Hello, I'm Sigmund Freud. Today I'm going
to be reading an excerpt from one of my
essays, "On Dreams." Shall we begin?
An examination of these dreams offers
advantages from another standpoint. For children's dreams are of that kind--
significant and not puzzling. Here,
incidentally, we have a further argument
against tracing the origin of dreams to
dissociated cerebral activity.
The common element in all these children's dreams is obvious. All of them fulfilled wishes
which were active during the day but had
remained unfulfilled. The dreams were
simple and undisguised wish-fulfillments.
Even when the content of children's dreams becomes complicated and
subtle, there is never any difficulty in recognizing them as wish-fulfillments.
An eight-year-old boy had a dream where he was driving in a chariot with Achilles
and that Diomede was the charioteer. It was shown that the day before, he had
been deep in a book of legends about the Greek heroes;
and it was easy to see that he had
taken the heroes as his models and was
sorry not to be living in their days.
This small collection throws a direct
light on a further characteristic of
children's dreams: their connection with
daytime light. The wishes which are fulfilled in them are carried over
from daytime as a rule from the day
before, and in waking life they have been
accompanied by intense emotion. Nothing unimportant or indifferent, or nothing
which would strike a child as such, finds
its way into the content of their dreams.
Numerous examples of dreams of this
infantile type can be found in adults as
well, though, as I've said, they're usually
brief in content. Thus a number of people
regularly respond to a stimulus of
thirst during the night with dreams of
drinking to quench their thirst, which
thus endeavor to get rid of the stimulus,
and enable sleep to continue. But in the
case of adults, anyone with some
experience in analyzing their dreams
will find to his surprise that even
those dreams which have an appearance of being transparently clear are seldom as
simple as those of children, and that
behind the obvious wish-fulfillment, some
other meaning may lie concealed. It would indeed be a simple and satisfactory
solution of the riddle of dreams if the
work of analysis were to enable us to
trace even the meaningless and confused
dreams of adults back to the infantile
type of fulfillment of an intensely
felt wish of the previous day. But
before taking leave of infantile dreams
with their undisguised wish-fulfillments,
I must not omit to mention one principal
feature of dreams which have long been
evident and which emerges particularly
clearly precisely in this group.
Every one of these dreams can be replaced by an optative clause, such as:
"If only the trip to the lake had lasted longer!" (optative clause)
"If only I had washed and dressed in time!" (optative clause)
"If only I had kept the cherries for myself instead of giving them to Uncle." (optative clause)
But dreams give us more than such optative clauses.
They show the wish as already fulfilled;
they present it as present and real; and
the material employed in dream
representation consists principally,
though not exclusively, of sensory images
and situations, mostly a visual character.
Thus, even in this infantile group, a
species of transformation, which deserves to be described as dream-work, is not
completely absent. The optative has been
replaced by a representation in the
present tense.
