to live with relatives of her
+husband's who did not contribute to the pleasantness of her home life."
+
+Have we not here all the environmental conditions which would drive a
+neurotic to withdraw his attention from reality through a protracted
+period of sleep?
+
+From the fact that I have instituted a comparison between sleep and the
+sleeping sickness, the reader should not draw the conclusion that I
+attribute to sleep any neurotic character.
+
+Sleep is a compromise, as I shall show later, when discussing dream life,
+between what the human animal was meant to do and what it can do in
+reality.
+
+The neurosis, also is a compromise, but it is a compromise that fails,
+while sleep is a compromise which is successful, beneficial and acceptable
+to all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV: HYPNOGOGIC AND HYPNOPOMPIC VISIONS
+
+
+The curve of sleep depth shows that our withdrawal from reality is not
+sudden but gradual. The transition from wakefulness to sleep is
+characterized at first by blurred visions, colours, shapes, moving objects
+with a scarcely defined outline, and immediately after by curiously
+symbolical visions, known as hypnogogic visions.
+
+Those phenomena are difficult to study for they are forgotten by the end
+of the night. The observer has to train himself to wake up after a few
+minutes of unconsciousness, a result which is achieved without difficulty
+after a few trials.
+
+The first visions of the night are in every subject I have asked and in
+myself, symbolical of the passage from one state to another. One
+hypnogogic vision I have had many times is of wading slowly into a lake or
+the sea, until the water reaches to the middle of my body after which I
+start swimming.[2]
+
+One night when I had a little difficulty in falling asleep my hypnogogic
+vision represented a truckman looking like myself whipping a team of
+horses hitched to a big load who were crossing a very high bridge leading
+from the city into the open.
+
+Another night, after seeing the "Follies," I dreamt that the police was
+trying vainly to quell a disturbance and that the rioters succeeded in
+placing their own police in charge of the disturbance. The newcomers were
+attired like the front row girls of the Follies. No more symbolical
+picture of the whole nervous situation could be found. The day's
+repressions being gradually replaced by the "follies" of dreamland.
+
+Not only is the passage from reality into dreamland thus symbolized by
+appropriate representation but the mental work of reality gradually merges
+with the mental work of the sleeping state.
+
+Thoughts of the day merge directly with the dream thoughts. There is no
+gap between waking thoughts and sleeping thoughts. This has been
+demonstrated by Silberer's experiments.
+
+"The very first dream," Silberer says, "visualizes, dramatises and
+interprets the very last waking thought."
+
+1st EXAMPLE: "I applied some boric ointment to the mucous of my nose
+before retiring to relieve a painful dryness."
+
+DREAM: "I see some one offering money to some one else. Only I notice that
+it is my right hand which is putting money into my left hand."
+
+INTERPRETATION: "I have often thought that this medication did not help my
+nose trouble but simply concealed it. The action is therefore presented as
+illusory help."
+
+2nd EXAMPLE: "I am thinking of a dramatic scene in which a character would
+intimate a certain fact to another character without putting the thought
+into words."
+
+DREAM: "One man is offering to another man a hot metallic cup."
+
+INTERPRETATION: "The cup transmits an impression of heat which has not to
+be expressed through spoken words."
+
+3rd EXAMPLE: "I try to remember something which in my sleepy state eludes
+me."
+
+DREAM: "I apply for information to a grouchy clerk who refuses to impart
+it to me. The interpretation is obvious."
+
+4th EXAMPLE: "I think that many simple arguments could be brought forth to
+prove some thesis of mine."
+
+DREAM: "A drove of white horses moves downward through my field of vision.
+Interpretation obvious."
+
+Likewise sleeping thoughts gradually merge with waking thoughts in the
+moments preceding awakening.
+
+The last dreams of the night or hypnopompic visions generally dramatize
+our awakening in picturesque, symbolical fashion.
+
+Here are several examples collected by Silberer from observations on
+himself:
+
+"I return to my home with a party of people, take leave of them at the
+door and enter."
+
+"After visiting some place, I drive home along the same road which lead me
+there."
+
+"One morning I woke up and decided to doze off for another half hour: I
+dreamt then that I was locked up in a house and I woke up saying: 'I must
+have the lock broken open.'"
+
+In hypnopompic visions we generally enter a house, a forest, a dark valley
+or take a train or a boat, or we fall (see typical dreams).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V: WHERE DREAMS COME FROM
+
+
+To sleep does not mean "perchance to dream," but to dream from the very
+second when we close our eyes to the time when we open them again.
+
+"But I never dream," some one will surely say.
+
+To which I will answer: Make experiments on yourself or some one else.
+Have some one wake you up fifty times or a hundred times in one night.
+Repeat the experiment as many nights as your constitution will allow and
+every time you wake up, you will wake up with the clear or confused memory
+of some dream.
+
+Most people forget their dreams as they forget their waking thoughts.
+Unless some very striking idea came to my mind yesterday afternoon, I am
+likely to be embarrassed if some one asks me: "What were you thinking of
+yesterday afternoon?"
+
+We shall see in another chapter that our dream thoughts are not in any way
+different from our waking thoughts, and that unless they have a special
+meaning there is no reason why they should obsess us more than our waking
+thoughts do.
+
+In fact, a remembered dream is as important as an obsessive idea and has
+the same meaning. Thousands of futile dreams dreamt in one night may not
+leave a deeper impression on our "mind" than thousands of futile thoughts
+which flit through our consciousness in one day.
+
+Before considering the origin of dreams I must restate briefly a
+proposition which I have discussed at length in _Psychoanalysis and
+Behaviour_, the indivisibility of the human organism.
+
+The words physical and mental are lacking in any real meaning and there is
+no physical manifestation which it not inseparably linked with some
+psychic phenomenon. Emotions, secretions and attitudes may be studied
+separately for the sake of convenience, but in reality there cannot be any
+emotion which is not unavoidably accompanied by a secretion and betrayed
+by some attitude, nor can there be any attitude which is not accompanied
+by a secretion and interpreted by some emotion.
+
+This must be constantly borne in mind when we attempt to answer the
+question: Where do dreams come from?
+
+If dreams "come from the stomach" why should distressed minds seek refuge
+in them? If they are purely psychic phenomena, what relief can they afford
+to our dissatisfied body?
+
+We shall not deny that a full bladder may at times induce urination
+dreams, that a full stomach may at times conjure up anxiety visions in
+which heavy masses oppress us, or that long continence and the consequent
+accumulation of sexual products may be at times responsible for sexual
+dreams.
+
+What the physical theory of dreams, most scientifically and
+conscientiously expounded by the Scandinavian Mourly Vold, will not
+explain, however, is that, in one subject, a urination dream may be a
+pleasurable visualization of relief, leading to continued sleep and, in
+another, an anxiety episode, picturing frustrated gratification and ending
+in an unpleasant awakening. A heavy dinner may people one sleeper's
+visions with large animals treading his stomach, and cause another to
+dream of vomiting fits which relieve the pressure of food.
+
+In one sleeper, sexual desire evokes libidinous visions, in another,
+terrifying scenes of violence.
+
+On the other hand, the very close relation observed in thousands of cases
+between the sleeper's dreams and his physical condition, invalidates any
+theory which would revert more or less literally to the belief held in
+ancient times that dreams were purely psychic phenomena, visions sent by
+the gods.
+
+Maury whose book, "Sleep and Dreams," published in 1865, was probably the
+first serious attempt at deciphering the enigma of dream thoughts, had
+various experiments performed on himself to determine what dreams would be
+brought forth by physical stimuli.
+
+He was tickled with a feather on the lips and nostrils. He dreamt that a
+mask of pitch was applied to his face and then pulled off, tearing the
+skin.
+
+A pair of tweezers was held close to his ear and struck with a metallic
+object. He heard the tolling of bells and thought of the revolutionary
+days of 1848.
+
+A bottle of perfume was held to his nose. He dreamt of the East and of a
+trip to Egypt.
+
+A lighted match was held close to his nostrils. He dreamt that he was on a
+ship whose magazine had exploded.
+
+A pinch on the back of the neck suggested the application of a blister and
+evoked the memory of a family physician.
+
+A sensation of heat made him dream that robbers had entered the house and
+were compelling the inmates to reveal where their money was hidden by
+scorching the soles of their feet.
+
+Words were pronounced aloud. He attributed them to some people with whom
+he had been talking in his dreams.
+
+A drop of water was allowed to fall on his forehead. He dreamt that he was
+in Italy, feeling very hot and drinking wine.
+
+A red light suggested to him a storm at sea.
+
+Struck on the neck, he dreamt that he was a revolutionist, arrested,
+tried, sentenced to death and guillotined.
+
+I have had some of Maury's experiments repeated on myself and the
+connection between the physical stimulus and the content of the dream
+leaves no doubt as to the direct relation between the two. On the other
+hand, the reader will notice that the same stimuli applied to Maury and to
+me produced absolutely different results. Compare my first and second
+experiments with his first and third.
+
+1. I was tickled on the nose with a feather. I dreamt that I was entering
+a forest and that branches and leaves were brushing against my face. I
+made an effort to push them away with my hand. (I had taken a ride through
+Central Park that very day).
+
+2. A bottle of perfume was held open under my nose.
+
+I dreamt of a landscape with thick clouds and mist to the left. Two dark
+figures carrying grips were hurrying toward the right where there seemed
+to be open fields, flowers, and sunlight. (The day preceding the dream had
+been cloudy.)
+
+3. My nose was stroked with a piece of paper.
+
+I dreamt I met a certain writer who asked me whether another writer had
+seen a certain lady and her daughter. I answered rather indifferently and
+went on my way. Then I saw either the other writer or myself seated before
+a window and showing a tall gaunt woman and another indistinct figure,
+either Japanese prints or some manuscript, and I woke up.
+
+(The day preceding the dream I had revised a manuscript for a woman and
+also spoken of one of the two writers.)
+
+4. Cold steel was applied to my throat.
+
+I dreamt that a cold wind was blowing; I tried to turn up my overcoat
+collar and woke myself up.
+
+Carl Dreher has devised an apparatus which can be set to throw flashes of
+light at a given time during the night and then wakes him up by means of a
+buzzer. The flashes have translated themselves in many cases into
+interesting visions: In one dream the last picture seen before the alarm
+went off was that of a building in front of which stood very white marble
+columns standing on a background of intense black. On another occasion
+extremely bright green snakes hung from trees, the space between the
+snakes being very dark. On another occasion he was talking to a girl who
+declares herself to be "intermittently in love." In another dream, he saw
+himself operating a moving picture machine which threw flashes on the
+screen regardless of whether he opened or closed the switch. After many
+such experiments, he saw his apparatus in a dream and woke up without
+having been directly affected by the light.
+
+In this last dream we have a case of dream insight, the dreamer refusing
+to pay any attention to a stimulus which has become familiar. This
+explains the phenomenon of adaptation to stimuli. People whose bedroom is
+near some source of regular constant noise can sleep in spite of that
+stimulus for their nervous system no longer translates it into fear; nor
+has it to interpret it lest it might create fear.
+
+Every one of the dreams thus produced artificially were closely related to
+experiences of the day before and to some of the dreamer's memories and
+complexes.
+
+The dreamer's unconscious was merely stimulated by the light flashes to
+express itself through images including an allusion to those flashes.
+
+In other words, the physical stimulus, be it an impression made upon one
+of the sense organs or an inner secretion, is interpreted by the sleeper
+according to the ideas which dominate the sleeper's mind at the time,
+memories of recent experiences or obsessive ideas.
+
+Which means that the personality of the dreamer expresses itself through
+his dreams. We need not heed Pythagoras' warning against eating beans. It
+is not the stimulus that counts; it is the end result. And the end result
+seems to depend from the memories which have accumulated in our autonomic
+nerves.
+
+Freud compares the dream work to a promoter who could never carry out his
+brilliant ideas if he could not draw upon funds accumulated elsewhere (in
+the unconscious).
+
+Silberer says that the appearance of a dream is like the outbreak of a
+war. There is a popular tendency among the ignorant to attribute a war to
+some superficial, visible cause, disagreement, insult, invasion. The real
+causes, however, are much deeper and lie not only in the present but in
+the past as well.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI: CONVENIENCE DREAMS
+
+
+Some of the hypnogogic visions and experimental dreams I have mentioned
+contradict the wide-spread belief that sound sleep is untroubled by
+dreams.
+
+The hypnagogic vision I have so often, that I wade into a body of water
+and finally start swimming, only adds one more pleasant feature to my
+escape from reality. Swimming is really my favourite sport.
+
+When my nose was tickled and I interpreted the stimulus as foliage
+brushing my face on entering a forest, that vision was not meant to awaken
+me, but on the contrary to keep me asleep by explaining away the tickling
+sensation and removing any sense of fear which would have compelled me to
+take notice once more of reality and protect myself.
+
+Such dreams have been designated as convenience dreams.
+
+Dreams of urination can be considered as typical convenience dreams. In
+the morning, when the pressure of urine on the walls of the bladder
+becomes stronger, dreams build up a convenient explanation around that
+unpleasant stimulus. Our wish to urinate is either represented as
+gratified or we are shown the impossibility of gratifying it (no toilet,
+doors locked, people looking, etc.). Unless the pressure is absolutely
+unbearable, we generally sleep on, satisfied or discouraged by such
+convenience dreams.
+
+Freud tells in his "Interpretation of Dreams" of a striking convenience
+dream of his and of a variation it underwent on one occasion: "If in the
+evening I eat anchovies, olives or any other strongly salted food, I
+become thirsty at night, whereupon I awaken. The awakening, however, is
+preceded by a dream, which, each time has the same content, namely that I
+am drinking. The dream serves a function, the nature of which I soon
+guess. If I succeed in assuaging my thirst by means of a dream that I am
+drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy that need. The dream
+substitutes itself for action, as elsewhere in life. 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 a chest
+near my bed. Several hours later in the night, came a new attack of
+thirst, accompanied by discomfort. In order to obtain water I would have
+had to get up and fetch the glass which stood on a chest near my wife's
+bed. I appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me to drink from a
+vase, an Etruscan cinerary urn. But the water in it tasted so salty,
+apparently from the ashes, that I had to wake up."
+
+On a chilly summer night a woman patient had the following dream:
+
+"A man took me in a canoe to the middle of a lake and upset the canoe,
+saying: 'Now you belong to me.'"
+
+She woke up shivering.
+
+The lake, the canoe upset and the man in the dream were associated with
+many conscious thoughts and memories of hers. But this was mainly a
+convenience dream, which endeavoured to explain away the chilliness of the
+night through an appropriate scene. When the unavoidable awakening took
+place it was dramatized, as it is in so many cases of awakening, through a
+fall accompanied by a certain fear of death.
+
+The few examples I have given and which could be multiplied, tend to show
+that the dream, far from being a disturber of sleep, is sleep's best
+protector.
+
+It seeks to explain away physical stimuli which might cause the sleeper to
+awake and it visualizes many reasons for not experiencing the fear
+usually connected with a certain stimulus.
+
+In every convenience dream which I have analysed, I have found a close
+connection between the image conjured up by the dream work and the ideas
+generally occupying the dreamer's mind in his waking states.
+
+In almost every case it could also be noticed that the convenience dream
+made use of some experience or observation of the previous waking state,
+which increases the plausibility of the dream's visualization.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII: DREAM LIFE
+
+
+The life we lead in our dreams, especially in healthy, pleasant dreams, is
+simpler and easier than our waking life.
+
+We obliterate distance and transport ourselves wherever our fancy chooses;
+our strength is herculean; we defy the law of gravitation and rise or soar
+with or without wings; we brave law and custom; we abandon all modesty and
+make ourselves the centre of the world, which is OUR world, not any one
+else's world.
+
+The simplification of life is attained in dreams through three processes,
+visualization, condensation and symbolization.
+
+The dream is always a vision. Other sensations than visual ones may be
+experienced in dreams but they are only secondary elements.
+
+In other words, we may now and then hear sounds, perceive odours, etc.,
+but the dream is based primarily on a scene which is perceived visually,
+not on sounds, odours, etc., now and then accompanied by a visual
+perception.
+
+In fact we seldom hear sounds in our dreams, unless they are actual
+sounds produced in our immediate environment; the people who address us in
+dreams do not actually emit sounds but seem to communicate their thought
+to us directly without any auditory medium. Seldom do we taste or smell
+things in dreams.
+
+On the other hand, we translate every stimulus reaching our senses in
+sleep, be it sound, taste, smell, touch, into a visual presentation. This
+process is to be compared to the gesticulation of primitive individuals
+who attempt to visualize everything they describe, indicating the length,
+height, bulk of objects through more or less appropriate mimic and who
+convey the idea of a bad odour by holding their nose, of pleasing food, by
+rubbing their stomach, etc.
+
+The dramatization of every thought and every problem follows the line of
+least effort. And this explains the popularity of the movies, the
+enjoyment of which does not presuppose on the part of the audience any
+capacity to conceive abstract ideas.
+
+Movie audiences are undoubtedly the least intelligent aggregations of
+people. They are not _told_ that a crime has been committed, they are
+_shown_ the crime while it is being committed. Captions warn them of what
+they are going to see, that they may not misunderstand the meaning of any
+scene. The movie, like our unconscious, translates every thought into a
+visual sensation, and when a psychological change cannot very well be
+visualized, for instance when the villain decides not to kill the ingenue,
+the fact is flashed on the screen in large type.
+
+Pleasures of the eye are probably stronger and simpler than those
+vouchsafed by other sensory organs.[3] The most uninteresting parade will
+attract thousands of people, many more for instance, than free concerts in
+the open. Illustrated lectures appeal to more people than lectures without
+illustrations. Displays in shop windows, picturesque signs, possess a
+greater selling power than the best advertising copy.
+
+In our waking life, we express our thoughts to ourselves and others
+through the algebra of abstract concepts. We speak of length, height,
+volume, weight, hardness, coldness, etc. It is doubtful, however, whether
+we can imagine length without thinking specifically of something long. In
+our dreams, the concept length disappears and is always replaced by
+something long.
+
+We notice that abstract thinking is more tiresome than descriptive
+thinking, that abstract facts demand more exertion in order to be grasped,
+than concrete facts. A philosopher expounding his theories to an audience
+tires himself and the audience quicker than an explorer would, describing
+his travels and possibly illustrating his talk by means of lantern slides.
+
+Dream life is further simplified through condensation. This process is the
+one through which, in waking life, we reach generalizations. When we think
+of a house we select the essential characteristics of the various houses
+we have seen, the properties wherein a house essentially differs from, let
+us say, a bird or a river. In our dreams, condensation is less subtle and
+more directly based upon our experience.
+
+We combine several persons into one, selecting as a rule the most striking
+features of every one of them. We may see a dream character with the eyes
+of one person, the nose of another and the beard of a third one.
+
+Freud having made one proposal to two different men, Dr. M. and his
+brother, the former having a beard and the latter being clean shaven and
+suffering from hip trouble, combined them in a dream in a figure which
+looked like Dr. M., but was beardless and limped.
+
+One of Ferenczi's patients dreamt of a monster with the head of a
+physician, the body of a horse and draped in a nightgown.
+
+Silberer dreamt of an animal which had the head of a tiger and the body of
+a horse.
+
+This is a process similar to the one which in the infancy of the race gave
+birth to strange composite gods and mythological creatures like the
+Assyrian bull a combination of man's intelligence, the bull's strength and
+the bird's power of flight, the various Egyptian deities in whom the
+process was reversed, for so many had the heads of animals and the bodies
+of men, the satyrs and syrens, combining respectively man and goat, woman
+and fish, Pegasus, the winged horse, etc.
+
+Finally, dream life is simplified through the symbolic representation of
+human beings or inanimate things.
+
+In symbolization, one striking characteristic of some complicated object
+is isolated from the others and some other object with only one
+characteristic substituted for it. Slang is made up of such
+symbolizations. Think of the expression "bats in the belfry," in which the
+complicated human head is replaced by an architectural detail much simpler
+in character and occupying in an edifice the same position which the head
+occupies in human anatomy. Then, instead of describing absurd ideas, of a
+sinister colouring, without definite direction, we simply visualize queer
+creatures, half bird and half mouse, flitting about blindly.
+
+Instead of explaining that the central figure of the christian religion is
+a godlike creature who died crucified, we select the most striking detail
+of the Passion, the cross, which to the initiated and uninitiated alike
+signifies christianity. In many cases we do not even represent the cross
+as that instrument of torture really looked but we simplify it, we
+symbolize it, by using a conventional design in which the proportion
+between the cross pieces has been entirely disregarded.
+
+Symbolization is a reduction of an object to one essential detail which
+has struck us as more important than the others.
+
+A child will designate a watch as a "tick-tick," a dog as a "bow-wow,"
+because to his simple mind, ticking and barking are the essential
+characteristics of a watch and a dog.
+
+In dreams, we simplify the concept of the body and often represent it by a
+house. The authority vested in the father and mother causes them often to
+be symbolized by important personages, etc.
+
+Without any more explanation, I shall sum up the various dream symbols
+whose selection is easily understood.
+
+Birth is often symbolized by a plunge into water or some one climbing out
+of it or rescuing some one from the water.
+
+Death is represented by taking a journey, being dead, by darksome
+suggestions.
+
+A great many symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. The figure 3, all
+elongated or sharp objects, such as sticks, umbrellas, knifes, daggers,
+revolvers, plowshares, pencils, files, objects from which water flows,
+faucets, fountains, animals such as reptiles and fishes, in certain cases
+hats and cloaks are used to represent the male sex.
+
+The female sex is symbolized on the contrary by hollow objects, pits,
+caves, boxes, trunks, pockets, ships.
+
+The breasts are represented by apples, peaches and fruits in general,
+balconies, etc.
+
+Fertility is symbolized by ploughed fields, gardens, etc.
+
+I have shown in another book, "Psychoanalysis, Its History, Theory and
+Practice," that symbols are absolutely universal and that the folklore of
+the various races and of the various centuries draws upon the same
+material for the purpose of simplified representation. Differences in
+climate, fauna and flora are purely superficial. Dwellers of the Polar
+regions are not likely to compare anything to a palm tree which they have
+never seen, nor will tropical races symbolize coldness through snowfields.
+
+Experiments made by Dr. Karl Schrötter have confirmed Freud's and Jung's
+theories of symbolization in dreams. To the uninitiated and sceptical,
+dream symbols generally appear rather ludicrous fancies and not a few
+opponents of psychoanalysis hold that symbols were resorted to by analysts
+unable to read an obvious wish fulfilment in every dream.
+
+Schrötter hypnotized his patients, then suggested to them a dream outline,
+ordering them also to indicate through an appropriate gesture when the
+dream would begin and end. This enabled him, by the way, to record the
+duration of every dream.[4]
+
+He then awakened the subject and made him tell his dream.
+
+One of his patients, a woman drawing toward middle age, who had been
+greatly upset when she learnt that the man she loved was suffering from
+syphilis, was asked to have a dream symbolizing her state of mind. Here is
+the vision she had:
+
+"I am walking through a forest on an autumn day. The path is steep and I
+feel chilly. Some one whom I cannot distinguish is near me. I only feel
+the touch of a hand. I am very thirsty. I would like to slake my thirst at
+a spring but there is a sign on the spring that means poison: a skull and
+cross bones."
+
+The fancy is rather poetical and this example is quite typical of the
+symbolization of our life's incidents by the dream work.
+
+A patient with a strong resistance to the analytic method saw me in a
+dream "carrying a fake refrigerator full of make-believe meats, vegetables
+and fruits."
+
+The interpretation is obvious. I am carrying in a deceptive way an
+assortment of ideas which can be of no use to any one.
+
+The refrigerator implies that the ideas are not even new but old and
+stale.
+
+The patient's repressions were such that, although the dream struck him as
+strange and he remembered it several months, he was unable to puzzle out
+its meaning. It expressed his mental state at the time and yet having made
+up his mind not to doubt me or the analytic treatment, he become unable
+to accept any disparaging thought consciously.
+
+Unconsciously, however, he expressed his doubts in most striking symbolism
+which he did not himself understand.
+
+This should be borne in mind if we wish to understand the psychology of
+nightmares. For in nightmares we may express a wish through a symbol which
+expresses it fittingly, but which we do not understand and which, on that
+account, may frighten us.
+
+Let those who sneer at the study of symbols watch some of the attitudes
+assumed by insane people[5] who have reached the lowest level of
+deterioration. Let them see a picture published in the issue of the
+_Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease_ for January, 1920, and which
+represents a hospital patient who has reached the lowest degree of
+infantilism. The patient hung herself in a blanket attached to a nail in
+front of a window. There she spent her days in the characteristic attitude
+of the unborn child in the womb.
+
+Everything in that attitude was symbolical of her regression to, not only
+infancy, but the prenatal condition.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII: WISH FULFILMENT
+
+
+An evening paper published recently a cartoon showing a kiddie in bed who
+asks his mother: "What makes me dream?"--"You eat too much meat," the
+mother answers. The next scene is laid in the kitchen where the mother
+finds her child ransacking the ice box for meat.
+
+Parents could testify to the illustrator's knowledge of the childish soul.
+Children like to dream and Freud's statement that every dream contains the
+fulfilment of some wish is confirmed by the dreams of healthy children.
+
+Children attain in their sleep visions the simple pleasures which are
+denied them in their waking states.
+
+Freud's little daughter, three and a half years old, being kept one day on
+a rather strict diet, owing to some gastric disturbance, was heard to call
+excitedly in her sleep: "Anna Freud, strawberry, huckleberry, omelette,
+pap."
+
+On one occasion she was taken across a lake and enjoyed the trip so much
+that she cried bitterly at the landing when compelled to leave the boat.
+The next morning she told the family a dream in which she had been
+sailing on the lake.
+
+Freud's little nephew, Hermann, aged twenty-one months, was once given the
+task of offering his uncle, as a birthday present, a little basket full of
+cherries. He performed that duty rather reluctantly. The following day he
+awakened joyously with the information which could only have been derived
+from a dream: "Hermann ate all the cherries."
+
+The _London Times_ of Nov. 8, 1919, had a report of a lecture by Dr. C. W.
+Kimmins, chief inspector of the London Education Committee, on the
+significance of children's dreams. He based his statements on the written
+records of the dreams of 500 children between the ages of eight and
+sixteen years.
+
+Up to the age of ten, dreams of eating predominated, but their number fell
+off after ten, when dreams of visits to the country began to increase.
+Dreams of presents and eating at all ages from eight to fourteen, were
+much more frequent with children of the poorer classes that with those
+from well-to-do districts and there was an appreciable increase of their
+number about Christmas time. Retrospective dreams were very uncommon among
+all children.
+
+Obvious wish fulfilment dreams were less common among boys than among
+girls, the proportion being respectively twenty-eight and forty-two per
+cent.
+
+Boys below ten had more fear dreams than girls of the same age. In both
+sexes it was some "old man" who terrified the dreamers. Both sexes
+suffered equally from the fear of animals, lions, tigers and bulls in the
+case of the boys, dogs, rats, snakes and mice in the case of the girls.
+
+From ten to fifteen a falling off in the number of fear dreams was very
+noticeable among boys, whereas among girls it rather increased.
+
+That increase was especially striking among girls of 16 and over, who were
+generally frightened by animals and strange men and women.
+
+When school life played a part in children's dreams it was more frequently
+the playgrounds than the classrooms which were visualized.
+
+The war affected boys' more than girls' dreams. The dreaming boy was a
+valorous fighter, mentioned in dispatches, rewarded with the Victoria
+Cross, thanked personally by the King; or he returned home wildly cheered
+by crowds.
+
+Girls, thirteen or over, saw themselves as Red Cross nurses, but no such
+dreams were observed in girls below ten.
+
+Normal, healthy children delighted in dreaming and telling their dreams
+with a wealth of detail.
+
+Dr. Kimmins mentioned that, while the dreams of school children were
+generally easy to interpret, the dreams of students from 18 to 22 "were so
+heavily camouflaged that it would be impossible for any one who was not a
+trained expert in psychoanalysis to deal with them satisfactorily."
+
+We can see how the repression made necessary by life conditions in modern
+communities slowly but surely transforms the obvious wish-fulfilment
+dreams of children into the symbolical and often distressing visions of
+the adult. The development of sexuality in boys and girls and the
+repression to which it is submitted explains easily the proportion of fear
+dreams in girls and boys.
+
+Sexual talk and sexual curiosity are more common among boys than girls and
+therefore occupy the boys' minds more constantly than the girls' minds. On
+the other hand, many of the boys above sixteen find forms of sexual
+satisfaction of which the girls of the same age are deprived. Fear dreams
+are therefore more frequent among growing girls, being simply a symbolical
+form of sexual gratification.
+
+The dreams of adults are far from being as uniformly pleasurable as those
+of young and healthy children.
+
+A few of them are frankly pleasant; most of them are apparently
+indifferent and a few of them frankly unpleasant.
+
+The pleasant dreams of the adults require as little interpretation as
+those of children and are obviously the fulfilment of conscious or
+unconscious wishes.
+
+A patient of mine, camping in the woods alone, dreamt during a rainy night
+that some of his friends were camping with him, that one of them had gone
+to a neighbouring inn to secure better accommodations and finally that he
+was in his own bed at home.
+
+Nordenskjold in his book "The Antarctic," published in 1904, mentions that
+during the winter which he spent in the polar wilderness, his dreams and
+those of his men "were more frequent and more vivid than they had ever
+been before. They all referred to the outer world which was so far from
+us.... 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, was exceedingly glad when he could report in the morning that he
+had had a three course dinner. Another dreamed of tobacco, mountains of
+it; still another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea under full
+sail. Still another dream deserves mention: the postman brought the mail
+and gave a long explanation of why he had to wait so long.... One can
+readily understand why we longed for sleep. IT ALONE COULD GIVE US ALL THE
+THINGS WHICH WE MOST ARDENTLY DESIRED." [Capitals mine.]
+
+Other dreams of wish-fulfilment appear at first glance either indifferent
+or absurd. Interpreted according to the technique outlined in Chapter
+XVII, however, they soon yield a meaning which is rather convincing.
+
+The following dream, recorded by a patient, would not lead the
+inexperienced interpreter to suspect the sinister death wish which it is
+meant to express in an indirect way.
+
+"I was visiting a factory and saw Charles working as a glassblower."
+
+Charles was the first name of a wealthy man who seduced a girl with whom
+the dreamer was in love. The wealthy man is reduced to the condition of a
+working man. The patient's unconscious association to _glass blower_
+proved to be _consumption_. The patient had once read statistics showing
+that a large number of glassblowers died from that disease. A very neatly
+concealed death wish.
+
+In other cases the death wish, while obvious in the manifest dream
+content, appears absurd and may cause the patient some anxiety. One of
+Ferenczi's patients, who was extremely fond of dogs, dreamt that she was
+choking a little white dog to death.
+
+Word associations brought out the memory of a relative with an unusually
+_pallid_ face whom she had recently ordered out of her house, saying later
+that she would not have such a snarling _dog_ about her. It was that
+white-faced woman, not a white dog, whose neck she wished to wring.
+
+Here is another example in which the wish fulfilment is cleverly
+concealed.
+
+"I am standing on a hill with Albert and somebody else. Bombs are falling
+about us. One of them strikes his car which is destroyed."[6]
+
+The patient, a woman, is in love with Albert and enjoys greatly riding
+with him in his car. Why should she wish to see it wrecked?
+
+The key to the enigma was given by the associations to the "somebody
+else." The somebody else was another woman whom Albert had taken to ride
+on several occasions and of whom my patient was very jealous. By
+destroying the car, the jealous woman was putting an end to the rides
+which had especially aroused her jealousy.
+
+The following dream seems rather unpleasant without being however an
+actual nightmare.
+
+DREAM: I heard a noise downstairs and went to investigate. Upon reaching
+the bottom of the stairs, I found a man lying on the floor with his coat
+off and drunk. Later he was hiding from me and running about the house.
+The man was captured and brought back by another man who cross-examined
+him. The other man made excuses for the thief and said he probably
+intended to steal but as he had a toothache he had sought the cellar and
+drunk to deaden the pain. To prove his explanations he opened the thief's
+mouth and pointed to a large cavity in one tooth.
+
+INTERPRETATION: The patient who brought me the dream was a young woman
+who, at the time, was worrying lest her husband should discover an
+indiscretion she had committed in her own house. The thief in the dream
+turned out to be her lover and the man who captures him, her husband.
+Everything is made simple and pleasant by the fact that the husband takes
+it upon himself to make excuses for the man he has captured. The excuse
+of the cavity was an allusion to alleged visits to a dentist's office
+which supplied her with alibis on various occasions.
+
+We spend a part of the night, if not the entire night, seeking solutions
+for the problems of the day. Patients who have been trained to remember
+and record their dreams accurately, sometimes bring a series of visions,
+apparently unrelated, but which after interpretation, prove to be
+successive presentations of one and the same problem from different
+angles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX: NIGHTMARES
+
+
+The Freudian theory of wish-fulfilment easily accepted by the layman as
+solving the problem of pleasant or indifferent dreams, meets with a most
+sceptical reception when it is applied to unpleasant dreams, to
+nightmares, which are characterized by a varying degree of anxiety.
+
+What I said in a previous chapter on the subject of symbols explains why
+certain wish-fulfilment dreams are perceived and remembered as nightmares.
+A woman may dream that she is surrounded by snakes, bitten by a dog,
+pursued by a bull, trampled down by a horse. A man may dream that he is
+stabbed in the back or that he is sinking slowly into water. In the first
+case we have a symbolic expression of the woman's desire for sexual
+intercourse, in the second a symbolic expression of the man's desire for
+homosexual gratification or for regression to the fetal stage (assuming of
+course that those various symbols have not a personal significance for the
+subject).
+
+The anxiety connected with those visions is due to the subject's
+inability or unwillingness to recognize as his the unconscious desires
+expressed by symbols.
+
+In not a few cases, the sleeper creates a dream situation which is
+distressing, full of danger, but which leads to a triumphal climax in
+which his ego reaps a rich reward of glory.
+
+Stekel in "The Language of the Dream," records a fine dream of his in
+which his egotism is vouchsafed all forms of gratification.
+
+DREAM: "I am in a great hall. On the stage there is a composite,
+centaurlike creature, half horse and half wolf or tiger. I am standing
+near the door, fearing that the beast might get out of bounds. In fact the
+tiger tears himself loose from the horse and leaps toward the door. I slam
+it shut and lock it up. After a while, I re-enter the hall. I behold a
+wild panic. Krafft-Ebing, the lion tamer, is rushing here and there. A man
+with two children is shaking with fear. Trumpet calls are heard coming
+from the tower."
+
+INTERPRETATION: "The dream was connected with a heated discussion in which
+I had taken part, about Zola's 'The Human Beast.' I contended that in
+every man there is a pathological strain and that no one is in absolute
+control of the beast. I see myself under two different aspects. I am the
+wolf or tiger and I lock the door in order that the wild cravings may not
+get loose. How great I am in this dream! Krafft-Ebing, the famous expert
+in sexual pathology, runs about helpless, while I hold the beasts in my
+power. The fear-stricken fellow with the two children is myself, an
+obviously tragic figure, symbolizing another side of my nature. The
+trumpet calls are from Beethoven's Fidelio. My marital faithfulness
+triumphs over my wildest urges. I am a model for all to imitate and I
+sound loud warnings."
+
+In a dream reported by a patient who was unconsciously trying to break his
+appointment with me, the anxiety is purely hypocritical, for each new
+obstacle placed in the dreamer's path is a new excuse for not reaching my
+office on time.
+
+"I was on Riverside Drive, strolling north. Mr. Tridon came along in the
+same direction, bare-headed and riding on a bicycle. He came near running
+into a boy, also on a bicycle, but swerved sharply and avoided a
+collision.
+
+"I was hurrying to keep the appointment with Mr. Tridon which I had for
+5.30 P. M. (I really had an appointment for 11.30 in the morning) but felt
+that I could not be there on time. My watch had stopped and the clocks I
+saw in stores had stopped likewise. The location was the slope of
+Morningside Heights and my direction still seemed to be northerly.
+
+"Another transition and I was climbing a hill near what looked like the
+99th Street station of the 3rd Avenue L. Near the summit the going became
+very steep and I was unable to go on, although I tried to scramble up on
+my hands and knees. I turned to the left, however, and climbed stairs
+leading through a white house, which I understood to be a school. There
+was a woman there with a few children. I then issued into a wide avenue
+running east and west which looked like Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. A
+trolley came along but as I ran for it, it seemed as though I had lost my
+coat. I turned back anxiously to find it but discovered that I was
+carrying it on my arm. I woke up before the next car came along."
+
+After attempting to ridicule me, the dreamer rehearsed all the excuses he
+might offer me for missing an appointment: Mistake about the hour, clocks
+stopped, going to the wrong direction (north instead of south), finally
+landing in Brooklyn, far from my office and missing several cars, etc....
+
+A young woman who had been invited several times by a friend to come and
+visit her and who had exhausted all the possible excuses for refusing such
+an invitation had the following dream after receiving one more letter
+renewing the invitation:
+
+"My friend's abode was a new apartment and I spent a night there. Upon
+awaking in the morning I discovered something crawling on my bed which
+looked like a caterpillar. I was disgusted and frightened. I went into the
+bathroom and there too found insects of the same species but very small in
+size. They reminded me of spiders and the ceiling and the walls were
+entirely 'decorated' with them.
+
+"I then decided to tell my friend to call this to the attention of the
+landlady and as I entered my friend's room I found her and the landlady
+cleaning my friend's bed.
+
+"I told the landlady how unpleasant it is to have such creatures in one's
+apartment and she said: 'The rooms were left unpainted for some time and
+this is the cause of it.'"
+
+An unpleasant dream, containing a little anxiety and some disgust and yet,
+a solution offered for the young woman's problem, a reason for not
+accepting the invitation. The place is not clean.
+
+The next dream is also an effort at finding a solution for a distressing
+problem:
+
+DREAM: "I was at home; some one looking like a nurse said: 'Come up
+stairs. You are going to have a baby.' I was neither surprised nor
+worried. The nurse added: 'When you have had the baby, you can select a
+husband for yourself.' I followed her and lay on a bed waiting for pains.
+Feeling nothing I grew impatient and went downstairs. Suddenly I became
+frightened and decided I must not have the child. I started to think how I
+could find a doctor to perform an abortion. I awoke suddenly with a
+tremendous sense of relief."
+
+INTERPRETATION: The patient is a southern girl living in New York. Home
+for her means the small town where her family resides. She has had a
+liaison and has often worried about possible consequences. The first part
+of the dream is a solution offered by the dream. She is at home, pregnant,
+but it seems natural to every one and the nurse (a nurse girl of her
+childhood days) is not only taking the matter as natural but shows her the
+advantages of her condition. On the other hand, the girl is frigid in love
+and used to associate pregnancy with orgasm. The pregnancy means here the
+fulfilment of her wish for an orgasm. Also it reveals her secret desire
+that her lover might be compelled to marry her. The lack of labor pains is
+another form of wish-fulfilment. The end of the dream indicates the mental
+processes of the patient, and her struggle against a regression. She first
+attempts to solve the problem by running back to "home and nurse" but
+insight enables her to analyse her dream and return to real life.
+
+There is no doubt but some painful dreams are, without any symbolism or
+distortion of any kind, dreams of obvious wish-fulfilment.
+
+There is a human type which enjoys pain, be it inflicted by others or
+self-torture, and to which fear and anxiety vouchsafe a good deal of
+gratification.
+
+When we remember the workings of our autonomic nerves we may not wonder at
+that fact. Pain, anxiety or fear pour into our blood stream fuel which
+gives us for a few minutes or a few hours a feeling of energy and power we
+may lack, and secretions which cause an arterial tension translated easily
+into "excitement," "exhilaration," etc.
+
+Children of the masochistic type like to have some one tell them stories
+of the most nightmarish variety which fill them with terror. We have all
+met the child who at some time or other makes the strange request: "Scare
+me."
+
+Anxiety dreams may play the part of a bracer and tonic in subjects of that
+type. The strange ritual of some primitive races, ancient and modern, in
+which mourners slash themselves or pull their hair or beards, corresponds
+closely from the endocrine point of view to the craving for terrible
+fairy tales or the frequency of certain anxiety dreams. The secretions
+brought forth by that self-inflicted pain may combat successfully the
+depression due to the loss of a dearly beloved person.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X: TYPICAL DREAMS AND SLEEP WALKING
+
+
+Thousands of explanations have been offered for typical dreams which
+almost every one has had at least once, such as dreams of falling or
+flying, but none of them should be accepted as covering all cases.
+
+The human mind is compelled to do its thinking along certain lines and to
+use certain categories like time, space, etc.
+
+Naturally, dreams, which are in no way different from waking thoughts,
+must move along certain definite grooves too; but we must remember that no
+symbol has an absolute meaning. Every symbol is likely to have a slightly
+different meaning for every individual.
+
+We shall see in the chapter on "Attitudes in Dreams" that it is the type
+of dreams rather than their content which is important psychologically.
+And it is the type of man who dreams which is important to bear in mind
+when we try to ferret out the meaning of a typical dream.
+
+Generally speaking, flying dreams seem to correspond to one of the most
+universal cravings of mankind: to liberate itself from the tyranny of the
+law of gravity and enjoy the freedom which winged creatures enjoy. All
+races have wished to fly and that desire, never gratified in waking life
+until recently, was bound to express itself in the dreams of all races at
+all periods of history.
+
+Freud has suggested that such dreams repeat memories of childhood games,
+rocking, see-sawing; Federn has seen in them a symbol of sexual
+excitement, both of which explanations sound unconvincing.
+
+There may be a symbolism of a different sort about flying dreams.
+
+If for some reason or other, our sleep becomes suddenly much deeper, we
+may represent our "flight" from reality through a flight through the air.
+We soar to the dream level which we feel to be higher than the waking
+level, to which on awakening, we fall painfully. Variations in the sleep
+depth would thus account for the frequent relation of sequence which is
+observable between flying and falling dreams. Flying dreams are never
+connected with any fear of anxiety, while falling dreams are almost always
+nightmares of usually short duration.
+
+The Freudians see in many falling dreams memories of falls in childhood.
+"Nearly all children," Freud writes, "have fallen occasionally and then
+been picked up and fondled; if they fell out of bed at night, they were
+picked up by their nurse and taken into her bed."
+
+This explanation fits only an insignificant number of cases.
+
+The symbolism of the falling dream is found upon analysis to be much
+richer.
+
+In women, dreams of falling are very often symbolical of sexual surrender.
+Anxiety or pleasure connected with falling dreams reveals the fear or
+pleasure connected with such a thought in the dreamer's mind. Not a few
+falling dreams transform themselves after a slight period of anxiety into
+flying dreams, thus indicating that the feeling of inferiority connected
+with the idea of surrender was very slight and easily replaced by a
+feeling of power, freedom and superiority to environment and conventions.
+
+Dreams of falling are sometimes "followed" by a terrified awakening. In
+reality it is the awakening due to some physical stimulus, noise, light,
+pain, etc., _which is followed by a falling dream_. The dream in that case
+is symbolical of the act of awaking.
+
+The anxiety is the natural displeasure felt by the dreamer when suddenly
+compelled to pass from dreamland into reality. This symbolism is rather
+apt, for the awakening lowers us from the free and irresponsible estate of
+the dream creature to the slavery entailed by leading a real life. We fall
+from the heights of our dreams to the depths of reality.
+
+At times, the dreamer has the impression of being mangled or killed as a
+result of that fall.
+
+Death is again a powerful symbol indicative of the dreamer's attitude. He
+feels he is dying when compelled to return to reality. Such a type is more
+dangerously attached to his fiction than the one who only resents awaking
+as a diminution of his ego and power.
+
+Dreams of falling teeth may be symbolical of unconscious onanistic
+tendencies. The slang of many languages has established a connection which
+cannot be casual between the pulling of teeth and sexual
+self-gratification.
+
+In dreams in which teeth grow again in the dreamer's mouth we may see a
+return to childish attitudes and memories of the years when the first
+teeth fell out and were replaced by stronger ones. An optimistic attitude,
+if somewhat regressive.
+
+When a certain tooth or group of teeth keeps on recurring in dream
+pictures, an X-ray examination of the entire denture should be made. I
+have observed several cases in which such dreams revealed the presence of
+root abscesses causing absolutely no conscious irritation and only felt
+unconsciously. Those dreams were both a warning and a wish-fulfilment
+(painless extraction).
+
+Dreams of nakedness, like dreams of flying, seem to express one of
+mankind's cravings, freedom from clothes. In the Earthly Paradise, Adam
+and Eve were naked and unashamed; all the gods and goddesses of the
+ancient religions were unclothed; even in our days academic sculptors
+represent modern heroes naked. Painters and sculptors of all epochs have
+been inclined to glorify the nude in their works.
+
+It is quite unnecessary to construct such dreams as a return to
+infantilism, as a regression, as the Freudians generally do.
+
+The attitude of the onlookers in those dreams contains a very obvious form
+of wish-fulfilment: whether we sit at a banquet or walk across a drawing
+room or appear on a street naked or half unclothed, no one seems to notice
+us. We generally try to hide or to drape ourselves in as dignified a
+manner as possible in whatever scanty garments we retain, but the anxiety
+is all on our side.
+
+Such dreams cannot be dreams of exhibitionism for they are never
+accompanied by the wish that people should see us, nor do we ever derive
+any pleasure from our exposure. I would be inclined to consider them in
+almost every case as symbolic dreams of attitudes. We are labouring under
+the burden of some secret which we are afraid of revealing. In spite of
+our anxiety, we are comforted by the fact that our secret (our total or
+partial nakedness) escapes the beholders. Our danger and our escape are
+simply visualized and symbolized.
+
+The symbolism of our exposure is quite obvious. The upper part of our body
+is usually covered up and it is the "lower" part of it which is exposed,
+and which we awkwardly try to wrap up in our shirt tails or to conceal
+under a table cloth or behind furniture or bushes. We are concealing
+something shameful, "low." Everybody knows the symbolism of high and low,
+right and left, which is expressed by the language of all races.
+
+One form of anxiety dream in which we grope our way through endless narrow
+passages, room after room, up and down flights of stairs, has been
+considered by some analysts as a memory of the first event of our life,
+when we were forced violently, painfully, through a narrow passage and
+finally reached the light of day. When the detail of those dreams is
+closely analysed it will prove much more valuable and important than a
+mere regression to the infantile.
+
+They will generally turn out to be the sort of dreams that coincide with
+the solution of a crisis and indicate that an adaptation to life has been
+reached, that the subject has been "reborn."
+
+Sleep walking is one variety of typical dream characterized by a greater
+motor activity than the usual dream in which we either lie still or only
+perform incomplete motions. Sleep walkers, like ordinary dreamers,
+performed in their somnambulistic states actions which they have refrained
+from performing in their waking states. While the sense of direction and
+of orientation seems unimpaired in sleep walkers, their perception of
+reality is very rudimentary.
+
+Two cases reported by the Encyclopédie Française and by Krafft-Ebing,
+respectively, illustrate that point.
+
+A young man used to get up at night, go to his study and write.
+
+Observers would now and then substitute a sheet of blank paper for the
+sheet which he had covered with writing. When he had finished, he would
+read over his manuscript aloud and repeat correctly, while holding the
+blank sheet before his eyes, the words written on the sheet which had
+been taken from him.
+
+One night the prior of a monastery was seated at his desk. A monk entered,
+a knife in his hand. He took no notice of the prior but went to the bed
+and plunged his knife into it several times; after which he returned to
+his cell. The next morning the monk told the prior of a terrible dream he
+had had. The prior had killed the monk's mother and the monk had avenged
+her by stabbing the prior to death. Thereupon he had awakened, horrified,
+and thanking God that the whole affair had only been a dream.
+
+In sleep walking dreams there is an accuracy, a singleness of purpose, a
+concentration of attention which has always struck all observers.
+
+The sleeper often wakes up when called by name, but he generally obeys
+without waking, all commands of a sensible character, such as to go back
+to bed.
+
+The sleeper often finds his way and locates the objects he may need for
+the purposes of his dream with his eyes closed, but noises and collisions
+with objects often fail to bring him back to waking consciousness.
+
+Sadger has attempted to point a connection between moonlight and sleep
+walking, which he calls at times "moon walking."
+
+The conclusions which he reaches at the end of his book on the subject are
+as follows:
+
+"Sleep walking, under or without the influence of the moon, represents a
+motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the dream, the
+fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the present, behind
+which, however, infantile wishes regularly hide. Both prove themselves _in
+all the cases analysed_ more or less completely as of a sexual erotic
+nature.
+
+"Also those wishes which present themselves without disguise, are mostly
+of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to be that the
+sleepwalker, male or female, would climb into bed with the loved object as
+in childhood. The love object need not belong necessarily to the present;
+it can much more likely be one of earliest childhood.
+
+"Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved
+person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or
+imitates his manner.
+
+"Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child
+pretends to be asleep, that it may be able without fear or punishment to
+experience all sorts of forbidden things, because it cannot be held
+accountable for what it does 'unconsciously in its sleep.' The same cause
+works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the deepest
+sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it.
+
+"The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and
+results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be
+referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular
+irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can
+compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this,
+these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics,
+epileptics, sadists and hysterics, with preponderating involvement of the
+motor apparatus.
+
+"Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of
+hysteria as of epilepsy; yet they are found frequently in conjunction with
+the former.
+
+"The moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved
+parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic
+colouring.
+
+"It seems possible that sleep walking and moon walking may be permanently
+cured through the psychoanalytic method."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI: PROPHETIC DREAMS
+
+
+Every one has heard relations of prophetic dreams which seem to imply a
+sense of unconscious sight going far beyond the limits of our conscious
+visual perceptions. It may be that, even as certain vibrations can be sent
+and received without any transmitting medium except the atmosphere, by
+wireless, certain visual information can be received, at times, under
+certain conditions, without any perception of such phenomena reaching the
+consciousness.
+
+At the same time, this is a field on which one must tread most carefully,
+for telepathy has never been studied very scientifically and the
+telepathic dreams which have been related to me or which I have read about
+had been recorded rather carelessly and the circumstances surrounding them
+had not been noted with the regard for accuracy which must characterize
+scientific research.
+
+A few times in my life, I have had the infinite surprise when lifting the
+telephone receiver, of hearing the voice of the very person I was going to
+call up and who had called me up at the same minute. On the other hand, I
+have endeavoured with the help of very intimate friends to effect
+synchronic transmission of thought and have failed dismally on every
+occasion.
+
+While I have never had prophetic dreams I have recorded one dream of mine
+which might be characterized as a "second sight" dream.
+
+One day I mislaid some documents which once belonged to my father.
+
+That night my father appeared to me and pointed to a desk drawer where the
+papers would be found. The next morning I looked in that drawer and found
+the documents.
+
+I certainly placed the documents myself in that drawer the day before and
+forgot the fact. But the unconscious memory of that action was retained
+and came up at night while my mind was at work solving the problem of the
+lost documents.
+
+If that explanation should meet with scepticism I would remind the reader
+that the wealth of information with which our unconscious is filled
+permits of unconscious mental operations of which in our conscious states
+we would be incapable. Janet's subject, Lucie, who was lacking in
+mathematical ability, could, in her unconscious states, perform
+calculations of an extreme complication. He would give her under hypnosis
+the following order: "When the figures which I am going to read off to
+you, leave six when subtracted one from the other, make a gesture of the
+hand." Then he would wake her up, and ask several people to talk to her
+and to make her talk. Standing at a certain distance from her, he would
+then read rapidly in a low voice a list of figures, but when the
+appropriate figures were read, Lucie never failed to make the gesture
+agreed upon.
+
+We notice thousands of things unconsciously, which means simply that every
+sensorial impression causes a modification of our autonomic system and
+probably of our sensory-motor system which is never completely effaced.
+
+During our waking hours only those memory impressions which are needed
+rise to consciousness. The many observations we have made, consciously or
+otherwise, enable us to calculate the distance between us and an
+automobile, the speed of that automobile, the width of the street, the
+dryness or the slippery conditions of the pavement, and to select the time
+for crossing as well as the speed at which we shall cross.
+
+In our sleep, when we are revolving the day's problems and searching for
+solutions, many other facts, stored up in our nervous systems, rise to
+consciousness and are used in solving the problem.
+
+In the personal case I cited, my unconscious applied its searchlight to
+recent events; in other cases reported in the literature of the subject
+the unconscious is shown bringing back events which seemed to have been
+entirely forgotten.
+
+Our organism never forgets.
+
+Forgotten incidents which suddenly rise to consciousness in dreams are
+sometimes responsible for visions which on superficial observation appear
+truly prophetic. Maury cites the following in his book on "Sleep and
+Dreams":
+
+"Mr. F. decided once to visit the house where he had been brought up in
+Montbrison and which he had not seen in twenty-five years. The night
+before he started on his trip, he dreamt that he was in Montbrison and
+that he met a man who told him he was a friend of his father. Several days
+later, while in Montbrison he actually met the man he had seen in his
+dream and who turned out to be some one he really knew in his childhood,
+but had forgotten in the intervening years. The real person was much older
+than the one in the dream, which is quite natural."
+
+One finds in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research many
+remarkable examples of dreams which, to the uninitiated, appear truly
+miraculous. Remembering, however, the wonders accomplished by Lucie under
+the influence of a hypnotic command, we may realize that the book-keepers
+who suddenly find in a dream the mistakes which have prevented them from
+balancing their books, or the various people who locate missing objects,
+are simply continuing in their sleep the day's work, drawing no longer
+upon their limited store of conscious memories and impressions, but upon
+all the wealth of information which is contained in their unconscious.
+
+Even the famous dream of Professor Hilprecht loses much of its glamour
+when viewed from this angle. Hilprecht had spent quite some time trying to
+decipher two small fragments of agate which were supposed to belong to the
+finger rings of some Babylonian god. He had given up the task and
+classified the fragments as undecipherable in a book on the subject. One
+night he had put his "o. k." on the final proofs of that book, feeling,
+however, rather dissatisfied at his inability to account for the
+inscriptions found on those ancient stones. He went to bed, weary and
+exhausted and had a remarkable dream: A tall, thin priest of Nippur
+appeared to him, led him to the treasure chamber of the temple of Bel and
+told him that the two fragments in question should be put together, as
+they were, not finger rings, but earrings made for a god by cutting a
+votive cylinder into three parts. The next morning he did as the dream
+priest had told him to do, and was able to read the inscription without
+any difficulty.
+
+I have received many letters from persons relating that they had dreamt of
+the San Francisco earthquake, of the sinking of the _Lusitania_, of the
+death of some friend or relative the very night preceding the event.
+
+I show in another chapter how treacherous and unreliable our memory of
+dreams can be at times.
+
+Happenings following quickly the awakening are likely to become
+"parasites" on the night's dreams and to appear as a component part of
+them.
+
+Time and over again, the newspaper one reads at breakfast adds details to
+the night's remembered dreams. Reading about some accident in the early
+morning may cause us to believe that we dreamt of the accident in the
+course of the night.
+
+When the German submarines began to sink passenger ships, thousands of
+dreamers who either wished unconsciously for such sinkings or feared them
+(which is generally the same thing) and many also who craved the
+excitement such catastrophes would bring them, must have had dreams in
+which large ships were sunk. And those thousands must have impressed
+themselves and their family circle by announcing, when the morning
+newspaper came out, that they had seen the tragedy enacted in a dream.
+
+Here again we are groping our way over uncharted fields and not until
+thousands of scientific observations made with the care characteristic of
+the chemical laboratory have been made, all explanations will only be
+tentative and all positive statements misleading.
+
+Those mentioning such dreams to me have at times been rather annoyed when
+I made them confess the wish lurking in them.
+
+One man told me that he had three brothers at the front during the war and
+that in a dream he saw one of them killed by the Germans. Soon afterward,
+news of his death reached the family.
+
+I asked him point blank why he wanted to get rid of that brother. He
+avoided giving me a direct answer but admitted that if one of the three
+was to die, the one whose death he saw in his dream would be least missed
+by his family as he had always made trouble and was the "black sheep."...
+
+Even in such cases the wish fulfilment theory holds good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII: ATTITUDES REFLECTED IN DREAMS
+
+
+Dreams reveal to us what our unconscious cravings are and this is of
+course valuable information. But cravings are only symptoms of something
+more important and less easily dealt with: the subject's attitude to life.
+
+The neurosis is merely a wrong attitude to life and its problems. A fear
+of darkness, an incestuous desire, an abnormal craving for a certain food
+are no more important in themselves than a small sore appearing on one's
+lip. But as the sore may mean that the organism is infected with the
+spirochaeta of syphilis, the "psychic" phenomena I mentioned may mean that
+the organism has adopted toward reality a negative attitude leading to
+death instead of life.
+
+Owing to its visualizing powers, the dream makes attitudes extremely
+obvious at the very first glance.
+
+We are as we see ourselves in our dreams.
+
+Positive, energetic dreams, full of action, indicate strength either in
+resolve or in resistance.
+
+Vague dreams, full of moods rather than of action, indicate stagnation,
+aimlessness.
+
+Dreams of adulthood, dealing with the present or the future, indicate
+progression. Dreams of childhood or dealing mainly with the past, indicate
+attempts at a regression.
+
+In his latest book, "Introduction to Psychoanalysis," Freud states that
+"the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile."
+
+This is one of the great Freudian exaggerations. Such a statement is true
+of the neurotic and explains why he is a neurotic. In fact the more
+infantile the unconscious appears to be, the more severe the neurosis
+generally is, until in certain forms of malignant regression, the patient
+acts like a helpless newly born infant. The predominance of infantile
+material in dreams indicates a fixation on infantile gratifications which
+makes the subject especially ill adapted to adult life. But in the normal
+individual the amount of infantile material is very small indeed.
+
+We start gathering unconscious material at the very minutes of our birth,
+if not before birth, but we keep on accumulating experiences, most of them
+unconscious and only rising to consciousness when needed, and conscious
+experiences which become unconscious when not needed.
+
+It is the proportion of material from the various periods of our life
+which enables us to gauge the level a human being has reached through his
+intelligent, positive acceptance of present day reality. I say acceptance
+of reality rather than adaptation to reality, for adaptation implies a
+certain suppression, and suppression may mean neurosis.
+
+It is the human being who satisfies all his infantile cravings within a
+sphere of activity beneficial to himself and the world, who remains
+healthy. He who tries to satisfy them through infantile or childish ways
+merges into a neurosis.
+
+We have seen that the dreams of children and of simple, normal people are
+obvious and devoid of any symbolic disfigurement. Children dream of the
+food or the pleasures they had to forego in the previous waking state.
+Nordenskjold and his sailors, icebound in the Antarctic, dreamt of fine
+meals, of tobacco, of ships sailing the open sea, of mail from home, in
+other words of the things of which they had been deprived for months.
+
+The use of symbols in dreams, on the other hand, indicates a lack of
+freedom of expression due to some fear or repression. A repressed vision
+appears on the screen of our mind in symbolized form.
+
+A highly symbolical dream is almost always a pathological dream. It means
+that we do not dare, even in our dreams, to visualize directly the thing
+we are thinking of.
+
+The phenomenon which Freud has designated as "displacement" also indicates
+an attempt at repressing certain important facts by harping on other facts
+of lesser importance.
+
+A child surprised in a part of the house where his presence is suspicious
+is not likely to reveal abruptly his plans. He will in all likelihood tell
+some story from which the real reason for his presence is carefully
+excluded. A young pie fiend found in the pantry would never mention the
+word pie but make great ado over the "fact" that his ball has rolled under
+the cupboard.
+
+And likewise it is very often the part of a dream which a patient has not
+told which holds the key to the enigma of the patient's mental
+disturbance.
+
+One of my hypnagogic visions which I have already mentioned, simple as it
+is, reveals my entire attitude, not only to sleep, but to life in general.
+
+I do not feel overwhelmed by sleep. I give myself up to sleep as
+voluntarily as I wade into the sea or plunge into a swimming pool. Sleep
+will refresh me as a swim would. When the proper depth is reached I swim
+out, conscious of my ability and experiencing no fear.
+
+I use sleep as a means to exercise my mental activities as I enjoy the
+muscular exertion necessary for swimming.
+
+Finally there is no one in the picture but myself. I am the central figure
+of the dream.
+
+To go into more details, I may confide to the reader that I have never
+enjoyed any form of sport, indoor or outdoors in which I do not play an
+important, if not the leading part, or which prevents me from indulging my
+own whims. Witnessing some one else's athletic performances bores me to
+extinction and games such as cards, checkers or golf which are surrounded
+with iron clad regulations appear to me not as a relaxation but as a
+useless form of hard work.
+
+Readers may think that these self-revelations are prompted by egotism, but
+an analyst should analyse himself as ruthlessly as he analyses others and
+egotism happens to be the dominant feature of my attitude to life.
+
+The following dream draws a remarkable picture of uncertainty, indecision
+and gloom:
+
+DREAM. "I am standing at the foot of marble stairs. I expect some danger
+from the left where a person clothed in authority, with tyrannical
+appearance, is approaching. I ask a female figure standing at the top of
+the steps, and who seems to be some acquaintance, relative, mother or
+sister, for help. I try to run up the steps but cannot. The figure extends
+me a helping hand but that hand is so weak, lifeless, that I feel
+helpless. I wake up in deep anxiety."
+
+ATTITUDE. We have in this case a "flight to the mother" coupled with fear
+of the powerful father. The patient had always suffered from some fear,
+fear of examinations as a school child, fear of competition in all life
+matters, fear of marriage, fear of decisions. He lived with his mother and
+sister and had an affair with a woman considerably older than himself whom
+he called "mother" and who called him her "boy."
+
+We shall now see a dreamer wrestling with a sentimental problem, seeking a
+solution for it and refusing to accept the solution suggested by an
+outsider.
+
+DREAM. "I was in a car with Albert, sitting in my usual seat but the
+steering gear had been moved so that I could steer from my seat. I was
+very inexperienced and felt anxiety. I was going down a steep city street
+and at the bottom, saw a house before which I wished to park; there were
+red lanterns and signs, however, which prevented me from stopping there.
+I went on and Albert disappeared, then I was in the open country climbing
+a hill and a man (A.T.) stood there and I asked him which way to go. The
+machinery bothered me, I didn't know what button to push but trusted my
+intuition and went all right. Finally I reached a desert stretch where
+there was nothing and in great anxiety awoke."
+
+ATTITUDE. The subject in love with a married man, had long hoped that he
+would secure a divorce and marry her. She often went motoring with him.
+Their affair was not satisfactory, however, and she had often considered
+the possibility of a separation.
+
+The situation is handled in the dream as follows. She has had her way and
+is running the car from her usual seat (he has come to her point of view)
+but she has misgivings about the experiment (unconsciously, she is not
+very keen any more to marry him); she tries to park in front of a house
+(their future home); red lanterns (danger signs, obstacles, law, custom)
+prevent her from doing so. She then starts out without him and asks her
+analyst for advice. He encourages her to go on her way but she reaches a
+deserted place and feels so forlorn, so hungry for human company that she
+escapes from the nightmare through awaking.
+
+Even when no change is observable in a patient's condition in the course
+of an analysis, constant attention to his dreams will enable the analyst
+to notice unconscious changes which very soon afterward translate
+themselves into a conscious modification of attitude.
+
+The following dreams illustrate that point:
+
+At the beginning of the analysis a patient, following in his dreams as
+well as in his neurosis, the line of least effort, dreamt he had solved a
+mechanical problem by means of a very simple apparatus consisting in a
+rocking chair, two thumb tacks and an old rubber coat. Later when he
+resumed closer contact with life, the machinery of his dreams became real
+machinery and he continued in his sleeping thoughts the calculations which
+had occupied him during the day and which to him were a constant source of
+pleasure.
+
+A patient whose ambition was to become a singer but whose husband was
+decidedly hostile to her plans, first brought me the following dream in
+which she frankly relied on me for advice:
+
+"I am on the stage, singing. I forget my part. A foreign looking conductor
+prompts me. In the wings, a man is looking at me, weeping. He falls in a
+faint. I rush to him. He looks like my husband. A foreign looking doctor
+picks him up and says to me: 'He will sleep now, after which he will feel
+better.' I go back to the stage and sing beautifully."
+
+Later, having acquired more self-confidence she visualized the situation
+as follows:
+
+"I see a man leading a Jersey cow on a rope. The cow is trying to get
+under the fence but cannot. Then the cow is changed into a yellow bird
+which flies away, perches on top of a barn and sings joyfully."
+
+In the first dream, I am, of course the conductor and the doctor. In the
+second dream, the cow is an allusion to the patient's tendency to gain
+weight. The song-bird is a very obvious symbol.
+
+A series of dreams reported by a stammering patient not only presented the
+Freudian feature of wish-fulfilment but indicated clearly the patient's
+changing attitude and his growing self-confidence, which finally
+culminated in his complete cure.
+
+One of the first dreams he brought me at the beginning of the treatment
+read as follows:
+
+"A congressman called Max Sternberg, who looks like me, is on the
+platform, making a speech. A gang of little Irish boys in the rear starts
+a disturbance. The audience, unable to hear the speaker, leaves the hall."
+
+On numberless occasions, small boys prevented him in his dreams from
+accomplishing his object, and in particular, disturbed him when he was
+speaking. Later the small boys became less and less aggressive. On one
+occasion he lead a group of them through a museum and they listened to his
+explanations without interrupting him.
+
+One night he had the following dream.
+
+"I am near Grand Central and thousands of children are lined on both sides
+of the avenue to welcome a school principal who is landing from the train.
+He arrives and they all cheer wildly and I have a feeling that I am that
+school principal."
+
+Little boys never disturbed the dreamer after that. He had conquered his
+regressive tendencies and his speech was improving.
+
+His self-confidence grew to such a point that he had the following dream:
+
+"I was in a room with John and Lionel Barrymore and I rehearsed them for a
+Shakespearian play. Lionel forgot his part and stopped. I prompted him and
+declaimed a few lines myself very eloquently. This was accompanied by the
+thought: Very egotistical-good."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII: RECURRENT DREAMS
+
+
+Whenever one and the same motive, with perhaps slight variations, recurs
+frequently in dreams we may assume that it is the leading motive of the
+dreamer's waking life. Whenever a person plays a dominant part in our
+dreaming, we can rest assured that that person dominates and directs our
+behaviour directly or indirectly.
+
+A man of forty-five, suffering from dizziness, was sent to me by his
+family physician after numberless tests had failed to attribute his
+illness to a "physical" cause. The patient had been troubled for two years
+with vertigo, which he insisted on attributing to arteriosclerosis
+(against the advice of several physicians). His legs had become very weak
+and unsteady. He had developed a deep sense of worthlessness and was
+haunted by suicidal ideas.
+
+My query as to his most frequent dream elicited the answer:
+
+"I dream very frequently of my father."
+
+His father had died two years before, from arteriosclerosis, and his main
+complaint had been dizziness, weakness of the legs and depression. To
+any one but the patient, the psychological connection between his illness
+and his father's illness would have been obvious. He, too, saw some
+connection between the two, only he placed upon that fact a more sinister
+construction. The heredity bogey was terrifying him. His father had
+bequeathed his illness to him, and he was to die as his father had died.
+
+It came out in the course of the analysis that he had been from infancy
+his father's constant companion, working for him till he was over forty
+years of age. Although he had always been fond of women, he had never
+thought of marrying until his father died. After reciting the usual
+arguments of the average bachelor directed against matrimony, he confessed
+that he had never had the courage to bring to his home any young woman he
+liked and who might have become his wife. Fear of his father's sarcastic
+remarks set to nought any plans he might have made for a home of his own.
+
+After his father's death, he went half-heartedly into various business
+ventures of which his father would have disapproved and he naturally lost
+his investment. Every time he met with a reverse, he would be tortured by
+remorse. "This is my father's money which I have been squandering." "My
+father would be furious if he knew what I have done."
+
+He would then dream that his father stalked past him, cold, indifferent,
+stern, and he "knew" his father had "come back" to show him his
+resentment.
+
+The superficial symptoms of the patient's trouble were easily removed when
+he acquired enough insight to realize that he had been imitating all of
+his father's attitudes and repressing his own ego.
+
+Physical exercise soon restored to his legs the steadiness which they had
+lost while the patient, imitating his father's helplessness, would sit in
+his father's chair day after day, never taking a walk. A more critical
+attitude of mind toward the father whom he worshipped, removed gradually
+the sense of worthlessness which had almost lead him to suicide.
+
+Suicide to him was the road that led back to his father, upon whom he
+wished to shift his responsibilities, and for whom he wished to work (as a
+younger man), etc.
+
+The case was much more complicated but the few details of it which I have
+presented are sufficient to show the close connection which existed
+between the patient's most frequent dream and his imaginary neurotic goal.
+
+A homosexual patient always dreamt of her stepmother whom her father
+married when she, the patient, was only twelve years of age. That marriage
+was the culmination of a complicated family tragedy, double divorce,
+unsavoury publicity, bitterness and hostility, puritanical gossip about
+sex, passion, etc., which made on the child an indelible impression.
+
+She felt obscurely then that relations between sexes were something
+unutterably filthy and while she liked a few boys in her flapper days, she
+could not master a feeling of disgust whenever their attitude reminded her
+of the "nasty" things which had wrecked her family.
+
+On the other hand, the pretty young woman whom her father introduced into
+his home, personified in her thoughts sexual attraction in its most
+irresistible form, a symbol of sin and bliss. To this day she has love
+affair after love affair with women, every affair followed by a "nervous
+breakdown" in which she repents her immorality and experiences terrible
+remorse. At every stay in a sanitarium, however, dreams of her stepmother,
+representing veiled and symbolized homosexual situations, obsess her
+night after night. In one of those dreams she took the place of her father
+and married the young woman, after which the hostility of the family,
+manifesting itself in various forms, transformed the pleasant fancy into a
+painful anxiety dream.
+
+Another patient, tyrannized over by an aunt who had brought her up, would,
+whenever an emergency arose and she had to take a decision, dream of the
+severe, forbidding aunt and feel so depressed the next day that she could
+not accomplish anything and thus postponed the solution of her
+difficulties.
+
+In certain cases, a recurring dream may bear a strange likeness to a
+splitting of the personality such as we observed in cases of dual
+personalities.
+
+The famous Rosegger dream, analysed by Freud and Maeder, should be
+reanalysed in the light of the statements made in the previous chapters.
+Rosegger went through a hard mental struggle from which he emerged
+victorious, but the recurring dream he relates in his book "Waldheimat"
+tells us much about the trials of a little tailor who managed to make a
+place for himself in the artistic world but for a long while felt out of
+place in his new environment.
+
+"I usually enjoy a sound sleep," Rosegger writes, "but many a night I have
+no rest. I lead side by side with my life as student and littérateur, the
+shadow life of a tailor's apprentice. This I have dragged with me through
+long years, like a ghost, without being able to get rid of it.... Whenever
+I dreamed, I was the tailor's apprentice, ... working without compensation
+in my master's workshop.... I felt I did not belong there any more ... and
+regretted the loss of time in which I could have employed myself more
+usefully.... How happy I was to wake up after such tedious hours! I
+resolved that if this insistent dream should come again, I would throw it
+off and shout: 'This is only a make believe. I am in bed and wish to
+sleep.' Yet the next time I was again in the tailor's workshop. One night,
+at last, the master said to me: 'You have no talent for tailoring. You can
+go, you are dismissed.' I was so frightened by this that I awoke."
+
+Freud compares this dream with a similar dream which pestered him for
+years and in which he saw himself as a young physician, working in a
+laboratory, making analyses and unable as yet to earn a regular living.
+This is his interpretation of it:
+
+"I had as yet no standing and did not know how to make ends meet; but just
+then it was clear to me that I might have the choice of several women whom
+I could have married. I was young again in the dream and she was young
+too, the wife who had shared with me all those years of hardship.
+
+"This betrayed the unconscious dream agent as being one of the insistent
+gnawing wishes of the aging man. The fight between vanity and
+self-criticism, waged in other psychic layers, had decided the dream
+content, but only the deeper rooted wish for youth had made it possible as
+a dream. Often, awake, we say to ourselves: Everything is all right as it
+is today and those were hard times, but it was fine at that time. You are
+still young."
+
+Maeder, of Zurich, refuses to accept such a simple explanation and offers
+a more complicated one, burdened, like many psychological interpretations
+of the Swiss school, with ethical considerations.
+
+"By his own efforts," Maeder writes, "Rosegger had worked himself up to a
+high position in life. This has made him proud and vain, two faults which
+easily disturb mankind, for they cause a man to suffer in the presence of
+superiors and place him in a parvenu position among the lowly.... Deep
+down, there takes place, in the sensitive poet, a gradual elaboration, a
+development of the moral personality.... The long series of tormenting
+dreams shows us the development of the psychic process which ends in a
+deep but effective humiliation of the dreamer.... His being sent away,
+dismissed, symbolizes in my opinion, the overcoming of the pride and
+vanity of the upstart."
+
+I agree with Freud on the wish for youth expressed by Rosegger's dream and
+fulfilled by way of a regression. But neither Freud, bent on introducing a
+sexual element into his interpretation, nor Maeder, overfond of
+moralizing, seem to have realized the tremendous meaning of such a series
+of dreams, culminating as they did in a changed attitude to life.
+
+I have shown in another book, "Psychoanalysis and Behavior," that in cases
+of dual personalities, the second personality is always one that leads a
+simpler, less arduous life, fraught with lesser responsibilities, than the
+normal life led by the first personality. The Rev. Ansel Bourne, being
+tired and needing rest, was transformed for several weeks into A. Brown, a
+fruit dealer in a small town far away from his home. Miss Beauchamp, prim,
+overconsciencious, repressed, became the irresponsible Sallie, devoid of
+manners or taste. The Rev. Thomas Carson Hanna, overworked and a spiritual
+disciplinarian, woke up from a fit of unconsciousness a newborn baby,
+helpless and in-organized.
+
+Rosegger, rising from manual to intellectual labour, compelled to adapt
+himself to the mannerisms of a different world, and to adopt a new set of
+social habits and customs for which his bringing up in a proletarian home
+had not prepared him, compelled also to ransack his brain constantly for
+new ideas to express or for new forms in which to clothe old ideas, may
+have at times regretted unconsciously the simpler life of a tailor, less
+rich in egotistical satisfactions but more comfortable intellectually and
+requiring infinitely less ingenuity.
+
+And some of the remarks which he appends to his dream, confirm my
+suspicions.
+
+What does he say of his awakening? "I felt as if I had just newly
+recovered this idylically sweet life of mine, peaceful, poetical,
+spiritualized, in which so often I had realized human happiness to the
+uttermost."
+
+Undoubtedly he had for a long while failed to enjoy it and unconsciously
+planned to escape from it through a regression to his former estate.
+
+Several lines further down the page we find this statement which is, I
+think, absolutely conclusive proof of what his mental attitude had been
+and of the crisis he had lived through.
+
+"I no longer dream of my tailoring days _which in their way were so jolly
+in their simplicity and without demands_."
+
+Rosegger's dream is one of those morbid manifestations which enable us to
+follow a neurotic struggle going on within the organism, a struggle for
+adaptation to life, a struggle of which the subject is consciously
+ignorant, because he has burnt his bridges and has repressed the most
+fleeting thought of a possible change.
+
+Rosegger must have smarted under the _demands_ of his new life, but it was
+out of the question for him to do anything else. The conflict, however,
+played itself off in his dreams, offering a solution of a regressive type.
+When, years later, the tailor's adaptation to the life of a writer was
+completed, his master dismissed him. The dream solution was no longer
+needed.
+
+Recurring dreams often give us valuable indications of physical trouble
+which should be investigated and remedied at once. Even in ancient times,
+the relation between recurring dreams of physical disability and some
+physical disability setting in at a later date had been noticed. In those
+days, however, the interpretation of such dreams was that the vision was a
+warning sent by the gods, or that the vision was responsible for the
+subsequent trouble. We read for instance of a man who dreamt that he had a
+stone leg. A few days later paralysis set in.
+
+In discussing dental dreams I have pointed out the importance of having
+the denture examined for possible pus pockets.
+
+Dreams of animals gnawing at some organ may indicate a cancer developing
+in that region. Dreams of exhaustion from climbing hills often denote
+heart disease.
+
+H. Addington Bruce had for several months had the same dream: a cat was
+clawing at his throat. Examination of the throat revealed a small growth
+which required immediate surgical intervention. The cat never came back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV: DAY DREAMS
+
+
+We do not always need to sleep in order to escape _normally_ from reality.
+Some of us manage to do it with their eyes open.
+
+Day dreams are not essentially different from night dreams and would not
+be mentioned separately but for the fact that they at times verge on a
+neurosis and that in certain cases they are not easily distinguished from
+delusions and hallucinations.
+
+Whatever was said of night dreams in the preceding chapters holds true of
+day dreams. There are pleasant day dreams, unpleasant day dreams and even
+day "nightmares" or anxiety day dreams.
+
+Like the sleep walker, the day dreamer manages at times to take just
+enough notice of reality to direct himself through his house or along the
+streets, while his mind is elaborating stories of varying complication.
+
+A day dreamer who consulted me during the war would imagine himself, while
+walking along the streets, enlisting, taking a tearful farewell from his
+relatives and friends and accomplishing deeds of valour which made him
+famous; after which he would be so affected by his greatness that tears
+would roll down his cheeks. Or the dream would end tragically and he would
+die and then again a cascade of tears would be let loose at the thought of
+all the grief his demise would cause. The result was that day after day he
+would suddenly "wake up" in some public place, his face wet with tears,
+annoyed and embarrassed by the attention which his appearance would
+attract.
+
+Those day dreams constituted in spite of their sad cast a fulfilment of
+his egotistical cravings. Even death was not too high a price to pay for
+the importance he acquired in his dream, a psychological fancy which is
+often found at the bottom of some sensational forms of suicide.
+
+The anxiety day dream is the form of compensation sought by many
+neurotics, weak in body and frequently taken advantage of by more vigorous
+and ruthless persons.
+
+It also plays at times the same part as masochistic nightmares, filling as
+it does, the body with glycogen and a sense of power.
+
+I have heard patients suffering from a sense of real or imaginary
+inferiority tell me of their obsessive anger finding relief in scenes
+which they made, while walking along the streets or when sleepless of
+nights, to some absent person whom they held responsible for their
+troubles.
+
+They would then rehearse some annoying or humiliating incident provoked by
+the offensive person and let loose a torrent of abuse leading unavoidably
+to a fight in which they would beat, scratch or murder their enemy.
+
+The sound of their own voice or the remarks of passers by would generally
+wake them up at the climax; their hearts then would beat wildly, they
+would be out of breath, if not bathed in perspiration, but they would
+experience withal a certain amount of satisfaction from the victory they
+had won and they would feel full of what a patient of mine termed "almost
+murderous energy."
+
+This form of "abreaction," when it does not assume the form of a constant
+indulgence taking the place of positive action, is rather desirable. The
+psychoanalytic treatment consists, in part at least, in the production of
+day dreams based on memories which free in the patient a certain amount of
+repressed energy. Thus a great deal of unrelated and unconscious material
+is made conscious and related. Day dreams, without any definite direction
+and unchecked, are likely, however, to be very dangerous and to exert a
+paralysing influence on the dreamer.
+
+The concentration and meditation recommended by some Hindoo philosophers
+can accomplish valuable results if the subject has a clear, analytical
+mind and knows how to correlate the scraps of thoughts which are thus
+allowed to rise to consciousness.
+
+For childish people, which are easily caught in the meshes of their
+fancies and let their imagination run away with them, that indulgence is
+deadly and it has led millions of Orientals into a nirvana-like idleness
+and weakness, destructive of energy and life, a negative escape from
+reality.
+
+This is one of the reasons why, in many forms of neurosis, a rest cure is
+the most dangerous form of treatment. The neurotic's attention is
+generally directed away from reality. His energy is too often deflected
+toward fictitious goals located outside of the real world. The neurotic
+has to be brought back into contact with life and human beings; he has to
+be trained to accept them _as they are_ and to enjoy them _for what they
+are_, instead of imagining _what they might be_. The idleness and
+seclusion of the rest cure may negative all efforts in that direction.
+
+The rest cure from which day dreams cannot be excluded, is simply an
+abnormal flight from reality sanctioned and abetted by a physician
+ignorant of psychology.
+
+The day dreams which produce happiness, which promote creation, scientific
+or artistic, and which lead the individual into the stream of life, are
+sound and healthy dreams. Those which only lead to more dreaming and away
+from life, are neurotic phenomena, devoid of any redeeming grace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV: NEUROSIS AND DREAMS
+
+
+Not infrequently neuroses and psychoses are ushered in by a dream and
+their termination is announced by a dream.
+
+This should not be understood to mean that the dream either "causes" the
+neurosis or "cures" it. That mistake has often been made by psychologists
+of the old school. Taine, among others, cites the case of a policeman who
+once attended a capital execution.
+
+This spectacle made such an impression on him that he often dreamt of his
+own execution and finally committed suicide.
+
+It would be absurd to believe that the sight of the execution "put the
+idea of suicide into his head." He undoubtedly had been consciously or
+unconsciously revolving death thoughts in his mind.
+
+The sight of the execution made those ideas more concrete and more
+obsessive. The recurrence of a death dream simply showed that the
+obsession was gradually overpowering his personality and seeking
+realization. The dream work, endeavouring to solve the problem of how to
+end his life, offered an easy solution: he did not have to commit suicide;
+he was being put to death. Finally the death wishes overthrew his
+personality and he killed himself.
+
+An epileptic was tortured every night by a dream in which a group of boys
+playing Wild West (he personifying the Indian) were pursuing him, throwing
+sticks and stones at him and finally cornering him. At the very minute
+where they were laying hands on him, he would experience a "dying" feeling
+and wake up in great discomfort. One night he turned round to face the
+gang which dwindled down to one small urchin whom he spanked. That night
+he slept soundly and the next day his fears of having a new fit
+disappeared. Neither that dream nor his fits have returned. It was not the
+dream that gave him fits, nor was it the last dream which cured him. The
+obsessive dreams were wish-fulfilment dreams, showing him how to dodge
+life's duties through his sickness which was a convenient, though painful,
+unconscious excuse and how to solve his life problems by getting out of
+reality.
+
+The last dream revealed a change in his mental attitude. He was not to
+seek any longer a neurotic escape from reality but face reality and fight
+his own battles.
+
+A patient suffering from delusions had the following dream:
+
+"A woman appeared to me and told me that it was all a dream and that all
+my troubles would soon end."
+
+Associations to that dream showed that the woman who appeared to my
+patient was a midwife who had helped her in a confinement some thirty
+years before (rebirth symbolism). At that time she almost died from
+puerperal fever and was also "saved" by a dream in which her grandparents
+appeared to her and told her that she would recover.
+
+Her dreams, in which she placed in the mouth of other people the
+expression of her own wish for health, corresponded well in their
+mechanism with her delusions in which she heard people berating her for
+her imaginary sins.
+
+At the time of the dreams, her delusions had lost their terrifying
+character and were only a mild annoyance to her. She had acquired enough
+insight to doubt their reality and to refer them to her unconscious
+thoughts.
+
+The woman who imagines that in every voice she hears she can distinguish
+the voice of the man she unconsciously loves builds up a "story" like the
+dreamer who, perceiving coldness in her feet at night, saw herself falling
+into a lake.
+
+The technique is exactly the same in both cases.
+
+Actual sensations are transformed into delusions closely associated with
+the dreamer's or the neurotic's complexes.
+
+People subject to hallucinations project outside of their body symbolic
+figures representing wishes they have endeavoured to repress and which
+they refuse to recognize as a part of their personality.
+
+They hear voices which say certain things they are trying not to think of,
+for they consider such thoughts as obscene, criminal or otherwise
+unjustifiable.
+
+Dreamers likewise represent their disabilities as something entirely
+separate from their bodies and their personality.
+
+The stammering patient dreaming that he was delivering a very eloquent
+speech but was interrupted by howling hoodlums, repressed out of
+consciousness the idea of his speech disturbance and gratified his ego by
+saying: "But for those hoodlums I could speak very well."
+
+Trumbull Ladd suffering from inflammation of the eyelids dreamt that he
+was trying to decipher a book in microscopic type: An attempt at shifting
+upon the book the responsibility for his difficulties in reading. The
+dream said: "There is nothing wrong with your eyes, but the type is too
+small."
+
+A young woman struggling with an unjustifiable attachment for a married
+man told me the following dream:
+
+"I was surrounded by little devils carrying pitchforks. I was afraid of
+them at first, but I finally grabbed them all in a bunch and dropped them
+into the fireplace. A pit opened under them and closed again and I felt
+free."
+
+Her psychology was the same psychology which in the Middle Ages caused
+religious people to invent the devil. Her desires which she refused to
+recognize as hers were little devils endeavouring to tempt her. We deal
+more easily with a stranger than with ourselves and "the devil tempted me"
+sounds more forgivable than "I did what I had always wanted to do."
+
+What makes it difficult for neurotics at times to tell the difference
+between their dreams and reality is that the emotions felt in dreams are
+accompanied by the same inner secretions as when felt in the waking life.
+A fear dream releases adrenin and a vivid sexual dream is followed by a
+pollution. The bodily sensations following certain dreams are evidential
+facts which some neurotics do not know how to controvert.
+
+The hallucinations of _delirium tremens_ patients which are generally
+accompanied by anxiety, illustrate the fact that we can be terrified and
+tortured by a dream which is a symbolized fulfilment of our conscious or
+unconscious wishes.
+
+It is admitted by all but the very ignorant that immoderate drinking is
+not induced by a taste for drink but by a desire to escape reality, in the
+majority of cases, to drown the consciousness of financial or sexual
+difficulties.
+
+The most common hallucinations of drunkards are those of snakes and lice.
+Snakes are almost without exception symbolical of the male sex. To the
+majority of neurotics, lice are symbolical of money and American slang
+recognizes that association in the expression _lousy with money_.
+
+The "DT" patient has his wishes fulfilled. He is covered with vermin and
+snakes crawl about his bed. He has all the symbolical wealth and the
+symbolical potency or homosexual love he could wish for. But curiously
+enough he does not understand those symbols and is terrified by the
+manifest content of his morbid dream.
+
+The story of Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel is a fine illustration
+of the relation between dreams and insanity.
+
+The king began to lose his sleep which was disturbed by nightmares. In the
+morning, however, the memory of those nightmares seemed to be entirely
+gone. Daniel contrived to reconstruct a forgotten anxiety dream in which
+the king saw a gigantic figure with head of gold, breast and arms of
+silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron and feet of iron and clay
+and which toppled down when struck by a stone.
+
+Here we have a morbid attitude to reality, the king visualizing his
+position (which unconsciously appeared to him precarious), through that
+unstable figure, and also expressing a neurotic wish to be delivered from
+his anxiety through the final catastrophe.
+
+Later the king had another dream visualizing his fears and death wishes
+through a different image: A mighty tree grew till its head reached the
+heavens. Then an angel cried: "Hew down the tree, leave the stump and
+roots in the earth, in the tender grass of the field; let it be wet with
+the dew and let his portion be with the beasts."
+
+Fear of defeat and a neurotic desire to escape reality via a regression to
+the animal level are clearly indicated in this dream and in Daniel's
+interpretation of it.
+
+Very soon after, auditory hallucinations began to appear. "A voice fell
+from heaven," speaking out the unconscious wishes which the king craved to
+gratify.
+
+In a siege of _dementia praecox_, Nebuchadnezzar ate grass like oxen and
+his body was wet with the dew from heaven; his hair grew like eagle's
+feathers and his nails like birds' claws.
+
+After a period during which he, like all cases of changed personality, led
+an easier, simpler, more primitive life, without any responsibilities,
+Nebuchadnezzar recovered and related thus his return to reality:
+
+"My reason returned unto me; for the glory of my kingdom, mine honour and
+brightness returned unto me; and my counsellors and lords sought unto me;
+I was established in my kingdom and excellent majesty was added unto me."
+
+In the meantime he had become reconciled with reality and had given up his
+paranoid attempts at being the mightiest factor in the world.
+
+By accepting as a possibility the existence of a mightier power, he
+protected himself against the ignominy of a possible defeat. Against an
+omnipotent God, even he could not prevail.
+
+Freud writes: "The overestimation of one's mental capacity, which appears
+absurd to sober judgment, is found alike in insanity and in dreams, and
+the rapid course of ideas in the dream corresponds to the flight of ideas
+in the psychosis. Both are devoid of any measure of time.
+
+"The dissociation of personality in the dream, which, for instance,
+distributes one's own knowledge between two persons, one of whom, the
+strange one, corrects in the dream one's own ego, fully corresponds to the
+well-known splitting of the personality in hallucinatory paranoia; the
+dreamer, too, hears his own thoughts expressed by strange voices.
+
+"Even the constant delusions find their analogy in the stereotyped
+recurring pathological dreams.
+
+"After recovering from a delirium, patients not infrequently declare that
+the disease appeared to them like an uncomfortable dream; indeed, they
+inform us that occasionally, even during the course of their sickness,
+they have felt that they were only dreaming, just as it frequently happens
+in the sleeping dreams."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI: SLEEPLESSNESS
+
+
+I have given in the previous chapters many reasons why human beings are
+compelled to seek at regular intervals an escape from reality which is
+made possible by the unconsciousness of sleep.
+
+Why is it then, that many people suffer from insomnia?
+
+Many physical factors are generally mentioned as the direct causes of
+sleep disturbances. None of them should be dismissed as unimportant; nor
+should any one of them, however, be accepted as an exclusive and
+all-sufficient explanation of sleeplessness.
+
+Coffee, tea and cocoa (the latter even in the shape of chocolate candy)
+taken in large quantities, particularly before retiring, affect our
+sympathetic or safety nerves. They make us, therefore, more sensitive to
+slight sound, light, pressure, smell, etc., stimuli, which under ordinary
+circumstances we would not notice consciously.
+
+In other words, they create imaginary "emergencies" which require the
+usual preparation for fight or flight, that is, keen observation of our
+environment, arterial tension, etc., all conditions which make sleep
+impossible.
+
+Yet we cannot say that coffee, tea or cocoa, without some other
+contributing cause would always bring about sleep disturbances.
+
+Bleuler writes: "I had been in the habit of drinking every night several
+cups of very strong tea which never prevented me from sleeping. Since I
+have had the influenza, things have been very different. I must be careful
+not to partake of such stimulants before going to bed. But even then,
+their effect depends on my mental condition. They affect me more at
+certain times than they do at others. If I am the least bit excited their
+effect is increased. When I am perfectly relaxed, I may not feel any bad
+effects."
+
+A bedroom into whose windows flashes of light or waves of sound may pour,
+is the not ideal place in which to seek escape from reality. Yet thousands
+of people sleep soundly in Pullman berths or even in day coaches,
+unmindful of the noise, light and bustle.
+
+We must keep in mind an observation made by Bleuler at the Zürich clinic:
+
+"When many people sleep in the same room, as in an insane asylum, some
+complain that they cannot sleep because their neighbour is snoring.
+Whoever tries to prevent the snoring or to move the snorer to another bed
+will have an endless task. The trouble is with the patient who is
+disturbed by snoring. It is not the noise itself but the attention he pays
+to it which disturbs him. One can see in wards for agitated patients most
+of the patients sleeping peacefully while some one disturbs the ward with
+the most savage howling.
+
+"The trouble lies, not in a special sensitiveness of the nervous system,
+but in the attitude we take toward a certain noise."
+
+Lack of exercise during the day will often cause us to toss and turn many
+times in our bed after retiring. There seems to be in every living being a
+craving for activity without any positive aim, activity which accomplishes
+nothing besides using up unused energy or relieving certain inhibitions.
+
+Children and all young animals seem to be unable to remain motionless for
+any length of time. In children and puppies, for example, the gleeful
+shouts and barking which accompany that display of muscular activity show
+unmistakably that it vouchsafes them a great amount of gratification.
+
+The satisfaction of the free activity urge which is one of the aspects of
+the ego-power urge is probably submitted to a strong repression in men and
+animals at a rather early age by the safety urge; frightened children and
+animals stop playing and become at times paralysed by fear.
+
+On the other hand there are many sluggish individuals who lead an most
+inactive life and yet sleep long hours without any interruption.
+
+Indigestion causes insomnia and so does hunger but it is also a fact that
+many indiscreet eaters are made drowsy by their very indiscretion and
+sleep soundly after a meal which would distress many other people. Also we
+find in the sayings of many races statements to the effect that sleep
+assuages hunger; the average prisoner sleeps in spite of the insufficient
+meal served at night in the majority of jails.
+
+Constipation seems at times to bear the guilt for restless nights and so
+do cathartics which, with some subjects, produce intestinal tension
+several times during the night but whose effect is not noticeable in other
+subjects until they wake up in the morning at the regular time.
+
+Toothache will keep some people awake while others will go to sleep in
+order to forget their toothache.
+
+Examples of that sort could be cited ad infinitum.
+
+In case of sleeplessness, the first thing to do is to remove all the
+possible physical causes which can be reached directly or with the help of
+a physician.
+
+Thyroid irritation for instance may at times make one more sensitive to
+even faint noises and a thorough medical examination should be undergone.
+
+The dentature should be examined with the help of X-ray photography in
+order that pus pockets, impaction, and other defects, not observable with
+the naked eye, may be revealed and remedied.
+
+The diet should be regulated so as to exclude indigestible foods while
+assuring, especially at night, sufficient nourishment.
+
+All stimulants should be avoided.
+
+A walk before retiring is very beneficial in all cases, not because it
+"tires" the subject, but because it absorbs the chemical products thrown
+into the blood for emergencies which did not arise in the course of the
+day. A long walk or any arduous exercise, on the other hand, might do more
+harm than good if they brought about the phenomenon of the second wind.
+
+Any form of physical or mental exercise involving rivalry or competition
+is to be avoided at night. The excitement caused by the "fear of losing"
+would again fill the blood with "fight or flight" products. Heated
+discussions, the witnessing of exciting films or plays, drives with a
+daredevil chauffeur, etc., are not conducive to peaceful sleep.
+
+When all those means fail, many devices have been offered to insomnia
+sufferers, such as prayer or counting sheep, reading, listening to some
+monotonous stimulus like the buzzing of a faradic inductor, or of an
+electric fan.
+
+A distinction must be made between stereotyped prayer (such as the Lord's
+Prayer) and personal prayer rehearsing one's worries and asking for help.
+The latter kind is not unlikely to revive all the day's problems and to
+set the would-be-sleeper solving them over again at the very time when he
+should forget them.
+
+The repetition of some passage which was memorized in childhood and which,
+from long familiarity has become perfectly impersonal, may go a long way
+toward creating the monotony, and hence the feeling of safety, without
+which there cannot be any sleep.
+
+After following all the rules I have laid down a number of people will
+still be unable to sleep. When the physico-psychic causes have been
+removed without improving the condition of the subject, the
+psychico-physical factors should then receive attention.
+
+As I said before, normal people can sleep under almost any conditions
+because their vagotonic activities function regularly, while neurotics
+cannot sleep well even under ideal conditions because their
+sympathicotonic activities are constantly raising a signal danger and
+imagining emergencies amidst the safest surroundings, mental and physical.
+
+The insomnia sufferer is suffering from some fear. That fear has to be
+determined and uprooted by psychoanalysis.
+
+Some people cannot sleep because they have gone through a period of
+sleeplessness and expect it to endure for ever. The men of the Emmanuel
+movement often had the following experience: a subject would explain that
+he could not sleep under any circumstances. The Emmanuel healer would ask
+him to sit in a chair in which, he said, many people had fallen asleep,
+and after a few minutes of soothing conversation or concentration, the
+insomniac would doze off peacefully. In certain cases, such a cure may be
+permanent; in other cases, when the results are obtained through
+transference and suggestion, the help of the psychological adviser or
+hypnotist may be too frequently required.
+
+Other subjects are prevented from sleeping by "worry." Telling a careworn
+insomniac not to worry is as silly and useless as telling a lovelorn
+person to stop being in love.
+
+Discussing a patient's worries with him, however, often accomplishes much
+good, for it compels him to sift all his evidence, which may be
+convincing to him but to no one else. The worried person who is beginning
+to experience doubts as to the magnitude of his trouble, is like the
+patient suffering from delusions who has lost faith in his delusions.
+
+The parasitic fears and cravings which attach themselves to some small
+worry and, at times, magnify it out of proportion, may in such a way be
+disintegrated and dissociated from the actual, justified fear.
+
+Giving the patient "good reasons" why he should not worry, is again a sort
+of suggestion of the most futile and least durable type.
+
+Obsessive fear which is at the bottom of every worry is due to certain
+complexes, at times apparently unrelated to the actual disturbance, and
+which cannot be unearthed and uprooted except by a thoroughgoing
+psychological analysis.
+
+This is especially true of certain cases of insomnia which the patient
+reports as follows. "I fall asleep with difficulty and with a certain
+apprehension. I sleep an hour or two during which I have awful dreams
+which I cannot remember. After which I hardly dare to close my eyes
+again."
+
+This is what I would call the fear of the unknown nightmare, and the
+anxiety dreams responsible for it must be patiently reconstituted from
+the scraps which invariably linger in the subject's memory, even when he
+imagines that he cannot remember any dreams. The procedure will be
+explained in the next chapter.
+
+While the psychoanalytic treatment is being applied, however, the patient
+must be made aware of a fact which will comfort him to a certain extent.
+
+Patients often fear that if their sleeplessness is not relieved "at once"
+they will "loose their minds." Thereupon they beg to be given some
+narcotic.
+
+We must remember that the results of sleeplessness depend mostly upon the
+attitude which we assume toward that condition. It may seem paradoxical to
+state that its bad results are mainly due to our fear of them but it is
+true nevertheless.
+
+We assume that we shall be exhausted by a sleepless night. We go to bed in
+fear and trembling, wondering whether we will or will not sleep. That
+anxiety is sufficient to liberate secretions which produce an unpleasant
+muscular tension and a desire for activity. This keeps us awake until the
+chemical contained in those secretions have been eliminated. In the
+meantime, we develop a fit of anger which releases some more of the
+identical chemicals. After which we are doomed to many hours of unrest and
+agitation.
+
+During those restless hours we toss about angrily and exhaust ourselves
+physically. About dawn, when sleepiness generally overtakes even the most
+restless, we finally doze off and are awakened by our alarm clock or some
+other familiar disturbance and once more relapse into anger at the waste
+of our sleeping hours and the disability which we feel is sure to result
+from it.
+
+We naturally feel worn out. If, on the other hand, we would resign
+ourselves to our sleeplessness, realize that rest, even in the waking
+state, will relieve our organism of all its "fatigue" and that, by
+complete relaxation in the waking state, we can liberate almost as many of
+our unconscious cravings as in the unconsciousness of sleep; if we were as
+careful not to waste uselessly our inner secretions as we are not to touch
+live wires, we would lie down as motionlessly as possible, and would
+consign to the scrap heap all the absurd notions as to the dire results of
+a sleepless night; we would then awaken in the morning as refreshed by the
+two or three hours of sleep that would finally be vouchsafed us as by the
+usual eight or ten.
+
+The amount of sleep one needs varies with every individual and increases
+or decreases according to unconscious requirements. Hence, statements to
+the effect that one needs eight or ten hours' sleep are absurd and
+dangerous.
+
+Many people are worried over the fact that their sleep is irregular, that
+is, that they sleep six hours one night and ten the next night and
+possibly only four hours the third night.
+
+This is probably as it should be. Our requirements vary with varying
+conditions. After eating salt fish one may need several glasses of water
+to slake one's thirst, while one may not need to drink a drop of any
+liquid after partaking of juicy fruit.
+
+One should also dismiss as an idle superstition the dictum according to
+which sleep before midnight is more beneficial than sleep after midnight.
+Hundreds of newspapermen, watchmen, policemen, printers, railroadmen,
+etc., work nights and sleep in the day time and do not contribute more
+heavily than other professions to the ranks of the mentally deranged.
+
+Older people, whose urges are at low ebb and do not require the
+satisfaction vouchsafed by dream life should become reconciled to the fact
+that they need few hours sleep; they should refrain from taking narcotics
+and go to bed later than they do, so as not to "lay awake all night,"
+which generally means that after dozing an hour or two in an armchair and
+retiring at ten they wake up normally about one or two in the morning.
+
+Sleep is important in health but even more so in mental disturbances. The
+solution for the complicated problems of the neurotic's life depends upon
+the wealth of facts contained in the unconscious rising freely to the
+surface in dreams and relieving the uncertainty. The tragedy is that
+except in cases of sleeping sickness, the neurotic who needs more sleep
+than the healthy subject, generally gets much less.
+
+The neurotic should sleep preferably at night and avoid day sleep. This
+for two reasons. He should keep in touch with reality when reality is
+active and obvious, as during the day. With the falling of the shadows,
+reality acquires a tinge of indefiniteness which lends itself to many
+misinterpretations and to fancies of the morbid type.
+
+Sleeplessness in the ghostly hours of the night is a poison for the
+neurotic, for everything at such times is exaggerated, distorted and the
+slightest worry is transformed into a terrible danger. Many children could
+be spared fits of "night terrors" if they were not forced to go to bed
+very early, after which they are likely to wake up in the middle of the
+night, disoriented and fearful.
+
+It has been said that insomnia was the cause of insanity and experiments
+such as those made at the University of Iowa show that men kept awake for
+a prolonged period of time begin to have delusions and hallucinations
+similar to those of dementia praecox. But it must be remembered that the
+men who submitted to those experiments were not allowed to "_rest_."
+
+The contrary proposition, that is, that insomnia is induced by insanity is
+more plausible psychologically.
+
+And indeed every psychiatrist has made the observation that some insane
+people sleep very little, so little in fact that such protracted periods
+of sleeplessness would kill the average normal person. That observation
+has been confirmed by Bleuler, who as the head of the Zurich psychiatric
+clinic and one of the most tireless psychological experimenters in the
+world, is in a position to speak with authority.
+
+Neurotics sleep very little, and the more severe their case is, the less
+they sleep. Return of normal sleep generally coincides with a cure and has
+been by many credited with bringing about the cure. Hence the many "rest
+cures" suggested for the mentally disturbed patient.
+
+The truth of the matter is that the absolutely insane person who lives all
+his absurd dreams in his waking life no longer needs the unconsciousness
+which the normal individual requires in order to escape from reality. The
+insane man who knows he is a combination of a Don Juan, a millionaire and
+a powerful ruler, need not dream of becoming all those characters. He has
+attained his goal and it is only the continued conflicts with reality
+which may reach his consciousness in his lucid moments which necessitate
+the unconsciousness of a few minutes or hours of sleep in which reality no
+longer intrudes into his absurd world.
+
+Since insomniacs can rest without sleep and insomnia does not lead to
+insanity, there is no reason why narcotics should be administered. There
+is a very good reason on the other hand why they should never be
+administered except in case some harrowing pain has to be relieved and
+shock avoided.
+
+For one thing, their effect is problematic and depends also to a great
+extent from the subject's mental condition.
+
+Kraepelin noticed that large doses of alcohol failed to produce the usual
+muscular lameness in subjects who were agitated. Bleuler makes the
+interesting suggestion that our central nervous system only "accepts"
+narcotics when they are "wanted" and keeps drugs, carried about in the
+blood stream, from being assimilated by the organism when the organism is
+not "willing" to submit to their influence.
+
+But the most cogent reason why narcotics should never be resorted to in
+"nervous" sleeplessness is that they do not relax the organism but
+paralyse it by killing it partly. If they only dulled consciousness and
+freed the unconscious, they would accomplish some good but we do not know
+of any agent besides sleep, which accomplishes that successfully.
+
+Narcotics partly kill both consciousness and unconscious. While their
+effect lasts, the very phenomenon which makes the neurotic a neurotic is
+exaggerated. In the neurotic's waking state, unconscious complexes manage
+to free themselves, somewhat indirectly. In the stupor of drugged sleep,
+the repression is complete. Hence the horrible feeling which is often
+experienced when awakening from drug-induced sleep. Normal sleep is
+brother to life, but drug induced sleep is indeed akin to death.
+
+Neither can hypnotic suggestion be recommended as a cure for
+sleeplessness, except of course, in emergencies.
+
+About the end of the nineteenth century, a Swedish physician,
+Wetterstrand, inaugurated a method of treatment which was founded on a
+just estimate of the value of sleep, although Wetterstrand himself could
+not at the time have understood the psychology of it.
+
+He had in Upsala a "house of sleep" furnished with innumerable divans and
+couches on which his patients were allowed to rest for hours in hypnotic
+sleep.
+
+Of course this procedure had two glaring defects: hypnotism is a neurotic
+phenomenon which should not be applied to the treatment of a neurosis and,
+secondly, sleep in the daytime is generally enjoyed at the expense of the
+night's sleep.
+
+At the same time, the sleep which patients enjoyed in Wetterstrand's
+"Grotto of Sleep," as it was called at the time, must have been of a
+somewhat curative kind; for the house was as silent as a grave. Thick
+carpets deadened all sounds and all the lights were dimmed. No stimuli
+were allowed to produce in the sleepers any fear reactions.
+
+What Wetterstrand really supplied to his patients was an ideal bedroom and
+an opportunity for an absolutely uninterrupted sleep of several hours. We
+do not know, however, how many of them were robbed of the effect of such
+an ideal environment by the anxiety dreams which the quietest bedroom
+cannot exclude.
+
+The conclusion to be drawn from what has been said in the preceding
+chapters is that the real mission of sleep is to free the unconscious, to
+relieve the tension due to repressions and to give absolutely free play to
+the organic activities which build up the individual.
+
+Hence the goal is sleep of sufficient duration, sleep undisturbed by
+physical stimuli, sleep FULL OF DREAMS but FREE FROM NIGHTMARES.
+
+No more potent curative agent could be found than that kind of sleep,
+whether the ills to be remedied are of a "mental" or of a "physical"
+nature. Not until all the fear-creating complexes have been disintegrated
+by psychoanalysis, however, can the insomniac hope to enjoy that perfect
+form of "rest."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII: DREAM INTERPRETATION
+
+
+Dream interpretation is not an idle pastime or a mysterious performance.
+Carried out in accordance with certain scientific rules based on common
+sense and not on mere theory, it has a positive value in health as well as
+in sickness.
+
+A nightmare whose meaning has been interpreted rightly ceases to be a
+nightmare. It disappears, or rather, is replaced by an obvious
+wish-fulfilment dream of the same import, which does not disturb sleep.
+
+The same modification is observable in recurrent dreams which, while not
+burdened with anxiety, may have puzzled us and created a certain
+apprehension.
+
+Insight into our own dreams enables us to release more completely the
+unconscious cravings which it is the mission of sleep to free from the
+repressions of waking life.
+
+The technique of dream interpretation is unfortunately, like every detail
+of the psychoanalytic technique, very slow and at times discouraging. The
+layman trained by quack literature to expect quick results, is apt to
+appear scornful when a conscientious analyst, asked to interpret offhand
+an apparently simple dream, refuses to perform that task and confesses
+that he does not know the meaning of it.
+
+When little Anna Freud dreamt that she was feasting on all sorts of
+dainties, no elaborate technique was needed to ferret out the enigma of
+such a vision. When Ferenczi's patient, however, saw herself strangling a
+white dog, the wish-fulfilment formula, applied indiscriminately, would
+have given poor results.
+
+_To the patient_, the white dog symbolized a snarling woman with a very
+pale face.
+
+Dream interpretation must never be attempted without the dreamer's
+assistance.
+
+Snakes are _almost always_ sexual symbols, but if on the day preceding the
+dream the subject was frightened by a snake or killed one or played with
+one, we should require a good deal of other evidence before we could
+safely assert that a snake dream on that night indicated fear, desire or
+repression of sexual cravings.
+
+A tooth pulling dream related by a subject who expects to go through the
+ordeal of dental extraction should not be hastily admitted to be a
+symbolical dream.
+
+Even apparently obvious dreams may assume an entirely different complexion
+when we inquire into the associations which every detail of them conjures
+up from the subject's unconscious.
+
+A year ago or so a Chicago woman sued her husband for divorce because he
+had been, while talking in his sleep, saying endearing things to his
+stenographer. That woman was both right and wrong.
+
+The fact that her husband dreamt of his stenographer was evidence that the
+girl was "on his mind," consciously or unconsciously. But we could not,
+without examining the husband's unconscious reactions decide to what
+extent the stenographer herself, as a distinct personality, obsessed him.
+
+Every man is more or less of a fetichist, irresistibly attracted by
+certain details of the feminine body, for ever seeking those
+characteristics and appreciating them above all others wherever found.
+When only one such characteristic and no other attracts a man, the man is
+known as a perverse fetichist.
+
+When the various fetiches which attract a man are found in one woman, let
+us say red hair, dark eyes and a slender build, we have the foundation for
+a passionate and durable love.
+
+When only one of those characteristics is found in a woman, that
+characteristic is bound to attract the man's attention regardless of the
+interest or lack of interest the woman may present for him. A red haired
+woman, while otherwise totally unattractive, might, to a red hair
+fetichist, symbolize the beauty he seeks and intrude into his dream
+pictures, _although she personally could not attract him sexually in his
+waking state_.
+
+Every one has had the experience of embracing in dreams some person who in
+the waking state would not inspire the dreamer with any desire. If we
+analyse carefully the appearance of the "ghostly love" we will in every
+case notice that he or she is endowed with a certain characteristic which
+is one of the constituting elements of our "love image."
+
+The Chicago woman should have taken her troubles to an analyst, not to a
+judge.
+
+I have dwelt at length on that example to show a few of the pitfalls which
+threaten the careless interpreter of dreams.
+
+The second rule I would formulate is this: Do not try to interpret one
+dream. Wait until you have collected a large number of dreams, let us say,
+twenty or thirty of them.
+
+Then classify them according to their character as follows:
+
+Pleasant and unpleasant dreams. Healthy and morbid. Masochistic and
+sadistic. Childish or adult. Regressive, static or progressive. Positive
+or negative. Varied or recurrent. Personal or typical. Hypnogogic and
+hypnapagogic visions, etc.
+
+Care must be taken then to note all the words and thoughts which appear
+most frequently in many dreams and which are likely to refer to important
+complexes.
+
+Whenever possible two versions of each dream should be studied.
+
+The subject should write down his dreams as soon as he wakes up, either in
+the morning or right after an anxiety dream which may have disturbed him
+in the course of the night.
+
+The version of almost any important dream which the subject tells the
+analyst will be found quite at variance with the version written
+immediately after awakening.
+
+Here is a dream reported orally to me by a patient.
+
+"I saw you through a restaurant window, having lunch with your wife."
+
+Here is the same dream as I found it in the patient notes:
+
+"You were to deliver a lecture in a park. There was a number of good
+looking girls there. One especially attracted my attention. As there was
+quite a little mud in the park she wore rubber boots. You were late in
+appearing and I went to look for you. I saw you sitting at a table in a
+restaurant with your wife, waving to some acquaintance on the side walk."
+
+The discrepancy between the two versions is quite amusing.
+
+After that preparatory work of classification and comparison, the actual
+work of interpretation can begin.
+
+Hebbel once wrote: "If a man could make up his mind TO WRITE DOWN ALL HIS
+DREAMS, WITHOUT ANY EXCEPTIONS OR RESERVATIONS, TRUTHFULLY AND WITHOUT
+OMITTING ANY DETAILS, TOGETHER WITH A RUNNING COMMENTARY CONTAINING ALL
+THE EXPLANATIONS OF HIS DREAMS WHICH HE COULD DERIVE FROM HIS LIFE
+MEMORIES AND FROM HIS READING, he would make to mankind a present of
+inestimable value. But as long as mankind is what it is, no one is likely
+to do that."
+
+The technique of dream interpretation could not have been described more
+accurately nor more aptly.
+
+The person whose dreams are to be analysed should relax completely,
+stretched out on a couch in a quiet room, listening for a while to some
+monotonous noise such as the buzzing of a fan or of an inductor, his mind
+concentrated on the story of the dream.
+
+Then he should tell in a rambling way, without trying to edit the things
+that rise to his consciousness, all the associations of ideas connected
+with every word of the dream. While we can interpret our own dreams and
+jot down our own ideas, the assistance of some sympathetic, discreet
+person makes the process much simpler. Jotting down notes detracts one's
+attention from the images rising to consciousness.
+
+The assistant, however, should confine himself to mentioning the next word
+or the next part of the dream as soon as the subject seems to have
+exhausted the associations brought forth by one part of it.
+
+The most surprising results are often obtained in that simple way. Facts
+which the subject had entirely forgotten, connections he had never been
+aware of, will suddenly jump into consciousness; the dream will gradually
+assume a meaning and its interpretation may at times reach an unexpected
+length. A dream of one line may suggest associations covering five or six
+pages.
+
+It may happen that in spite of the subject's efforts to remember his
+dreams and of devices such as being awakened in the course of the night,
+etc., the only memories preserved of the night's visions will be scraps
+such as "going somewhere," "talking to somebody," "something unpleasant,"
+etc.
+
+In such cases, the subject should be allowed to sink into what Boris Sidis
+calls "hypnoidal sleep" by being made to listen to some continuous noise
+in a partly darkened room, all the while thinking of the "dream scrap."
+
+"While in this hypnoidal state," Sidis writes, "the patient hovers between
+the conscious and the subconscious, somewhat in the same way as in the
+drowsy condition, one hovers between wakefulness and sleep. The patient
+keeps on fluctuating from moment to moment, now falling more deeply into a
+subconscious condition in which outlived experiences are easily aroused,
+and again rising to the level of the waking state. Experiences long
+submerged and forgotten rise to the full height of consciousness. They
+come in bits, in chips, in fragments, which may gradually coalesce and
+form a connected series of interrelated systems of experiences apparently
+long dead and buried. The resurrected experiences then stand out clear and
+distinct in the patient's mind. The recognition is fresh, vivid, and
+instinct with life, as if the experiences had occurred the day before."
+
+Through this procedure, patients are often enabled to recollect forgotten
+dreams and nightmares.
+
+Certain patients do not forget their dreams but refuse to report them. In
+such cases the simplest procedure consists in asking the patient to make
+up a dream while in the analyst's office, that is to put himself in the
+hypnoidal state described above and to tell the images and thoughts that
+come to his mind. Or if the analyst suspects the existence of a certain
+complex, he may ask the patient to build up a dream on a topic so selected
+that it will touch that complex.
+
+A question which audiences have asked me hundreds of times is: "Cannot the
+patient make up something that will deceive you entirely and throw you on
+the wrong trail?"
+
+My answer to such a question is emphatically negative.
+
+A study of the literary and artistic productions of all races has shown
+that in every "story" and in every work of art, the writer or artist was
+solely bringing to consciousness his own preoccupations, in a form which
+may have deceived him but which does not deceive the psychologist slightly
+familiar with the author's biography.
+
+Brill tells somewhere how his attention was first drawn to the value of
+artificial dreams and of so called "fake dreams."
+
+In 1908, he was treating an out of town physician, suffering from severe
+anxiety hysteria. The patient was very sceptical, did not co-operate with
+Brill, never talked freely and pretended he never had dreams. One morning,
+however, he came for his appointment bringing at last one dream. "He had
+given birth to a child and felt severe labour pains. X., a gynecologist
+who assisted him, was unusually rough and stuck the forceps into him more
+like a butcher than a physician."
+
+It was a homosexual fancy. Asked who X. was, the patient said he was a
+friend with whom he had had some unpleasantness.
+
+Then he interrupted the conversation, saying: "There is no use fooling you
+any longer. What I told you was not a dream. I just made it up to show you
+how ridiculous your dream theories are."
+
+Further examination, however, proved that the patient was homosexual and
+that his anxiety states were due to the cessation of his perverse
+relations with X. The lie he had made up was simply a distorted wish
+closely connected with the cause of his neurosis.
+
+As Brill states very justly, "everything which necessitates lying must be
+of importance to the individual concerned."
+
+Personally, I have found that, with certain patients, the artificial dream
+method is productive of better results than the free association method.
+With the docile patient who has much insight and a positive desire to rid
+himself of his troubles, the association method reveals quickly the
+darkest corners of the unconscious. The patient who, on the other hand,
+constantly answers: "I cannot think of anything," and is always on his
+guard, the association method wastes much valuable time and is very
+discouraging to patient and analyst.
+
+It is not always advisable for the analyst to reveal to his subjects the
+import of their dreams. It is especially when the meaning of their dreams
+is frankly sexual that discretion and tact are necessary. In cases of a
+severe repression of sexual cravings extending over many years, when, for
+instance, one has to deal with a woman, no longer young and whose attitude
+to life has been rather puritanical, a good deal of educational work has
+to be undertaken before the subject can be enlightened.
+
+She must be gradually led to consider sex as a "natural" phenomenon before
+she can be made to accept the sexual components revealed by her dreams as
+a part of her personality.
+
+Repressed homosexualism is perhaps even harder to reveal to the subject.
+
+I have found my task infinitely simpler when the subject had done a good
+deal of reading along psychoanalytic lines or had attended many lectures
+on the subject. In fact it is my conviction that when psychoanalytic books
+are read by a larger proportion of the population, thousands of "sex"
+cases will disappear, together with the absurd fears based on ignorance
+which are responsible for many a mental upset.
+
+Interpreting a subject's dreams is the best known means of probing and
+sounding his unconscious, but in the majority of cases it only helps
+indirectly in treating the case. When we deal with nightmares, however,
+the results are more direct and more rapidly attained. A nightmare
+interpreted rightly will never recur, or if it does, WILL NOT FRIGHTEN OR
+AWAKEN THE SUBJECT.
+
+Insight will develop which, even in the sleeping state, will enable the
+subject to recognize that his dream is only a dream and to sleep on
+undisturbed. A patient who was often terrorized by a dream in which some
+man stabbed him in the back, gradually came to recognize his unconscious
+homosexual leanings and analysed the nightmare in his sleep when it
+occurred again with excellent results. It did not frighten him and
+gradually disappeared, being replaced by grosser dreams devoid of anxiety.
+
+A patient was bothered by dreams in which he was repelling onslaughts of
+large beasts with a walking stick or an umbrella which invariably broke
+and which he was always trying to tip with iron rods or tacks.
+
+He finally gained insight into his unconscious fear of impotence which was
+dispelled by a visit at a specialist's office.
+
+Not only did that nightmare disappear but very soon after, his dreams
+changed to visions of successful sex-gratification.
+
+Dream insight based upon the personality of the analyst should not be
+considered as real insight. When a patient reports, "I dreamt that I was a
+baby but remembered that Mr. Tridon would call that a regression dream and
+I awoke," or, "I felt that Mr. Tridon would characterize the whole thing
+as a masochistic performance and awoke," much work remains to be done.
+
+The dreamer must _know_ that his nightmare is a symbol and not merely know
+that his analyst would call it a symbol.
+
+When the dreamer has acquired the technical skill which enables him, after
+a little concentration and meditation, to interpret his own sleep visions,
+he is no longer at the mercy of the annoyance called nightmare. When he
+can see at a glance where the repression seems unbearable, he may devise
+ways and means to satisfy his cravings more completely if they are
+justifiable and lawful; if they are unjustifiable or socially taboo, he
+may seek substitutes for them and, especially as I have explained in
+another book, free them from the parasitic cravings which make them unduly
+obsessive.
+
+He who can read the indications of his own dreams, has at his disposal an
+instrument of great precision which indicates to him the slightest
+fluctuations of his personality and, besides, points out various solutions
+for the problems of adaptation which the normal, progressive human being
+must solve every day of his life.
+
+Oneiromancy is the algebra which enables us to perform rapidly complicated
+calculations in the mathematics of psychology.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+ABRAHAMSON, I.--Mental disturbances in lethargic encephalitis. _Journal of
+Nervous and Mental Disease._ September 1920.
+
+    A study of the sleeping sickness based mainly upon cases observed at
+    Mt. Sinai Hospital.
+
+ABRAHAM, K.--Dreams and Myths. _Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph
+Series._ No. 28.
+
+    A monograph proving that legends and myths are in reality the day
+    dreams of the human race.
+
+ADLER, A.--Traum and Traumdeutung. _Zentralblatt f. Ps. A. III_, p. 574.
+
+    A short essay on dream interpretation from the point of view of the
+    ego urge.
+
+ASCHAFFENBURG, G.--Der Schlaf in Kindesalter und seine Störungen.
+Bergmann, Wiesbaden.
+
+    Observations on the disturbances of the sleep of children.
+
+BRUCE, H. A.--Sleep and Sleeplessness. Little Brown.
+
+    A popular exposé of the problem of sleeplessness from a modern point
+    of view.
+
+CORIAT, I.--The Meaning of Dreams. Little Brown.
+
+    A small book containing the analyses of many dreams according to the
+    Freudian technique.
+
+CORIAT, I.--The Nature of Sleep. _Journal of Abnormal Psycho._ VI. No. 5.
+
+CORIAT, I.--The Evolution of Sleep and Hypnosis.
+
+    Ibidem, VII. No. 2.
+
+DELAGE, Y.--La nature des images hypnagogiques. _Bulletin de l' Inst. Gen.
+Psycho._ 1903, p. 235.
+
+DU PREL, CARL.--Künstliche Träume. _Sphinx_, July 1889.
+
+    A study of artificial dreams.
+
+FREUD, S.--The Interpretation of Dreams. Macmillan.
+
+FREUD, S.--Dream Psychology, with an introduction by André Tridon. McCann.
+
+    The most important books on Dream Interpretation.
+
+FRÖMNER, E.--Das Problem des Schlafs.
+
+    Bergmann, Wiesbaden.
+
+HENNING, H.--Der Traum ein assoziativer Kurzschluss.
+
+    Bergmann, Wiesbaden.
+
+MAURY, A.--Le Sommeil et les Rêves. Paris 1878.
+
+    The first attempt at a methodical study of dreams and at correlating
+    them to physical stimuli.
+
+MAEDER, A. E.--The Dream Problem. _Nervous and Mental Disease monograph
+series._ No. 22.
+
+    A presentation of the subject from the point of view of the Swiss
+    School.
+
+HALL, B.--The Psychology of sleep. Moffat Yard.
+
+    A review of the various sleep theories from the academic point of
+    view.
+
+KAPLAN, L.--Ueber wiederkehrende Traumsymbole. _Zentrablatt f. Ps. A._ IV,
+p. 284.
+
+    An essay on dream symbolism.
+
+MANACÉINE, M. DE.--Sleep, its physiology, pathology, hygiene and
+psychology. Scribner.
+
+    The most complete study of sleep from every possible point of view,
+    placing the emphasis, however, on the physical aspects of sleep.
+
+SACHS, H.--Traumdeutung und Menschenkenntniss. _Jahrb. d. Ps. A._ III, p.
+121.
+
+SCHROTTER, K.--Experimentelle Träume. _Zentralblatt f. Psy. A._ II, p.
+638.
+
+    A record of very interesting experiments in the production of
+    artificial dreams through hypnotism.
+
+SILBERER, H.--Der Traum Enke. Stuttgart.
+
+    A very clear primer in dream study, epitomizing the latest hypotheses
+    in interpretation.
+
+SILBERER, H.--Ueber die Symbolbildung. _Jahrbuch d. Psy-A._ III, p. 661.
+
+SILBERER, H.--Zur Symbolbildung. _Jahrbuch d. Psy-A._ IV, p. 607.
+
+SILBERER, H.--Bericht über eine methode Hallucinationserscheinungen
+herbeizurefen. _Jahrbuch d. Psy.-A._ I, p. 513.
+
+STEKEL, W.--Die Sprache des Traumes. Wiesbaden, 1911.
+
+STEKEL, W.--Die Traüme der Dichter. Wiesbaden, 1912.
+
+STEKEL, W.--Fortschritte in der Traumdeutung. _Zentralblatt f. Psy-A._
+III, pp. 154, 426.
+
+STEKEL, W.--Individuelle Traumsymbole. _Zentralblatt f. Psy-A._ IV, p.
+289.
+
+    Stekel is essentially a Freudian but his books contain hundreds of
+    illustrations and case histories, making his books more understandable
+    to laymen than Freud's writings.
+
+    "Die Sprache des Traumes" is the most useful text book of Symbol
+    Study.
+
+TRIDON, A.--Psychoanalysis, Its History, Theory and Practice. Huebsch.
+
+    See Chapter V: Symbols, the language of the dreams, and Chapter VI:
+    The dreams of the human race.
+
+TRIDON, A.--Psychoanalysis and Behaviour. Knopf.
+
+    See part IV, chapter II: Self-knowledge through dream study.
+
+TRIDON, A.--Introduction to Freud's "Dream Psychology." McCann.
+
+VOLD, J. M.--Ueber den Traum. Leipzig 1910-1912.
+
+    Void holds that every dream is caused by a physical stimulus.
+
+VASCHIDE, N.--Le Sommeil et les Rêves. Paris, 1911.
+
+    A physical explanation of sleep and dreams.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Readers unfamiliar with my previous works might accuse me of placing
+undue emphasis upon "mental" causes and ignoring the influence of bacilli,
+toxins, etc., in disease. I refer them to the chapter: Mind and Body, an
+indivisible unit, in my book, "Psychoanalysis and Behaviour." It is a
+truism that in tuberculosis for instance the prognosis depends greatly
+from the "mental" condition of the patient and on his will to live. We are
+protected against disease germs by the various secretions of the mouth,
+stomach, intestine, etc. Whenever a "mental" cause, such as fear, intense
+sorrow, etc., translates itself into an action of the sympathetic system
+which stops the flow of saliva and gastric juice and the intestinal
+peristalsis, we can see how the organism is then predisposed to an
+invasion of pathogenic bacteria. The depressed, the stupid and the
+ignorant are the first victims in any epidemic, the depressed because
+their protective vagotonism is too low, the stupid and the ignorant
+because they are more frequently than the intelligent and well informed a
+prey to fear.
+
+[2] The orthodox Freudian would of course interpret such a vision as a
+symbol of an attempted regression to the fetal condition, return to the
+mother's womb, etc. As a matter of fact, sleep is to a certain extent a
+return to the period of the fetus' almost complete omnipotence of thought.
+I have noticed, however, that I never dream of swimming except on days
+when I have been prevented from indulging in my favourite sport at the
+shore or in the swimming pool.
+
+This is to my mind a perfectly obvious dream needing no far fetched
+interpretation, symbolical only in so far as it expresses my attitude to
+sleep (See chapter on Attitudes reflected in dreams).
+
+[3] Dr. Percy Fridenberg has shown the exaggerated shock reactions felt by
+the organism after the eye suffers an injury or is operated on, and
+recalls Crile's saying that our activation patterns come from sight.
+
+[4] The duration of a dream is not as short as some of Maury's experiments
+would lead us to believe. Some of the experimental dreams timed by
+Schroetter lasted almost as long as it takes to relate them.
+
+[5] Insanity is simply a day dream from which we cannot awake at will.
+
+[6] All the dreams cited in this book are reported in the patient's own
+words.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Psychoanalysis, by André Tridon
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44085 ***