Conflict and Dream

DREAMS have always excited man’s curiosity and 
wonder, and there can be little doubt that they have 
had a most important place in determining some of 
the deepest and most widespread of his beliefs. In 
the childhood of man one of his greatest difficulties 
must have lain in his acquirement of the power to 
distinguish the experience of the waking life from that 
of sleep, and among many peoples, if not even some- 
times among ourselves, the distinction is incomplete. 
Not only have the occurrences of sleep had a large, 
if not a preponderant, rdle in determining man’s 
belief in a spiritual world, but they must have taken 
a large part in producing that mysterious aspect of its 
experience which gives to religion in general its peculiar 
character. 

From quite early times it has been held that dreams 
are not mere accidental occurrences of sleep, but have 
a definite meaning. The interpretation of dreams 
was very prominent in early literature, and in the 
Old Testament it is assumed without question that 
such dreams as those of Pharaoh and his servants 
had definite meanings. Among nearly all peoples there 
grew up definite systems of dream-interpretation, 
according to which each image of a dream had a specific 
meaning, and nearly all literatures, including our own, 
have dream-books which give these meanings. Pharaoh 
only became greatly exercised about his dreams of 

I A 

the seven fat kine and the seven lean kine and of the 
seven full ears and the seven blasted ears of corn after 
his own wise men had failed to interpret them on 
the traditional lines of the time, so that a stranger 
had to be fetched out of prison to provide the solution. 

In accordance with the spirit of that time the solution 
expected and given was of a prophetic kind. Dreams 
were regarded as means of foretelling the future, and 
this view is not only still widely held in popular belief, 
but it shows its influence also in the great importance 
attached to what is called the prospective value of 
the dream by one of the two chief schools of scientific 
dream-interpretation at the present time. 

It is only during the last twenty years that we have 
made any real advance in the scientific study of the 
subject. Until still more recent times psychologists 
in general have paid but little attention to dreams. 

When I suggested a question on dreams in a Univer- 
sity examination not many years ago, it was objected 
that the students would know nothing about the 
subject, which meant, of course, that they had been 
taught nothing about it. The consideration of the 
psychology of dreams was not deemed worthy of 
inclusion in a course of academic psychology. 

The great revolution in the attitude of psychologists 
which has since occurred is due to Freud—I think one 
might say entirely due to him. Among the many 
aspects of the vast influence which Freud has exerted 
upon psychology, none is more prominent than that 
concerned with dreams and their interpretation, 
It is natural, therefore, that I should make his work the 
starting-point of this discussion, and that a considerable 
part of the book will deal with criticism of his views. 

I am very far from accepting everything that Freud 
has taught about the psychology of dreams, and I 
hope in this book to do my best to make clear where, 
in my opinion, his views should be accepted; where 

we must refuse to follow him; and where our treat- 
ment, though running near his, should nevertheless 
diverge from it somewhat; either in its course or in its 
ultimate goal. 

The first great contribution made by Freud to our 
understanding of the dream is his distinction between 
the manifest and the latent content. The older inter- 
preters were chiefly interested in the incidents of the 
dream as actually experienced. If they dreamt of a 
death or a birth they were content if they were able 
to discover that on the previous day, or at some earlier 
time, they had seen a funeral or had heard of an addition 
to the family of an acquaintance. They gave no 
explanation of the irrational and fantastic character 
of the dream, nor did such explanation seem to them 
necessary. They were content to regard this char- 
acter as proper to the dream and as no more in need of 
explanation than the imaginative character of poetry or 
the mournful nature of a tragedy. Even now there are 
prominent “ scientific ’’ writers who believe that they 
have provided a sufficient explanation of a dream when 
they have been able to refer its incidents to associations 
arising out of waking experience. 

By Freud the features of the dream as experienced 
and related by the dreamer are spoken of as the mani- 
fest content, and  this is sonly regarded as of interest 
in that it is held to be the expression of a deeper mean- 
ing, an expression of thoughts Which Freud calls the 
latent content. This distinction between the manifest 
and latent contents and the view that the manifest 
content is an expression of a deeper meaning, are 
the most important and essential features of Freud’s 
scheme of dream-interpretation. 

A second feature is that, according to Freud, this 
deeper meaning always takes the form of the fulfilment 
of a wish, and that, the manifest content of the dream is 
thé expression.in more or-less symbolic form of some 

desire of the dreamer. I may say here at once that 
while I accept without hesitation Freud’s distinction 
between the manifest and latent contents of the dream, 
I regard the view that every dream is a wish-fulfilment 
as an inadequate expression of the relation between 
the two kinds of content. A large part of this book 
will be devoted to a criticism of this aspect of Freud’s 
position, and an endeavour to state a different point of 
view. 

A third feature of Freud’s scheme is that the manifest 
content becomes the expression of thé Wish through a 
process of distortion, whereby the real meaning of the 
dream is disguised from the dreamer. Freud believes 
that it is the function, or one of the functions, of the 
dream to protect the sleeper from . thoughts w which might 
so disturb him if they reached his consciousnessthat he 
would awake. The dream is regarded as the guardian 
of sleep. Freud believes that in the dream the dis- 
turbing thoughts are so distorted and disguised that 
their real nature is not recognised by the sleeping- 
consciousness. This again is a subject in which I shall 
not be able to follow Freud faithfully. Consequently 
I shall not speak of the process by which the manifest 
content is produced as a distortion of the latent content, 
but shall use the word “ transformation ”’ in its place. 
I shall speak of the manifest content of the dream as 
coming into being by a process of transformation of a 
wish or other form of latent content. 

I propose to leave until the next chapter an account 
of the processes by which this transformation is effected, 
the processes which Freud has summed up under the 
general title of the ‘ dream-work.’”’ I shall only 
mention now one other feature of his scheme of dream- 
interpretation. According to Freud the process of 
transformation, or, as he would call it, distortion, 
is due to the necessity of overcoming resistance to 
the appearance of the latent content in consciousness, 

even in the form of a dream. It is supposed that the 
manifest dream is an occurrence in which experience 
appears in the consciousness of sleep which has been 
banished from the consciousness of the waking life 
by processes of repression or suppression, and that 
the process of transformation is necessary in order to 
overcome a resistance to his appearance. Freud has 
given a metaphorical expression to this resistance 
by the use of the simile of the social process of censor- 
Ship. He supposes that the experience kept out 
of the consciousness of waking life can only find access 
to the consciousness of sleep if it suffers such trans- 
formation or distortion that its real meaning will not 
be recognised by the sleeper. The feature of resistance 
thus presented to the direct and undisguised appearance 
of the latent content Freud calls censorship. 

I must be content with this general sketch of Freud’s 
scheme of dream-interpretation. I propose now to give 
a brief account of the history of my own attitude 
towards the scheme; one which I believe to represent 
that of many students of the older psychology. 

Though I had taken much interest in the general 
views of Freud before the war, I had not attempted to 
master his theory of dreams. I was more interested 
in the applications of his scheme to the explanation of 
psychoneurosis and the anomalous behaviour of every- 
day life. When the war brought me into touch with 
dreams as prominent symptoms of nervous disorder 
and as the means of learning the real nature of the 
mental states underlying the psychoneuroses of 
war, it became necessary to study Freud’s scheme of 
dream-interpretation more closely, and I read his book 
carefully. This reading, however, left a most unsatis- 
factory impression on my mind. The interpretations 
seemed to me forced and arbitrary, and the general 
method of so unscientific a kind that it might be used 
to prove. anything. Let me give one or two instances, 

Freud claims that several of his patients’ dreams 
depended upon the desire to convict Freud himself 
of error when he assumed the nature of dreams to be 
wish-fulfilments, and yet he continues, apparently 
without hesitation, to rely upon the analysis of his 
own dreams, in which the desire to show the rightness 
of his views must have been a far stronger motive than, 
or at least as strong a motive as, could have been 
present in the case of his patients. 

Again, the idea that an event of a dream may indicate 
either one thing or its opposite, gives an arbitrary 
character to the whole process of dream-interpretation, 
which must be most unsatisfactory to anyone accus- 
tomed to scientific method. One of Freud’s rules of 
interpretation is that every element of the dream 
may be interpreted by its opposite as well as by itself, 
and that only the connections of the dream can enable 
the interpreter to decide in favour of one or the other. 
Such a method would reduce any other science to an 
absurdity, and doubts must be raised whether psycho- 
logy can have methods of its own which would make it 
necessary to separate it from all other sciences and 
put it in a distinct category. At this time I had little 
opportunity for testing dream-interpretation practi- 
cally. I was serving in a hospital for private soldiers, 
where the idea had got about that dreams were used 
by the medical officers as means of testing whether 
their patients were to be sent back to France, and it 
was only rarely that one was able to obtain more than 
the merest fragments of a dream. Such dreams 
as were related by my patients were usually of a very 
simple kind and, so far as they went, furnished con- 
firmation of Freud’s view that dreams have the ful- 
filment of a wish as their motive.* Thus, one soldier 

* In this paragraph I think Dr Rivers underestimates the extent 
of the experience of dream-interpretation he acquired at the Maghull 

Hospital, and especially the part such experience played in shaping 
his own views on the réle of conflict.—G, E. S. 

dreamt that he was sent back to the front, but directly 
he landed in France, peace was declared. 

In October 1916 I was transferred to a hospital for 
officers, where I soon began to obtain from my patients 
dreams of a less simple kind, but I made no great 
progress in dream-analysis or in the clinical utilisation 
of dreams until I had a dream myself which went 
far to convince me of the truth of the main lines of 
the Freudian position. Before I record this dream I 
should like to say a few words about my method of 
dream-interpretation, which differs in some important 
respects from that of most other workers, especially 
those of the psycho-analytic school. In the inter- 
pretation of dreams by the dreamer himself, it is custom- 
ary to use the method adopted in the psycho-analytic 
investigation of others, and to make each image or 
incident of the dream the starting-point of a process 
of free association. It is believed by Freud and his 
followers that the thoughts coming into the mind in 
association with the image or incident of the dream 
will lead back to the dream thought which formed 
the corresponding feature of the latent content. 

As I have said, my own method is different. In 
order to make its nature clear, I must describe a special 
feature of my mental make-up which I have utilised 
in this process. 

For many years I have been the habitual subject of an 
experience in which, as soon as I become aware that I 
am awake, I find that I am thinking, and have for 
some time been thinking, over some problem, usually 
in connection with the scientific work upon which I 
am at the time engaged. Many of the scientific ideas 
which I value most, as well as the language in which 
they are expressed, have come to me in this half- 
sleeping, half-waking state directly continuous with 
definite sleep. When I began to analyse my dreams I 
frequently had a similar experience in which as soon 

as I was awake I found that I was already having, 
and had for some time been having, thoughts about a 
dream, the dream itself being still clearly in my mind. 
In some cases it was difficult to say where the dream 
ended and the unwitting analysis had begun, but a 
distinction was usually possible, owing to my lack of 
imagery when awake.* I could be confident that so. 
long as the experience was accompanied by definite 
imagery, it was that of a dream or of a dream-like 
state, while the period when imagery was absent was 
one in which I was no longer dreaming, though I may 
not yet have realised that I was awake. 

This peculiarity of my experience of the process of 
awaking introduces a special feature into the records 
and analyses of my own dreams. There can be little 
question that the ideal condition for an irreproachable 
analysis of a dream is one in which the dream is fully 
recorded before the analysis begins. In this case all 
danger is avoided that elements derived from, or 
suggested by, the analysis may be incorporated into 
the tissue of the dream. In many cases in which I 
awoke from a dream more or less suddenly I was able 
to fulfil this ideal condition, but in the frequent cases 
in which the dream passed insensibly into the half- 
waking, half-sleeping and unwitting process of analysis, 
the danger to which I have referred cannot be excluded. 
The comparison of dreams so analysed, or partially 
so analysed, with those where the act of awaking was 
sudden shows, however, that there is little or no 
difference between them, and I am inclined to regard 
my unwitting or partially unwitting method of analysis 
as one especially likely to lead one to the real thoughts 
and emotions forming the latent content of the dream. 

In other cases, after having fully awaked and re- 

*See Instinct and the Unconscious, Cambridge, 1920; 2nd 
Edition, 1922. The page references given elsewhere in this book 
apply equally to both editions. 

corded the dream, I would fall into the half-waking, 
half-sleeping state, and not infrequently it was in 
this state that the thoughts came which furnished 
the explanation of the dream. In more than one case 
this later period of sleepiness passed into one which 
must be regarded as sleep, for the clue to the nature 
of the dream came as a definite image. In this case 
we may regard the interpretation of a dream as having 
been furnished by a second dream, even though, as 
a matter of fact, this second dream may have consisted 
only of a single image. 

Where the solution of the dream failed to come in 
this more or less spontaneous way, I adopted the more 
usual procedure of turning my attention to different 
elements of the manifest content, allowing any associa- 
tions so aroused to pass through my mind. I also 
searched the experience of the day or two before the 
dream which could have taken part in determining 
the nature of the manifest content, and in some cases 
found that the experience which had determined the 
manifest content was of distinct service in the process 
of reaching the deeper meaning of the dream. When 
I had reached what seemed to me to be the inter- 
pretation of the dream, I wrote out the analysis as 
fully as possible and, except in a few cases, the excep- 
tions being definitely noted in my records, the complete 
analysis of the dream had been made and recorded 
before breakfast on the morning immediately following 
the dream.* 

THE ‘‘ PRESIDENCY ”’ DREAM 

I can now return to my dream. I dreamt I was ina 
Cambridge College garden—not the garden of any one 
college, but it was thought of vaguely, in the manner 

* Other aspects of this problem are discussed in Chapter IV on 
Methods of Dream-Analysis. 

so characteristic of the dream, as a kind of composite 
of the gardens of three colleges of which Pembroke 
was perhaps the most prominent. In this dream- 
garden I met my friend Professor X, with whom I 
entered into conversation I did not remember what 
we said, but when I left him I went towards a building 
with the idea that a meeting of the Council was being 
held there, and, more vaguely, that the Council in 
question was that of the Royal Anthropological Institute 
of which both Professor X and I were members. As 
I was entering the room I hesitated, because it occurred 
to me that they might be discussing some matter in 
which I was myself concerned. I entered, however, 
and found a number of people sitting round a table 
whom, with one exception, I did not know. The 
exception was a prominent member of the Council of 
the Institute who was reading a list of names, which 
I took to be those of the persons who were being pro- 
posed as members of the Council for the ensuing year. 
I failed to recognise these names as those of any persons 
I knew.* When the reader had finished, he put the 
paper from which he had been reading on the table, 
and I leaned over to look at it, in order to ascertain 
who had been nominated as President, for I knew that 
his name would appear at the head of the list of new 
members of Council There I read 

S. Poole. 

In the thoughts which followed, when from later 
experience I can be fairly certain that I was in the half- 

* The fact that the persons proposed for membership of the 
Council were allunknown to me has someinterest. It has often been 
in my thoughts how large a proportion of members of the Council 
are unknown as anthropologists, and it is more than probable that 
my failure to recognise the names of the persons proposed at the 
dream-meeting is connected with this opinion. It is noteworthy 
that the ‘‘ prominent member of the Council’ who read the list is a 
representative of the older school of anthropologists whose influence 
is sometimes a matter of annoyance to me in connection with the 
management of the affairs of the Institute. 

IO 

waking state, I thought of the name as connected 
with Stanley Pool, the great bend of the Congo, while 
the person who came into my mind was Professor 
Lane-Poole, the Orientalist. I wondered why, if they 
were choosing an Oxford scholar, they had not rather 
chosen Professor Haverfield, whose work seemed to 
me to lie nearer the interests of the Institute. About 
this stage I became aware of the fact that I was in 
bed and that the experience through which I had 
just passed was that of a dream. Interested as I was 
at the time in dream-interpretation, it was natural that 
I should begin a process of analysis, or rather continue 
the analysis which had already begun in the thoughts 
of the half-waking state which I have already related. 
The first fact which occurred to me was that it was 
about the date at which the meeting would normally 
occur at which the President and Council of the Institute 
for the ensuing year would be chosen. I was also 
aware that my name would almost certainly have been 
considered for the position of President if I had not 
been working at so great a distance from London. 
Some time earlier I had discussed the question whether 
I should accept the Presidency, if it were offered to me, 
with Professor X who had appeared in the dream. In 
this conversation I had made clear a definite conflict 
which was present in my mind in relation to the posi- 
tion. On the one side was a natural desire to hold a 
position of honour, the leading position in connection 
with anthropology in Great Britain, and one which, 
for certain family reasons,* I should especially value. 
The motives on the other side were that its duties 
would involve a great deal of time and trouble; that the 
business of presiding at meetings was highly irksome to 

* This reason was that my mother’s brother, James Hunt, had 
been one of the founders and the first President of the Anthropo- 
logical Society of London, one of the two societies by the fusion of 
which the Institute was formed. 

Il 

me, and that I had certain disqualifications for the 
post, especially the stammering to which I am liable 
when I have to make speeches of a ceremonial kind, 
such as inevitably fall to the lot of a President. I 
had gone over these reasons in my conversation with 
Professor X, and had then inclined to the view that I 
would, on the whole, prefer not to hold the position, 
rather with the idea that, as a result of our conversation, 
it might not be offered to me, for I suspected that I 
should not have the strength of mind to refuse it if it 
were actually offered. 

‘It will thus be obvious that there were amply suffi- 
cient grounds for a conflict of a definite kind. Though 
I was not aware that the matter had been active in my 
thoughts at the time, I knew that the Presidency for 
the ensuing year would be decided about this time, 
and the receipt of the journal Man,* which would 
have reached me a day or two earlier, might well have 
tended to arouse the conflict. 

A meeting of the Council of the Anthropological 
Institute being thus natural as the subject-matter of a 
dream, it remained to discover why the dream should 
have taken its especial form, and why the name “5S. 
Poole ’’ should have appeared in place of my own name, 
if the dream were the fulfilment of a wish that I should 
be nominated as President. It soon became obvious— 
I was not aware of any difficulty in reaching the con- 
clusion—that the name I saw on the paper of the 
dream was a transformation of my own name, and my 
first impression was that the initial ‘‘S ”’ was the final 
letter of my own surname transposed so as to become 
the initial of a baptismal name. As is every boy 
whose name is derived from a natural object, I had been 
miscalled Streams, Waters, and other variants at school, 

* On the cover of this journal it is customary to print a list of the 
names of the office-bearers and Council of the Royal Anthropological 
Institute. 

I2 

but so far as I could recollect, my name had never in 
actual life taken the form assumed in the dream, but 
I had no doubt that the dream-name was only another 
such variant.* The dream thus seemed to furnish 
confirmation of two of.the most important features 
of Freud’s scheme: his theory of the dream as a wish- 
fulfilment and his view that the manifest content is a 
transformation of this latent wish of such a kind that 
is not recognised by the sleeper, but only becomes 
apparent through a process of interpretation in the 
waking state, and in the vast majority of dreams 
never becomes apparent at all. In this case the trans- 
formation was even of a kind to which the term dis- 
tortion might legitimately be applied. 

The use of a certain disposition of water in Nature 
in place of that to which my proper name has reference 
might also be regarded as an example of that mechanism 
of the dream-work which Freud calls displacement. 
The interest attendant upon seeing my own name in a 
certain connection had been transferred from that 
name to one which had no significance for me while 
dreaming and only became significant through a process 
of examination after waking. 

My impression at the time, then, was that two 
prominent features of Freud’s scheme of dream- 
formation found striking confirmation in the example 
I have related. Before I consider the matter critically, 
however, it may be well to examine certain features 
of the manifest dream more closely with the aim of 
discovering how they were determined. It is necessary 
to explain why the name “S. Poole” should have 
taken the place of my own; why the letter “e”’ 
should have appeared at the end of the word “ pool,”’ 
which would be the more natural variant of my name ; 
why the final letter of my own name should either have 

* For another example of a pun on the name Rivers, see theTrans- 
ference Dream in Chapter II, page 32. 

disappeared or have been transferred to the beginning ; 
and why Professor Lane-Poole and Stanley Pool 
should have been so prominent in the thoughts of the 
half-waking state which immediately followed the 
dream. 

As I have already said, my first impression was that 
the “‘S”’ of the dream-name was the transposed final 
letter of my own name, a transposition which would 
be assisted by my familiarity as an anthropologist 
with Stanley Pool as a geographical expression. The 
first step in the further analysis of these features of 
the manifest content occurred at breakfast on a morning 
following the dream. On relating the dream to my 
colleagues one of them told me that Dr Lane-Poole’s 
Christian name was Stanley, a fact of which I was 
certainly not manifestly aware. It became evident 
that if I could discover why Dr Lane-Poole’s name 
had taken the place of my own, I should also obtain 
the explanation of the prominence of ‘‘ Stanley Pool ”’ 
in the thoughts following the dream. 

The next step in the analysis of the manifest content 
occurred a day or two later when glancing through the 
Scotsman I found the name of Lieutenant S. Pool 
among those who had received the Military Cross. 
As Lieutenant Pool was a member of the R.A.M.C., 
it occurred to me that I might have seen his name 
before my dream in one of the medical papers, and on 
consulting the British Medical Journal of 2nd December, 
I found not only that the name was there in the form 
“Temp. Lieut. Samuel Pool, M.B., R.A.M.C.,” but 
that it occupied a prominent position at the head of 
a column,* so that it would almost certainly have 
struck the eye of anyone reading through the list. 
I had no doubt that I had seen the paper, as it was my 
habitual practice to read it, but I had no witting 
memory of having done so, or of having seen the name in 

* Brit. Med. Jour., 2nd December 1916, page 775. 

question. If, as I have no doubt, I had seen this 
name, it would have helped to determine the special 
form assumed by the dream-surrogate of my name. 
If the initial S was the transposed end-letter of my 
name, it would have helped to determine this trans- 
position. 

A more difficult topic was the substitution of Dr 
Lane-Poole for myself, and on this I could for some 
time obtain no light whatever. Several weeks later, 
however, a patient who was leaving the hospital 
returned to me a book-catalogue which I had lent 
him. The patient was a theological student and the 
catalogue was one of theological and Oriental books, 
and, on looking through it, I found that Dr Lane- 
Poole’s name occurred in it in the form “S, Lane- 
Poole.” I do not know when I looked through this 
catalogue, or even with certainty whether I had read 
it at all, though it is very unlikely that I omitted to 
do so before lending it. I tried to discover from the 
bookseller exactly when it was sent to me, but without 
success, and I must be content to mention the possibility 
that this catalogue may have furnished the occasion for 
the appearance of Dr Lane-Poole in my dream-thoughts, 
and consequently for the final letter of my dream-name. 

Of the various elements of the process by which my 
name was transformed in the dream, that which will 
arouse most doubt—it certainly gave me such doubts— 
is the transposition by which the final letter of my own 
name became an initial letter of my dream-name. It 
is therefore of interest that, through the kindness of 
Mrs Eder, I am able to give a similar example of this 
process. One of her patients had a dream in which 
he saw the following name: | 

L. Pestiles, 

Associations with this word gave both “ pastilles ” 
and ‘‘ Bastille,’”’ both of which words contain a double 

4 in place of the single / of the dream-name. It is 
highly probable that here also we have to do with a 
case of transposition of a letter, in this case a trans- 
position from its proper position in the middle of two 
words to become the initial letter of a dream-name. 
Having now explained as far as possible how the 
manifest content of the dream was determined, I can 
return to consider more closely how far the dream is in 
harmony with Freud’s scheme. There is no question 
concerning one most important feature of this scheme. 
In the dream an outstanding, indeed the essential, 
element of the latent content appeared in such a guise 
that its nature was not recognised by myself so long 
as I was asleep. A wish that I should be chosen to 
be president of a society was disguised by the appear- 
ance of my name in a distorted form. The dream 
differed from many of the dreams of adults, or at any 
rate of educated adults, in that in other respects the 
manifest content of the dream was closely connected 
with the wish that formed its motive. Though there 
was the fantastic feature that a meeting of the Council 
of a London Society took place in an outhouse of a 
Cambridge College garden, a feature that is possibly 
connected with my objection to the journeys to London 
which the Presidency would involve, the actual setting 
of the dream was just such a meeting of the Council 
of the Society as would normally decide the choice 
of a new President, and the chief actors were not dis- 
guised, but their identity was clearly recognised in 
the dream, being people active in the affairs of the 
Society. Indeed, it was the unusually small amount 
of transformation or distortion in the dream as a whole 
which made it so easy to recognise the transformation 
which produced its culminating feature. It was the 
small amount of transformation, or rather its limitation 
to the central point of the dream, which made the 

process so obvious. 

I have so far assumed that the dream I have related 
provides a good example of the fulfilment of a wish, 
and I may now consider this matter more fully. When 
looked at from one point of view, the appearance of 
my name, though in transformed character, as President 
of a Society was undoubtedly the fulfilment of a wish 
which was clearly present in my mind, at any rate 
beneath the surface, but this wish was in conflict with 
other wishes. To say that the dream I have related 
expressed the fulfilment of a wish seems too simple 
a way of expressing the situation. The dream was 
rather the expression of a conflict between a number 
of wishes, or more accurately between a number of 
conative trends, some of which might be called wishes, 
while others were rather of the nature of fears or 
apprehensions. I prefer, therefore, to regard the dream 
as the expression of a conflict, and as an attempt to 
solve the conflict by such means as are available during 
sleep. 

If we regard mental experience as being arranged in 
strata or levels comparable with those which we now 
believe to be represented in the nervous system, the 
dream may be regarded as the solution of a conflict 
by means of processes belonging to those levels of 
activity which are still active in sleep. In setting-out, 
therefore, on our study of dream-psychology in this 
book, I propose to regard Freud’s formula as unduly 
simple, and suggest as an alternative the working 
hypothesis that the dream is the solution or attempted 
solution of a conflict which finds expression in ways 
characteristic of different levels of early experience.* 
It will become our business to inquire not only whether 
this hypothesis is capable of explaining the many 

* For a preliminary statement of this position, see my paper on 
‘‘Freud’s Concept of the Censorship’? in The Psycho-analytic 
Review, republished as one of the Appendices in Instinct and the 
Unconscious. The view now put forward is formulated especially 
on pages 230-232 of the latter work. 

17 B 

varieties of the experience of sleep, but also whether 
the adoption of modes of expression characteristic 
of different periods of life bears any relation to the 
character of the desire or other state which is finding 
expression in the dream.

IN the first chapter I dealt especially with those parts of 
Freud’s scheme of dream-interpretation according to 
which the manifest dream, the dream as we experience 
it, is the fulfilment of a latent desire in the dreamer’s 
mind, expressing itself in a symbolic form through the 
intermediation of a process of transformation or, as 
Freud prefers to call it, distortion. 

I left on one side the nature of this process of trans- 
formation or distortion, a process which Freud has 
called “the dream-work.” I propose now to begin 
the consideration of the processes which make up this 
dream-work. 

Freud himself distinguishes four main processes: 
(i) condensation ; (ii) displacement; (ili) plastic re- 
presentation, and (iv) secondary elaboration. 

The first of these, condensation, is a process with 
which it is not necessary to deal at length because, 
in my opinion, it is not a process which is especially 
characteristic of the dream, but is a feature of every 
mental process, waking or sleeping It is just as much 
a character of mental products in general as of the 
dream. If you take any of the ideas which I am now 
trying to bring before you, or any of the images which 
may be called up in your minds on hearing my words, 
you will find that there is condensed in each of them 
a vast mass of experience derived both from the conver- 
sation and reading of everyday life and from special 
studies. In exactly the same way it is possible to 

show that any image or incident of a dream is the 
product of a process of condensation in which many 
different experiences have converged. Thus, to take 
an example from the dream considered in Chapter I, 
the dream-name ‘“ S. Poole’”’ was found to have heen 
determined, partly by a fanciful resemblance to my 
own name; partly by the fact that a similar name 
had been seen in a medical paper a day or two earlier ; 
partly perhaps by the fact that I had noticed the name 
of Dr Lane-Poole in a book-catalogue, and partly 
by my anthropological interests which would have 
given to some chance reference to Stanley Pool more 
meaning to me than it would have had to another 
person. Moreover, it is probable that a deeper analysis 
than that carried out by myself would have led to 
other elements of experience which had taken a part 
in determining that S. Poole should have been nomi- 
nated by the dream-consciousness as a substitute for 
myself. 

The second process singled out by Freud is that he 
calls displacement (Verschiebung). I believe that this 
process, as described by Freud, is one in which several 
processes are combined which should properly be 
distinguished from one another. I shall only mention 
here one to which Freud ascribes especial import- 
ance, according to which the image or incident which 
is most important in the manifest dream is not a 
symbol of the most important latent dream-thought, 
but is an image of an indifferent kind to which the 
interest of the latent thought has been displaced. If 
again I take my “ Presidency ” dream as an example, 
it cannot be regarded as an example of a displacement 
of this kind. There can be little question that the 
prominent image of the dream was the name of S., 
Poole of the dream-president, and few, I think, will 
question that the prominent feature of the latent 
dream-thoughts was my repressed wish to be President. 

There was displacement in that the interest in myself as 
President was transferred to the neutral personage 
S. Poole, of the dream, but there was no displacement 
of the kind which Freud regards as the most char- 
acteristic form of the process. 

The third element which Freud finds in the dream- 
work, that which he calls plastic representation, is 
one the nature of which can be made clearer if we 
distinguish in it two different processes, symbolisation 
and dramatisation. By means of the first of these two 
processes the latent dream-thoughts find expression 
by means of symbols. The images of a dream are 
symbols of the elements which enter into the conflict 
by which, as was explained in the last chapter, the 
dream has been determined. The process of dramatisa- 
tion is closely connected with this use of symbols. 
The dreamer sees in the dream persons moving before 
him and events happening which give it a dramatic 
character by which the conflict is made concrete 
and, though in altered guise, conspicuous. 

The dream related in Chapter I is not a good example 
of either of these processes. The Presidency dream 
had a certain dramatic character, but this was of much 
the same nature as that of the process, viz., the choice 
of a President, which the dream was illustrating, 
and the S. Poole of the dream can hardly be regarded 
as a good example of a symbol. I propose to devote 
the larger part of this chapter to the consideration 
of a dream which illustrates far more aptly these two 
processes of symbolisation and dramatisation. 

I do not propose to speak at length about Freud’s 
fourth process of the dream-work, that which he calls 
secondary elaboration. This is a process in which 
the dream as experienced is modified and altered 
in the process of relating it or of recalling it if it has 
disappeared, or seems to have disappeared, from 
memory. As will be evident, it is a process of great 

ai 

importance whenever we are trying to estimate the 
value of a dream as evidence, whether for some prac- 
tical purpose, such as medical diagnosis, or for some 
scientific purpose, such as that of discovering the nature 
of the mental processes by which the character of 
dreams in general is determined, but it is not in itself 
a process of any great scientific interest, and I shall 
say little about it in this book. 

I can now turn to the dream by means of which I 
propose to illustrate these processes of the dream-work. 
It is a dream of one of my patients, a medical man 
with the rank of captain in the R.A.M.C. who had 
served in France. This service, and especially certain 
experiences centring round the death of a French 
prisoner who had been mortally wounded during his 
escape from the German lines, had given him such a 
horror of medical practice that he was extremely 
reluctant to return to the practice of his profession. 
His relatives, and especially his wife’s people who 
came from Canada, unaware of the real motives of 
this reluctance, were using all their mfluence to induce 
him to return to medical practice. Shortly before 
the dream he had talked over the whole situation 
with me, and I had suggested that he should take up 
“Public Health,” where he would rarely, if ever, 
be subjected to experiences which would recall the 
horrors of his war service. A few days later he sent 
me an account of the dream by which I propose to 
illustrate the nature of the processes of symbolisation 
and dramatisation. 

THE ‘“‘ SUICIDE ’’ DREAM 

[ give this dream in the form in which it was recorded 
for me by my patient, whom I will call ‘‘ Captain.” 

“ T was seated in the front of the stalls at the Golders 
Green Empire. I was to give a speech on ‘ The Present 
22 | 

Struggle.’ I felt extremely nervous, because I was of 
two minds on the subject on which I had to speak. 
You were on the stage with me when I mounted it, 
and everybody I knew and had known seemed to be 
there. Gathering courage I commenced: ‘ Ladies and 
Gentlemen, I desire to address you on ‘‘ The Present 
Struggle.” ’ Even as I started speaking I noticed 
that the seat I had just left was occupied by a man, 
though I had not seen him come in. I felt compelled 
to address myself to this man in particular. He 
appeared to be a stranger to me, yet there was some- 
thing familiar about him. He looked like a Viking, 
that is, so far as his complexion, hair and eyes were 
concerned. I mean that his eyes shone fiercely blue 
and his hair seemed luminous gold. 

“T resumed: ‘ We must continue the struggle to 
the last man. Better let us die than lose our manhood 
and independence and become the slaves of an alien 
people.’ 

“The man in the seat seemed to become intensely 
depressed as I said these words. Yet, though he 
approved, my words seemed to arouse some dissent 
in other parts of the hall, and it was then that I noticed 
that there were two stewards, one at each exit. The 
steward on my left was a Canadian with the face of 
my father-in-law, and the man on my right was Dr X, 
wearing his post-mortem apron and gloves. I con- 
tinued pointing out how everything depended upon our 
putting out our mightiest fight. The man in my chair 
cheered and his eyes shone. 

‘‘« Silence there,’ threatened the Canadian, ‘or Ill 
deal with you,’ as he glanced at the man in my chair. 
‘T’'ll give you a taste of this,’ and he held up a stick 
towards the man. Then I noticed that a snake was 
crawling up the stick and it seemed to menace the man 
in my seat. I was filled with horror, and then I noticed 
that the man in my chair had changed. As he looked 

at the Canadian his eyes became dark and filled with 
infinite suffering and he seemed to be almost another 
person, for his hair had become dark and his skin was no 
longer fair. He so affected me that I became less 
confident. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘that we have suffered 
and are all suffering dreadful agony.’ At this the man . 
in my chair, still dark in eye and face, groaned aloud 
in agony. 

“““ What rest peace would bring us all,’ I continued. 
The man’s eyes now showed such agony that I felt it 
would be merciful if I killed him immediately, and 
Dr X seemed to read my thoughts, for he smiled. 
‘T'll deal with him,’ shouted the Canadian, and putting 
his stick with the snake down, he held up a lady’s 
corset and cried: ‘I’ve a straight-waistcoat for him.’ 
Here you interposed from the platform saying, ‘ Order 
there. Let the man alone. Go on, Captain. The 
fellow is ill, very ill.’ 

“ Taking courage I went on, telling them that despite 
our intense suffering we must go on. ‘ There must 
be no surrender. We must not give in.’ Again the 
man in my seat became a different being. His stature 
seemed to increase. Again his eyes seemed to shine 
blue fire, his hair was of gold and he cheered aloud. 
This enraged the Canadian at the exit and he again 
lifted the stick with the snake writhing on it. ‘TI’ll 
give him a taste of this,’ he shouted, and the man in 
my chair seemed to shrink. Again he was suffering 
dreadfully and I could not bear to see it. His eyes 
showed such agony that I felt I must kill him. Dr 
X smiled grimly and approvingly at me and shouted : 
‘This way for the Angel of Peace.’ You then inter- 
posed, saying that the man was so ill. I said: ‘Tl 
put him out of his misery,’ and took up a revolver 
which lay on the table. ‘He won’t feel it,’ I said, 
‘there will be no blood and he will stop breathing at 
once.’ ‘ Don’t do it,’ you said, ‘ the man is ill, but he 

will get well.’ I could no longer stand the look in 
the man’s eyes and determined to shoot. I was just 
raising the revolver when I heard the voice of my son 
saying, ‘ Don’t do it, daddy, you'll hurt me too.’ 

“TI woke, feeling ill and very depressed. It seemed 
very terrible and was the worst dream I ever had in 
my life.” 

I knew the patient so well that I was able to interpret 
nearly every feature of the dream at once. From 
boyhood the patient had wished that he had been fair 
and had had blue eyes, and this wish, combined with 
the fact that the man occupied his seat in the audience 
left no doubt whatever in my mind that the man in 
the patient’s chair was the dream-substitute of the 
patient himself. We can with confidence interpret 
the dream-experiences of the man in the audience 
as those of the patient. I recognised at once that the 
Canadian who had the face of his father-in-law repre- 
sented his wife’s people, and that the stick with the 
snake first creeping up it and then writhing round 
it was a symbol of Medicine, with which his wife’s 
people were, in fact, threatening him. Dr X, the 
guardian of one of the exits of the hall, was a friend 
of the dreamer who had recently committed suicide, 
whence his approval of the resolve of the patient to 
shoot the man in the audience. As this man was the 
dream-surrogate of the patient, the shooting, if it 
had taken place, would have been a dream-homicide 
symbolising an act of suicide, the suicidal nature of 
the act being disguised by the transformation of the 
dream in which the patient was represented by the man 
in the audience. 

The voice of the sleeper’s child in the dream repre- 
sented the element in the conflict arising out of the 
social sentiment whereby a suicide inflicts a stigma 
upon those he leaves behind him. 

The attitude towards the corset waved before the 
man in the audience undoubtedly represents the 
relation of the dreamer towards his wife, but the 
record of the dream leaves the exact nature of this 
relation doubtful. The eyes of the man again became 
blue and his skin fair after the incident of the corset, . 
but it is doubtful whether this change was directly 
due to the waving of the corset, or to the nature of 
the speech which the dreamer was making. The 
comparison of the corset with a straight-waistcoat 
points to one aspect at least of the dreamer’s attitude 
towards his wife being one of antagonism. It is 
probable that the doubtful character of the interpreta- 
tion only reflects the ambivalent attitude of the patient 
towards his wife, his love for her being blended with 
antagonism due, at any rate in part, to her being one 
of the forces driving him back to the practice of 
Medicine. 

The speech of the dreamer was a direct indication 
of a conflict which I knew to be actively present 
between manifest opinions that the war must be 
fought to a finish and deeper feelings that a struggle 
involving such horrors as those which he had experi- 
enced should continue. At the same time, there can 
be little doubt that it was also a symbolic expression 
of the conflict between desire to continue the work of 
his profession and horror.at the thoughts which the 
practice of his profession, even in the modified form I 
had recommended, would inevitably arouse. 

Among incidents of the dream which were readily 
explained by my knowledge of the patient I may 
mention the stress laid on the expression of agony 
in the eyes of the man in the audience, which was 
derived from a special feature of the experience with 
the dying French prisoner to whom I have already 
referred. The choice of a revolver for the suicide and 
the mention of the absence of blood and the fact that 

breathing would stop at once were also referable to 
this experience. The mention of the rest brought by 
peace and Dr X’s use of the words “‘ Angel of Peace ”’ 
as an expression for ‘“ death,’ show clearly that the 
speech about the war symbolised his own struggle, 
with the desire for death as its end. 

The two means of exit from the hall may be taken to 
represent the two alternative solutions of his conflict, 
which at the moment seemed possible; one, the 
return to Medicine, symbolised by his father-in-law 
with his stick and snake; the other, suicide, symbolised 
or represented by a person who had recently committed 
this act. 

The impression received by the dreamer as he was 
beginning his speech that everyone he knew or had 
ever known was there, may be taken as an expression 
of the thought that the act then prominent in the 
dreamer’s thoughts was one which, through the pub- 
licity attendant upon suicide, would become as 
prominent in the minds of all those he knew or had 
ever known as at the moment his place on the plat- 
form of the dream made him prominent to all those 
present. 

This is not the place to consider the practical or the 
prospective value of this dream, but I may say in 
passing that I have never known a dream which had 
more important practical consequences. I was con- 
vinced at once that the mere thought of returning to 
Medicine, even in the modified form I had suggested, 
was so painful to the patient that he was contemplating 
suicide. When he visited me at my request I was 
doubtful at first whether simply to act on this conclu- 
sion without revealing my grounds for advising that 
he should renounce all thoughts of return to Medicine, 
or whether I should go into the situation with him 
fully. A short conversation soon made it clear that 
he had been entertaining definite thoughts of suicide, 

thoughts which had been strengthened, if not suggested, 
by the recent suicide of his friend, Dr X, whose role in 
the dream it was to encourage its transformed suicide. 
I went into the whole situation carefully with the 
patient, and it was decided that he should give up all 
thoughts of Medicine and enter upon some other 
career. 

Having now interpreted the dream, at any rate in its 
main outlines, let us consider how far it supports 
Freud’s scheme of the production and function of the 
dream. In the first place, the interpretation has shown 
that the dream was the transformed expression of a 
wish to commit suicide in order to escape from a 
conflict which was becoming intolerable. On the one 
side was the patient’s intense desire to give up the 
practice of Medicine, not merely on account of anticipa- 
tion of the horrors which medical practice, and especi- 
ally the sight of blood, would inevitably recall, but 
also on account of the fears for his reason with which, 
in common with nearly every sufferer from the severer 
forms of anxiety-neurosis, the patient was troubled. 
On the other side of the conflict was not only the desire 
to please his wife’s relatives as well as his own, but also 
the natural objection to give up a profession for the 
practice of which he had given many years of prepara- 
tion, while combined with this was the knowledge 
that he had no other clear prospect of maintaining 
his wife and family. His love for his child was acting 
more explicitly perhaps than any other feature of the 
situation as a motive for continuing the practice of his 
profession. 

While the dream was thus clearly the expression of a 
violent conflict between wishes of different kinds, it 
was at the same time so transformed in the dream that 
the patient, even after he had written out the dream 
and was talking about it to me, had no idea of its 
inner meaning. He wholly failed to recognise that 

the man in the audience was the dream-representative - 
of himself. He was even unaware that the stick 
with the snake writhing round it was a symbol of Medi- 
cine though, even while he was talking to me about the 
dream, he was wearing on his tunic the badge of the 
R.A.M.C. Not only during the dream, but even after 
much consideration in the waking state, the deeper 
meaning of the dream was wholly hidden from him, 
The transformation, transparent as it seems to be, 
was sufficient to disguise the nature of the conflict of 
which his sleep had been the scene. 

If we now turn to the processes which make up the 
dream-work, it would be difficult to find better examples 
of the processes of dramatisation and symbolisation. 
In the representation of Medicine by a snake writhing 
round a stick; of his wife by a corset; of the act of 
suicide by a recent example of this act, we have char- 
acteristic examples of symbols, while a dramatic 
character of the whole dream is present in an intense 
degree. 

Of condensation the dream is full of examples, only a 
few of which I have been able to give, but even in the 
main outlines of the analysis we have in the speech 
of the dreamer not merely an expression of views 
about the war which the dreamer actually held, but 
the speech at the same time expressed another conflict 
of a wholly different kind which was also finding expres- 
sion in the dream as a whole. Another example of 
condensation is the combination of the ancient desire to 
have blue eyes and of certain experiences with a French 
prisoner during the war, both of which contributed 
to make the eyes of his substitute so prominent in the 
dream. Again, the horror of this substitute, when 
threatened with the symbol of Medicine, was the ex- 
pression of a large number of experiences by which 
this horror was produced and supported. 

It is when we turn to displacement that the dream 

fails to support the Freudian position. There is no 
question that the prominent element of the dream- 
thoughts was the danger of suicide. Though this 
act was disguised by the use of a dream-surrogate in 
place of the dreamer himself, suicide, disguised as 
homicide, was the outstanding feature of the manifest 
content of the dream. There was displacement in 
the sense that the dreamer did not direct the revolver 
towards himself but aimed it at his dream-repre- 
sentative and there was displacement in that the horror 
of Medicine and the love of his wife showed themselves 
not in himself but in the eyes, hair and face of his 
dream-surrogate. If, however, we understand dis- 
placement in the Freudian sense as a process in which 
the outstanding feature of the manifest content does 
not correspond with the outstanding feature of the 
’ Iatent content, the dream cannot be regarded as an 
example of the process. In this dream disguise was 
effected by means of symbolisation rather than by 
displacement, 

If now we consider how far the dream is an example 
of wish-fulfilment, we find a situation very similar to 
that presented by my own dream. The patient un- 
doubtedly wished to kill himself as a means of escaping 
from an intolerable situation. In waking life the 
patient knew that he was in danger of suicide from 
which, at any rate at times, he wished to be saved, 
and in the dream this wish was realised in a dramatic 
manner by the intervention of his child at the moment 
when the symbolic suicide was about to take place. 
But the dream expressed far more than this and, 
as in the case of my own dream, the view that this 
dream was a wish-fulfilment is far too simple. Again, 
I think there is good reason to suppose that the really 
important desire in the dreamer’s mind was for suicide, 
for “the peace of death ’’ emphasised in one passage 
of the dream, and that from this point of view the 

dream was not a fulfilment but the negation of a wish. 
As in the case of my own dream, it is at least equally 
possible to regard the dream as a whole as an attempted 
solution of a conflict of a very complicated kind which 
was going on in the mind of the dreamer, a conflict of 
which I have already enumerated the leading elements 
on either side. 

Accepting, at any rate provisionally, the view that 
the dream was an attempted solution of a conflict, 
let us inquire how far it was one in which the elements 
found expression in forms characteristic of different 
periods of life. In the first place, the form in which 
the patient himself found expression in the dream 
revealed a characteristic phantasy of childhood. 
From childhood the patient had wished that he had 
blue eyes and fair hair and skin, and his appearance in 
the dream as a Viking was a thorough realisation of 
this infantile desire. The form taken by the symboli- 
sation of Medicine was the result of a relatively late 
experience, but the symbolisation itself was a process 
of a characteristically youthful kind, though one which 
is frequently persistent in adult life, and especially 
in collective manifestations, such as heraldry and the 
wearing of uniforms and badges. 

The act of being saved from suicide found expression 
in the dream through the intervention of his child, a 
process characteristic of the kind of melodrama which 
appeals to the youth, but which was of far too crude 
a kind to appeal to my patient in his waking state. 
The conflict between the deeper desire for the peace 
of death and the duty to live, especially for the sake of 
his son, was expressed in the dream by a dramatic 
struggle between the symbolic expressions of various 
factors which entered into the conflict, ending in a 
dramatic dénouement in which, at the moment of 
directing the revolver at his dream-substitute, he was 
saved by the voice of his child. The whole dream is a 

striking example of a process according to which the 
dream is a solution or attempted solution of a conflict 
by means of symbolic images and metaphors char- 
acteristic of different periods of life. In this case 
most of the symbols were of a youthful kind, but it 
is of great significance that there was one image which. 
was largely devoid of this symbolic character, and 
was of a kind which would make a direct appeal to the 
adult mind. I refer to the adoption in the dream of Dr 
X as arepresentative of suicide. It is doubtful whether 
one would be justified in speaking of the image of Dr X 
as it appeared in the dream as a symbol. Dr X had 
committed suicide quite recently, and there is no ques- 
tion that when the patient was thinking of suicide in 
the waking state at this time, the example of Dr X 
was clearly in his mind. The appearance of Dr X 
in the manifest dream must be regarded as an example 
of suicide of a kind which would appeal to the adult, 
rather than as a symbol of suicide such as might be 
regarded as characteristic of childhood or youth. 
Though the substitution of a surrogate for himself 
disguised from the dreamer the fact that he was about 
to commit a symbolic suicide, the presence of Dr X 
on the stage and his obvious approval of the proposed 
act came nearer to the realisation of the deeper meaning 
of the dream than any other part of its content. I 
propose now to give a second dream of this patient, 
which may have.occurred a week or two later, because 
it illustrates points already considered and others 
which I shall have to discuss later. 

TRANSFERENCE DREAM 

The dream was as follows : 

‘“‘ T was on a journey which seemed as if it would never 
end. I had come from a very hilly country and far 
back I could see many small rivers among the hills 
joining to form the large river by the side of which 

I felt I must continue my terrible journey. I felt 
terribly exhausted and the river was friendly and 
sang to me to swim on my journey and take courage. 

“T did so and felt happy and could take powerful 
strokes with ease and became so full of confidence 
that I landed and determined to walk, again keeping 
close by the bank of the river which I felt would help 
meon. YetsomehowI felt I ought to fight ahead on my 
own. The ground, however, was full of menace, alive 
with snakes, and harsh and forbidding like the desert. 

‘“‘T stumbled and fell again and again, encouraged not 
a little by the voice of the river until I was confronted 
by a hideous blood-red snake reared up to strike with 
its tail curled round a log of dead wood. The French- 
man held it in tether round the neck by a rope which 
was blood. 

‘‘Then I heard my boy’s voice from afar: ‘Swim in 
the river, daddy, or he will get you,’ and I knew I was 
so safe in the river, and yet that I would only have to 
leave it again to struggle on. So I determined, since 
I could not go on alone and could not pass the French- 
man with his awful companion to turn away into the 
terrible plain which was strewn with whitened bones,”’ 

This dream was of so horrible a character that the 
patient awoke vomiting. 

The character of this dream leaves little doubt that 
the snake still served to symbolise Medicine and its 
horrors, but this meaning was more disguised than in 
the earlier dream by the colour of the snake and by 
the fact that only its tail was now connected, with 
the log of dead wood taking the place of the stick 
which more nearly resembled the caduceus of the earlier 
symbol. Without the presence of the symbol of the 
earlier dream it would have been difficult and hazardous 
to recognise in this image of a dream the symbol of 
Medicine. 

Goch: Cc 

At the same time the association of the snake of the 
second dream with the dying Frenchman who had come 
to stand in the mind of the patient for so much of his 
horror of Medicine only serves to confirm the conclu- 
sion that the snake was a symbol of Medicine, while 
‘“ the rope of blood ”’ brings out again the horror of blood . 
which was connected in so many ways with the patient's 
dread of following his profession. We have here an 
elaboration of symbolism which leaves no doubt as to 
the meaning of the dream, though this elaboration was 
of a kind to disguise this meaning more fully from the 
sleeper. 

If Medicine had been symbolised in the same way as 
in the earlier dream, the meaning of the symbol would 
have been recognised by the dreamer. Whatever 
may have been the basis of the elaboration of the 
symbolism, there can be little question that it served 
the function of disguising from the sleeper the meaning 
of his dream. 

The confrontation of the dreamer with a modified 
form of the symbolisation of Medicine by snake and 
stick, however, was only an incident of the dream and 
not its main motive. This motive may now be con- 
sidered. As soon as I heard the dream, I had no doubt 
that its meaning was one in which I was intimately 
concerned, and that it furnished another example of 
the capacity of my name for symbolisation or trans- 
formation. I was puzzled by the union of many small 
rivers to make up the large river by the side of which 
the dreamer was journeying, but it seems possible 
that this was the way in which the dream-consciousness 
symbolised the plural form of my name. 

It is clear that the river symbolised a person or 
object upon whom or which the dreamer was relying 
for help and comfort, and there is no doubt that I 
stood in that relation to him. Moreover, the way in 
which the patient’s son intervened points to my being 

definitely regarded by the dreamer as a protection 
against his being drawn back to Medicine, about which 
again there was no doubt. If we accept this inter- 
pretation, we have to discover why the outcome of the 
dream should have been that the dreamer turned 
away from the help which I was then offering to him. 

It is necessary for this purpose that I should explain 
more fully the nature of my relation to the dreamer 
at this time. He had been my patient in Scotland, 
a fact which may possibly account for the hilly country 
with which the dream begins, and was now living in 
London where I was also working. At this time he 
could hardly be regarded as my patient. I was in 
touch with him as with many other of my old patients, 
and when I gave him the advice about taking up 
Public Health, it was while he was paying me a visit 
that I regarded merely as an occasion on which an old 
patient had come to talk to me about his plans for the 
future. As soon as I knew about the first dream, 
however, it became evident that the situation was far 
more serious than I had supposed, and I asked the 
patient to come to see me regularly, but he did not do 
so, and I accepted his own excuse that he knew I was 
busy and did not like to trouble me. 

The second dream, however, revealed that the 
question of coming to see me was the subject of a 
serious conflict in the patient’s mind, a conflict, appar- 
ently of a deep kind, between one desire to come to 
me for help and another desire to stand on his own 
feet and rely on his own strength. I need hardly 
say that it was a regular part of my treatment to guard 
against the process known to the psycho-analysts as 
transference. Though in this case there had been 
nothing which could properly be called psycho-analysis, 
I had obtained a very extensive knowledge of such 
parts of the patient’s early experience as were acces- 
sible to consciousness without special procedures, 

There had at first been rather violent resistance to 
this process, followed later by a state in which I had 
recognised the danger of transference, and it had 
formed an essential part of my treatment to inculcate 
independence, “‘ fighting ahead on his own,” to use 
the language of the dream. The practical importance 
of the dream was that it revealed a tendency to such 
transference so strong as to form the subject of a 
serious conflict, and that this conflict had acted as 
the basis of a dream as painful as that I have narrated. 

Let us accept this interpretation, at any rate provi- 
sionally, and consider how it bears out the scheme of 
Freud. In the first place it is evident that while 
the dream readily falls into line as the attempted 
solution of a conflict, it is far from as readily capable of 
explanation by the simple formula of wish-fulfilment. 
If it was the fulfilment of a wish, this wish must have 
been that of getting away from my influence. I 
have no hesitation in accepting the position that this 
wish was present in the patient’s mind and present 
to a degree so powerful as to lead to the occurrence 
of a dream of this painful kind. At the same time 
there was, I think, no question as to the existence 
of another wish, also of a powerful kind, to avoid or 
lessen his immediate discomforts by coming to me 
for help. We seem to have here a case where I believe 
it is far more convenient to regard the dream as a 
solution or attempted solution of a conflict between 
two powerful desires rather than the fulfilment of a 
wish, and I hope to show later that the adoption of the 
latter point of view has obscured an aspect of the dream 
which greatly helps us to understand its nature. 

Passing to the thesis that the solution of the conflict 
reached or attempted by the dream is one expressed 
in regressive form, this dream seems to me to afford 
an even better example of it than either of the other 
dreams I have related. 

My réle in the situation with which the dreamer was 
presented was that of one who was protecting him 
from the fate of being drawn back to the practice of 
his profession ; and at the point which may be regarded 
as the crisis of the dream, he was confronted on the 
one hand by the symbol of Medicine, so modified as to 
bring into prominence the dread of blood, which had 
so much to do with his horror of Medicine, and on 
the other hand by the chance of escape by following 
my advice and putting all thoughts of Medicine wholly 
on one side. I am inclined to believe that a large 
element in the dream was that he was so under the 
influence of his family surroundings that it was almost 
impossible for him to follow my advice. At any rate 
the later history of the case points definitely in this 
direction. 

COMPARISON OF THE THREE DREAMS 

Having now described and interpreted three dreams, 
one of my own and two of another person, let us com- 
pare them with one another and see in what points 
my dream resembles or differs from the others. In 
all three there was such transformation of the latent 
meaning of the dream that its meaning was not re- 
cognised by the sleeper, but the dreams differed greatly 
in the amount of this transformation. 

In my patient’s first dream the disguise affected by 
the transformation of the dream was almost complete. 
The patient wholly failed to realise that the dream 
was an expression, hardly veiled at all, of the conflict 
which was rendering his life terrible. If it had not 
been for the presence of Dr X in the dream, I am 
doubtful whether the patient would have recognised 
that it bore any relation to suicide. In the patient’s 
second dream the disguise was even more complete. 
In my own dream, on the other hand, I had no doubt 

in the dream that its subject was the choice of a Presi- 
dent of a Society, and my act of looking to see who 
had been nominated as President was clearly indicative 
of my direct interest in the choice, though, owing to 
the absence of any clear limit between dream and 
interpretation, I am unable to say definitely whether 
a desire to see my own name or that of another was the 
explicit motive. 

One important difference between my dream and 
the other two is thus the amount of transformation and 
disguise. In the dreams of my patient there was 
also far more symbolisation, it being through the ex- 
tensive utilisation of this process that the disguise 
was effected. In all three dreams there was no dis- 
placement, if by displacement is meant a process in 
which the central point of the manifest content does 
not correspond with that of the latent dream-thought. 

I have so far said nothing of one feature in which 
the examples I have described differ greatly from 
one another. In my own dream there was no affective 
accompaniment of any moment. The two dreams of 
my patient, on the other hand, were not only accom- 
panied by powerful affect while they were in progress, 
but when he awoke from the first the dreamer felt ill 
and depressed and described the dream as the worst 
he had ever had in his life, a strong statement for one 
who had been troubled throughout his illness by night- 
mares of a fearful kind; while he awoke from the 
second dream in so disturbed a state that he vomited. 

I propose in a later chapter to consider the problem of 
affect in the dream fully, and I must be content here 
to call attention to the great contrast in this respect 
between the dreams just recorded, which will provide 
the material for the discussion of this question, 

The solution of the problem which I shall submit is 
that the affective character of a dream depends on 
whether the conflict which is finding expression in 

the dream receives a satisfactory solution. I suggest 
that when a dream provides a satisfactory solution 
of a conflict, the nature of which is disguised from the 
dreamer by a process of transformation, there is no 
affect, or one of slight kind, but that when the dream 
wholly fails to solve the situation, or still more when 
the solution it provides is contrary to the deepest 
desire of the dreamer, there is affect, and affect of a 
painful kind. I have suggested that the strongest 
motive in the conflict which produced my patient’s 
dream was the desire for death, or rather for the 
peace which death would bring, a desire fitly sym- 
bolised by the reference to the Angel of Peace, em- 
phasised by Dr X, the dream-representative of suicide. 
I have suggested that the highly painful character of 
the dream was due to the fact that this deep desire of 
the dreamer was frustrated by the social considerations 
which found concrete expression in the dream in the 
voice of his son. It is this point of view which has 
especially led me to be dissatisfied with Freud’s formula 
of the dream as a wish-fulfilment. From my point of 
view this suicide-dream was not the fulfilment of a 
wish, but the direct negation of the wish which was at 
the time most prominent in the mind of the dreamer.

THE first two chapters have been based on the record 
of dreams which were not altogether of the kind which 
have most excited the wonder and curiosity of students 
of dream-psychology. None of them can perhaps be 
regarded as characteristic examples of the grotesque 
or fantastic character which is so frequent in the 
consciousness of sleep. Beyond the feature that the 
meeting of the Council of a London Scientific Society 
should take place in an outhouse of a Cambridge 
College garden, there was nothing very fantastic about 
my own dream, which was mainly of an intellectual 
kind and devoid of any definitely affective accom- 
paniment. The chief feature of the first dream of 
my patient, on the other hand, was its tragical rather 
than grotesque character. Though it evidently had 
a comic character to those who did not recognise its 
deeper meaning, it was far more coherent than dreams 
often are. 

I propose now to consider another dream of my own 
in which the fantastic and grotesque character was 
definite, and to inquire whether it is possible also to 
lead a dream of this kind back to factors which make 
it intelligible and even rational. 

Before I record and interpret this dream I should 
like to say a word about a difficulty to which I have 
not so far referred. 

One of the greatest hindrances to the psychological 
study of dreams, or rather perhaps to the general 
discussion of its problems, is the fact that the dream is 

continually revealing thoughts and sentiments of the 
dreamer which cannot easily be made public or in 
which there is the risk that the object of these thoughts 
may be recognised. One of the infantile characters 
of the dream-consciousness is that it blurts out like 
a child just what it really thinks and feels about persons 
and things. Thus, in the dream of my own already 
recorded I was obliged to omit certain features for 
this reason, and the same is true of the dream which I 
am about to analyse. 

With the dreams of others similar precautions may 
be even more necessary. Thus, it will be evident to 
all that it would be most unfortunate if the dreams 
utilised in the last chapter should be traced back to 
their source, and I have made certain alterations in the 
details of the dream and its interpretation which will 
prevent the recognition of the identity of the dreamer, 
but at the same time I was obliged to omit several 
details which would have made the interpretation 
even more convincing. Freud himself has suffered 
greatly from this limitation. As a well-known physi- 
cian it is widely known who have been his patients, 
and this has prevented him from using much material 
which would doubtless have been better suited to 
illustrate his subject than the dreams which he has 
actually chosen. (In many cases of my own the inter- 
pretation would be far more convincing if it were 
possible to give all the facts, and if it were not necessary 
in many cases to omit features which would allow the 
identification of the subject of the dream by others.) 

, 

In the dream now to be considered I was playing 
billiards with Dr (now Sir) Maurice Craig, the well- 
known specialist in mental disease. I had to make a 
stroke in which the place of the red ball was taken by 

a cup and saucer in a position relative to the white ball 
which would make an easy cannon, the white ball and 
the saucer being only a few inches from one another. 
I played with this intention but with a result, which 
I am sure neither Mr Inman nor Mr Smith could attain, 
that both the white ball and my own were brought 
into contact with the saucer and remained there. In 
the following stroke, which I played in spite of the 
.fact that the balls, real or symbolic, were touching 
one another, I only succeeded in separating the cup 
and saucer from the two balls. Dr Craig then made a 
remark which I did not catch exactly, but I took it to 
be: ‘“‘ You should have made a two and a three of it,” 
and as I was asking what exactly he had said, I awoke. 

On thinking about the dream the first things that 
came into my mind were certain incidents of the pre- 
vious day which had evidently determined features 
of the manifest content. I had dined out in the 
evening and my hostess had drawn my attention 
particularly to her coffee cups, which were of a peculiar 
pattern, decorated with representations of a dragon-fly. 
The cups had come from Sweden and the mention of 
the Swedish word for “ dragon-fly ’’ had formed the 
starting-point of a conversation on philological and 
ethnological topics that had greatly interested me and 
had given me new ideas concerning certain problems 
of the ethnology of northern Europe. A cup and 
saucer had thus formed the starting-point of a train of 
thought which had touched one of my chief interests. 
The feature which had thus determined one element 
of the manifest content, though apparently trivial, 
had in reality been closely associated with my chief 
interest in life. 

The appearance of Dr Craig was equally natural. 
On the previous day I had sent him a reprint of an 
article, and during the evening we had spent some time 
watching a wonderful scene, in which Craig House stood 

out prominently against a background of a superb 
sunset. Craig House is an institution for patients with 
mental disorder, and would thus have strengthened 
the tendency already present to bring to mind a friend 
bearing the same name. Moreover, I was working at 
Craiglockhart Hospital. 

The occurrence of a game of billiards as the setting 
of the dream was less obvious, but Dr Craig and I had 
been residents together at Bethlem Hospital many 
years ago, where we had frequently played billiards, 
and as he was by far the better player, I had learned 
much from him. His remark in the dream was alto- 
gether in keeping with his rdle as my mentor in the 
game. 

The chief features of the manifest dream were thus 
capable of direct explanation through incidents of the 
day, and especially of the evening, immediately pre- 
ceding the dream. According to the old point of view 
which regarded the fantastic and grotesque character 
of a dream as natural and as in no need of explanation, 
but limited this process to the manifest images of 
which the dream is composed, the dream would already 
have been analysed in a thoroughly satisfactory manner 
and nothing more would be needed. As I was not 
content with such a superficial explanation, I tried to 
put myself into an attitude which would allow further 
associations with the dream to appear, and I soon 
became aware of a definite visual image of one of my 
patients, whom I will call James, which rapidly dis- 
appeared, to be replaced by his name, which remained 
firmly fixed in my mind. At this time there were two 
patients of this name under my care. The appearance 
of one of them as the subject of a visual image showed 
that I must have been at least in a half-sleeping state, 
for I never experience so definite a visual image when 
fully "awake. 

The occurrence of the image and name of a patient, 

either in a transient second dream, or at least in a 
hypnogogic state, at once brought to my mind the 
fact that so many of my dreams at that time had been 
traced to anxieties connected with my medical work, 
and at once two definite causes of anxiety occurred to 
me, one of which had presented itself when going round — 
the hospital immediately before going to bed. The 
first of these two anxieties which came to my mind 
concerned the patient I call James, of whom I had had 
the visual image. He was to have a Medical Board on 
the following day and I had decided to recommend 
his return to duty. I had made a similar decision 
on an earlier occasion and had had to change it, owing 
to the appearance of new symptoms, and now that I 
had again decided to recommend discharge to duty, I 
was very doubtful whether I was taking the right 
course. On thinking over the situation, however, I 
could see no way whatever in which any conflict 
concerning this patient could have found expression 
through the symbolism of the dream. The only 
feature of the dream which was in any way appropriate 
was the intervention of Dr Craig, for the case was 
one in which I should have been glad of his counsel. 
His action as mentor at billiards was an appropriate 
symbol of the rdle he might have occupied as a con- 
sultant in a medical difficulty. I was wholly unable, 
however, to see how either the special features of the 
dream-game or his remark at the end bore in any way 
on this case. This led me to continue my search 
and I turned my attention to the other patient of the 
same name. 

It is necessary here to give a preliminary account of 
a feature of my work at that time. The bedrooms of 
the hospital were small and most of them accommo- 
dated two or three patients. I was in the habit of 
giving much thought to the suitability to one another 
of patients who occupied the same room. I tried to 

arrange not only that they were men who would get on 
well together, but also that there was agreement in 
such points as their times of getting to sleep, their 
need for a light at night, and similar features of their 
cases. It not infrequently happened that patients 
put together on arrival, when little was known about 
them, turned out to be incongruous, and were separated, 
but such rearrangement could, as a rule, only take 
place on the days when Medical Boards were held, 
when vacancies made redistribution possible. As I 
have already mentioned, the following day was a 
Board-day, and we expected an unusually large number 
of discharges, so that there was scope for any desirable 
rearrangement. I had already made certain tentative 
plans, and on my night-round I had spoken to the 
Sister concerning one such rearrangement, which in- 
volved the second patient, named James, while the bed 
to be vacated by the first James also entered into the 
redistribution. 

With this introduction I can return to the inter- 
pretation of the dream. When I turned my attention 
to the second patient named James, the whole problem 
concerned with my plan of redistribution came clearly 
to my mind and I saw that there was at least a prima 
facie case for the explanation of the game as a symbolic 
expression of my difficulty and its proposed solution. 
The second James was one of the occupants of a three- 
bedded room in which one of the three was disturbing 
another seriously by the noises he made in his sleep. 
My tentative solution had been to move into another 
room the patient who was being especially disturbed, 
thus separating him, not only from the patient who was 
disturbing him, but also from the third occupant 
of the room with whom he was in every way congenial. 
At first I considered how far the strokes of the dream- 
game could have symbolised my proposed distribution. 
It was not difficult to see that the game dealt with 

three objects, the two billiard balls and the cup and 
saucer, and that the cup and saucer might represent 
the patient who was disturbing the other two occupants 
of his room, represented by the two balls. Moreover, 
in a rough kind of way the result of my strokes might 
symbolise the aim of my proposed redistribution : ° 
for the result of the second stroke had been to separate 
the cup and saucer from the two billiard balls, though 
only after the first stroke had brought them together. 
At this step the remark made by Dr Craig at the 
end, ‘‘ You should have made a two and a three of it,” 
came into my mind. It was only when I turned my 
attention to this incident of the dream that a wholly 
new solution of the problem flashed into my mind. 
An event had happened on the previous day which 
had left a two-bedded room free and I now saw that 
this would enable me to move both the companions 
of the noisy patient instead of only one and put them 
together into this newly available room. At the samie 
time I saw a means of placing the disturbing patient 
in such a way that it would leave me with the three- 
bedded room free for the use of new patients. 

Dr Craig’s advice in the dream-game, viz.: ‘‘ You 
should have made a two and a three of it,’’ seems to 
have given me the clue to the new arrangement. His 
remark is a fairly exact expression of this arrangement, 
for the essence of the new plan was that it enabled me to 
utilise a two-bedded room and leave a three-bedded 
room free for immediate needs, in place of the older 
plan for which the dream-expression had no meaning. 

Though, as I have already indicated, the details of the 
dream-game represent more or less roughly the aims 
and results of the redistribution, the matter is not 
quite straightforward. The second stroke is com- 
paratively simple for, if the cup and saucer symbolised 
the disturbing patient, it had as its result the separation 
of this man from the two patients whom he was dis- 

turbing. This separation only took place, however, 
after the first stroke of the game had brought them 
together, and for this incident of the dream I can find no 
very satisfactory explanation. I was more or less 
responsible for these incongruous patients being to- 
gether, and it is possible that my responsibility in this 
matter was expressed by means of the first stroke. 

We are still left with the need to explain the most 
striking feature of the dream, viz., the symbolisation of 
a patient by means of a cup and saucer as a prominent 
element of a game of billiards. If the interpretation 
which I have given is correct, it must have been the 
disturbing patient who was thus symbolised, for the 
whole object of the rearrangement was to separate 
him from one of the other patients. We have to 
discover why this patient should have been repre- 
sented in this grotesque fashion. Though the chief 
reason for separating the patient from one of his com- 
panions was that he slept badly, only got to sleep late 
at night, and then was so noisy and restless that he 
disturbed the sleep of his companions, and especially 
the second James, he was also thoroughly incompatible 
with the other occupants of his room in interests. 
The disturbing patient was a man who seemed to be 
devoid of any of the qualifications usually regarded as 
those of an officer in the army. So far as one could 
see, he possessed neither the intellectual or social 
qualities nor the force of character which would fit 
him for the position. He seemed, indeed, as much 
out of place as an officer in the army as a cup and 
saucer is unfitted to serve as the object of a stroke at 
billiards. 

At the same time the social disqualification of 
this patient for his position helps to explain another 
difficulty. Though I had a certain amount of anxiety 
about this rearrangement, it was an anxiety of a wholly 
altruistic kind. I mistrust any interpretation of a 

dream which does not lead one back to a factor which 
definitely touches the self-interest of the dreamer and 
makes the conflict upon which the dream depends 
one which affects himself. If the problem with which 
we are dealing had been one which merely concerned 
the health and comfort of patients, I am doubtful © 
whether it would have formed the basis of a dream. 
Is it possible, then, that there were factors in this 
case which would have led to the presence of an egoistic 
aspect ? It was not difficult to find such an aspect, one 
directly referable to the personality and social position 
of the disturbing patient. As soon as I turned my 
attention to this aspect of the case, I was aware that 
I had been the subject of a definite conflict, owing 
to the doubt whether I was not being influenced in my 
decision to separate two patients by other than purely 
medical considerations. I believed that the health 
of one of the patients was being prejudiced by associa- 
tion with so bad a sleeper, but at the same time I could 
not help fearing that I might also be influenced by the 
social incompatibility of the two men, and was laying 
myself open, at any rate in my own mind, to the 
suspicion of favouritism. I believe that this motive, 
one directly connected with those qualities of the 
disturbing patient which makes his representation 
as a cup and saucer appropriate, introduced just 
that egoistic element which was necessary to make the 
interpretation complete. 

It is also of importance that my former plan was one 
which would have made it possible for the disturbing 
patient to suspect that separation from himself was 
the motive of the change, whereas the new plan for- 
mulated as the result of the dream was less open to 
this possibility. 

I have now finished the interpretation of the dream, 
but before I proceed to consider it in its theoretical 
bearings, I should like to say that I shall quite under- 

stand the scepticism if anyone hesitates to accept the 
interpretation. To my mind it is almost too good to 
be true and is one of those cases in which you are justi- 
fied in thinking that the case is so good that there 
must be something wrong with it. Though I cannot 
help sharing these doubts myself, I propose to accept 
the interpretation provisionally and as a basis for the 
discussion of certain theoretical problems. 

I will begin with one which so far we have not touched, 
viz., the function of the dream as a constructive agency. 
It is well known that novelists, of whom Stevenson is 
perhaps the most striking instance, have utilised 
dreams in the construction of their plots, and dreams 
have also taken a definite part in the production of 
poetry. The experience I have just recorded sug- 
gests that the dream may also be capable of solving 
or helping to solve such practical problems as are 
presented by the course of daily life and, though in 
fantastic form, may express conclusions better than 
those reached by the waking consciousness. In the 
case I have related it would appear that the dream- 
consciousness utilised a piece of information, viz., 
the setting free of a two-bedded room, the importance 
of which had not been grasped by the consciousness 
of the waking life. 

If my interpretation is correct, we have here a 
definite contribution to the evidence upon which it 
may some day be possible to formulate a scheme of 
the constructive function of the dream. I have shown 
reason to believe that this dream was the expression 
of a conflict between the necessities of certain patients 
and the fear of laying myself open to the charge of 
favouritism, and if this were so, the dream was not 
merely a solution of the conflict, but a successful solu- 
tion, a solution better than that which I had reached 
when awake. It is not necessary to modify our tenta- 
tive conclusion that the dream is the solution of a 

49 D 

conflict, but it is desirable to consider once again why 
the solution reached by the dream should find expres- 
sion in a fantastic or even grotesque form, which not 
only disguised its meaning from the sleeper, but made 
it far from easy to recognise this meaning even after 
waking. While it is possible to see why it may be at 
least serviceable that the meaning of a dream should be 
disguised when it is unpleasant, or reveals features of 
the sleeper’s mental make-up, of which he might be 
ashamed, it is difficult to see why there should also be 
disguise of such a constructive function as seems to 
have been present in the dream which I have related. 

If, however, I am right in my supposition that the 
protective function of the dream is a secondary feature 
and that the disguise of the dream is a necessary conse- 
quence of its infantile character, or at least of its 
character as an expression of the mentality of some 
period of life earlier than that of the occurrence of the 
dream, the difficulty disappears. The disguise of the 
practical and constructive value of the dream, though 
of no service, or rather of disservice to the dreamer, 
is a necessary consequence of the essential nature 
of the dream as the coming into being of an early 
form of mental functioning. The form in which the 
constructive function of the dream manifests itself 
only serves to support a conclusion reached by the 
study of dreams in which no such constructive function 
can be detected. 

Returning now to the inquiry how far the billiard 
dream serves to illustrate points already dealt with in 
Chapters I and II, we have already seen how it sup- 
ports the view that dreams are solutions of conflicts. 
In this case again the Freudian interpretation that the 
dream is a wish-fulfilment is too crude and simple a 
statement of the case. It might be possible to state 
the case as one in which the dream was the fulfilment 
of a wish to carry out a certain purpose without expos- 

ing myself to the charge of favouritism, but I believe 
it is a far more suitable view to regard the dream as the 
solution of a conflict, a conflict of a rather complex 
kind. Still more important is the problem why this 
conflict, which was of no especially unpleasant kind, 
should have found expression in the fantastic and 
grotesque imagery which formed so effectual a disguise. 
In my opinion it is quite unnecessary to have recourse 
to the concept of an agency watching at the threshold 
of consciousness which only allowed this conflict to 
reach consciousness in this disguised form. It is 
enough for me that the dream, being a regressive 
phenomenon, seized upon objects to which my attention 
had been drawn the evening before and chose them to 
form symbols of the person round whom the conflict 
centred, and of the setting in which the conflict was 
symbolically solved. The process of symbolisation 
illustrated in this dream is absolutely foreign to all 
my normal adult modes of mental functioning when 
awake, and I can only suppose that at one period of my 
life I was accustomed to think in such images. 

I can now turn to consider how far the dream I 
have just recorded illustrates the different processes 
by which the meaning of a dream finds expression in 
manifest form. It is not necessary to dwell on the 
value of this dream as an example of the processes of 
dramatisation and symbolisation, and I can pass at 
once to the feature of condensation. Here I must 
begin by referring to a feature of the dream and its 
interpretation which I have hitherto left on one side. I 
may remind you that the starting-point of the inter- 
pretation was the appearance, either in a second dream 
or as a hypnogogic hallucination, of the image of a 
patient who had the same name as a man who entered 
into a situation which seems to have formed the real 
central point of the dream. So far as I could tell, my 
anxiety about this patient was considerably greater 

than that involved in the problem concerning the re- 
arrangement of bedrooms, and the appearance of an 
image of this patient during the process of interpretation 
suggests that the anxiety about him may have helped 
in the determination of the dream, even though his case 
seems to have had nothing to do with the imagery of the 
dream itself. ¢ 

The combination of the sending of a reprint to Dr 
Craig and the view of Craig House may also be regarded 
as an example of condensation in determining the mani- 
fest content of the dream. 

So far as displacement is concerned, the dream seems 
to confirm the conclusion based on the dreams already 
considered. The whole process of interpretation points 
to a problem in which an incongruous patient was the 
central personage of the latent dream-thoughts and 
of his separation from his companions the essential 
object of these thoughts. On the other hand, the cup 
and saucer and their separation in the dream-game from 
the billiard balls were also the prominent features of 
the manifest dream. The dream gives no support 
whatever to the occurrence of displacement in Freud’s 
sense, vlz., aS a process in which elements prominent 
in the latent content become of subsidiary importance 
in the manifest dream. 

The appearance of the image of the first James during 
the process of interpretation would seem to be a far 
better example of displacement. This displacement, 
however, was not a feature of the original dream, but 
of an occurrence which was either a second dream or a 
hypnogogic hallucination which occurred in the course 
of the interpretation. The dream I just have related 
agrees with those already considered in showing that 
symbolisation plays a far more active part in effecting 
disguise than the process of displacement, or at any 
rate that kind of displacement upon which Freud lays 
especial stress.

THERE can be no doubt that the conditions under 
which dreams are recorded and analysed have a great 
influence upon the results obtained in the analysis. 
Thus, the doctrines concerning dreams held by Freud, 
Jung and psycho-analysts generally are greatly affected 
by the fact that most of the dreams they analyse and 
make the basis of their theoretical views are obtained 
in the course of psycho-analysis, 7.e. in the course of 
a long-continued process of a complex and peculiar 
kind in which there is a special relation, again of a 
peculiar kind, between the person whose dreams are 
being analysed and the person who is performing the 
analysis. Freud has even shown reason to believe + 
that some of the dreams of his patients have been the 
outcome of a wish on their part that the views on which 
their treatment is being based should be shown to be 
wrong. If factors, such as resistance to the views of 
the analyst, which enter into the process of psycho- 
analysis can have an effect of this crude kind, we can 
be confident that influences of a far more subtle kind, 
influences less easily detected, must be continually in 
action, and that, on the whole, the influence of psycho- 
analysis will be to produce dreams which will tend to 
confirm the views of those conducting the analysis. We 

* This chapter was read at a General Meeting of the British 
Psychological Society on 23rd July 1921, and published in The 
British Journal of Psychology (Medical Section), Vol. II, Part 2, 
January 1922, the Editor of which has kindly consented to its 
reproduction here. 

t+ Die Traumdeutung, 5te Auflage, Leipzig and Wien, IgI9, pages 
104 and 106 (Brill’s translation, page 127). 

oo 

can have little doubt, for instance, that an analyser 
who believes, or who is generally supposed to believe, 
that all psycho-neuroses, if not all dreams, are due to 
disturbance of the sexual instinct will through this 
belief, or supposed belief, influence the dreams of his 
patients and, if he is known to hold this belief, he will 
produce this effect even if he is careful not to refer to 
sex in any way in the course of his analysis. It is 
therefore by no means strange that such a physician as 
Stekel, who believes that the context of nearly all 
dreams is sexual * and evidently discusses this belief 
with his patients, should find sexual motives so pro- 
minent in their dreams. We can also be confident that 
one who is believed by his patients, or his prospective 
patients, to hold this belief will have a similar effect 
even if he says or does nothing wittingly during the 
analysis to confirm the belief. At the same time the 
converse must be true. There is the similar danger that 
analyses of dreams which take place under the dominant 
influence of one who disbelieves, or is supposed to dis- 
believe, in the influence of sex will tend to give results 
in accordance with this attitude, or supposed attitude, 
of the analyser. 

Again, if wishes concerning the truth or falsity of a 
theory can have the effect on the dreams of patients 
which Freud supposes, how far-reaching must be the 
effects which such wishes must have upon the dreams 
of one who has formulated a theory or has adopted 
with fervour the theory of another. The self-analysis 
of dreams must be exposed in equal or even greater 
measure to the possibility of influences tending to 
produce dreams which support, or can be utilised in 
support of, the theory which is dominating the dreamer. 

Equally important must be the conditions under 
which dreams are analysed after they have occurred. 
It must make a great difference whether the dream is 

* Die Sprache des Traumes, Wiesbaden, 1911, page 13. 

analysed at once or after an interval of hours or days ; 
whether the analysis is carried out by the dreamer 
himself or by another; whether the incidents of the 
dream are remembered and recorded before the analysis 
begins or whether they are only brought to light in 
the course of the analysis; whether the associations 
with the dream are left wholly open, whether they start 
from different selected elements of the manifest content, 
and whether they are assisted by some special process 
of word-association. Lastly, and perhaps most im- 
portant of all, it must make a great difference in the 
case of analysis by other than the dreamer to how 
great an extent the analyser intervenes in the process 
of analysis and tends, perhaps even unwittingly, to 
direct the course of the thoughts to which the analysis 
leads. 

If dream-analysis is exposed to all these sources of 
error, and we may take it as certain that their influence 
cannot be excluded, it becomes of the utmost im- 
portance that one who utilises dreams in the study of 
psychological problems should make it his business 
to record as fully as possible the conditions under 
which the dreams he studies have been experienced, 
recorded and analysed. It becomes equally important 
that those engaged in the study of dreams should con- 
sider fully different methods of record and analysis and 
should seek to discover procedures which will at least 
reduce to as small proportions as possible the various 
sources of error to which dream-analysis is open. 

As I am at present engaged in such an attempt to 
utilise an extensive record both of my own dreams and 
of the dreams of others, I propose to employ this oppor- 
tunity in giving an account of my own procedure 
together with a criticism of the procedure now in vogue 
among psycho-analysts as a means of producing 
criticism of my own procedure and counter-criticism 
of my remarks on the procedure of others. 

In describing my own procedure it is necessary to 
begin with a feature of my own general psychological 
experience which has an important bearing on my 
method of analysing dreams. 

For many years I have been the habitual subject of - 
an experience in which, as soon as I become aware that 
I am awake, I find that I am thinking, and have for 
some time been thinking, over some problem, usually 
in connection with the scientific work upon which 
I am at the time engaged. Many of the scientific 
ideas which I value most, as well as the language in 
which they are expressed, have come to me in this 
half-sleeping, half-waking state directly continuous 
with definite sleep. When I began to analyse my 
dreams I frequently had a similar experience in which 
as soon as I was awake I found that I was already 
having, and had for some time been having, thoughts 
about a dream, the dream itself being still clearly 
inmy mind. In some cases it was difficult to say where 
the dream ended and the unwitting analysis had begun, 
but a distinction was usually possible owing to my lack 
of imagery when awake.* I could be confident that so 
long as the experience was accompanied by definite 
imagery it was that of a dream or of a dream-like state, 
while the period when imagery was absent was one in 
which I was no longer dreaming, though I had not 
yet realised that I was awake. 

This peculiarity of my experience of the process of 
awaking introduces a special feature into the records 
and analyses of my own dreams. There can be little 
question that the ideal condition for an irreproachable 
analysis of a dream is one in which the dream is fully 
recorded before the analysis begins. In this case all 
danger is avoided that elements derived from, or 
suggested by, the analysis may be incorporated into the 
tissue of the dream. In many cases in which I awoke 

* See Instinct and the Unconscious, Cambridge, 1920, page II. 

from a dream more or less suddenly I was able to fulfil 
this ideal condition, but in the frequent cases in which 
the dream passed insensibly into the half-waking, half- 
sleeping and unwitting process of analysis, the danger 
to which I have referred cannot be excluded. The 
comparison of dreams so analysed, or partially so 
analysed, with those where the act of awaking was 
sudden shows, however, that there is little or no 
difference between them, and I am inclined to regard 
my unwitting or partially unwitting method of analysis 
as one especially likely to lead one to the real thoughts 
and emotions forming the latent content of the dream. 

In other cases, after having fully awaked and re- 
corded the dream, I would fall into the half-waking, 
half-sleeping state, and not infrequently it was in this 
state that the thoughts came which furnished the ex- 
planation of the dream. In more than one case this 
later period of sleepiness passed into one which must 
be regarded as sleep, for the clue to the nature of the 
dream came as a definite image. In these cases we 
may regard the interpretation of a dream as having 
been furnished by a second dream even though, as 
matter of fact, this second dream may have consisted 
only of a single image. 

Where the solution of the dream failed to come in 
this more or less spontaneous way, I adopted the more 
usual procedure of turning my attention to different 
elements of the manifest content, allowing any associa- 
tions so aroused to pass through my mind. I also 
searched the experience of the day or two before the 
dream which could have taken part in determining 
the nature of the manifest content and in some cases 
found that the experience which had determined the 
manifest content was of distinct service in the process 
of finding the deeper meaning of the dream. When I 
had reached what seemed to me to be the interpreta- 
tion of the dream I wrote out the analysis as fully as 

possible and except in a few cases, the exceptions being 
definitely noted in my records, the complete analysis of 
the dream had been made and recorded before break- 
fast on the morning immediately following the dream. 

When features of the dream come to mind during > 
the process of analysis I am accustomed to indicate 
their late coming to mind by enclosing them in brackets, 
and similarly when elements are added to the analysis 
after it has been first written out, this is indicated in 
a similar manner. 

So far as I am aware, we have few records of the 
methods adopted when dreams have been analysed by 
the dreamers themselves, but so far as can be judged 
from chance remarks, the method appears in general to 
be similar to that by which it is customary, and usually 
necessary, to analyse the dreams of others. At some 
period of the day following the dream, the dreamer 
takes different elements of the manifest content and 
allows his thoughts to rove freely from these starting- 
points and notes the images and ideas which come into 
his mind. In other words he imitates as closely as 
possible the method of free association which it is 
customary to employ when analysing the dreams of 
others. We are not told whether the dream is written 
out before the analysis begins and any further additions 
clearly distinguished from those already recorded, 
though it is occasionally mentioned that a feature of 
the dream only came to mind during the process of 
analysis. This point is of great importance in relation 
to the category of secondary elaboration of which so 
much use is made by Freud in his theoretical discussions 
of the dream. 

I can now pass to the methods which I have adopted 
in analysing the dreams of others I have rarely 
adopted the usual psycho-analytic procedure in which 
the patient is made to lie down in the presence of the 
analyser and started by him upon the process of free 

association, for I believe that in the majority of persons 
a state of a hypnoidal kind is thus set up which greatly 
assists the occurrence of a process of morbid trans- 
ference. In some cases where I was already well 
acquainted with the special desires and anxieties of the 
dreamer the main lines of analysis were already clear 
as soon as the dream had been related. In such cases 
I endeavoured by means of guarded inquiries, carefully 
avoiding leading questions, to ascertain whether this 
interpretation was justified, and frequently these 
conversations led me to discover new wishes and 
anxieties or modifications of those with which I was 
already acquainted, 

In other cases in which the dreamer has adopted a 
procedure on waking, similar to that followed by 
myself, I have obtained valuable clues to the meaning 
of a dream. My method in these cases has been to 
instruct the patient as far as possible in my own pro- 
cedure and to make the analysis a matter in which 
the patient and I are partners. 

Before proceeding further I may say that in the 
majority of cases this process of analysis has led me to 
wishes, anxieties and conflicts arising out of recent 
experience which have served to explain, not only the 
general features of the dream, but alsoits details. I am 
ready to acknowledge that a deeper and longer analysis 
would in many cases have led to earlier and deeper 
experience, while there can, in my opinion, be no doubt 
that when the experience of early years has been 
brought to the surface, or is in course of being brought 
to the surface during an analysis, desires and conflicts 
arising out of this experience contribute to the full inter- 
pretation of the dream. It seems to me, however, 
necessary that we should distinguish carefully between 
certain differences in the subject-matter of dreams 
which are often confused. 

In dealing with this subject I will begin by con- 

sidering how far the material reached by the customary 
process of free association can legitimately be held to 
have taken a necessary part in the causation of the 
dream. The assumption which underlies the whole 
construction of Freudian dream-analysis is that the 
process of free association, starting from an element of 
the manifest content of a dream, will lead to the dis- 
covery of experience which enters into the chain of 
causation by which the dream has been produced. 

I am quite ready to acknowledge that this process 
leads the analyst to experience which enables him to 
understand the state, morbid or otherwise, of the person 
who is being analysed, and since in many cases this 
state may have taken part in determining the nature 
of the dream, the process will, in these cases, give valu- 
able indications of the conditions by which the dream 
has been produced. It is, however, a purely arbitrary 
assumption to suppose that every element of experience 
to which one is led by the process of free association 
has had a share in the production of the dream except 
in the very broad sense that behaviour at any moment, 
waking or sleeping, is determined by the sum total 
of the experience of the behaver, Every feature of 
experience to which one is led by the process of free 
association may have contributed to the causation 
of the dream, but it is a pure assumption, and one 
which needs far firmer foundations than have been 
provided by the psycho-analysts, that the experience 
to which free association leads has the importance 
universally attached to it by the psycho-analytic 
school. 

Except for the practical reason already mentioned, 
I have no fault to find with the process of free associa- 
tion as an instrument of diagnosis and treatment, or 
as a means of contributing to the better understanding 
of the mind or behaviour of the person whose dreams 
are being analysed, but I need far more evidence than 

we possess at present to satisfy me that the process 
of free association starting from an incident of a dream 
necessarily leads one to experience which has taken 
any direct part in the causation of the dream, and 
these doubts become all the stronger, the greater the 
interval between the dream and the analysis. 

I am ready to acknowledge that the special condi- 
tions under which dreams .are utilised by psycho- 
analysts should lead to some degree, and perhaps to a 
considerable degree, of relation between the elements of 
a dream and experience to which one is led by the 
process of free association starting from those elements. 
When the practice of psycho-analysis is in progress 
from day to day, it is only natural that elements which 
enter into the causation of dreams should also enter 
into the chains of association which emerge when an 
element of a dream is taken as a starting-point. I 
wish to make clear that I am not objecting to the use 
of associations starting from an incident of a dream as 
a process of diagnostic value, while I concede that the 
special conditions under which dreams are usually 
analysed by psycho-analysts will probably lead to 
the presence of a relation, if not a directly causal rela- 
tion, between an incident of a dream and experience to 
which the dreamer, starting from that incident, is led 
by free association.* My point is one of scientific 
rather than of practical method. I am objecting to 
the view that experience reached by free association 
starting from an incident of a dream has any neces- 
sary connection with the dream, and I believe that the 
chance of any such connection is especially slight 
where only a single dream is analysed, or where the 
interpretation of a dream does not form part of a long- 
continued process of psycho-analysis. 

The criticism which I am now making of the cus- 

* In this case the time-interval between dream and analysis will 
be of no great importance. 

_ tomary psycho-analytic method of dream-analysis has 
been foreseen and answered by Freud,* but the answer 
seems to me far from satisfactory. It reveals a failure 
to appreciate the difference between the value of free . 
association as a method of psycho-analysis, 7.e. as 
a method of practical diagnosis, and its value as an 
instrument in the scientific study of the dream. Freud 
answers the objection I am now making by referring to 
the congruity of the results reached by the method and 
their agreement with the results of the treatment of 
hysterical symptoms, in which case he regards the 
disappearance of these symptoms as evidence for the 
correctness of the procedure. He then launches out 
into a defence of his method against a charge, very 
different from mine, that the chain of association is 
arbitrary and not strictly determined, and he repels 
the concept of a chain of thought without a definite 
end. He assumes that in the process of dream-analysis, 
this end is necessarily that which has determined the 
nature and course of the dream. 

I have already mentioned one factor which is present 
whenever the dream of one person is analysed by an- 
other. In this case a person takes a part in determining 
the chain of associations who was not necessarily influ- 
ential in determining the course of the dream. In 
this case I am very far from denying that the process 
of free association is strictly determined. I am only 
being more thorough in my belief in determinism in 
that I am including the activity of the analyser, 
whether witting or unwitting, in the process of deter- 
mination. 

Even when the dream is analysed by the dreamer 
himself, in which case this extraneous element in the 
process of determination has been excluded, it is 

* Die Traumdeutung, 5te Auflage, Leipzig and Wien, 1919, page 
393 (Brill’s translation, page 418); also Vovlesungen zur Einfuhrung 
in die Psychoanalyse, Leipzig and Wien, 1916, page 108. 

wholly unjustifiable to conclude that thoughts reached 
by the process of free association have necessarily 
taken a part in determining the dream. It is necessary 
here to distinguish between two cases, that in which 
the associations are formed in the fully waking state and 
that in which they occur in the half-waking or hypnoidal 
state. In the former case it is evident that factors 
will be present during the process of association which 
were not present in the determination of the dream, 
and these additional factors will probably be the more 
numerous and more influential, the greater the interval 
between the occurrence of the dream and the time of 
its analysis. If, on the other hand, self-analysis 
takes place in the half-waking or hypnoidal state, it 
becomes far more probable that there will be a relation 
between the thoughts reached by the process of associa- 
tion and those which have determined the dream, but 
even here we cannot be absolutely confident that the 
associations will retrace exactly the path which they 
had previously followed when, according to hypothesis, 
they were determining the dream. If a period of 
wakefulness and witting reflection has been allowed to 
intervene between th: dream and the process of analysis, 
no believer in strict determinism can arbitrarily reject 
this period as having played no part in the process 
by which the later associations have been determined, 
and the chance that this period has had an effect is 
the greater, the less free the process of analysis is left 
and the more the self-analyser adopts the artificial 
method of directing his thoughts to different elements of 
the manifest dream. The objection I bring against 

( Freud’s method of dream-analysis by free association 

is that it neglects factors which must be acknowledged 

to play a part if the doctrine of determinism is to hold 

good. The thoughts associated with a dream are the 

more likely to lead back to those by which the dream 

was determined, the more influences of other kinds can 

be excluded and the less the degree in which witting 
processes are allowed to intervene. It is for that reason 
that I believe the orthodox psycho-analytic method to 

be unsatisfactory and the method by which I have. 

analysed my own dreams to be that best fitted to bring 
out the nature of the latent content. I have already 
mentioned that this method may fail to reach a solu- 
tion and that in such case success may nevertheless 
be attained by the use of the method of free association 
starting from incidents of the dream. Moreover, 
analysis by another person may succeed where self- 
analysis has failed. I do not regard my own method 
as infallible or of universal application, but as one 
which is free from certain sources of error which must 
accompany the application of the orthodox psycho- 

analytic procedure. The assumption upon which my. 
method depends is that the latent thoughts which have. \ 

determined the nature of a dream during sleep continue 
to be active on awaking, especially when this waking 

is only partial, and that the period between sleeping / 
and waking provides the fittest opportunity for the | 

discovery of these thoughts. 

\

In the second chapter I pointed out that the dreams 
which I had chosen to introduce the subject differed 
greatly in their affective character, my own manifest 
dream being apparently devoid of any affect, while the 
dreams of my patient were of so unpleasant a kind that 
he described one as the most terrible he had ever known 
and vomited on waking from the other. I propose now 
to consider the relation of affect to the dream more 
fully, and will begin with Freud’s view concerning this 
relation. According to Freud one character of the 
dream is that its manifest content is as a rule poorer 
in affect than the dream-thoughts. Where there is 
an affect in the manifest dream it will also be found 
in the latent content, but the converse is not true. 
There may be no appreciable affective disturbance in 
the manifest dream when the presence of affect in the 
deeper content is evident. In other words, one of 
the results of the transformation of the latent into 
the manifest content of the dream is not only to dis- 
guise the nature of the dream-thoughts from the 
sleeper, but also to lessen or inhibit its affective char- 
acter ; and just as Freud ascribes the fact of disguise to 
the censorship, so does he ascribe to this agency the 
lessening or inhibition of affect. I will begin by 
saying that my own experience definitely confirms 
Freud’s statement that affect may be absent or at 

* This chapter was published in the British Journal of Psychology 

(General Section), Vol. XII, Part 2, in October 1921, and is repro- 
duced here with the permission of the Editor. 

65 E 

least inappreciable in the manifest dream when it is 
evidently present in the deeper dream-thoughts of which 
the manifest dream is the transformed expression. 
This is a definite fact which has to be explained by any 
theory which endeavours to account for the relation 
of the dream to the affective aspect of experience. 
I propose, however, to begin the consideration of 
this subject by dealing with a variety of the dream in 
which affect is not merely present in the manifest 
content, but is present in an extreme degree. In the 
nightmare there is painful affect of the most intense 
kind, and any theory of the dream must take account 
of this character. This variety of dream, in the form 
of so-called night-terror, is especially liable to occur 
in childhood, but examples of one kind or another 
often occur in adult life, especially under abnormal 
circumstances. Everyone who had to do with war- 
neurosis became very familiar with this form of dream 
as a characteristic example of the nightmare. 

The nightmare of war-neurosis generally occurred at 
first as a faithful reproduction of some scene of warfare, 
usually some experience of a particularly horrible kind 
or some dangerous event, such as a crash from an 
aeroplane. A characteristic feature of this variety of 
dream is that it is accompanied by an affect of a 
peculiarly intense kind, often with a special quality 
described as different from any known in waking life. 
The dream ends suddenly by the patient waking in a 
state of acute terror directly continuous with the terror 
of the dream and with all the physical accompaniments 
of extreme fear, such as profuse sweating, shaking, and 
violent beating of the heart. Often the dream recurs 
in exactly the same form night after night, and even 
several times in one night, and a sufferer will often keep 
himself from sleeping again after one experience ie 
dread of its repetition. 

Two of these features are of special interest in relation 

to the place of affect in the dream. One is that the 
affective disturbance is extreme in amount ; the other, 
that the dream is often the repetition of an actual ex- 
perience without transformation of any kind. There 
is absolutely nothing of the grotesque or fantastic, 
but the dream follows the grim reality faithfully. 
Moreover, it is often in my experience one of the first 
signs of improvement that some amount of transforma- 
tion appears; the events of the actual experience are 
replaced in the dream by incidents of other kinds, such 
as the appearance of terrifying animals, which stand 
in no direct relation to the actual war-experience of 
the dreamer. Though in these cases the dream con- 
tinues to be accompanied by fear, this is less intense and 
accompanied by less severe physical manifestations, and 
in many cases this transformed character serves as a 
stage towards the disappearance of the “ nightmare ”’ 
character of the dreams. The course of many of these 
cases suggests that there is a definite relation between 
the amount of transformation and the intensity of the 
affect. They suggest that the intensity of affect is 
inversely proportional to the amount of transforma- 
tion, a suggestion in harmony with the view of Freud 
that one of the results of the transformation of the 
latent into the manifest content of the dream is to 
lessen or inhibit its affective character. 

When, however, we examine these dreams more 
closely we find that they show features which can hardly 
be reconciled with the general Freudian position. Above 
all is the difficulty of reconciliation with the view that 
every dream is a wish-fulfilment. It is difficult to see 
how such awful and terrifying experiences as those 
of dreams of this kind can be the result of wishes of the 
dreamer. Even if there were no other facts to lead 
us to regard Freud’s view that the dream is a wish- 
fulfilment as unduly simple, and in my opinion there 
are many such facts, the nightmare and the battle- 

dream would themselves be sufficient to lead us to 
revise the Freudian view. In its place Iam accustomed 
to look upon the dream as the attempted solution of a 
conflict, an attempt to solve a conflict of the waking 
life by such means as still remain open when the higher 
levels of mental activity have been put out of action 
by the inhibition of sleep. 

Following this line of thought let us inquire how far 
the nightmare and the battle-dream are capable of 
explanation as infantile attempts to solve a conflict. 
In considering this matter I will begin with a feature 
of dreams of this kind which I have not so far mentioned. 

In most, if not all, battle-dreams it is found that 
in the waking state the dreamer has been striving 
to keep out of his consciousness the experience which 
is reproduced in the dream. He has been repressing 
this experience. It has been found over and over 
again that when this process of repression is given up, 
the dreams no longer occur, or, if they continue, lose 
their terrifying character. A large body of evidence 
accumulated during the later years of the war shows 
that these terrifying dreams are due to repression of 
the experience which forms the content of the dream. 
So far as desire enters into causation, the dream is the 
direct negation of a wish, the wish not to be subjected to 
the repetition of a painful experience, the wish leading 
to a process of repression in the waking life which in 
its turn produces the dream in sleep. 

Taking the process as a whole it seems to have the 
following character: One who has dreams of this kind 
has been the subject of a painful experience which tends 
to obtrude itself upon his attention, a tendency which 
is counteracted by a process of repression, a process of 
keeping the experience out of attention whenever it 
tends to appear. The conflict is one between a process 
in which an experience tends to recur to memory and 
a desire that the experience shall not recur. So long 

as the subject of this conflict is awake, the process of 
repression has the upper hand, but as soon as sleep 
occurs and the process of witting repression is removed, 
the repressed experience meets with no obstacle and 
makes its presence felt with full force. From this 
point of view the dream, instead of being the fulfilment 
of a wish, conscious or unconscious, is the complete 
failure of a wish which is only effectual so long as the 
subject of the experience remains awake. The experi- 
ence of the nightmare not only fails wholly to fit 
into the category of wish-fulfilment ; it suggests that 
this form of dream is essentially an expression of the 
complete negation of a wish. 

If now we turn to consider how far a dream of this 
kind can be regarded as the solution of a conflict, we 
find that a conflict is undoubtedly present, viz., a 
conflict between the tendency of an experience to recur 
and the wish that it shall not do so. But if the dream 
is regarded as a solution of this conflict, it is a solution 
of a quite unsuccessful kind, so far as the health and 
happiness of the dreamer is concerned. From this 
point of view a dream of this kind must be regarded as 
a failure of solution, and, if I am right in my view 
concerning the dependence of this form of dream upon 
repression, a failure directly due to a wrong method of 
meeting the situation. The whole process belongs to a 
category of a kind very different from that in which 
we place dreams of the more usual kind. 

In the case, on the other hand, in which the dream 
begins to show a certain amount of transformation 
with the accompaniment of less intense affect, we find 
ourselves in the presence of a process of the same 
order as that with which we are acquainted in dreams 
of the customary kind. It is only when the process of 
transformation begins that it becomes at all possible 
to consider the nightmare as the solution of a conflict, 
and since in this case the chief result at first is to 

lessen the intensity of the painful affect, it can only 
be regarded as a solution of an imperfect kind, the 
effect of the transformation being to lessen to some 
extent the painfulness of an experience which the 
dreamer wishes to keep altogether out of his conscious- 
ness. If we include the nightmare in the dream- 
category, it becomes no longer possible simply to regard 
the dream as the solution of a conflict, though it may 
still be possible to look upon it as an attempted solution. 
It is to the process of transformation that we must 
look as the instrument whereby the dream-consciousness 
reaches a symbolic solution of a conflict which is present 
both in the sleeping and the waking mind. 

The nightmare, especially in the pure form taken 
by the battle-dream, has such special characters that it 
might perhaps seem desirable to exclude it from the 
category of dreams and put it in a class by itself. 
If, however, such a suggestion were seriously enter- 
tained, it would be necessary to point out that the same 
need arises in the case of dreams of a very different 
kind. There is a large class of dreams, that with a 
manifest sexual content, in which there may be little 
or no transformation and the affective accompaniment 
is of a pleasant kind. Moreover, the affect may be 
present in an intense degree and accompanied by 
physical manifestations just as appropriate to the 
content as sweating and tremor are appropriate to the 
dream dependent on fear. Another point of similarity 
between the two kinds of dream is that the manifest 
sexual dream is almost certainly connected with 
repression and can be lessened in frequency and inten- 
sity, or altogether inhibited, if the repression ceases. 
Here, again, there is reason to believe that when trans- 
formation occurs in this class of dream, it is associated 
with a 'essening or disappearance of affect. If the 
absence of transformation is to exclude from the 
dream-category, the process of exclusion will have to 

7O 

go far beyond the nightmare and will apply to frequent 
experiences of sleep which are universally recognised 
as dreams. 

The study of the nightmare with its excess of affective 
disturbance has thus far led us to connect affect with 
the degree of transformation and to regard lessening 
or total inhibition of affect as a function of the process 
of transformation rather than of the dream process in 
general. Moreover, we are led to regard the night- 
mare as a phenomenon of sleep i in which the affective 
disturbance is of an extremely painful kind because 
the dream is the expression of complete failure in a 
conflict; a-conflict between the tendency for a painful 
experience to recur and an intense desire that it shall 
not do so. We are tempted to connect the extremely 
painful character of the affective disturbance with the 
complete failure of the dream as the solution of a 
conflict. It is suggested that whether a dream is 
accompanied by a painful affect, or has an indifferent 
character from the affective aspect, depends on the 
degree of success in the solution of the conflict which 
is finding expression. The general view is suggested 
that where a conflict is solved in a dream in a symbolic 
manner there is no affect. 

Thus, in the two dreams of my own, we must suppose 
that there was no appreciable affect, because these 
dreams were satisfactory solutions of the conflicts 
upon which they depended. In the Presidency dream 
(Chapter I) the solution was a compromise between 
conflicting desires which satisfied both parties to the 
conflict, while the ‘‘ cup and saucer’”’ dream (Chapter 
III) was even more satisfactory in that it furnished, 
though in symbolic guise, a solution even more satis- 
fying than that previously reached by the waking 
consciousness. But where the solution is completely 
unsuccessful there is affect of a highly painful kind ; 
and that different degrees of painfulness of the affect 

depend on different degrees in which the dream forms 
a successful solution. 

According to this point of view a dream is accom- 
panied by a painful affect because it fails to provide a 
solution of the conflict upon which the dream depends, ' 
and when there is transformation in the dream the 
degree of painfulness of the accompanying affect is 
correlated with the extent to which the dream provides 
a solution of this conflict. I have considered the typical 
battle-dream as an example of the case in which there 
is a complete failure of solution, and it remains to 
give examples of cases in which, though the dream is 
accompanied by transformation, this fails to provide a 
solution of the conflict upon which the dream depends. 

One such example is the highly painful dream of a 
patient reported in Chapter II, which was found to 
arise out of a situation of a very difficult and unpleasant 
kind. In the final incident the dreamer was about 
to shoot a dream-personage, who was certainly a surro- 
gate of himself, when he was stopped by the voice of his 
child saying : ‘‘ Don’t do it, daddy, you'll hurt me too.”’ 
The dreamer was at the time involved in a very severe 
conflict between a desire on the one hand for suicide and 
for the peace which that act would bring, and on the 
other, motives ofa social kind which acted in the 
opposite direction, prominent.among these being 
the knowledge that every suicide inflicts a social 
stigma upon those he-leaves-behind him. The dream 
ended with the victory.of these lattermotives..as 
expressed in the voice of his son, and the consequent 
frustration of the wish for the solution of the conflict 
which would bring rest and_ peace. 

‘In the other dream of the same patient, the “ trans- 
ference dream ”’ of Chapter II, which was so unpleasant 
that he awoke vomiting, the dream ended by his 
turning away into a wilderness from a river which was 
shown by the analysis to symbolise myself. The 

dream expressed a conflict between his tendency to 
undue reliance upon my help and his desire to stand 
on his own feet, and the ending of the dream expressed 
a frustration of his wish to continue to rely on me for 
help and comfort. The dream had its source in a 
situation arising out of the process of “ transference ”’ 
in the course of psycho-therapy. 

Both these dreams support the conclusion reached by 
the study of the battle-dream that the affective accom- 
paniment of the dream is determined by the degree 
in which the dream reaches a satisfactory solution of the 
conflict upon which it depends. The extreme affect of 
the nightmare, according to this view, will be the 
result of the complete failure to effect a solution, while 
the highly painful character of the two dreams of my 
patient was due to the dream-consciousness having 
reached a solution contrary to the desires most pro- 
minent and most potent in the sleeper’s consciousness 
when awake. 

Having reached this solution of our problem, I can 
now consider another aspect of the dream so far as 
its affective nature is concerned. According to the 
view here put forward, dreams are not only regarded 
as solutions of conflicts, but as solutions of a kind 
differing from those adopted in healthy waking life in 
that the solution has an infantile character,* or at least 
a character belonging to a period of life earlier than 
that of the occurrence of the dream. Let us now 
inquire how far this infantile character is true of the 
nightmare, again taking the war-dream as our instance. 
The first point to notice is that under the ordinary 
circumstances of our modern civilised life, dreams of 
this character are exceptional in the adult. It is in 
childhood that they are best known, forming the basis 
of the night-terrors from which so many children suffer. 
When they occur in the adult, they may be regarded as 

* See Instinct and the Unconscious, page 230. 

examples of regression to a state characteristic of 
childhood. 

A feature of the war-dream, and of other adult 
nightmares, is the exaggerated character of the fear 
experienced, this exaggeration being again a character 
of infancy and childhood. There is little doubt that 
infancy and childhood form a period of life in which the 
human being is liable to affective disturbances of a 
very intense kind with the crude explosive nature which 
is characteristic of the affect of the nightmare or 
war-dream. 

Still another feature of the war-dream, and probably 
also of the adult nightmare in general, is of special 
significance. The affective disturbance is described 
as having a peculiar quality unlike any experience of © 
adult waking life, or only paralleled by the gusts of un- 
reasoning terror which are also liable occasionally to 
overwhelm sufferers from certain forms of psycho- 
neurosis. It is not, of course, possible to say that this 
quality which seems so peculiar and strange to the adult 
is a regression to a quality of the fears of childhood, but 
this is at least possible. 

I suggest, therefore, that the nightmare and the war- 
dream are themselves examples of infantile states, 
that they are occurrences of the sleep of adults which 
appear in a form characteristic of infancy. 

If now we pass to the stage of the war-dream in which 
transformation appears, one of the most frequent 
forms in which this transformation shows itself in my 
experience is that terrifying animals take the place of 
the incidents of warfare which have hitherto formed the 
exclusive content of the dream. There is little question 
that animals are prominent in the terrifying dreams of 
childhood, and their occurrence in the transformed 
war-dream may thus be regarded as another example 
of regression. Some of my patients remembered having 
had similar dreams in childhood, while in one case in 

which the terrifying image was a Chinaman, the 
dreamer distinctly recollected its occurrence in the 
dreams of his childhood. The images utilised in these 
examples of transformation were characteristic of an 
early period of life. 

The examination of the nightmare and war-dream 
thus shows that they possess, though in a different way, 
a character which I have ascribed to dreams of the 
more ordinary kind. The nightmare and the war- 
dream share with dreams of other kinds the feature 
that they are occurrences in which experience finds 
expression in sleep in a form characteristic of infancy 
~ or of periods of life earlier than that of the occurrence of 
\ the dream. While it is not possible to regard all dreams 

‘either as wish-fulfilments or as successful solutions of 
conflicts, it is possible to bring them all into the cate- 
gory of regression, of throwing back in sleep to modes 
of mental activity and expression characteristic of 
earlier periods of life. 

While the pure battle-dream thus differs from the 
general run of dreams in respect of transformation, 
it falls into line with the rest with regard to the infantile 
form in which the affect finds expression. The in- 
fantile character gives a broader basis for classification 
than is afforded by the process of transformation. This 
being so, let us inquire how far this infantile character 
is capable of explaining, or at least of illustrating, the 
relation of the affect to the dream. 

I will begin with cases in which affect is absent. 
In my own “ cup and saucer ”’ dream the situation was 
ridiculous to anyone with the most elementary know- 
ledge of billiards, and if there had been affect or affective 
expression corresponding with the manifest content of 
the dream, we should have expected it to have taken 
the form of amusement and laughter, both of which 
were certainly absent. If, however, the dream, as I 
have supposed, depended on the employment of a 

childish use of metaphor applied in a game with which 
the child was not familiar, there would be no special 
place for amusement or laughter. I acknowledge, 
however, that this dream is not well suited for the . 
illustration of my point of view. For this purpose I 
shall use a dream which Freud has cited * in order to 
illustrate this topic. It is of a very unpleasant kind 
but peculiarly instructive for the light it throws on 
the problem before us. In this dream Freud cleansed 
the seat of a closet loaded with excrement by the 
same means as that adopted by Gulliver in order to 
put out the fire of the Lilliputian palace. In the dream 
Freud was wholly free from the disgust which such a 
scene would have aroused if it had been a real incident 
of his waking life, and he uses this dream to illustrate 
the absence of affect in the manifest dream when this 
is present in the deeper content. In a very interesting 
and instructive analysis of this dream Freud shows that 
it was the expression of a desire to be clear of un- 
pleasant aspects of his professional work, and was a 
symbolic expression of a wish to clean out the Augean 
stables with which in a fit of despondency he tended to 
compare these surroundings. On the other hand, his 
own role as the Hercules of the occasion seemed to 
Freud to correspond with certain grandiose traits he 
detected in his own attitude towards the situation. 
Freud refers the absence of disgust in the dream to 
the fact revealed by his analysis that the thoughts of 
cleansing an Augean stable were combined with others 
of a pleasant kind referring to his own powers as a 
cleanser. The indifferent character of the dream in its 
affective aspect is referred to the combination of the 
two opposed kinds of affect present in the dream- 

thoughts. 
On the view that the dream is an expression of infan- 

* Die Traumdeutung, 5te Auflage, 1919, page 318; The Interpreta- 
tion of Dreams, 1916, page 372. 

tile modes of mental activity, another and a simpler 
explanation of the absence of disgust becomes possible. 
From this point of view Freud’s dream is an expression 
of a conflict between his desire to get away from certain 
disgusting aspects of his professional work and the 
desire for the beauties and pleasures of a holiday. The 
dream produces a symbolic solution of the conflict by 
getting rid of the disgusting aspects of his work by 
means of a procedure which would make a direct 
appeal to the mind of a child and is in consonance 
with a child’s modes of activity. The absence of 
disgust in the dream seems to receive an explanation 
more natural and at the same time more simple than 
that given by Freud if in his dream he had for the 
time regressed to an infantile attitude and was seeking 
to purify his surroundings symbolically by a procedure 
characteristic of childhood. In the child such a pro- 
cedure would not arouse the emotion of disgust and 
therefore no such emotion was aroused in the dream. 
The indifferent affective character of this dream 
becomes natural and needs no elaborate explanation 
if the dream be an infantile mode of expression of a 
wish-fulfilment or the solution of a conflict. 

This dream of Freud’s is one in which the absence 
of affect in a situation where it might be expected 
to occur 1s readily accounted for on the view that the 
dream has an infantile character. Let us now turn 
to examples of dreams accompanied by manifest 
affect and inquire whether these also become explicable 
on the view that the dream expresses infantile men- 
tality. For this purpose let us turn to the dreams of 
my patient. 

The central situation of the suicide dream (see page 
27) was one in which the dreamer was about to shoot 
himself symbolically when he was stopped by the voice 
of his son calling attention to the injury he would inflict 
upon the boy if he carried out his design. There can be 

ae 

no question that the homicidal situation presented by 
the dream would be at least as terrifying as, and prob- 
ably far more terrifying, to the child than the suicide 
of which the dream-homicide was a symbolic expres- . 
sion. In this case the difference lies not so much in the 
relation between affect and the incident which calied it 
forth, as in the nature of the affect itself. The infan- 
tile character shows itself in the intense and explosive, 
or as I have expressed it elsewhere,* in the “ all-or- 
none ’’ character of the affect, while in the real situation 
this would have had the more restrained form which 
emotion normally assumes in adult life. 

Again, if the transference dream was an expression of 
infantile modes of feeling and acting, we have a case in 
which we may suppose that the child of the dream was 
being forced to turn away from one upon whom he 
had come to rely, and if current views concerning 
transference have any value, from one whom he had 
put in the position of his father. The intense affect of 
the dream, inappropriate perhaps to the actual situation 
of the dream, certainly inappropriate to the situation 
of having to turn from the help given to him by his 
physician, becomes wholly appropriate if in the dream 
the man had become again the child and was turning 
away from his father and ceasing to depend upon him 
for help and comfort.t The intensity of the affect 
becomes intelligible if the dream be a regression to 
infancy, just as the absence of affect becomes intelligible 
if the dream-situation is one which the infantile mind 
would regard with indifference. 

I have so far dealt almost entirely with painful or 
unpleasant affect in its relation to the dream. It is now 
necessary to say something about the affects of a 

* See Instinct and the Unconscious, page 117. 

I may point out here that the physical reaction of this dream 
has a clearly infantile character. The dreamer awoke vomiting, a 

mode of reaction to unpleasant situations far more frequent in 
infancy than in adult life. 

pleasant kind which so often accompany the dream. 
We have been led to connect the degree of intensity 
of painful affect present in the dream with the extent of 
the process of transformation, the absence of affect 
being correlated with the completeness of this process. 
I have supposed that the presence, nature and amount 
of affect present in the dream stand in no definite 
relation to the presence, nature and amount of affect 
accompanying the conflict to which the dream is due, 
but are determined by the attitude which would have 
been proper to the dreamer at the level of mental 
development active in the dream. If the level of 
mental activity which is active in the dream is that of 
childhood, and if the guise in which a conflict finds 
expression in a dream is one which would be terrifying 
to the child, the dream will be accompanied by affect 
in the form of terror. If, on the other hand, the ima- 
gery and symbolism in which a conflict is finding 
expression are of a kind so natural to the child that 
they would not be accompanied by affect, there will be 
no affect in the dream. The situation as portrayed in 
the dream may be one of adult life, but the dream- 
reaction is that of the child so far as affect is 
concerned. 

If we now apply this point of view to the case in 
which the affect of a dream is of a pleasant kind, it 
will again be necessary to distinguish between dreams 
with varying degrees of transformation. We should 
expect pleasurable, as painful, affect to be the more 
definite, the less the degree of transformation. Where 
there is no transformation, we should expect the 
affective accompaniment to be considerable in amount. 
As an example of this may be cited the dreams of the 
kind, to which I have already referred incidentally, 
where the manifest content has a sexual nature. Here 
the pleasant nature of the affect is just as natural to 
the situation as the fear or terror accompanying a 

dream of which the manifest content has reference to 
danger. 

Another variety of dream accompanied by affect of a 
pleasant kind is that in which the manifest content 
has the nature of a day-dream. In this case again 
there is little if any transformation, but there is carried 
over into the dream an experience of waking life 
which in that waking life is definitely accompanied 
by pleasant affect. It may be suggested that the 
occurrence of the experience in sleep gives it that 
enhanced vividness and apparent reality which is 
characteristic of the day-dreams of childhood, and 
that the pleasantness of the affect is associated with 
this approach to an infantile character. 

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned a view of 
Freud to which I may now return for a moment. 
According to this writer, the lessening or disappearance 
of affect which accompanies the transformation of the 
latent into the manifest content of the dream is an effect 
ascribed to the censorship. As already mentioned, I 
have dealt elsewhere with the value of the concept of 
the censorship as a means of explaining or expressing 
the facts of transformation and disguise. I have 
referred these processes to the infantile character of 
the dream and have supposed that transformation and 
disguise are necessary consequences of this infantile 
character and would have occurred even if there had 
not been present the resistance for which Freud has 
adopted the simile of the censorship. It is evident 
that this point of view is equally applicable to the 
problem considered in this chapter. The absence of 
affect in Freud’s “‘ Augean stable dream,” and its 
intense character in the dreams of the suicidal patient 
follow with equal readiness from the infantile character 
of the dream, and need no agency watching at the 
threshold of consciousness for their explanation. 
Freud’s concept of the censorship was especially 

devised to meet the cases where affect is lessened or 
abolished and fails wholly to account for such dreams 
as those of my patient. The explanation of the nature 
of the affect in the dream as the necessary result 
of its infantile character not only renders the concept of 
the censorship unnecessary when it might seem to be 
appropriate, but it covers a wider field and is able to 
bring within its scope features of the dream with which 
this concept is wholly inadequate to deal. 

I will conclude this chapter by stating the conclusions 
reached init. I started from the position that dreams 
are attempts to solve in sleep conflicts of the waking 
life, and that these attempts are necessarily, from the 
nature of sleep, of a more or less infantile kind, since 
in sleep only the earlier levels of mental functioning are 
active. Next, I have supposed, and here I follow 
Freud, or at least agree with him, that the effect of 
transformation is to diminish or abolish the affective 
aspect of the conflict. Consequently, when there is 
no transformation, there is affect in the dream. This 
affect is painful when the conflict fails of solution, 
fails to satisfy the most prominent wishes of the 
dreamer. On the other hand, it is pleasant when 
these wishes are gratified. But in the majority of 
dreams the affective aspect is slight or absent because 
the struggle is transformed and the solution of the 
conflict only of a symbolic kind. 

Moreover, just as I have argued that the transforma- 
tion, ascribed by Freud to the need to evade the agency 
he calls the censorship, is a natural and indeed inevit- 
able result of the expression of the conflict in the mental 
imagery and modes of mental functioning of early 
life, so do I now suppose that the affect has a similar 
infantile quality and that it is equally unnecessary 
to have recourse to the agency of the censorship to 
explain the relation between the manifest and latent 
contents of the dream so far as affect is concerned. 

81 F

In this chapter I propose to submit the record of a 
series of three dreams, occurring during one night, 
which illustrate several points of interest. They show, 
in the first place, the great importance which the 
manifest content may have as a guide to the deeper 
meaning of dreams. They illustrate, further, a point 
insisted on by Freud that all dreams occurring in 
one night can be referred to the same latent content ; 
and lastly, they will serve as an introduction to the 
problem why dreams are so easily forgotten and to 
the relation of the depth of sleep during which a dream 
is experienced to the nature of the dream. 

The first dream began with a vague idea or image of 
having a sum of money in the form of large coins, 
either crowns or dollars. Then I was sitting at a 
table with the Master of my College who had a docu- 
ment before him which said that the Government was 
anxious to know of people who had money immediately 
available. He took down a record of the amount I 
possessed, which was very vague when I awoke, but 
the number 500 was more or less prominent. I awoke 
suffering from indigestion and began to think about 
the interpretation, when I fell asleep again and had a 
second dream, in which I was with a number of men who 
seemed to be lawyers. One of them read an essay, 
and then just as another, who was much like one of 
my patients, was about to read a second essay, he 
handed it to me to read for him. I was about to 
begin when I found that there was an introduction 

82 ; 

or abstract at the beginning, and I asked the chairman 
if I should read it. On his instructions I did so, and 
found a large number of difficult words over which I 
stumbled. Finally I came to two foreign words, one 

of which was something like ALMIRES. I hesitated 
how to pronounce it, and especially how to give the 
second vowel, not being sure whether it should have 
the Italian or the ordinary English value. The writer 
of the essay called my attention to the fact that the 
correct pronunciation was given in a footnote. I had 
not seen this note and was still looking for it when I 
awoke. On thinking about this dream I was very 
surprised to find that I still remembered the previous 
dream. I intended to write them both down, but 
before I could do so, I went to sleep again. I had 
looked at my watch, in the meantime, however, and 
found that it was two o'clock. 

I woke again about six o’clock with a third dream 
rather vaguely in my mind, in which there were two 
men who had apparently been rowing. They were 
talking about the second person plural, referring also 
to some other mode of expression which I supposed 
to be connected with rowing. The subject of the con- 
versation was that this second expression had not 
been used on the occasion when they used the second 
person plural. Though the actual content of the dream 
was vague, it was clear to me that it dealt with a 
philological problem in which two linguistic peculiari- 
ties were associated, and the absence of one in the 
dream was accepted by me as a sufficient explanation 
of the absence of the other. 

On awaking I was again surprised to find the two 
earlier dreams clearly in my mind, though I had not 
written them down. I could, however, see no meaning 
in the three dreams, nor could I get any clue to the 
manifest content. I then tried association with various 
elements of the dream without success, and was giving 

up the task of analysis, when it flashed on me that on 
the preceding afternoon I had received a notice of 
lectures to be given in the following autumn at Univer- 
sity College, London. I could not then remember 
what the lectures were about, but on getting up and 
recovering the notice from the waste-paper basket I was 
at once able to recognise several titles which had 
especially interested me when I read the list. These 
were : 

THE ORIGINS OF COINAGE ; 
PHONETICS AND ITS VALUE FROM THE IMPERIAL 
STANDPOINT ; 

SCIENTIFIC METHODS OF LANGUAGE STUDY AND 
THEIR IMPORTANCE TO THE EMPIRE; and 
THE GROWTH OF COMPARATIVE LAW SINCE MAINE’S 

“ANCIENT LAW.” 

The first subject would account for the coins of the 
first dream and may have contributed to produce the 
strange words of the second dream. The two lectures 
on language would account for the general features of 
the second and third dreams, while the lecture on 
Comparative Law would not only account for the legal 
setting of the second dream, but would also help to 
explain the appearance of the Master of my College, 
for he is a lawyer. The manifest content of the three 
dreams was thus to a large extent explained by the 
items in the list of lectures which had especially at- 
tracted my attention on the preceding evening 

The special interest of this dream, however, is that 
the explanation of its manifest content at once gave me 
the clue to its deeper meaning. At this time I was 
away from my hospital in Scotland on sick leave. A 
few days before I had heard that a project was on 
foot to give me an appointment in connection with the 
Royal Flying Corps, which would involve my living 
in London. When I read through the list of lectures, 

the thought had occurred to me that if the project 
went through, I might be able to attend some of these 
lectures and thus satisfy ethnological and sociological 
interests which were being starved in Edinburgh. 
The dreams thus appeared to be expressions of a 
rather simple wish to be given the new appointment. At 
the same time there was no question that the problem of 
this new appointment was the basis of a definite con- 
flict in my mind. On the one side there was the 
desire for change and novelty, which is one of the 
strongest elements in my mental make-up, as well as 
the desire to become acquainted with the psycho- 
logical and medical problems connected with flying. 
There was also the fact that I should be in much closer 
touch with my other interests in life, and one special 
factor was that I should be associated in the new in- 
vestigations with Dr Head, in collaboration with whom 
so much of my work had been done. On the other 
side of the conflict were the facts that the new appoint- 
ment would oblige me to leave my chief in Edinburgh, 
who was in a situation of peculiar difficulty, in which I 
knew that I might be of considerable service, and 
the change of work would also mean leaving to others 
the care of several patients in whom I was especially 
interested. On the evening before the dream I had 
written to one of these patients who was in a situation 
of a very difficult and complicated kind, in which I 
had some reason to believe that the outcome depended 
largely on my influence. 

It was thus clear that the University College lecture- 
list which had evidently determined the general char- 
acter of the manifest content of the three dreams had 
a definite relation to a conflict of a serious kind. In 
this conflict my own wishes were explicitly in favour 
of the new appointment, but these conflicted in the 
most direct manner with motives of an altruistic 
kind, involving duties and responsibilities towards 

others. Dreams which at first sight seemed wholly 
inexplicable turned out to have a definite general 
relation to this conflict as soon as the explanation 
of the manifest content gave the necessary clue. It 
is not sufficient, however, or it should not be held 
to be sufficient, that a situation of the waking life 
should explain the general characters of a dream or 
dreams. It is also necessary to explain the details, 
and to these we may now turn. 

The details of the first dream can be referred to a 
subsidiary conflict which was present at the time, and 
was one which would be affected by my change of post. 
I was at this time making an amply sufficient income 
for my needs through my pay as a Captain in the 
R.A.M.C., and I was at times worried by doubts 
whether I ought not to return to the College my income 
as Fellow, but I satisfied these doubts by investing 
every penny I could in war-loans, and the number 500 
was certainly explained by the fact that this was the 
amount I had invested in this way. It thus became 
natural that the Master, as the natural representative 
or symbol, of my College, should have appeared in this 
dream. 

The chief detail to be explained in the second dream 
was the appearance of the strange word which I found 
it difficult to pronounce. Association led me back 
at once to the early days of a visit to India, where I 
had been especially impressed for some reason by the 
fact that it is customary in that country to call a 
wardrobe an “‘ Almeira.”” On the day before the dream 
I had been re-reading Charles Marriott’s novel The 
Column, which was intimately associated with the early 
days of my visit to India and with the friend from 
whom I had first heard the word ‘“ Almeira’’ and 
learnt its meaning. The greater part of the strange 
word was thus intimately linked with the general 
philological setting of the three dreams, while its 

occurrence may also have been assisted by the an- 
nouncement of a lecture on “ Hindu Religion and 
Philosophy ”’ in the University College list of lectures. 
The letter at the end of the word was certainly from the 
Greek alphabet, but though it resembled Xi in some 
respect, it was associated with the idea of Digamma. 
I failed wholly to explain this feature of the word. 

~The third dream contained two details which are 
very puzzling, while the whole character of the dream 
is obscure, apart from its general philological setting. 
I was quite unable to discover the meaning of the 
reference to the second person plural and was also 
much puzzled by the reference to rowing. One of 
the results of the move to London would be to allow 
me to visit Cambridge more often, and if the dream is an 
expression of youthful mentality, it is possible that 
rowing acted as a symbol for Cambridge, for in boyhood 
my chief interest in Cambridge had been through the 
boat race. | 

Though there are details of which the interpretation 
is lacking, there can be no question that the main 
features of the three dreams were determined by the 
conflict arising out of the prospect of a new appoint- 
ment, the manifest content being determined by an 
incident of the previous day which had directly stimu- 
lated this conflict. I have cited this series of dreams 
primarily as an example of the way in which know- 
ledge of the mode of determination of the manifest 
content may assist the discovery of the deeper meaning, 
but they have several other points of interest. 

One such interest is the confirmation given by the 
dreams to the statement made by Freud that when 
several dreams occur to a person in one night they will 
all be found to refer to the same latent content. It is 
only very exceptionally that I have been able to 
analyse more than one dream occurring during a 
night, and it is noteworthy that on the sole occasion 

on which the analysis of three dreams should have — 
been possible, all the three should be so clearly referable 
to one interpretation. It may be noted, however, that 
the connection of the third dream with the conflict 
about the appointment was less obvious than in the 
case of the two earlier dreams, and that the time- 
interval between this dream and its predecessors 
was probably longer than that between the first and 
second dreams. 

I need hardly point out how natural it is that under 
ordinary circumstances all the dreams of one night 
should be referable to one latent content if the view put 
forward in these lectures is correct. Unless something 
should happen during the night which introduces a 
new cause of conflict, there ought to be no change 
in the nature of the deeper thoughts which are finding 
expression in the form of dreams. It is not necessary, 
however, that such dreams should have the high degree 
of unity which seems to be shown by those I have 
recorded. Thus, Abraham * mentions a case in which 
a woman had five dreams in one night which realised 
five different possibilities which might arise out of 
the situation in which she was placed at the time. 
In the language of this book the five dreams attempted 
five different solutions of the conflict in which she was 
involved. 

A point of great interest of the dreams which I 
must now consider more fully is the ease, most unusual 
in my own case, with which the dreams were remem- 
bered. Asarule my dreams are forgotten very rapidly 
and have to be written down at once if a record is to 
become possible, but in this case I not only remembered 
the dreams more or less clearly when I awoke, but 
as much as was remembered when I awoke continued 
clearly in my mind after later sleep, the length of 
sleep before the third dream being as much as four 

* Dreams and Myths, page 56. 

hours. Combined with this was an impression, de- 
finitely recorded in my notes at the time, that I had 
been sleeping very lightly. 

This experience raises the very important question 
- why dreams are so readily forgotten. According to 
_ Freud this is one of the effects of the censorship. 
_ According to the hypothesis of the censorship, the 
‘ occurrence of dreams depends upon relaxation of the 
activity of this agency watching at the threshold of 
consciousness, the activity being so far relaxed as to 
allow the buried dream-thoughts to appear in con- 
sciousness, though in distorted guise, and the forgetting 
is the natural result of the regained full activity of the 
censorship: An alternative view suggested by the 
dreams now under consideration is that whether 
dreams are remembered with ease or difficulty depends, 
at any rate partially, upon the depth of sleep, the 
dreams of light sleep being readily accessible, while 
those of deeper sleep are soon forgotten. This raises 
the question whether there is any relation between 
the depth of the sleep during which a dream is ex- 
perienced and the character of the dream, and from 
this point of view the dreams I have just described 
are of interest. Except for the occurrence of imagery 
and the doubtful use of rowing as a symbol of Cam- 
bridge, these dreams can hardly be regarded as an 
example of infantile or even of youthful mentality. 
The imagery or symbolism in which the dream-thoughts 
were clothed was of an abstract and elaborate kind 
and oniy differed from the thought-processes of adult 
waking life in their inconsequent and erratic character. 

Much other experience of my own dreams points 
in the same direction. Thus, I not infrequently have 
dreams in which I am reading a paper or giving a 
lecture which I am able to recall with ease when I 
awake, and I have always found when the content 
of a dream is thus easily remembered that it differs 

very little, if at all, from what I might have written 
or spoken if I had been in full waking activity. In 
such a case it would be ridiculous to regard the dream 
as an expression of infantile mentality, and experiences 
of this kind have led me to the view that dreams 
differ in character according to the depth of the sleep 
during which they occur. The lighter the sleep which 
a dream accompanies, the more nearly does it approach 
in its character to the mode of mental functioning 
proper to the age at which it occurs and the more 
easily will the dream be remembered. This view 
is a natural corollary of the scheme which I have put 
forward elsewhere,* that the mind may be regarded 
as composed of a number of levels or strata compar- 
able with the levels of neurological activity which are 
now widely held to furnish the best explanation of 
the mode of action of the nervous system. According 
to this view the deeper the sleep, the larger the number 
of these levels which are put out of activity and the 
lower the level which finds expression in the dream. 
The dreams of deep sleep in which many levels of mental 
activity are put out of action will reveal infantile 
modes of thinking, feeling and acting; the dreams of 
less deep sleep in which fewer of the higher levels 
are inactive would express modes of mental functioning 
proper to childhood or youth; while the dreams of 
very light sleep would have a character but little 
different from that of the ordinary mental activities 
of the waking life. 

The general point of view which I am developing 
in this book was originally formulated in order to 
account for the appearance of distortion or disguise 
in the dream which forms Freud’s chief argument for 
the censorship. I now suggest that this view is also 
able to account for the readiness with which dreams 
are forgotten, a fact which Freud has also referred to 

* Instinct and the Unconscious, 2nd Edition, 1922, page 229. 

go 

his mechanism of the censorship. Dreams, or rather 
certain dreams, are readily forgotten because they are 
the manifestations of levels of mental activity remote 
in character from those of later periods of life. Accord- 
ing to the scheme put forward in my book Instinct 
and the Unconscious, early levels of mental activity 
are suppressed because they are incompatible with 
the activities of later life. The mental efficiency of 
a person would be greatly prejudiced if modes of think- 
ing, feeling and acting proper to infancy or childhood 
were continually intruding into the activities of adult 
life, and from this point of view it is natural that when 
these early modes of mental functioning are brought 
into temporary activity during sleep, they should 
again pass into oblivion as rapidly as possible when 
the sleeper awakes. 

One difficulty for this point of view must be con- 
sidered here. There is one kind of dream of which 
memory is exceptionally vivid and, so far as can be 
told, accurate. One of the features of the nightmare 
is that it is not merely remembered on awaking, but 
it tends to persist with an unusual degree of vividness 
in the mind of the dreamer. Is this to be explained 
by the occurrence of this kind of dream in light sleep, 
or is it necessary to look for some other mode of ex- 
planation of the vivid memory of these dreams? I 
have little doubt that the answer is to be found in the 
second alternative and that we must look to the excess 
of affect which is characteristic of the nightmare and 
the battle-dream as furnishing the ground for the 
readiness and vividness with which their incidents 
persist in memory. It is probable, therefore, that 
depth of sleep is only one of the factors upon which 
persistence depends, and that in sleeping as in waking 
life there is a definite relation between the amount 
of affect associated with an experience and the per- 
sistence with which it is remembered. It must always 

ol 

be borne in mind in this connection that excess of 
affect may also be the cause, or one of the causes, 
of suppression or active forgetting. The importance 
of excess of affect in relation to memory is that it © 
tends to be associated either with unusual persistence 
in memory or with more or less complete suppression. 
By excess of affect an experience may be prevented 
from occupying its place among the vast mass which is 
readily accessible to consciousness and only absent 
from it at any given moment because it is not the 
object of attention or has not been brought into the 
focus of attention by appropriate associations. But 
if an experience accompanied by excess of affect 
is not suppressed, it persists with a high degree of 
vividness, and I suggest that this vividness accounts 
for the ease and fidelity with which the incidents of 
a nightmare or battle-dream are remembered. 

THE DREAM-PROCESSES AS REGRESSIVE 

One of the chief general conclusions to which I 
have been leading in this book is that the character 
of the dream, and especially its apparently fantastic 
and grotesque features, are due to the fact that it 
is an expression of early modes of mental functioning 
which have been allowed to come into action, owing 
to the removal of higher restraining influences derived 
from the experience of later life. 

I have supposed that sleep is a process which acts 
progressively upon successive levels of mental activity, 
first putting out of action the experience and modes 
of mental functioning which have been recently ac- 
quired. _The deeper the sleep, the greater the number 
of such levels put out of action and the lower and 
earlier the levels which are left to manifest their 
special modes of activity in the dream. I suppose 
that in the process of waking the higher levels are 

Q2 

successively released, beginning with the lower, the 
nature of a dream experienced during the process 
of waking being determined by the level which is 
manifesting its activity at the moment when the dream 
is experienced. 

From this point of view the fantastic or grotesque 
nature of the dream is not due, as Freud supposes, to 
a process of distortion dependent on the necessity 
of eluding a guardian watching at the threshold of 
consciousness, but it is a necessary result of the infan- 
tile nature of the dream. I do not deny that the 
nature of the thoughts to which the dream is due 
are disguised from the dreamer, and it is possible, 
if not probable, that this disguise has a useful function, 
but even if there were no such utility, the dream would 
have this fantastic character which is a necessary 
consequence of its regressive origin. 

According to this point of view, a dream appears 
the more fantastic or grotesque to the dreamer when 
awake, the deeper the level of mental functioning 
upon which the dream depends. The deeper the level 
the more strange and unlike his normal self will the 
dream and the dream-personality seem to be. More- 
over, it will follow that the more a person has changed 
in his modes of mental functioning during his life, the 
greater will be the difference between his dreanis and 
the processes of his normal adult life, the greater also 
the difference between the dream-personality and the 
personality of the ordinary waking life. 

One interest of this point of view is that it serves to 
explain a feature of the dream about the existence 
of which there seems to be little doubt, viz., that 
there is a relation between the complexity and amount 
of transformation of the dream and the degree of 
education of the dreamer. My experience of the 
dreams of uneducated persons is that they are exceed- 
ingly simple and their meaning often transparent, 

as in the example I cited in the first lecture, and 
I believe that this is in accordance with general experi- 
ence. It is the result of education, and I may say 
that I am not here limiting this term to the formal: 
process of school and university. Education widens 
interest and produces a continuous process of modi- 
fication in the mental make-up. The characteristic 
of the uneducated person is that the mental outlook of 
adult life does not differ appreciably from that of 
childhood, while the mind of the person who continues 
his education throughout life is that the whole mental 
make-up of mature adult life may be vastly different 
from that of his childhood or his youth or even of his 
younger adult life. To give an instance in illustration : 
In some of us older people the educative influence 
of the last ten years has been so great that we should 
hardly recognise ourselves if we were brought face to 
face. I suggest that the dream is a process whereby 
we are thus brought face to face with these earlier 
selves Speaking for myself, I am quite prepared to 
believe that if I had a dream in just that depth of sleep 
which found expression in the thoughts and senti- 
ments of ten years ago, the dream has to some extent 
that strange and fantastic character which I ascribe to 
its regressive nature. 

There is little doubt that I have been led to stress 
the importance of the point of view according to which 
the dream is a regression to a special feature of my own 
mental make-up which creates a striking difference 
between my dream-personality and the personality 
of my ordinary life. In my dreams I am a visualiser ; 
I also often have perfectly definite auditory imagery, 
and less frequently imagery of other kinds, such as 
of taste and smell. In my ordinary life, on the other 
hand, I rarely experience imagery, and then usually 
in so fugitive and vague a form that if my attention 
had not been attracted to the subject through my 

scientific interests, I should doubtless never have 
noticed such capacity for imagery as I possess. 

Moreover, as I have described elsewhere,* I know that 
in early life the power of imaging was present, and 
was probably as good as that of the average child. 
I have brought forward evidence to show that the 
disappearance of the capacity to image was the result 
of a process of suppression, which probably began 
before the age of five and has since become more 
complete. 

If this history of my capacity to image be accepted, 
it will follow that when I image in my dreams, my 
dream-consciousness is utilising an infantile process 
which is not at my disposal in my ordinary waking 
life. The action of sleep in my case is to remove the 
activity of certain restraining or suppressing influences, 
whereby the power of imagery is kept in abeyance, 
but the reappearance of the power to image in sleep 
shows that it is there in my mental make-up, only 
waiting to come into action when the removal of the 
restraining influences gives it freedom. The view 
which I am now putting forward is that just as my 
power of imaging is normally suppressed and only 
finds expression in sleep, so is it with other early modes 
of mental functioning. Thus, all that I know of 
myself goes to convince me that in my adult waking 
life it is quite foreign to me to think in terms of the 
symbols of an incongruous person in surroundings 
to which he is unsuited by such a simile or metaphor 
as that of a cup and saucer as an element in a game of 
billiards. Nor in my dreams can I remember that 
I ever thought in such similes, but my experience in 
regard to imagery leads me to suspect that I was 
once subject to such ways of thinking, and that the 
use of such similes in a dream is only another expression 
of an early mode of mental functioning. 

* Instinct and the Unconscious, page 11.

IT has so far been my object to consider the processes 
or, as they are sometimes called, the mechanisms 
of the dream, the processes by which mental conflicts, 
wishes, anxieties or other states find expression in 
sleep. I have described and given examples of such 
processes as symbolisation, dramatisation and con- 
densation through which these mental states receive 
concrete representation in the dream. [ have tried 
to find how far we are justified in accepting a process 
of displacement as a fourth element in the dream-work, 
and have considered how far we can ascribe to this 
and the other elements of the dream-work the function 
of disguise and distortion in the interests of the con- 
tinuance of sleep. The conclusion to which I have been 
led is that the special character of the dream is not 
due, as Freud supposes, to the activity of a process of 
censorship leading to a distortion of the real meaning 
of the dream, so that this meaning shall not be recog- 
nised by the dreamer, but is the result of the fact that 
the dream depends on the coming into activity in 
sleep of early modes of mental functioning. I have 
regarded the symbolisation and dramatisation of the 
dream as processescharacteristic of childhood and youth, 
which come into activity in sleep, because more recent 
modes of mental functioning have passed into abey- 
ance in sleep, with the consequent removal of the control 
which in the waking life they normally exert on older 
activities.. From this point of view the dream may be 

regarded as a regressive state, including under the 
word all the earlier phases of mental development. 

When the dream is regarded as regressive or in- 
fantile, however, something very different from this 
is often meant. When we speak of the dream as an 
expression of infantile mentality, this may mean two 
very different things. It may refer to the infantile 
character of the processes of the dream or it may 
mean that the dream has an infantile content. Thus 
far it is only in the first of these two senses that I 
have dealt with the regressive character of the dream ; 
it remains to consider how far the content of the dream 
is derived from the experience of earlier life. 

It has been a striking feature of all the dreams 
related and analysed in this book that they have been 
concerned with recent conflicts. Their latent content 
has not been derived from the early experience of the 
dreamer, but has dealt with conflicts active in the mind 
of the dreamer at the time that the dream occurred. 

Most of the analyses of dreams which we owe to the 
psycho-analytic school, on the other hand, take us 
back to conflicts or wishes forming the latent content 
which are frequently, if not generally, derived from the 
experiences of early life. It is necessary to deal 
with this discrepancy between the two sets of results. 
The first point to note is that the vast majority of 
dreams recorded in psycho-analytic literature, and 
utilised in support of psycho-analytic beliefs, have 
occurred in the course of treatment in which the 
attention of the dreamer has been led back to the 
experience of early life. Conflicts dating back to 
some early period of life have been revived and brought 
into great prominence in the waking consciousness 
of the dreamer. I have myself recorded dreams 
occurring in the course of psycho-therapy which well 
illustrate this point. Thus, the patient with claustro- 
phobia, whose case I have recorded in Appendix II 

97 & 

of Instinct and the Unconscious, had several dreams, 
the content of which dated back to the period of life 
which we were then trying to explore. 

If, on the other hand, we turn to such a record of 
dreams and their analysis as that given by Freud 
himself in the Tvaumdeutung, we find a striking similar- 
ity with those which I have analysed with respect to 
the recency of the conflicts they reveal, a considerable 
proportion referring to situations arising out of Freud’s 
professional career closely comparable with those 
which have provided the motives of so many of my 
own dreams. Moreover, in Freud’s discussion of the 
varieties of source upon which dreams depend, the 
conclusions which emerge agree with those I have just 
stated. If objection is made to my record of dreams 
on the ground of the recency of the conflicts upon 
which they depend, we have only to go to Freud * for 
confirmation, excepting only those cases which must be 
regarded as of a more or less artificial kind, in which 
dreams occur as incidents in the course of a_psycho- 
analysis. 

Though dreams going back to early experience as 
their source frequently occur under such circumstances, 
it is far from necessary that the dreams of patients 
under treatment shall have this character. Thus, 
the patient’s dreams recorded in Chapter II had as 
their source a conflict of quite recent origin which was 
raging at the time that the dream occurred. I will 
now cite another dream of a patient which also had 
recent conflict as its source. 

2) 

THE ‘‘ ICHTHYOSAURUS ’”’ DREAM 

In this dream the patient was being accused of the 
murder of two people in Paddington Station, while an 
ichthyosaurus was looking on. While being taken 

* Die Traumdeuiung, 5te Auflage, 1919, pages 125-6. 

away by the police, the ichthyosaurus spat venom at 
him, The dreamer was taken to a Court of Justice 
where a letter was produced which incriminated him, 
but made no mention of his brother who had also been 
concerned in the murder. The dreamer awoke fright- 
ened and sweating. 

The dream was probably an example of a war-dream 
in which the war experience had been completely trans- 
formed, for the dreamer was still liable occasionally 
to dreams of the nightmare kind, of which the content 
was actual war experience. I need not go into* the 
explanation of the..manifest™ content, the origin: of 
which. we»were»able»to»trace: The consideration of 
the dream led back at once to events of the previous 
day. The patient was an active member of a Com- 
mittee which was concerned with the regulation of 
games, supply of writing materials and other matters 
managed by the patients. On the previous day he had 
found that certain changes were being made in the 
hospital which involved the temporary loss of the use 
of a writing-room, and, in common with another 
member of the Committee, he believed that this was 
being done by the matron and assistant matron with 
the connivance of the steward and behind the back of 
the C.O. of the hospital., The dreamer was a business 
man who had served through several years of the war. 
While on active servicé he had always been especially 
concerned for the comfort of his men, and in this con- 
nection had repeatedly come into conflict with battalion 
quartermasters, so that he had developed what would 
sometimes be called a ‘“ quartermaster complex,” 
or, as I should prefer to call it, an anti-quartermaster 
sentiment, which helped to make him suspicious 
of the steward of the hospital, who was virtually its 
quartermaster. It seemed clear that the steward 
was represented in the dream by the ichthyosaurus, 
and that the two people of whose murder he was being 

accused were the matron and the assistant matron, 
while his brother seemed to have stood in the dream 
for the other patient with whom he had been associated 
in the matter of the writing-room.., I cite this as an 
example of a dream which had a recent experience as 
its source, occurring in a patient under treatment, 
and one in which the experience was not connected, or 
only very remotely connected, with his illness. The 
dream arose out of a situation which might just as 
well have arisen in any other relation. It had as its 
source a quite recent experience, and in this respect 
falls into line with the other dreams which I have 
utilised in this book. 

The anti-quartermaster sentiment of this patient 
was well illustrated a few days later by another dream 
about a similar situation in which the disguise was less 
complete. In this dream he received orders to obtain 
rations before marching with his company. He was 
in one of the narrow streets paved with cobbles near 
the Cathedral in Rouen, and went to the quartermaster- 
general’s stores, where he found nothing left but pieces 
of smoked salmon hanging from the rafters. After 
much discussion, in which the dreamer laid great stress 
on his indifference to the exact amount, so long as the 
distribution was equal, he went off with two pieces 
of the salmon. His men groused badly, and he told 
them it did not matter how little they had, so long as 
they got their proper share. He said that they had 
not been able to get their proper amount this time, 
because the quartermaster had favoured other company- 
commanders, and that he would see that they had their 
proper share in future. 

This dream occurred at a time when the food in the 
hospital was very inadequate. The patient would not 
have minded if he had known that this was due to the 
necessity for national economy or to the insufficiencies 
of the kitchen staff, but he could not help the con- 

viction that the person who was reaping the advantage 
was the steward. I might mention that one of the 
functions of the Committee, of which the patient 
was a prominent member, was to bring any complaints 
before the officer commanding the hospital, so that 
he had a real cause for anxiety and conflict in the 
matter. At the time that these dreams occurred, 
nothing was being done to bring the early life of the 
dreamer into the focus of attention or to arouse early 
conflicts. The dreams thus confirm the conclusions 
reached by myself and implied in Freud’s own classi- 
fication of the sources of the dream. Unless some 
process is taking place which tends to arouse early 
experience and bring it into prominence, dreams deal 
with situations in the recent life of the dreamer. 

The view generally held by the psycho-analytic 
school, and widely accepted by others, that the content 
of dreams is so frequently experience derived from 
early life does not, however, rest solely on the fre- 
quency of early experience as the motive of dreams 
taking place in the course of psycho-analysis. The 
typical dreams of Freud are believed also to point in 
this direction. Thus, the dreams of nakedness or scanty 
clothing experienced by so many persons are ascribed 
to impulses of exhibition which are common in child- 
hood, and the equally frequent dreams of the death 
of dearly loved persons are led back to the frequent 
wishes of children, ill acquainted with the implications 
of death, that their parents or other relatives should die. 

It is a feature of most dreams of this kind that they 
are recurrent and occur again and again, sometimes 
in precisely similar form, and when they have this 
recurrent character, it is probable that they go back, 
at any rate in some measure, to early experience. I 
shall return to this topic when considering typical and 
recurrent dreams in a later chapter, and shall only 
deal here with dreams of this kind when they occur 

IOI 

sporadically, choosing for illustration the dreams 
that dearly loved persons are dead. 

Such dreams have naturally formed an obstacle to 
_ the acceptance of Freud’s view that every dream is 
a wish-fulfilment, an obstacle which has been partly 
overcome by the reference of many of these dreams 
to the recurrence of early wishes of childhood. Freud 
has also shown, however, that wishes for the death of 
dearly loved relatives may occur in adult life and act 
as the motive of dreams. In one well-known and 
striking example * he records a dream of this kind, 
in which the desire for the death of a nephew is inter- 
preted as the result of a wish to meet an old lover, a 
meeting which would naturally take place at the 
funeral of the nephew who died in the dream. When 
the thought that if the nephew died the lover would 
come to the funeral came to mind, we must suppose 
that it was at once repressed, but that the conflict 
so aroused only remained below the threshold, to 
become again active in sleep, owing to the absence of 
restraining influences derived from adult modes of 
thought, the wish for the death of the nephew being 
then given full rein. The dream agrees exactly with 
the view that in the dream infantile modes of thought 
come into activity, though the actual motive of the 
dream was a quite recent wish for an opportunity 
of a much desired meeting. I have met with several 
cases in which dreams that relatives were dead, or 
had suffered misfortunes, have been explained in a 
similar, though perhaps rather simpler fashion, and I 
will relate two examples. 

DREAMS ARISING OUT OF RECENT EVENTS 

One of my patients came to me much distressed 
because in a dream of the previous night he had shot a 

* Traumdeutung, 5te Auflage, page 107 ; Interpretation of Dreams, 
page 128. 

younger brother of whom he was especially fond. 
The dreamer had had a very trying time in France, 
under the strain of which he had broken down. The 
brother whom he had murdered in the dream was 
being trained for active service, and it transpired that 
the dreamer was so greatly worried about his brother 
and the trials awaiting him in France, that he had 
allowed himself to think it better that the brother 
were dead rather than that he should be exposed to 
such experiences as those he had himself undergone. 
This wish for the death of the brother was naturally 
repressed in the waking state, but found expression 
through the act of a dream, when sleep had removed 
the activity of the restraining influences derived from 
the social attitude of our society towards wishes for 
the death either of others or ourselves. 

Another patient, whose wife was shortly expecting a 
child, had several dreams by which he was much dis- 
turbed. In one he visited his wife in a nursing home, 
and she upbraided him severely for her pregnancy. 
She said she did not wish to have a child, and told her 
husband that she wished never to see him again. On 
another occasion he dreamed that his child had been 
born and that it was a kind of cross between a, rabbit 
and a monkey, but that his wife was so delighted 
with the child that she ran about clapping her hands. 

In reality his wife was very pleased at the prospect 
of becoming a mother and was showing no anxiety 
about her approaching ordeal, but the patient was 
greatly worried about his financial position. More 
than once he had found himself wishing that he were 
not about to have a child in his present circumstances, 
but these wishes had been at once repressed. 

The aim of this chapter has been to show not only 
by means of facts collected by myself, but also through 
the evidence of Freud himself, how frequently dreams 
arise out of situations in the recent life of the dreamer. 

Excepting the case of recurrent dreams, it is probable 
that dreams always arise out of recent situations, 
unless something has taken place which has aroused 
ancient conflicts and brought them again into pro- 
minence in the mind of the dreamer. The special 
aim of the process of psycho-analysis is to bring the 
experience of early life into such prominence, and 
it is therefore natural that this procedure should have 
obscured the importance of recent conflicts. It is 
intelligible that those whose experience is chiefly 
derived from the psycho-analytic study of the dreams 
of their patients should have laid so great a stress on 
the importance of infantile experience as the source 
of the dream-content. 

COMPARISON WITH FREUD’S VIEWS 

The close agreement between most of the dream- 
_ analyses of Freud and my own, in so far as concerns 
the recency of the conflicts upon which dreams depend, 
raises the question why there should be so widespread 
a belief among psycho-analysts that the source of 
dreams is to be found in wishes of early childhood. 

One reason, and probably the most important, is 
that while Freud used comparatively few dreams of 
his patients when formulating his scheme of dream- 
formation, the general body of psycho-analysts rely 
mainly on such dreams for their evidence, and when they 
utilise their own dreams are influenced by the use of a 
method of analysis by free association, which they 
have come to associate with early experience, so that 
such experience tends especially to occur to their 
minds. The only passage which I have been able to 
find which seems to express Freud’s own attitude 
towards the problem raised by the discrepancy be- 
tween his own evidence and the view concerning the 
importance of early experience is one in which he 

regards a conflict between vanity and self-criticism as 
having determined the content of a dream, but sup- 
poses that it was only a more deeply seated wish of 
youth which had made this content possible as a 
dream,* 

The idea which seems to underlie this opinion is that 
a recent conflict will not find expression in a dream 
unless a wish of early life is also active. So far as I 
can gather from other writings of Freud, it is held 
that the function of this early wish is to supply the 
energy or drive necessary for the appearance of the 
dream, but I cannot say definitely that this is so. My 
view is that conflict is quite sufficient. 

This seems a suitable place to consider a theoretical 
difficulty which stands in the way of the view I am 
putting forward in this book, one which might possibly 
be met by some such view as that expressed by Freud 
in the passage I have quoted. If the special character 
of dreams depend on putting out of action the levels 
or more recently acquired experience, how does it 
come about that recent conflicts, which must be in- 
cluded in the levels of recently acquired experience, 
should be so active in the dream, and that recent 
experience should also supply the motives for the . 
details of the manifest content ? If my general position 
is to hold good, it becomes necessary to discover how 
it is that a conflict which forms part of quite recent 
experience should provide the essential motive for a 
dream, when the expression of this conflict by means 
of infantile symbolism suggests that it is early modes 
of mental functioning which are mainly or even wholly 
in action. My hypothesis is here met by a very serious 
and it might be thought insuperable difficulty. Before 
considering it, let us state clearly the chief factors 
entering into the problem. We have found that dreams 
are the expression of recent conflicts, a conclusion 

* Tyvaumdeutung, 5te Auflage, page 324 (Brill’s translation, page 379). 
T05 

confirmed by Freud himself, at any rate in so far as 
the determination of the content of the dream is 
concerned, and that by universal consent the manifest 
content is determined by recent experience. Next 
we have found that most dreams consist of imagery, 
symbols, similes, etc., which, at any rate in some 
cases, do not form part of the mental furniture of the 
adult life of the dreamer but belong to earlier periods 
of his life, this being especially striking in such a 
person as myself, from whose adult mental life images 
have almost completely disappeared for many years. 
In order to explain the second fact, I have hitherto 
been content to adopt the hypothesis that the conflict 
finds expression in this form because the infantile 
modes of mental functioning are alone available when 
the higher or more recently acquired modes of mental 
functioning have been put out of activity in sleep. 
We now have to deal with the difficulty that according 
to the hypothesis in this crude form the recent con- 
flicts which find expression in the dream, as well as 
the experience determining the manifest content, being 
part of recent experience, should have been put out 
of activity, so that they could not function in the 
way supposed. It is evident that the proposition 
that in sleep different levels of experience are put 
out of action successively in chronological order is 
only a crude statement of the case, and that this part 
of the hypothesis needs more exact expression. The 
solution of the problem evidently lies in a more exact 
statement of the nature of sleep, and to this subject 
we must therefore turn. 

In my chapter on sleep in Instinct and the Unconscious 
I have considered at some length the power of selec- 
tive attention which is possible in sleep. There are 
many facts which demand the existence of a high degree 
of discriminative activity on the part of a sleeping 
person in relation to certain kinds of external stimuli. 

In the chapter cited I quote especially the awakening 
of the doctor by his night bell while he is not disturbed 
by the crying of his infant to which his wife immedi- 
ately responds. Such facts make it evident that sleep 
is not a process which puts out of action different 
levels of mental activity and mental experience in 
chronological order, but that certain parts of recent 
experience remain active even in deep sleep. 

In my book I have regarded the conditions which 
awake a person as determined by special systems 
within the personality of the sleeper, and it is not 
difficult to see how this view can be extended, so as to 
explain the activity of a recent conflict in sleep. We 
must regard this conflict as being, or forming part 
of, a special system within the personality of the 
sleeper, which still remains active after the process 
of sleep has put out of action other recent experience 
and modes of mental functioning. 

We must suppose that when experience is the subject 
of a mental conflict, or is more or less intimately associ- 
ated with such a conflict, it fails to undergo the process 
of suppression which is one of the chief elements 
of the process of sleep, but remains active, ready to 
find expression in a dream. Two subsidiary diffi- 
culties attendant on this point of view have to be met. 
The first is that in order to explain the occurrence of 
incidents from recent experience as elements of the 
manifest content, we have to suppose that these inci- 
dents are not trivial and indifferent, but are in some 
way connected with the conflict, so that they form 
part of the system which remains active after other 
recent experience has been inhibited in the process 
of sleep. I have already dealt with this topic and 
have shown reason to believe that the incidents deter- 
mining the manifest content have not the trivial char- 
acter ordinarily supposed, but can often be shown to 
stand in an intimate relation to the subject-matter of 

the conflict which is finding expression in the dream. 
We need far more observations on this point. There is 
a tendency at present unduly to neglect the manifest 
content, probably as a reaction against the exclusive 
interest of so many of the older students in this aspect 
of the dream. But if we are to understand the dream, 
we cannot neglect any of its aspects, and the theo- 
retical position now put forward requires a careful 
inquiry into the exact nature of the relation between 
the incidents which have determined the manifest 
content and the conflict which forms the latent content 
of the dream. 

The second difficulty is that if certain elements of 
recent experience remain active in sleep, we should 
expect these elements to influence the general character 
of the dream. We should expect that the dream in 
general would not show an exclusively regressive 
form of mentality, but that there would be features of 
the dream which would reveal a mentality resembling 
that of the period of life at which the dream is experi- 
enced. I would meet this difficulty by saying that, 
as a matter of fact, the dream shows just such variety 
as we might expect to follow from the retention of 
activity of certain kinds of recent experience. Thus, 
to take only one instance, while the suicide dream 
recorded in Chapter II shows on the whole an infantile 
mentality, the representation of suicide by the image 
of Dr X, who had himself recently committed suicide, 
was just such an example as would be utilised by the 
adult, and had actually influenced the thoughts of 
the dreamer. Moreover, it is significant that this 
representation, derived from recent experience, which 
was prominent in the dream, was intimately con- 
nected with the conflict which was the chief source 
of the dream. If certain streaks, as it were, of recent 
experience remain active after the greater part of 
this recent experience has been put out of action in 

sleep, many features of the variegated character of the 
dream become explicable, which wholly fail to fit in 
with the simple view that the higher levels of mental 
activity are wholly inhibited in sleep. 

When, therefore, I speak of the dream as an expres- 
sion of regressive mentality, this must only be taken 
to apply to the general character of the dream, and 
that the non-infantile features which are often present 
are due to the persistent activity of such elements of 
experience as are closely bound up with the conflict 
which forms the active source of the dream. The 
system which is active in the dream comprises two 
parts. One consists of such levels of early activity as 
still remain in action with the depth of sleep which is 
present ; the other of such portions of the total body 
of recent experience which, on account of the con- 
nection with a conflict and consequent recent excita- 
tion, still continue active after the rest of the levels 
embodying recent experience have been put out of 
action by the inhibition of sleep. 

In considering the nature of the dream-content I 
have so far dealt only with its time-aspect, with the 
question how far the conflicts determining dreams are 
derived from recent experience and how far they date 
back to earlier periods of life. The general tendency of 
my argument has been to emphasise the importance of 
recent conflicts and to assume that, when early con- 
flicts form the sources of the dreams, this is because 
they have been revived in waking life and again brought 
into prominence, the most frequent instances of this 
revival at the present time arising out of activity of the 
psycho-analysts. 

Time, however, forms only one aspect of the topic of 
dream-content, and this seems to be a convenient 
moment to consider briefly the nature of the experience 
involved in the conflicts upon which dreams depend. 
I am the first to recognise that my own material 

is of a special kind. It is derived from two sources: 
one, the dreams of soldiers suffering from the effects of 
war experience, with active conflicts arising out of this 
experience; the other, my own dreams, where sexual 
conflicts might perhaps hardly be expected to be as 
active as in the dreams of younger people. Moreover, 
most of my own dreams which have been analysed 
occurred at a time when, owing to the extreme interest 
of my work and my absorption in it, I was far more free 
than usual from the sexual conflicts which are generally 
believed to be active in dreams. Many of the dreams 
which I analysed at this time could be referred to 
conflicts connected with my work, while another 
very interesting series, of which I have not yet given 
you an example, seemed to be explained by certain 
conflicts arising out of my attitude towards the war. 
So far as my positive evidence goes, sexual conflicts 
find expression in my own dreams with relatively 
little transformation and disguise, and it is only 
rarely that I have been able to explain a dream devoid 
of manifest sexual aspects as a conflict of a sexual 
kind. It is quite possible, of course, that when such 
conflicts are in action, there is an unusually great 
resistance, and that this resistance accounts for my 
not infrequent complete failure to analyse a dream. 
But even if this be the case, it must be remembered 
that the conditions under which my own dreams 
occurred were in many ways exceptional, and that 
sexual conflicts, transformed so as to be unrecognisable 
at first sight, would almost certainly be far more 
frequently active in a younger person and one less 
absorbed in special forms of mental activity. Because 
my own dreams can be referred comparatively rarely 
to conflicts of a sexual kind, it must not be concluded 
that sexual conflicts are not frequent, probably even 
the most frequent, sources of dreams. I am inclined 
to believe that it is just because the dreams I have 

analysed happen to be so largely independent of sex 
that they furnish examples especially suited for the 
purpose of demonstration. If they had dealt with 
sex-conflicts the analyses would probably have been 
full of passages which a natural reticence would have 
driven me to withhold or garble, thus interfering 
with the cogency of the demonstration. Moreover, 
in addition to such witting and clearly recognised 
obstructions, there would probably have been also 
others of an unwitting kind dependent on the resistance 
for which Freud has adopted the, in my opinion, 
unsuitable simile of the censorship. It is, I think, 
natural that this resistance should show less activity 
in the case of such comparatively innocent conflicts 
as those to which I have referred my dreams than 
might be expected if the conflicts had been con- 
cerned with sex. 

DISPLACEMENT 

On several occasions in this book I have referred to 
difficulties connected with the process of displace- 
ment which, according to Freud, forms a prominent 
element of the dream-work, and is one of the chief 
agencies, if not the chief agency, in disguising from 
the dreamer the real nature of the thoughts to which 
his dreams are due. If by displacement we only mean 
the process by which elements of the latent content 
find expression in a symbolic or other form, which 
prevents the recognition of their true nature by the 
dreamer, the dreams which have been recorded and 
analysed in this book afford numerous instances of 
its occurrence, but it is clear that Freud means some- 
thing more than this. /According to him displacement 
is a process in which the interest attaching to a pro- 
minent element of the latent content is not transferred 
to the element or elements of the manifest content 

III 

by means of which it is symbolised, but is displaced 
so as to become attached to some other insignificant 
image of the dream. The image which is most pro- 
minent in the manifest dream is not regarded as a 
symbol of the leading wish or other element to which 
the dream is due, but is an image of an indifferent 
kind to which the prominence has been displaced. 

Displacement of this kind occupies a very prominent 
position in Freud’s scheme, because to this process is 
especially ascribed the distortion which the latent 
content of a dream is believed to undergo in order that 
it may elude the vigilance of the censorship. ‘There is 
little question that it is the weight laid by Freud on 
the necessity for distortion and disguise which has 
led him to take so great an interest in, and attach so 
much importance to, this process. 

In the dreams of my own and of other persons which 
I have analysed I have been unable to confirm the 
presence of displacement in this sense. Thus, in my 
own “‘Presidency”’ dream the prominent element in the 
latent content was certainly the wish to be President 
with the conflict connected with this wish, and the 
prominent element in the manifest dream was with 
equal certainty the occurrence of the name of “S. 
Poole,’ who had been nominated as President by the 
dream-consciousness. In the suicide dream of my 
patient the prominent element of the deeper content 
was undoubtedly the impulse to suicide, and few would 
hesitate to accept the incident in which the dreamer 
took up the revolver to shoot his dream-surrogate 
as the outstanding feature of the manifest dream. 
In my own “ cup and saucer’ dream the outstanding 
feature of the latent content was the disturbing patient, 
for with him were connected the egoistic elements 
which really determined that the rearrangement of 
rooms should become the subject of a dream, and the 
cup and saucer by which he was symbolised in the 

IIz2 

dream formed the outstanding feature of the manifest 
content. In the three dreams which expressed my 
wish to go to London, the matter is less simple, but 
the prominent objects in all three manifest dreams 
were directly connected with the lectures, the in- 
formation about which had acted as the immediate 
means of strengthening this wish. 

My own evidence having thus failed to confirm one 
of the most important parts of Freud’s scheme of the 
process by which wishes or other forms of mental 
content find expression in the dream, let us turn to 
Freud’s own record and inquire into the nature of the 
dream and dream-analyses upon which he has founded 
his conclusions. I will begin with the dream of the 
botanical monograph with which Freud starts his 
consideration of displacement.* This dream is very 
short, so that it can be given in full: 

‘““T have written a monograph upon a certain plant. 
The book lies before me, I am just turning over a folded 
coloured plate. A dried specimen of the plant is 
bound with every copy, as though from a herbarium.”’ 

After considering certain incidents which had deter- 
mined the manifest content, Freud was led by the process 
of free association to the complications and conflicts 
that result from services rendered among colleagues, 
which put them under obligations to one another, and 
from these he was led to the reproach that he was 
accustomed to sacrifice too much to his hobbies. He 
regards ‘‘ botanical’ as the central point of the mani- 
fest dream, and finds no place for this element in the 
nucleus of his dream-thoughts. 

Only one such connection could be found, viz., 
that as botany was not one of his favourite studies, 

* Traumdeutung, 5te Auflage, page 118 (Brill’s translation, 

page 142). 
+ Ibid., page 209 (Brill’s translation, page 284). 

113 H 

there would have been an antithetical relation between 
the central point of his dream-thoughts and the element 
“botanical,” which he regards as the outstanding 
feature of the manifest dream. 

Let us now examine the dream and its associations 
for ourselves. The first point to be noted is the pro- 
minent place taken in the associations by the fact 
that Freud had once himself written a _ botanical 
essay (Aufsatz). Moreover, this essay on the coca 
plant had called the attention of K. Koller to its 
anesthetic properties, and Freud himself clearly recog- 
nised in his analysis that, if he had been more thorough, 
he might himself have made the discovery which 
Koller made as the result of reading Freud’s essay. 
It is evident that this early essay of Freud was of 
very great importance, and if, instead of picking 
out “botanical’’ as the central point of the manifest 
dream, Freud had regarded “ botanical essay ”’ as this 
central point, this nucleus would have been closely 
connected with an incident of Freud’s life of great 
importance. One cannot help suspecting that the 
reproaches concerning hobbies which were reached 
in Freud’s analysis were not altogether disconnected 
with his failure to discover the possibilities connected 
with the anesthetic properties of cocaine. 

Let us now turn again to Freud’s analysis. In the 
evening before the dream Freud had had a long con- 
versation with Dr Koenigstein, an eye-specialist, 
in which subjects were considered which touched 
Freud closely and awakened memories revealing 
the most diverse feelings of his inner self. We are 
told that among the subjects touched on in this con- 
versation were cocaine and Freud’s preference for 
monographic studies. But had it also included, or 
even touched, such a topic as Freud’s position in 
the world as a psychiatrist, there would have been 
another definite connection with the essay on coca, 

II4 

for if this work had led Freud to discover the practical 
value of cocaine as an anesthetic, it would have had 
an enormous influence upon his career. If he had 
been known to the world as the discoverer of cocaine 
his psychological doctrines would have had far greater 
chances of acceptance. Even if the conversation 
with the eye-specialist did not directly touch this 
aspect of Freud’s life, the mere fact that his friend 
was an eye-specialist would have been enough, for 
there is no branch of medical practice in which cocaine 
is more important than in ophthalmology. 

After considering his conversation with Dr Koenig- 
stein Freud sums up the analysis by assigning to the 
dream the meaning. ‘I am the man who has written 
that valuable and successful treatise (Abhandlung) 
on cocaine.’ One cannot help suspecting that a 
process by which the word “ Abhandlung ”’ (treatise) 
was substituted for ‘‘Aufsatz’’ (essay), when Freud was 
writing, was responsible for obscuring the meaning ; 
and that if this substitution had not taken place, Freud 
might have been quicker to recognise that ‘ botanical 
essay” rather than “botanical’’ was really the central 
point of the manifest content. 

I have not finished. Freud was not able to analyse 
this dream until the evening of the day following 
the dream, but during the morning of this day he had 
a kind of day-phantasy. According to my point of 
view such a phantasy is far more likely to lead to the 
essential content of the dream than the method of 
free association, which (especially after the interval of 
a whole day’s experience) is likely to introduce a 
number of irrelevant topics. It is therefore of great 
interest that this day-phantasy dealt explicitly with 
cocaine and with the share which Freud had had in 
its discovery. 

I suggest, therefore, that the very first dream cited 
by Freud as an example of a process of displacement 

of the deeper meaning to an unessential element of 
the manifest content not only fails to confirm his 
conclusion, but provides definite evidence (so far as 
it is possible to obtain such evidence from the re- 
examination of a published analysis), that there was 
no such displacement. 

In this re-examination of Freud’s analysis .the only 
- new factor which I have introduced is the great effect 
which his fame as the discoverer of cocaine would have 
had on the acceptance of Freud’s psychological doc- 
trines; which is by no means essential to the analysis. 
In every other part of my re-examination I have only 
slightly altered the stress laid on facts definitely 
recorded by Freud himself, and by this alteration of 
relative stress have brought out the fact that under- 
lying the image of a botanical monograph, which was 
the central feature of the manifest dream, there lay 
a system of reproaches and regrets arising out of a 
botanical essay written by Freud in early life,

In the history of my attitude towards Freud’s theory 
of the dream, which I gave in the first chapter, I related 
how a sceptical tendency was overcome by the experi- 
ence of a dream arising out of a latent desire to be 
President of a Society. One result of this dream was 
to make me a temporary convert to the view that the 
dream expresses the fulfilment of a wish. It was not 
long, however, before I had other dreams which fitted 
less easily with this formula, and I was led by them 
to the view that instead of the dream being always 
the fulfilment of a wish, it might be the expression 
of any other affective state. At this time it seemed 
to me probable that dreams were so often the expres- 
sion of desire, because desire is so frequent and so 
prominent among our affective states: Other experi- 
ences, and especially the occurrence of dreams referable 
to anxiety, which not only came into my own experience 
but were still more prominent in the minds of my 
patients, led me to the view that dreams might be 
the expression of any affective state of which the 
dreamer had been the subject during the preceding 
day. 

During the time when this view was forming in my 
mind I had a dream which seemed at first sight to 
give it striking confirmation. I propose to devote 
the greater part of this chapter to a consideration 
of an unusually complicated analysis of which this 
dream has been the subject. 

, 

The earliest feature of this dream, which occurred at 
Craiglockhart about 2.15 A.M. during the night of 
20th—21st March 1917, that I could recall is that I was 
reading a letter from a Cambridge friend. On waking 
I could not remember the details of the letter, but its 
general purport was to reproach me for my political 
views. In accordance with the real habit of the 
writer, the letter was in an allusive style, only referring 
indirectly to the grounds for his displeasure, but 
these grounds seemed quite obvious to me in the dream, 
and the highly reproachful character of the communi- 
cation was evident. I did not reach the end of the 
letter and was not aware on waking that I had seen 
the signature, though I had no doubt about the identity 
of the writer. I passed insensibly from reading the 
letter to the consideration of its subject-matter. The 
political views with which my friend was reproach- 
ing me were connected with the general European 
situation at the time. The thoughts to which I passed 
from the reading of the letter dealt particularly with 
the theme that the misfortunes of the Entente powers 
had been due to lack of co-ordination among its 
members. One of these thoughts which stood out 
especially clearly in my mind when I had become 
definitely awake was that the lack of co-ordination 
among the members of our own Government, which 
had come to light a short time before in the Dardanelles 
Report, would certainly have been present in even 
greater degree when the co-ordination needed had 
to be between the rulers of different countries, About 
this phase of the experience there came to my mind 
the list of the new French Ministry which had appeared 
in the paper the day preceding the dream. I saw 
this list clearly in just the visual form in which it had 

appeared in the newspaper. I believe that I saw the 
whole list in the paper of the dream, but on waking 
I could only remember the names of Ribot, Viviani 
and Thomas, and the absence of the name of Briand. 
The sight of this list started a line of speculation con- 
cerning the reasons for the change of Ministry. I 
wondered how far it indicated a diminution in the 
Strength of the jusqu’ au boutiste element in France, 
and proceeded to think about the possible influence 
of the change on the conduct of the war. 

About this point I became aware that I was awake 
and that I had had a dream. I wrote down at once 
all that I could remember. 

On proceeding to the analysis it was obvious that the 
experience was a characteristic example of the process 
which I have described in Chapter I, in which the 
dream proper had passed insensibly into thoughts 
of the half-waking state. The experience resembled 
exactly that which, as I have stated, has produced 
so much of my scientific work, with the difference 
that the subject-matter of the half-waking thoughts 
was the political situation of the moment instead 
of the scientific problems which usually form the object 
of such thoughts. There was no clear dividing line 
between the reading of the letter with which the dream 
began and the speculations at the end when I was 
clearly half-awake, but at the point in the experience 
when I saw a definite visual image of the list of the 
French Ministry, I was certainly nearer the sleeping 
than the waking state. 

Though it has taken some time to describe the general 
nature of this experience of sleep, the process of classi- 
fying it was very rapid in reality, and I proceeded 
almost at once to consider any events of the previous 
day which could have determined the manifest content. 

I remembered clearly reading the list of the new 
French Ministry in the newspaper of the preceding 

11g 

day, and that I had been especially interested in the 
absence from it of Briand’s name. During the day 
I had met an old Cambridge man who had asked me 
about the state of the University during the war, 
and this conversation would have tended to arouse 
the memory of the friend whose letter I had read in 
the dream. On the previous day I had also received 
the Cambridge Magazine of 17th March, containing an 
account of the attack which was being made on the 
Magazine at the time and of the measures by which 
the attack was being met, and at intervals during the 
day I had read extracts from the foreign journals 
which formed the especial feature of the paper at this 
time. I had been especially struck by the line taken 
by certain French journalists that the economic 
crippling of Germany was incompatible with the 
extraction of any indemnity from her in case of a 
successful conclusion of the war. This material seemed 
to have been utilised in the dream and to have influ- 
enced my speculations concerning the probable effects 
of the change of Ministry in France. 

The day before the dream had thus provided plenty 
of material which would have determined the general 
lines of the sleeping experience. Much of this experi- 
ence, however, was only very doubtfully of the nature 
of a dream. The part of the experience which was 
certainly a dream was reading the letter from my 
Cambridge friend, and therefore I turned my attention 
especially to this feature. As I have said, I could not 
remember its contents clearly, but the two points 
which stood out most prominently were its reproachful 
tone and the fact that the reproach was directed to my 
political views. 

Several other dreams about this time seemed to have 
been determined by anxieties connected with my 
hospital work, and at this point in the analysis I turned 
to the medical experience of the previous day to find 

whether I had had any experience which could have 
made reproach the dominant affective element of the 
dream. 

I had begun the previous morning feeling very tired 
and unfit for work, and had had an exceedingly busy 
day, through which I had only been carried by the 
interest of several cases and the belief that on the 
whole I had been able to deal with them successfully. 
The success of the day had, however, been marred 
by an incident at its close. Late in the evening I 
had been asked by a colleague to deal with a case of 
a very difficult kind, involving a disciplinary aspect. 
The situation was one of peculiar difficulty, and I 
had succeeded in carrying out the purpose desired by 
my colleague. But, though my conduct of the case 
had apparently been successful, I was acutely dis- 
satisfied with it myself, for I had only succeeded through 
the application of a somewhat violent procedure, where 
milder measures might have been sufficient if I had 
shown more patience and forbearance. A successful 
day had thus ended with a feeling of dissatisfaction, 
and I had definitely reproached myself for what I 
counted as a failure. 

The analysis thus led me to refer the reproachful 
character of the dream-letter to an affect of reproach 
which had been present in my mind shortly before 
going to bed. I was content with this interpretation 
and had not attempted to continue the analysis. 
At this time I had reached a point in the development 
of my views concerning the psychology of the dream 
when any confidence in Freud’s views concerning the 
role of wish-fulfilment, which had been due to the 
“Presidency ”’ dream, had been seriously undermined 
by later experience. I had been coming to the view 
that desire was not the only affective state by which 
a dream could be determined, but that dreams might 
be the expression of different affective states, such as 

12a 

fear, anxiety, shame, grief, etc. The especial interest 
of the dream to me at the moment was that the out- 
standing affective element of the manifest content had 
been reproach, and that reproach had been the out- 
standing feature of the experience of the period imme- 
diately preceding sleep. This dream had thus seemed 
to furnish striking confirmation of the view to which 
I was already being led, that dreams are attempts 
to express in sleep the affective state which is pro- 
minent in the dreamer’s mind before going to sleep. 
At that time I had not formulated the view which I 
am adopting in this book, that dreams are the attempted 
solutions of conflicts. 

Let us now turn to consider this dream and see how 
far it can be explained as a solution or attempted 
solution of a conflict. As I have already indicated, I 
regarded the political setting of the dream as having 
been determined by the contents of the Cambridge 
Magazine on the previous day. Taking the experience 
as a whole, I was inclined to regard it as an expression 
of a reproach arising out of my medical work, and 
was content to regard the difference in political opinion 
between my dream correspondent and myself as merely 
a feature of the manifest content by which the reproach 
had found expression. 

If, however, we regard the incident of reading the 
letter as the dream proper, and the whole of the rest 
of the experience as half-waking, half-sleeping thoughts, 
to which we must look for the meaning of the dream, 
we are driven to conclude that the real factor deter- 
mining the dream proper was a conflict arising in some 
way out of my attitude to the war. At the time I 
did not consider the dream from this point of view, 
for I was satisfied with the interpretation by which its 
content was referred to grounds for reproach arising 
out of an incident of my medical work. If, however, 
I am to adhere to the general principle of interpretation 

upon which this book is based, that the thoughts 
present in the half-waking state following a dream 
provide the clue to the thoughts by which the dream 
has been determined, we must regard a conflict con- 
nected with the war as the essential factor in the 
production of the dream. I was therefore driven to 
depart from my usual procedure and to undertake a 
new analysis when writing this chapter. In order to 
estimate the value of this analysis it must be remem- 
bered that it was made more than four years after the 
dream had taken place, and it is doubtful whether I 
should have thought it worthy of publication if the 
new analysis had not been made under conditions 
which are themselves of interest and illustrate the value 
of the thoughts immediately following a dream. 

This chapter, up to the beginning of the last para- 
graph, was written on the morning of 29th July 1921, 
after which I proceeded to attempt a new analysis. 
In this I referred the dream to a conflict which I 
supposed might have been going on in my mind con- 
cerning the continuance of the war. At the time of the 
dream (1917) I was manifestly adopting the orthodox 
attitude, and any such pacifist tendency as might 
have been aroused by reading the Cambridge Magazine 
would have been repressed, thus providing exactly 
the conditions by which such a dream as that with 
which we are dealing would have been produced. I 
regarded the element of reproach as the affect which 
would naturally have come into action if in the dream- 
conflict the crude patriotic attitude had gained the 
advantage. During the following night (29th—3oth 
July) I had a long and confused dream, of which, 
when I awoke, I remembered clearly only that I was 
going to my bedroom to have a siesta after lunch, 
taking with me books to read. On waking from this 
dream I found myself thinking about the problem of 
the day before, and then remembered clearly what I 

had then completely forgotten, that I had had a definite 
conflict in my mind at the time (t.e. March 1917) 
whether I was right in subscribing to the Cambridge 
Magazine. The conflict was between the view that 
it must be right to know the truth, to know what the 
people of other nations, enemy or allied, were thinking, 
and the view that in time of war nothing should be 
done to make people doubtful about the absolute 
justice of the cause for which they were fighting. In 
such a conflict there would be little question that the 
former attitude would appeal more to my adult in- 
telligence, while the second point of view would have 
appealed more to me in youth. If I am right in 
supposing that in the dream infantile or youthful 
attitudes find expression, owing to the removal of 
higher restraining influences, the reproach which was 
the prominent affective feature of the dream would be 
natural to the youthful attitude which was finding 
expression in the dream. 

The thoughts immediately following a dream which 
occurred four years after the analysis of another 
dream have thus led me to revise this analysis and to 
refer the earlier dream of reading the reproachful letter 
to a conflict arising out of the war, in place of regarding 
it as the expression of a reproach arising out of my 
medical work. 

A: question which remains is whether this professional 
reproach took any part in the causation of the dream, 
and whether the affect of reproach, which was mani- 
festly present in my mind shortly before going to sleep, 
can have contributed to the reproach of the dream. 
The possibility that this may have been so, must 
certainly be kept in mind, though I do not think it is 
possible at present to form a decisive opinion. We 
need further evidence to show whether an affective 
state present in the mind of a person before going 
to sleep can reinforce or help to determine the occur- 

rence of that affective state in a dream. (It must be 
noted that in the dream under consideration we have 
not to do with the occurrence in the dream of an affect 
of self-reproach, but of a reproachful tone on the part 
of a dream-personage. Though I was clearly aware 
of the reproachful character of the letter, I was not 
aware of experiencing in the dream any such state of 
self-reproach as clearly existed in the waking state 
before going to sleep.) 

The analysis which I have just concluded was thus 
completed more than four years after the dream, as 
the result of half-waking thoughts reached after a 
second dream experienced while the later stage of the 
analysis was in progress. 

I propose now to say something about this dream 
though, short as it is, I am unable to analyse it com- 
pletely. In this dream I was going to my bedroom for 
a siesta, taking with me some books, and I had the 
impression that the books which I was taking to my 
bedroom were connected in some way with the Cam- 
bridge Magazine, though this impression was vague.* 
On seeking for an explanation of the manifest content, 
I remembered almost at once that I had read in the 
paper on the previous day that Mr Lloyd George had 
been advised to take a siesta after lunch, and was 
deriving great benefit from the practice. Mr Lloyd 
George was so intimately connected with the conduct of 
the war that it was natural that information concerning 
him should have been utilised to express a content in 
which the conduct of the war was intimately con- 
cerned. A recent experience of my own would also 
have tended to give the siesta after lunch a certain 
amount of prominence in my mind. A more important 
point is connected with the memory of the conflict 
about the Cambridge Magazine. In association with 

* In connection with this, it may be mentioned that the Cambridge 
Magazine undertook the sale of books. 

the act of taking these books to my bedroom I had 
the idea that it might have been right to read the 
Magazine in private, but that it was not suited for 
general circulation. This certainly fitted with an 
element in the old conflict, according to which it was 
thought that such knowledge as was being provided 
by the Magazine should be accessible, but that such 
accessibility had its dangers, especially in connection 
with the army, where it might lead to a lowering of 
morale. The bedroom of the dream thus seems to 
have served as a symbol for privacy as opposed to 
publicity in relation to this publication 

This dream of “the reproachful letter’’ and its 
somewhat complicated analysis illustrates another 
point of great interest which I may consider here. 
In an earlier chapter I have mentioned the fact that 
according to Freud the wish of a patient to prove or 
disprove the views of his physician can provide the 
leading motive of a dream, and this suggests the 
danger that the theories of the dreamer may influence 
his dreams, leading them to provide evidence in favour 
of his views. I have had this possibility in mind 
from the time that I began to study dream-psychology, 
and have frequently made notes of facts which might 
help to determine how far this danger is real. In my 
original analysis of the dream of the reproachful 
letter there is a record of this kind. At the time 
that I had this dream I was reading The Interpretation 
of Dreams for the second time, and on 19th March 
I had read the final chapter of the book on the “‘ Psycho- 
logy of Dream Activities.’”’ When reading it, the 
thought had occurred to me that the danger of having 
his dreams influenced by his theories must be especially 
great in the case of one who had formulated so definite 
a theoretical position as that of Freud. I had wondered 
whether it might be possible to find evidence for such 
influence in any dream of mine. The sleep of the 

following night was, so far as I could tell, free from 
dreams, but the dream of the reproachful letter occurred 
on the following night. As I have already stated, I 
was at that time coming to question Freud’s view 
that the dream is always a wish-fulfilment, and was 
coming to believe that it might be the expression of 
any affective state. At the end of my original analysis 
I comment on the fact that according to this analysis 
this dream was determined by an affect of self-reproach, 
and thus furnished confirmation of the theoretical 
view to which I was already inclining. The dream 
and its analysis thus seemed to support the view that 
the course of a dream might be determined by the 
theoretical interests of the dreamer. The result of 
the later analysis undertaken in this chapter, however, 
has been to show that the early analysis was wrong, or 
at least very incomplete. The reproach arising out of 
my medical work has been shown to have taken only a 
secondary place, the real motive being just a conflict 
of a political kind, such as was implied in the dream- 
letter. Ifthe later analysis is accepted, any influence of 
my theoretical bias at the time had been on the analysis 
rather than on the dream itself. I have no doubt 
whatever that it was only my theoretical interest 
in the view that the dream might be the expression 
of any kind of affective state which led me to be satisfied 
with an analysis which referred the dream to a state of 
self-reproach, and led me to pay no attention to the 
conflict which was revealed four years later by the 
thoughts following another dream. I suggest, there- 
fore, that, so far as this dream is concerned, it shows 
clearly how the theories of a dreamer may influence his 
self-analysis, but provides no evidence that they 
influence his dreams. The dream and its analysis have 
more bearing on the methodology of the self-analysis 
of the dream than on the theory of the dream itself, and 
reveal clearly one of the dangers of such self-analysis. 

CONSTRUCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 

There is little question that problems may be solved 
in sleep which either have not previously been the 
object of serious attempts at solution or may even 
have been beyond the powers of the sleeper when 
awake. In such cases it is often difficult to obtain 
any light upon the nature of the process by which 
the problem was solved. As often happens, cases in 
which the constructive function is less obvious and less 
complete may be of more value in enabling us to recog- 
nise the kind of process by which such results are 
obtained. 

A good example of a constructive function of this 
kind is provided by the “cup and saucer’? dream 
reported in Chapter III, in which a problem con- 
cerning the distribution of patients in the different 
rooms of a hospital was suggested by a dream, the 
dream-consciousness having apparently utilised a piece 
of information, the importance of which had not been 
realised in the waking state. The dream-consciousness 
had formulated, though only in symbolic form, a 
solution of which the waking consciousness had not 
been capable. 

THE ‘‘ HIDDEN SOURCES’ DREAM 

I propose now to relate a dream of my own 
which illustrates the kind of way in which the con- 
structive function is exerted. In this dream, which 
occurred during the night of 24th-25th March 1917, I 
was reading a paper in what I took to be the Southern 
Cross Log, the monthly publication of the Melanesian 
Mission, in which a missionary was writing about the 
people of some island, either in the Banks group or 
the New Hebrides. He was referring to the fact that 

THE *“‘ REPROACHFUL LETTER” DREAM 

the natives of this island were quite ignorant of any 
such history of the origin of their stonework as I had 
put forward in my book The History of Melanesian 
Society. The writer spoke of this with regret, owing 
to its seeming failure to support the value of “ hidden 
sources,’ to which, in common with myself, those 
working in Melanesia were coming to attach so much 
importance. I had the idea in the dream that “ hidden 
sources ’’ referred to survivals. The writer then passed 
on to regret that my views concerning such matters 
were practically dead. 

In this dream I saw the print distinctly, but not the 
whole page. At the same time there was a distinct 
visual image, which appeared to be detached from the 
printed page, of a pattern of lines which I took to 
represent stonework. The stones had sharp outlines 
as if carefully carved and placed in close apposition 
to one another, so that in some respects the image 
resembled a design for weaving or plaiting rather than 
a representation of stonework. It was certainly very 
different from any stonework found in Melanesia. I 
woke from this dream more or less suddenly, without 
any obvious half-waking stage, and wrote down the 
dream before the analysis began. 

The first thought which came to me was that during 
the preceding evening I had read a paper on “ Tiiba- 
tulabal and Kawaiisu Kinship Terms,” by E. W. 
Gifford,* which had reached me on that day from 
America. In the paper there had been several refer- 
ences to the dependence of kinship nomenclature upon 
forms of marriage in which I am especially interested. 
These references had been brief and one was of a kind 
which, though probably not intended by the author, 
might have been regarded as contemptuous. I may 
have been annoyed by this, but what had interested 

* University of California Publications in American Archeology 
and Ethnology, Berkeley, U.S.A., Vol. XII, page 219, 1917. 

129 I 

me far more was that, failing to recognise the depend- 
ence of kinship terms upon forms of marriage as only 
part of the much wider thesis of regarding these terms 
as an expression of the social organisation, the author 
had paid no attention to facts which seemed to me to 
afford striking evidence in favour of my views. I had 
therefore finished the paper highly pleased at having 
been provided with evidence in favour of my views— 
evidence all the more satisfactory in that it could not 
be due to any bias on the part of the collector of the 
information, for he had completely missed its bearing. 
Between reading the paper and going to bed I had 
been subjected to one or two annoying experiences and, 
being very tired, my general mood was depressed on 
going to sleep. Consequently, when the analysis was 
made, I was inclined to regard the reference to my 
views being practically dead as an expression of an 
attitude of depression connected with my anthropolo- 
gical work, and of my annoyance at the real nature 
of my views concerning the relation of kinship and 
social organisation having been misunderstood. 

I could recall no special event during the preceding 
day which would have called my attention to Melanesia, 
but the peculiarity of nomenclature which had especi- 
ally interested me in Gifford’s paper was characteristic 
of certain Melanesian systems of relationship, and 
would certainly have taken my thoughts in that 
direction. Moreover, a copy of the Southern Cross Log 
was lying on a table in my room and had probably 
been observed during the day. 

The feature which stood out with especial prominence 
when I recalled the dream was the reference to ‘‘ hidden 
sources.’ I had the idea clearly in the dream that 
this expression referred to survivals, and it was only 
at a late stage of the analysis that it occurred to me 
that it was an unusual way of regarding survivals 
to speak of them as “ hidden sources.’’ The doctrine 

of survival is very prominent in my anthropological 
work, the whole of my theoretical construction based 
on the nomenclature of kinship resting upon the idea 
that kinship terms are survivals of earlier forms of 
social organisation. There would thus be a definite 
connection between “ hidden sources ”’ and the thoughts 
aroused by reading Gifford’s paper. 

It then occurred to me that “hidden sources ”’ 
would also be an appropriate expression for facts 
prominent in my mind at the time through my growing 
interest in the work of Freud that the unconscious 
is a store of “ hidden sources”’ of knowledge. So far 
as I am aware, it had not previously occurred to me 
that there was any similarity between the “ survivals ”’ 
of anthropology and the unconscious experience 
which bulks so largely in the Freudian psychology. 
It had never occurred to me that a kinship term 
used by a people who had no idea that it reveals their 
past history might be regarded as a hidden source of 
knowledge comparable with a piece of unconscious 
experience. Though the resemblance implies nothing 
more than an analogy, it is one of those analogies 
which enables us the better to understand the two 
kinds of experience brought into relation with one 
another. The analogy of a social survival with a 
fossil is one with which I was already familiar, and 
a fossil is pre-eminently a “ hidden source” of know- 
ledge, but that a social survival might be regarded as a 
“hidden source’’ of knowledge had not previously 
occurred to me. 

So far I have been content to explain the occurrence 
of the “ hidden sources’ of the dream and have sug- 
gested that this expression points to a resemblance 
or analogy between two very different things which 
had not occurred to me when awake. I may now 
consider this dream from another point of view, with 
the aim of discovering whether we can discern the kind 

of process by which the dream-consciousness reached 
this construction. The dream occurred at a time 
when I was coming to the conclusion that dreams 
might be the expression of any affective state pro- 
minent in the mind of the dreamer at the time. It 
occurred four nights after the dream of the reproachful 
letter, which seemed to me at the time to provide such 
good evidence for the truth of the view which was 
then being formulated in my mind. It was therefore 
natural that I should have been content to regard 
the conclusion expressed at the end of the dream 
that my views were practically dead as due to the 
state of depression present before I went to sleep. 
At that time I had not reached the view that dreams 
are attempted solutions of conflicts. Let us now 
inquire how far it is possible to look upon this dream of 
“hidden sources ’’ from this point of view. 

Though I made no reference to the fact in my 
original analysis, there is no question that at the time I 
was the subject of a definite conflict between interests 
in ethnology and psychology. During the earlier 
part of my medical service during the war, my main 
intellectual interest continued to be in ethnology, 
and until the beginning of 1917 my spare time was 
devoted to work on that subject. It was only after I 
began work in Scotland that my growing interest in 
the psychological problems suggested by war-neurosis 
began to compete and conflict with my interest in 
ethnology. I believe that this conflict formed a 
definite factor in the “ pacifist ’’ dream, and my desire 
to return to my ethnological work took an important 
part in the egoistic motive which led to my wish that 
the war should end at all costs. If, as I can be con- 
fident was the case, this conflict was present at the 
time, there is no question that it would have been 
stimulated by reading Gifford’s paper. This paper 
contained facts which were not only of great interest 

in themselves, but they also provided important 
arguments in favour of my views concerning the 
scientific problem which forms perhaps my most 
important contribution to ethnology. Moreover, there 
was a special motive of an egoistic kind which would 
have led me to wish to carry on the line of work sug- 
gested by Gifford’s paper. At this time several 
American ethnologists were disagreeing with my 
views and especially with their applicability to 
American society. Common to all of them was a 
misunderstanding of an important part of my position, 
which, although clearly stated in my book, had been 
neglected. Gifford’s paper, on the day preceding the 
dream, had provided evidence in my favour, and the 
fact that it had been provided by an American worker 
who obviously disbelieved in my position, provided a 
controversial opportunity which one would be sorry to 
miss. Nevertheless, I knew that I could only avail 
myself of this opportunity by withdrawing from my 
psychological work the small amount of spare time for 
writing which was then available. I do not think that 
it requires much imagination to see how strong such a 
conflict would be and how naturally, if my general views 
are correct, it would become the groundwork of a dream. 

Let us now consider the dream in more detail to 
discover how far it provides a solution, successful or 
unsuccessful, of the conflict. If my interpretation is 
right, the dream forms a good example of condensation. 
The expression “ hidden sources’ was found to point 
to the recognition by the dream-consciousness of a 
similarity between a kinship term and a fragment of 
unconscious experience. The expression brought into 
relation with one another the two interests which were 
conflicting with one another. It affords a good example 
of a compromise-formation in which the dream-con- 
sciousness pointed the way to a means of reconciliation 
which had not occurred to me in the waking state. 

It was only later that I came to see that there was no 
real conflict between ethnology and psychology, but 
that the two studies are mutually helpful, and that 
such knowledge of the two as had come to me formed 
an opportunity to be utilised, and later in the year I 
prepared the lecture Dreams and Primitive Culture,* 
which forms the first of a series of papers in which I 
have dealt with the extensive border-region between 
psychology and ethnology. 

If I am right, this dream was an example of the con- 
structive function of the dream in that the expression 
“hidden sources ”’ refers to a resemblance or analogy 
which had not presented itself to the waking con- 
sciousness. J must now inquire whether we can 
discover any reason why this analogy should have 
occurred in sleep rather than in the waking state ; 
why in this respect the state of sleep should have shown 
itself superior to the waking life. I do not think it is 
difficult to find the answer. In sleep the conflict be- 
tween ethnology and psychology was free and open. 
There was no process of repression in activity to keep 
the conflict out of sight and restrain one or other of 
the two contestants. The egoistic motive which 
urged me not only to go on with my ethnological 
work, but also to avail myself of an opportunity to 
demolish opponents, was not checked and thwarted 
by the more altruistic motive that it was now my 
business to understand and apply the principles of 
psycho-therapy. The two interests had equal play, 
so that the imagination could apply itself without 
restraint to find a solution for the conflict. 

One other element may be discerned in the solution. 
The expression ‘“ hidden sources”’ refers only to an 
analogy. In my adult state I distrust analogies, and 
the mere fact that the resemblance suggested by the 
dream is nothing more than an analogy would, in the 

* Bull. John Rylands Library, 1917. 

adult waking state, have aroused distrust and conse- 
quent repression. It is probable that this forms 
another motive for the occurrence in sleep of a means 
of solving my conflict which had not occurred to me 
when awake. 

I have dealt with this case at length because, though 
the problem attacked and solved by the dream-con- 
sclousness is comparatively trivial and unimportant, I 
believe that it points the way to the explanation of the 
more serious constructive accomplishments, of which 
sleep may be the scene. In this case the consciousness 
of sleep succeeded in pointing the way to a mode of 
reconciling two conflicting interests, partly because 
there was no inhibition or repression, partly because 
the solution was of the nature of an analogy which 
was not acceptable to the scientific attitude of the 
waking state. I suggest that these two factors, and 
especially the former, may be responsible for those 
cases in which, in sleep, people have written poems 
or accomplished other works of art. This suggests 
that poems composed in sleep, and such accomplish- 
ments, as the solving of mathematical or other problems 
in sleep, should be more carefully scrutinised than has 
hitherto been customary, with the object of discovering 
whether the sleeping consciousness has not utilised 
processes, such as analogy and simile, which would 
have been distrusted in the waking state. 

One other feature of the dream must be considered. 
The dream ended with an expression of regret on the 
part of the dream-writer that my views concerning the 
stonework of Melanesia were practically dead. In my 
original analysis I took this to be an expression of 
the depressed mood present before I went to bed. 
The dream not only ended with the statement that my 
views were dead, but it also expressed regret that my 
views concerning “hidden sources’’ were not con- 
firmed, These parts of the dream seem to suggest 

that in spite of its constructive effort the dream was, 
nevertheless, a failure of solution. When considering 
the dream of the reproachful letter I mentioned the 
possibility that, though this dream could be explained 
as the result of a conflict, the affect which was dominant 
in it may have been due to the attitude of reproach 
present before going to sleep that had taken so pro- 
minent a place in my first attempt at analysis. The 
despondent tone of the present dream seems to point 
definitely in the same direction. It suggests that 
though dreams are the attempted solutions of con- 
flicts, the nature of the solution is largely determined 
by the affective attitude dominant before going to 
sleep,

UnTIL now I have been considering the psychology 
of the dream, quite apart from its relation to other 
products of mental activity. I propose in this chapter 
to deal—it can only be very briefly—with some of 
these relations. The dream, or perhaps more correctly, 
different varieties of the dream, occupy an _ inter- 
mediate position between certain forms of mental 
activity universally regarded as pathological, and 
others which are not only regarded as normal and 
healthy, but as products of the human mind, so valu- 
able that they might be regarded as supernormal, 
rather than subnormal or abnormal. I propose now 
to consider the relation of the dream to certain patho- 
logical mental processes on the one hand, and to the 
products of artistic and religious activity on the other 
hand. 

It has been one of the chief arguments of this book 
that dreams are attempts to solve in sleep conflicts 
which are disturbing the waking life. I have referred 
the character of the dream, at any rate in so far as 
its emotional aspect is concerned, to the degree in 
which this attempted solution is successful. Those 
who have read my book Instinct and the Unconscious 
will have recognised that I have been trying to bring 
dreams within a formula closely comparable with that 
by which I have in that book explained the psychoses 
and psycho-neuroses. These are regarded as attempts, 
successful or unsuccessful, so far as the patient’s 
comfort is concerned, to solve conflicts which are dis- 

turbing the normal course of life. When the solution 
is successful, as in the state which I have taken as 
the characteristic example of hysteria, there is no 
affect. When the solution is wholly unsuccessful, as 
in anxiety-neurosis, there is affect and of a painful 
kind. Moreover, just as it is possible to consider many 
forms of dream as the simple fulfilments of a wish, 
in a symbolic form which satisfies the level of the 
mind that is active in the degree of sleep in which 
the dream occurs, so is it possible to regard the hysteri- 
cal paralysis or mutism as the unwitting fulfilment of a 
wish for some occurrence which will remove the subject 
of a mental conflict from the scene of that conflict. 
We may even, in many cases, regard the paralysis 
or mutism as having a symbolic nature, as being a 
symbol of the more complete suppression of all move- 
ment of which I have supposed the hysterical dis- 
ability to be a manifestation. Attempts have been 
made to show an even closer similarity between the 
dream and hysteria, and to find processes in the pro- 
duction of the hysterical symptom that correspond 
to those by which the latent dream-thoughts find 
expression in the manifest dream. Thus, as I have 
already indicated, even the simple hysterical paralysis 
may be regarded as an example of symbolisation, and 
this character is still more obvious in many cases of 
civilian hysteria where, in place of the crude paralysis 
or anesthesia, the symptoms are of a more elaborate 
kind in which they symbolise, or seem to symbolise, 
the situation from which the patient wishes to escape. 
The next character, that of dramatisation, is more 
obvious. Hysteria may be regarded as a prolonged 
drama, in which the sufferer leads, perhaps for years, 
a life of an artificial kind, by which he or she escapes 
from a conflict with a situation of real life. In this 
mode of solving the conflict, the element of make- 
believe enters in a manner closely comparable with 

that which forms an essential part of a dramatic 
situation. Hysteria may be regarded as an unwitting 
simulation, and thus resembles the simulation of 
situations of real life, which is an essential part of the 
drama. Condensation again is often evident in the 
production of the hysterical symptom. Factors of 
the most various kinds, which enter into the conflict, 
may find their expression in a mutism or other simple 
form of hysterical disability. 

“Displacement again occurs in a form closely com- 
parable with that to which Freud assigns so important 
a place in the production of the dream, so closely, 
indeed, as to lead one to suspect that the weight laid 
upon displacement by Freud, in his theoretical con- 
sideration of the dream, was suggested by his experi- 
ence with hysteria, for it must always be remembered 
that the whole of Freud’s construction starts from 
hysteria, and that a tendency can always be discerned 
in his work whereby this is the pattern to which other 
mental mechanisms, normal or abnormal, are made to 
conform.“ 

These various characters are even more strikingly 
present if we compare the dream with the disorder 
known as compulsion-neurosis. In this disease the 
sufferer has an overwhelming drive to perform certain 
acts, sometimes of a simple kind, but often very com- 
plex, which, while they satisfy a craving if carried 
out, give rise to the most intense discomfort if their 
performance is not allowed. 

In this case psycho-analytic investigations have 
shown clearly that the compulsive acts are of a de- 
finitely symbolic kind. They are symbolic acts whereby 
a person satisfies wishes or cravings in an unwitting 
manner. This is especially clear in the ritual, often of 
a highly complex kind, which, in many persons, may 
accompany the act of going to bed. The various acts 
of arranging the bed and bed-clothes in a certain manner 

or other features are almost certainly symbols by means 
of which a conflict is unwittingly satisfied. Their dram- 
atic quality is still more obvious, and they may be equally 
regarded as examples of condensation and displace- 
ment. In these two cases of hysteria and compulsion- 
neurosis, the conflict of the real life is satisfied by these 
symbolic expressions, and so long as the hysterical 
manifestation or the performance of the compulsive 
act is not interfered with, the painful affect natural 
to the conflict is absent, though the solution itself is 
liable to produce new conflicts by its incompatibility 
with the social surroundings of the sufferer. 

While in these two examples the solution is, or may 
be, so successful as to lead to absence of affect, psycho- 
neurosis may be accompanied by painful and even 
highly exaggerated affect, just as the dream may be 
so accompanied. 

In the discussion of ‘‘ Affect in the Dream ”’ (Chapter 
V), I have regarded the nightmare and other such 
painful dreams as those of my suicidal patient (Chapter 
II) as failures to solve the conflict upon which the 
nightmare or dream depends, and that I ascribe the 
painful character of the affect to this failure. I 
believe that the case is exactly the same in the disorder 
we call anxiety-neurosis. This is a psycho-neurosis, 
accompanied by painful affect, and there is every 
reason to believe that the special features of the 
disease depend upon a conflict, present in the patient’s 
mind, which wholly fails of solution. There is the 
further striking feature that prominent among the 
symptoms of anxiety-neurosis are nightmares and 
unpleasant dreams. The close similarity between the 
unpleasant dreams and states of anxiety-neurosis is 
well illustrated by a dream of my own, which occurred 
during the last year of the war, when I was living 
within a hundred yards of the great gun at Hamp- 
stead. One night I awoke with the report of the gun, 

I40 

and while listening to the varied sounds of the raid, 
thought that I distinguished one which might have 
been caused by the bursting of a bomb. Then I found 
myself in a room, sitting by a bed, with my head, face 
downwards, pressed against the bed. I was aware 
that there was the danger of a bomb and that the room 
was near the roof, and I looked up with definite appre- 
hension. I was reproaching myself for showing fear 
in an air-raid, when I realised that the room in which I 
had just been present was not my own and that the 
experience had been a dream. The apprehension had 
either gone as soon as I awoke, or went as soon as I 
realised that I had been dreaming, and I became at once 
extremely interested in the experience through which 
I had just passed. I recognised it as fitting in a 
beautiful manner with my theory of the role of repres- 
sion in connection with the nightmare. There can be 
little doubt that when I distinguished the sound 
which I took to be that of a bursting bomb, I had had 
a tendency towards fear, which I had repressed, and 
that on going to sleep this fear, repressed in the waking 
state, had found expression in the apprehension of 
the dream. On going into the details of the dream I 
remembered an occasion on which I had looked up- 
wards during an earlier air-raid. I had sat through a 
performance at the Coliseum during an air-raid, and 
on looking upwards had noticed that I was sitting 
immediately under the dome, with its obvious sugges- 
tion of possibilities. During this speculation about 
the nature and causes of my apprehension I went to 
sleep again and had a second dream, the details of 
which I remembered clearly when I awoke, but rapidly 
forgot, as I did not record them at once. The important 
point, however, is that it was wholly free from any 
unpleasant affect. I then went to sleep again, and 
slept through the rest of the raid without waking. 

The interest of the first dream is that it may be 

regarded as a miniature psycho-neurosis lasting only 
a minute or two and cured completely, also in a minute 
or so, by the procedure I was accustomed to employ 
in treating cases of anxiety-neurosis. I have no 
doubt that if on waking I had been ashamed, as indeed 
I was for a moment, and had repressed the fear and 
shame, and had tried to persuade myself that I had 
not been afraid, I should have had a second dream of 
which the nightmare character would have been more 
definite, or I might even have started an anxiety- 
neurosis, for at that time all the conditions, such as 
fatigue and impaired physical health, which would have 
predisposed to the occurrence of a psycho-neurosis, 
were definitely present. Instead of this, the occurrence 
of fear in sleep became at once, on awaking, an object 
of scientific interest, and this interest removed at once 
all danger of repression and all occasion for the occur- 
rence of shame. My attitude provided an admirable, 
though as a matter of fact unwitting, example of the 
psycho-therapeutic principles which at that time I 
was seeking to formulate. I was at the time so inter- 
ested in the réle of repression in the production of the 
symptoms of psycho-neurosis that on thinking about the 
dream only this aspect occurred to me. The dream 
also fits in with the formula that dreams are attempts 
to solve conflicts; in this case an unsuccessful solution, 
as indicated by the accompaniment of unpleasant 
affect. In this connection I must refer to a condition 
of a conflict which I have not so far mentioned. There 
were many people living in the house, all of whom, with 
the exception of myself, were in the habit of getting up 
whenever there was an air-raid, and assembling in one 
of the lower rooms of the house. I believe that when 
I thought on this occasion I had detected the sound 
of a bomb, I may have been tempted to follow the 
general example. 

The chief interest of this dream is that it illustrates 

so well the resemblance between a dream and a psycho- 
neurosis that it may be regarded as a miniature psycho- 
neurosis, the whole course of which, including its 
successful treatment, lasted only a few minutes. It 
not only illustrates the part taken in the, production 
both of dreams and psycho-neuroses by repression, 
as well as the mechanisms common to both, but it 
also serves as an example of the general principle that 
both are the attempted solutions of conflicts, as well 
as of the further principle that the nature and intensity 
of the affect depends upon the degree in which the 
attempted solution is successful. 

Another general formula put forward in this book 
is that the dream is an example of regression. Here 
again the formula corresponds exactly with one which 
holds good for psycho-neurosis. In Chapter XVIII of 
Instinct and the Unconscious I have considered many 
forms of psycho-neurosis and psychosis from this 
point of view, and have tried to show that all their 
manifestations can be regarded as regressions to earlier 
forms of mental functioning and to instinctive reactions, 
many of which never become manifest in healthy 
adult life. 

Another feature of the dream upon which I have 
tried to insist in this book falls closely into line with 
one which, according to my belief, holds good of the 
psycho-neuroses. All the dreams which I have analysed 
have been referred to recent conflicts in the life of the 
sleeper. Though many dreams and many features 
of dreams require for their complete explanation 
conditions going back to the early life of the dreamer, 
states determined by heredity, and even happenings 
with which the dreamer as an individual has had 
nothing to do, it has been possible to explain every 
feature, even of long and complex dreams, by the 
nature of conflicts in the recent experience of the 
dreamer. / The conclusion has been drawn that Freud 

| 143 

and the psycho-analytic school generally have greatly 
exaggerated the part taken by infantile experience in 
the causation of the dream. The view put forward 
in this book is that while the dream is essentially a 
mode of regressive mental functioning, a regression 
to the ways of early life, the experience which is 
embodied in the dream, upon which the dream- 
processes act, is derived from the recent experience 
of the dreamer. ; 
I believe that an exactly similar situation holds 
good of mental disorder, and that in this department, 
as in the psychology of the dream, the importance of 
early experience has been greatly exaggerated by Freud 
and his followers. Evidence seems to be accumulating 
that the special “complexes,’’ or other special forms of 
infantile experience, to which so great a réle has been 
ascribed in the causation of the psycho-neuroses, 
belong to the mental make-up of everyone. If they 
are the essential causes of mental disorder, we have to 
explain why some people suffer from psycho-neuroses 
and others escape. Factors universal in mankind 
cannot be regarded as the essential causes, though they 
may take their part in determining the special forms 
which mental disorders in general take. The tendency 
of the psycho-analytic school to accentuate the im- 
portance of the early factors, and the accompanying 
neglect of the part taken by recent conflicts, seem to 
me to be of exactly the same order as the attitude of 
the same school towards the dream. In both cases 
we have to distinguish a highly complex chain of 
causation. The recent history of the study of both 
dream and psycho-neurosis seems to reveal a similar 
tendency to lay undue stress on early factors and a 
relative neglect of recent conflicts, which I believe to 
be far more influential in the production of both 
dream and psycho-neurosis than is now usually 
supposed. 

DREAM AND MYTH 

I can now turn to the relation of the dream to artistic 
and religious activity. If I am right in regarding the 
dream as a regression, it is evident that we must seek 
for its points of resemblance with artistic production 
to the earlier and cruder forms of this activity. Though 
it is possible, if not probable, that even in the highest 
developments of artistic production there are points 
of resemblance with the dream, it is with the earlier 
forms of these activities, such as the myth, that we 
should expect to find the resemblance especially 
definite and far-reaching. It is therefore not surprising 
that the relation of the dream to the myth is a subject 
which has already been frequently considered by the 
psycho-analytic school. 

In the numerous writings on this subject, which we 
owe to Freud and his followers, far more attention 
has been paid to the content of the myth than to the 
processes by which the myth comes into being. Follow- 
ing the general trend of psycho-analytic writings, the 
chief aim of workers has been to prove that just as 
most dreams and all psycho-neuroses are believed to 
have a sexual basis, so are sexual motives believed to 
play the chief, if not the only, part in the origin and 
development of myths. 

The mechanisms of myth-production have, however, 
been by no means neglected, and here again, following 
Freud, it has been customary to regard myths as the 
fulfilment of wishes. Thus, according to Karl Abraham, 
one of the first to follow Freud in this region, the myth 
contains in disguised form the wishes of the childhood 
of the race. This disguise is believed to be effected 
by processes of condensation and displacement exactly 
comparable with those of the dream-mechanism, 
while the concept of the censorship is freely drawn 

145 K 

upon in the attempts to show how these processes 
have been in action. 

It is impossible within the limits of this book to 
attempt to treat this subject adequately, and I propose 
to content myself with a few points of resemblance 
between the dream and the myth, as illustrated by 
dreams already related or referred to in this book. 

One of the most general features of early mythology is 
the tendency to personify natural objects, and to regard 
these objects, such as hills, rivers, trees, etc., as having 
such human characteristics as the power of speech. 
It is therefore of interest that in what I have called 
the transference dream of my patient, narrated in the 
second chapter, the river sang to the dreamer to 
swim on his journey and take courage, an incident of 
a kind which repeatedly occurs in the myths of primi- 
tive peoples. We have reason to believe that in the 
dream this human behaviour of the river was directly 
connected with the identification of the natural objects 
with a human being, that the river of the dream was 
the symbol or representative of a person, and it is 
probable * that, at the stage of social development, 
of which myth-formation is especially characteristic, 
there is a similar identification, and that every natural 
object to which man’s attention is especially directed | 
is thought of as having human characteristics, and is 

* If Dr Rivers had been able to prepare the manuscript of this 
book for publication it is unlikely that he would have left these 
statements concerning the comparison of dreams and myths in their 
present form. His attitude toward the general problem is clearly 
expounded in his Presidential Address to the Folk-lore Society 
(‘‘The Symbolism of Rebirth,” Folk-love, March 1922); and after 
having formulated his views so definitely it is inconceivable that he 
would have permitted the crude animism to which he seems to 
subscribe on this page to have gone forth as his real opinion. Nor 
do I think he would have left his statements concerning the sexual 
factor in the development of myths (page 152) in their present form 
without further explanation and qualification. Therefore I have 
added a brief note (Appendix II) calling attention to certain con- 
siderations which he might have set forth if he had revised his 
manuscript himself.—G. E. S. 

endowed with such human characters as the power of 
speech and the capacity for locomotion. That animals 
should talk is just as natural to the man of lowly culture 
as it is natural to the dream-consciousness of the most 
highly civilised of mankind. 

Another feature of the same dream may be noted. 
I will quote the part of the dream to which I have 
already referred: “‘ The river was friendly and sang 
to me to continue on my journey and take courage. 
I did so, and felt happy, and could take powerful 
strokes with ease.” 

The point to which I wish to call attention here is 
that nothing is said in the account of diving or other 
means of getting into the river, but it is natural to 
the dreamer that he should at one moment be walking 
by the river bank and at the next taking powerful 
strokes. Transitions of this kind are in my experience 
habitual in the narrations of the people we call savage, 
especially in their myths. At one moment a narrator 
will be talking about a man and at the next moment he 
will speak of his settling on the bough of a tree, as if 
it were a perfectly natural thing to do, it being quite 
unnecessary to make any reference to the transforma- 
tion into a bird which, from our point of view, is needed 
to make the action of the story intelligible. Everyone 
who thinks of the natural and easy transitions of his 
dreams from one situation to another cannot fail to 
recognise the probability that such transitions are 
equally natural to man in the mythopeeic stage of his 
development. 

Another interesting point of similarity between the 
dream and the myth or other product of the savage 
mind is the composite nature of their objects. One 
of the most common experiences of the dream is the 
appearance of a composite image of a person in which 
it is possible to distinguish two or more different 
personalities. Thus, in a dream of my own (reported 

in Chapter X), which depended on a conflict concerning 
a pacifist attitude, there is a good example of such a 
composite personality of two professors, each of whom 
personified an aspect of the conflict, that character 
predominating which was in agreement with the 
nature of the solution which was being expressed by 
the dream. Similar composite creatures are very 
prominent in early myth and belief, though composite 
animals or creatures made up of man and animal are 
more frequent than in the dream of the civilised 
person. An excellent example of such a composite 
creature is the dragon, which resembles in many respects 
the composite formation of a dream.* 

DREAM AND POEM 

While many may be ready to acknowledge the 
similarity of dream and myth, the proposition that the 
mechanism of the production of poetry is closely 
similar to that of the dream will awaken more opposi- 
tion. There is little doubt, however, that this simil- 
arity exists. It is possible to take the images of 
the manifest content of a poem and discover more or 
less exactly how each has been suggested by the 
experience, new or old, of the poet. It is also possible, 
at any rate in many cases, to show how these images 
are symbolic expressions of some conflict which is 
raging in the mind of the poet, and that the real under- 
lying meaning or latent content of the poem is very 
different from that which the outward imagery would 
suggest. Moreover, it is possible to show the occurrence 
of a process of condensation by means of which many 
different experiences are expressed by means of a 
simple image. There is also a striking resemblance 
with other products considered in this book in that the 

* G, Elliot Smith, The Evolution of the Dvagon, Manchester, 1919. 

poem may come in a state closely resembling a dissocia- 
tion from the experience of ordinary life. 

I cannot give you direct evidence for this, for the 
obvious reason that, unfortunately, I am not a poet. 
Just as I believe that a really satisfactory analysis 
of a dream is only possible to the dreamer himself or 
to one who knows the conflicts and experiences of 
the dreamer in a most unusual way, so do I believe 
that only when poets and other artists have set to 
work to analyse the products of their artistry can we 
expect to understand the real mechanism of artistic 
production. 

In this comparison of the poem with the dream, one 
fact must be emphasised. The poem as we read it 
is very rarely the immediate product of the poetic 
activity, but has been the subject of a lengthy process 
of a critical kind, comparable with that which Freud 
has called the secondary elaboration of the dream. It 
is only through the study of the immediate unelabor- 
ated product of the poet’s mind that we can expect 
to understand the part of the process of artistic 
production which is comparable with the formation 
of the dream. 

CONTENT AND MECHANISM 

In the consideration of the psychology of the dream, 
of which I have attempted a brief sketch in this book, 
and in the still more brief consideration of other 
products of mental activity, which I have attempted 
in this chapter, I have been dealing especially with 
the mechanisms or processes by which these different 
products of mental activity come into being. I have 
said little about the nature of the material upon which 
these mechanisms or processes work, and build it 
up, it may be, into the airy and fantastic dream ; 
or into the equally fantastic if less airy behaviour of 

the subject of a compulsion-neurosis ; or into the mea- 
sured imagery of a poem. 

Before I close I should like to say a word about the 
content of these different forms of activity. 

The dreams which I have related in this book have 
been carried back to contents of various kinds. In 
one dream this content was concerned with the con- 
flicting emotions generated by doubts concerning the 
acceptance of an honour; in another was deeply 
involved the instinct of self-preservation as brought 
into action by the presence of a situation so terrible 
that to the subject of the conflict there seemed no 
remedy but suicide; in another dream the conflict 
was between a simple wish for change and for the 
satisfaction of interests which, though taking the 
guise of science, were really nothing more than mani- 
festations of the instinct of curiosity on the one hand, 
and social sentiments of duty towards others. 

» These dreams conflict with the opinion generally 
ascribed to Freud and his followers that dreams have 
usually or always a sexual content.“ That dreams 
may have such a content, and have such content 
very frequently, stands beyond all doubt, but for 
obvious reasons one does not choose them when the 
object is to illustrate the mechanisms and processes of 
dream-production. I trust that the dreams I have 
related will be sufficient to show that all dreams have 
not this content, and that any conflict which is capable 
of disturbing the even tenor of Man’s life may serve 
as the motive of a dream. I should like further to say 
that in this opinion I am in agreement with Freud 
himself. Not only do most of the dreams he relates and 
~analyses depend on other than sexual motives, but in 
the last edition of the Tvaumdeutung, he states expli- 
citly that neither in that edition nor in any earlier 
edition will the reader find any support for the view 
that dreams are wholly determined by motives of a 

sexual kind. That extravagance is only one among 
the many extravagances which we owe to indiscrimi- 
nating zeal with which the followers of Freud have 
outrun their master, and thereby brought a great 
contribution to knowledge into disrepute. 

In the similar views concerning the nature of the 
factors which underlie the production of psycho- 
neurosis Freud himself cannot be acquitted from blame, 
though such a mistake is not unnatural if attention 
be limited exclusively to the disorders customary in 
the ordinary life of civilised society in which the 
sexual instinct is more than any other the subject of 
unregulated repressions and suppressions. The ex- 
perience of the war has now, however, convinced 
most students of the subject that the equally funda- 
mental, or even more fundamental, instinct of self- 
preservation must be put side by side with the sexual 
instinct as the starting-point for the development 
of psycho-neurosis, and it is probable that, when 
attention is directed to it, the instinct of self-preserva- 
tion will be found to play a far more important réle 
in the production of the neuroses of civil life than most 
psycho-analysts are yet ready to recognise. 

Mythology and magical or religious rite already have 
a history long enough to allow a forecast of what we 
may expect to happen in other branches of mental 
activity. Anthropology has already passed through 
the phase in which to every strange rite and belief 
of the different peoples of the earth was ascribed a 
sexual, or, as it was called, a phallic, motive. This 
was followed by a later phase in which, perhaps as a 
reaction against the sexual interest, students ascribed 
all myths to an interest largely of an intellectual kind— 
the interest in the movements and changes in appear- 
ance of sun, moon and stars, and especially in Germany 
many mythologists came to believe exclusively in 
these motives as others had believed as exclusively in 

motives of a sexual kind. Strangely enough, it is 
only since the war, and as the result of the discovery 
of the great part which the instinct of self-preservation 
plays in the production of mental disorder that we 
are beginning to recognise the vast part which this 
instinct has taken in the determination of savage 
belief and custom. We are now coming to see to how 
great an extent uncertainties concerning the supply 
of food, and especially the need for rain as the necessary 
condition of an abundant food supply, have taken 
in the determination of the magical and religious 
beliefs and practices of mankind. In all the early 
civilisations, in Asia, in Africa, in Oceania, and in 
America, a foremost place was given to magical and 
religious rites for the production of the rain which is so 
essential to the satisfaction of the instincts of nutrition. 
Again, under the leading of Elliot Smith * we are 
coming to believe in the enormous importance of the 
desire for the lengthening of life as a motive for some 
of the most striking beliefs and customs of mankind. 
It is possible, perhaps probable, that our interest in 
these and other motives has led us to neglect the part 
which motives of a sexual kind have taken in the 
growth of mythology and religion. These motives 
are quite clearly to be discerned in some of the more 
advanced religions, and are especially obvious in 
certain of the developments of the religions of India. 
It may be that in the study of the ruder beliefs and 
customs of mankind, the pendulum has swung too far, 
and that sexual factors have been more important 
than we now suppose. t 
/ * The Evolution of the Dragon, Manchester, 1919. 

/. t Itisimportant to discriminate between the sexual act and the 
' process of reproduction or life-giving. The earliest religious ideas 
are associated with the concept of life-giving, not merely in the 
literal sense of birth or rebirth, but also of prolonging life, renewing 
youth, averting death, or attaining success in love and sport. In 

other words, the motive underlying the most primitive form of 
religion, which is preserved in myth, is the worship of the Great 

I need not refer here to the varied nature of the 
content of poetry and of other products of artistic 
activity. All the forms of activity which have been 
brought into relation with the dream agree with it in 
being capable of arising through the action of any 
agencies which may set up a conflict in the mind. 
The dream is just as little determined solely by motives 
arising out of sex as motives of this kind are solely 
responsible for the morbid processes of psycho-neurosis 
and for the products of artistic and religious activity. 

PRACTICAL VALUE OF THE STUDY OF DREAMS 

If I am right that the dream affords a guide to the 
nature of psycho-neurosis, and that the study of the 
dream confirms the importance of recent conflicts 
in the production of psycho-neurosis, it will follow 
that in psycho-therapeutic treatment especial atten- 
tion should be paid to recent conflicts by facing these 
conflicts and learning the means by which they may 
be solved. We may acknowledge that for a complete 
understanding of the conflict, and of the personality 
of the patient as an essential element in the conflict, 
a deeper analysis may be necessary, but there are many 
cases in which, for reason of time or money or other 
cause, the acquisition of such deeper knowledge is 
not practicable, and much can be done by a more 

Mother or Giver of Life; and it is an expression of the instinct of 
self-preservation rather than that of sex. But once the organs of 
reproduction came to symbolise the life-giving powers, and especially 
when the phallus replaced the female organ as the more important 
religious symbol, it was inevitable that its potency as a life-giver 
should be overshadowed by its attributes as the instrument of sexual 
gratification. What I want to emphasise here is that the réle of the 
sexual instinct in the development of religion, myth and folk-tale, 
is not primary but secondary to the craving for a life-giving elixir. 
The recognition of this unquestionable fact destroys the foundations 
of the speculations of Freud, Jung and their followers. In his zeal 
to build a bridge which will bring the Freudians and the ethnologists 
together, Dr Rivers has used ambiguous phrases, which suggest views 
that are contrary to his real beliefs.—G. E. S. 

complete dealing with the recent conflict which serves 
as the immediate cause of the morbid state. Even in 
a very small experience I have met with cases in which 
it has seemed to me that in their enthusiasm for the 
discovery of factors dating back to childhood, psycho- 
analysts have neglected obvious recent conflicts, or 
have not given them sufficient weight.* 

I do not propose here to say anything about the value 
of the dream in psycho-analysis proper. There is no 
doubt that the dream and associations arising out of 
the dream can provide the means of getting back to 
early experience and to morbid elements of this experi- 
ence. I propose here to consider only the clinical 
value of dream-analyses of the kind I have described 
in this book. I shall only deal with the question 
whether dream-analysis has value when one is content 
with getting back to the recent conflicts which are 
serving as the immediate conditions of dream or 
psycho-neurosis, or both. | 

It might seem at first sight that such analysis of 
the dreams of others as I have utilised in this book 
may be of little clinical value. If I am right that one 
is only justified in using the dreams of others as material 
for the scientific study of dreams, when one has exten- 
sive knowledge of the personality of the dreamer 
and of the conflicts by which his life is being disturbed, 
it might seem that the dream can be of little use 
practically. It is necessary, however, here to distin- 
guish between value as scientific evidence and clinical 
value, two very different things. I have given you 
one striking example of the clinical value of the dream 

* Dr Rivers had intended to compare this tendency in psycho- 
logical practice with the recent history of ethnological speculation, 
and to refer especially to the way in which the true and obvious 
meaning of certain groups of facts has so often been overlooked by 
those who were intent on discovering some more elusive explanation 
in the mistaken belief that they were interpreting the evidence in 
accordance with the principles of evolution. 

in what I call the suicide dream. NHere I was able 
to analyse the dream at once, owing to my knowledge 
of the dreamer, and it may be useful to inquire exactly 
in what the utility of that dream consisted. I already 
knew about the conflicts of the patient. The dream 
contributed practically nothing novel in that respect. 
What it did was to enable me to estimate the severity 
of the conflict and judge just what effect it was having 
on the patient. In this case the special value of the 
dream was that it showed the dreamer was tending 
towards a special solution of his conflict, and since, 
in this case, the solution was suicide, with all the vastly 
important consequences which this solution would 
bring, the value of the dream was obvious. But, 
though less striking, the dream always has this value 
in helping the exact estimation of the personality 
of the dreamer and of the forces internal and external 
which are acting upon him. Thus, the two dreams of 
my patient with what I call the anti-quartermaster 
sentiment arose out of quite subsidiary and temporary 
conflicts, and had little immediate or direct importance 
in his treatment, but, nevertheless, they were of distinct 
value in enabling me to estimate the character of the 
dreamer. They enabled me to estimate the patient’s 
mode of reaction towards the minor worries of life, 
and his perhaps overstrong sense of responsibility 
in his dealings with his fellow-men. They defi- 
nitely assisted an exact diagnosis of his personality. 
A deeper analysis might have shown that the quarter- 
master was a surrogate for some other person, perhaps 
his father, and knowledge of this kind might possibly 
have helped the patient to readjust his life. If he 
had broken down as the result of the ordinary strains 
of civil life, some such deeper analysis would perhaps 
have been desirable. I mention this case here only 
to illustrate how even dreams dealing with minor 
temporary conflicts have their value in that estimation 

of personality which helps towards the successful 
treatment of psycho-neurosis. 

The point I am trying to make now is that even when 
the physician is already well acquainted with a patient 
and his conflicts a dream may have a definite value 
in helping him to weigh the relative importance of 
different elements of a conflict, and to estimate more 
exactly the nature of the personality by which the 
conflict has to be solved. One value of the kind of 
analysis which I have been considering in this book 
is that it enables the more exact estimation of the 
finer shades in the diagnosis of the situation with which 
it is the business of patient and physician to deal. 

In this book, dealing primarily with the scientific 
aspect of a problem, or set of problems, I have so far 
only recorded dreams where an extensive knowledge 
of the dreamer has allowed me to utilise his dreams 
as evidence. I propose now to give a few examples 
of dreams related by patients of whom I knew com- 
paratively little, in order to illustrate their value in 
diagnosis of a cruder kind. 

I will begin with a dream related by a young pilot 
in the R.A.F. He had flown and fought for many 
months in France, and as the result of the strain was 
suffering from a mild anxiety state with unpleasant 
dreams which could, however, hardly be called night- 
mares, and were certainly not battle-dreams of the 
ordinary kind. Apparently there was not much wrong 
with him, and as was customary with my patients in 
the Air Force, I was only trying to make sure that he 
was not the subject of any special conflict, or, if he 
was, that he was dealing with it in the right way 
before sending him away for a holiday as a preliminary 
to return to duty. I failed to detect the existence 
of any youth conflict. He seemed the usual, cheerful, 
irresponsible kind of youth with whom one was accus- 
tomed to deal in the Air Force, very different from the 

man weighed down by responsibilities and anxieties 
with whom I had been accustomed to deal in the 
army. Though the generally unpleasant nature of 
his dreams made me suspect the existence of some 
conflict, none could be discovered. One morning, 
however, he related the following dream : 

He was in gaol. He did not know and could not 
find out what offence he had committed, but he was 
sure of his innocence. 

On inquiry into the incidents of the previous day he 
related that he had received a letter in the evening 
from a favourite uncle who was in prison as a con- 
scientious objector. He was especially fond of this 
uncle, who had had much influence with him, and early 
in the war the patient had tended to sympathise with 
his uncle’s views, so that there had been at one time 
a certain amount of conflict about enlisting. After 
joining, any doubts about the justifiability of war had 
completely disappeared, and, as I have already said, 
he had had a successful career as a pilot. As a result 
of the strain of active service, however, his doubts 
had reappeared. We had a conversation about the 
situation which hitherto he had not really attempted 
to face. Three days later his dreams had become much 
less disturbing, and a week later he was not only very 
much better in every respect, but he was having no 
dreams at all. 

The dream I have described certainly put me on 
the traces of a conflict which was apparently so slight 
that the patient did not himself attach much import- 
ance to it. It is very improbable that he would 
have told me about it if I had not been put on its 
track by a dream. (I may mention that two days 
after the first dream he had another dream, from 
which he awoke feeling natural and comfortable, 
which appeared to depend on another minor conflict 
concerning uniform. In this dream he saw a balloon 

which came down, and a dozen strange-looking men 
got out of it. He went up to them and asked them by 
what authority they were in civilian clothes. Instead 
of answering they disappeared, and then he noticed 
that he was wearing an old tunic which did not belong 
to him.) 

The dreamer was very young and looked even more 
youthful than his years. On the previous day he had 
been out in a new uniform and had noticed people 
looking at him. He had supposed that they were 
thinking that he had only just got his commission. 
In the dream he exerted authority and was wearing an 
old tunic. 

In this case a dream led me to a conflict which I 
should probably otherwise have missed, chiefly because 
it seemed to the patient too trivial to be worth mention. 
In another case the conflict was more serious, and 
probably I should have discovered it sooner or later 
without a dream being needed. The patient held a 
commission in the Air Force, and had had severe 
concussion in a crash under painful circumstances 
in that his companion was killed. He was suffering 
from severe nightmares, from which he awoke sweating 
and frightened, of falling over cliffs and burning in 
his aeroplane, which is, of course, the chief dread of 
nearly every flying man. He was repressing vigor- 
ously and could not stand being in the dark, because 
the thoughts of flying repressed during the day then 
came into his mind. As usual in such a case my 
treatment was directed to enable him to deal with 
his crash and its consequences, as with any other 
experience of life. Owing to his leaving the hospital, 
I did not see him for some time, and when we met 
next he told me of a very painful dream, which had 
recurred on three successive nights. In this dream he 
was “‘ carting about ’” a dead body wherever he went. 
He had a horror of the body and a dreadful feeling of 

anxiety because it was always with him. The dream 
ended by his going home and putting the dead body 
under his bed. The body was always in the same atti- 
tude, with hands over the shoulders, so that the palms 
were exposed. The body was that of a very big man 
with thick wrists and a greenish skin. 

The patient had been in the army before he joined the 
R.F.C., and after some thought he remembered a day in 
1916 when he had tried to jump a trench, and failing 
to clear it had unearthed a partially buried German, 
exposing the whole body. The hands of the corpse 
were in just the attitude of the dream, and there was 
also agreement in its general appearance. The chief 
feature of the manifest dream was thus accounted 
for. It remained to discover the deeper meaning, 
which was soon clear. Four days earlier he had dis- 
covered, after suspecting for some time, that he had 
acquired syphilis. He had much knowledge of this 
disease and was acquainted with the relation between 
it and general paralysis. At the same time he was 
engaged to be married. His immediate conflict was 
concerned with his relation to his fiancée, as he believed 
that there would be a danger of his incurring general 
paralysis as long as he lived. We discussed the matter 
fully. I naturally laid much stress on the necessity 
for thorough treatment and minimised the danger of 
any lifelong influence if this was undertaken. 

On the following night he did not dream, and though 
the dream had previously recurred three nights running, 
he never had it again. 

I have cited this dream for its practical value, but I 
cannot resist relating an element of the analysis of 
scientific interest. JI was anxious to discover why the 
body of a dead German only seen momentarily two 
years earlier should have acted as the symbol of the 
syphilis with which he believed he was to be encum- 
bered for the rest of his life. At first he could think of 

T59 

nothing which would connect this sight with any 
element of his conflict, until at last it occurred to him 
that just about the time he unearthed the German he 
had heard that the girl who had later become his 
fiancée, whom he had known for many years from 
childhood, had become engaged to someone else. 
He was very much upset and had become thoroughly 
reckless, but matters had gone better later, for she had 
broken her engagement and had become engaged to 
him. There was thus a definite association between 
his fiancée and the experience with the German with 
upturned palms. 

THE DREAMS OF CHILDREN AND ANTARCTIC EXPLORERS 

So far, I have been considering dreams to be at- 
tempted solutions of conflicts; but now I must refer 
to certain types that appear at first sight to be obvious 
cases of wish-fulfilment, into which the element of 
conflict either does not seem to enter at all, or at any 
rate to be an obtrusive feature. One of these cases 
is that of the simple dreams of children, in which they 
attain in their dreams desires formed during the day. 
Having had no experience in the investigation of the 
dreams of children, it would be of little value to deal 
with this matter at length; but I may note that the 
records of such dreams * show that the desires attained 
in them are often those, the satisfaction of which has 
been forbidden by parents or others during the day, 
where there are obvious grounds for the presence of a 
conflict. The same is probably true of the simple 
dreams of adults, which seem to be simple wish-ful- 
filments. Thus, the frequent dreams of soldiers in 
France that they were on leave were probably some- 
thing more than the result of the natural and obvious 

* See, for example, those recorded by Dr Kimmins in his book, 
Children’s Dreams. 

desire to be on leave. It is evident that in such cases 
there would be scope for conflicts arising out of the 
incompatibility between these desires and sentiments 
connected with military duty. One would like to 
know something about the character and general 
mental attitude of those who had dreams of this kind. 
A third type of dream which raises greater difficulty 
is that presented by the dreams experienced by members 
of Arctic and Antarctic Expeditions, especially dreams 
in which they enjoyed the pleasures of the table. 
Dreams of this kind have been recorded by Otto 
Nordenskjéld. Thus he writes: * 

“ Very illustrative of the direction of our innermost 
thoughts were our dreams, which were never more 
vivid and numerous than now. Even those of us 
who otherwise dreamed but seldom, had long stories 
to tell in the morning when we compared our latest 
experiences from this world of fantasy. All of our 
visions concerned the outer world, which now lay so 
distant from us, but were usually applied to our present 
circumstances. One of the most characteristic dreams 
was that where one of us fancied he had gone back 
to his school-bench in order to learn how to flay minia- 
ture seals, which were of a size just suitable for use in 
instructing a class. But meat and drink were usually 
the centres round which our dreams revolved. One 
of us who made a speciality of going to banquets in his 
visions was highly pleased one morning when he could 
relate that ‘last night I managed to get through 
three courses.’ Naturally, we were also busied in our 
visions with more impossible things, but the want of 
fantasy in almost all the dreams I had, or those which 
I heard related, was most apparent; still, I think it 
would have been of great psychological interest had 
all these dreams been taken down.” 

* Antarctica, Otto Nordenskjold and Gunnar Andersson, London, 
1905, page 290. 
161 L 

Similar dreams have been frequent among the 
members of recent British Antarctic Expeditions, 
and I am indebted to Mr R. E. Priestley of Christ’s 
College for much valuable information about them. 

In his experience dreams of this kind fell into two 
classes, those in which the dreams were satisfied by 
a dream-meal, and those in which food only formed the 
subject-matter of the dreams. The meals enjoyed 
or only contemplated would vary from a mere snack 
to a twelve-course City dinner. 

It is natural to regard dreams of this kind as simple 
wish-fulfilments. It seems natural that men whose 
dietary was confined to limited amounts of monotonous 
fare should have strong desires for food of a different 
kind, and that the dreams were simply the fulfilment 
of these desires. Mr Priestley tells me, however, that 
the desire for food was far from being always satisfied 
in these dreams. Several members of his party had 
dreams in which they imagined that there was a shop 
behind the hut in which they were living, which they 
had only to visit in order to obtain ample supplies of 
food. The dreamer would make his way out of the 
hut by the same laborious means as those necessary 
in real life, only to find on reaching the shop that it 
was early closing day. If the dreams were determined 
by wishes for food, these wishes were thus by no means 
always satisfied in sleep. 

Another fact cited by Mr Priestley is very important 
in relation to the thesis which I am putting forward 
in this book. Mr Priestley tells me that in his opinion 
nothing was more the subject of conflicts during these 
expeditions than food. Dreams of the kind we are 
considering were especially frequent and definite when 
he was with a party whose food had to be very severely 
rationed. There were frequent occasions for conflict 
in connection with food, such as those arising out of 
finding a fragment of biscuit which had fallen during 

the process of distribution, or the opportunities pre- 
senting themselves while cooking. His evidence shows 
that during waking life there were present just those 
conflicts connected with food which on the hypothesis 
put forward in this book would have made food the 
natural subject of a conflict in sleep. 

In all three of the special kinds of dream, which seem 
at first sight to furnish difficulties for the view that 
dreams depend on the activity of conflicts in sleep, it 
has been found that there are present the conditions 
necessary for conflict. It is a question, however, 
whether all wishes do not imply some degree of conflict. 
There would be no occasion for a wish if there were not 
an obstacle of some kind to the attainment of the end to 
which the wish is directed. It is possible to speak of a 
dream as determined either by a wish or a conflict, 
and my objection to Freud is not so much to his ex- 
pression of the purpose of a dream in terms of desire 
as to his view that dreams are necessarily the fulfilment 
of desire. I have not only tried to show that in many 
dreams wishes are not fulfilled but frustrated, and 
that in such cases the fate of the desire has a most 
important bearing on the nature of the affective aspect 
of the dream. The formula I propose has not only 
been made wider than that of Freud, in order to 
include every kind of dream, but, still more important, 
because it enables us to explain certain features of 
the affective aspect of dreams before which Freud’s 
simpler formula is quite inadequate, if not indeed 
wholly helpless. 

I may take this opportunity of giving an account of 
a dream related to me by Mr Priestley which admirably 
illustrates the main thesis of this book. Among the 
members of the Scott Expedition there was a Norwegian 
who was naturally divided in his wishes concerning 
the race to the South Pole by his having the same 
nationality as Amundsen, their rival. This Norwegian 

had a dream in which he was in the streets of Chris- 
tiania when a telegram was put into his hands. On 
opening it he found a message, signed by Amundsen, 
saying that he had reached the Pole. We have here 
an almost perfect example of a dream as a solution of 
a conflict in accordance with the deeper wishes of 
the dreamer. During the day the Norwegian was an 
apparently whole-hearted adherent of the Expedition 
to which he belonged, and apparently really desired the 
success of his adopted country in the struggle upon 
which they were engaged, but in his sleep the youthful 
attitude reasserted itself, so that not only did his 
native country form the setting of the dream, but his 
countryman was the victor in the contest.

THE ‘‘ PACIFIST’’ DREAM 

TuIs dream consists of two parts: an earlier, of which 
my recollection on waking was vague, though not 
perhaps more vague than my usual memory of dreams ; 
and a later part which I recollected with unusual 
definiteness. 

Part I. I arrived at a place near the sea by train, and 
went to the house of a married friend, who seemed to 
be the composite image of two people, one of whom 
was a professor of physiology and the other a professor 
of another science. I will call the physiologist V and 
the other W. When I was packing up to go away, 
I put two numbers of a journal with a yellow cover 
in my Gladstone bag. I had the impression that these 
were numbers of the Austrian anthropological publica- 
tion Anthropos. On the journey I had left things in 
the train, and on seeking them found a hard bowler 
hat and an umbrella in the rack of a railway carriage. 
I left the house for the train to go away, driving with 
my host and hostess. At a turning into a street I 
got out of the carriage in which we were driving. I 
do not know how I was dressed in this part of the dream. 

Part II. I was in the house with the same friends, 
and went out of their front door into a large court- 
yard. I was told by my host to turn to the left, but 
instead of doing so I turned to the right. I did not 
find the door I expected. I was turning away when my 
host, whose personality had in this phase of the dream 

changed in nature so as to resemble V more than W, 
called to me that I had gone the wrong way and must 
go to the left. I went to the left and found a small. 
door in a corner of the courtyard on which was written 
‘““ Physiologisches Practicum.” I entered and went up 
a flight of stairs, at the top of which I was met by a 
man whom I could not identify with anyone I knew 
or had known. He was bandaged and had one arm 
in a sling. He greeted me and asked me if I was in 
practice. I said that I was working temporarily in 
the army, whereupon he asked after Professor Z, 
another English physiologist, and spoke about the 
work he had been doing. Though the man spoke 
English he was definitely thought of in the dream as 
‘a German professor. He was in civilian dress, while 
I had the impression that J was in uniform, though 
on waking I could not recall an image of myself in 
this dress. 

On thinking over the dream, I recalled a number of 
events of the previous day which would have helped 
to determine the manifest content. I had lunched 
_with Mrs A, with whom I[ had travelled to Australia 
just before the outbreak of the war. During lunch 
she had reminded me of a pamphlet with a yellow 
cover which had been lost on the voyage. This 
pamphlet was on an anthropological subject, and I also 
had two numbers of Anthropos with me on the voyage. 
This journal also has a yellow cover. We had talked 
about Professor and Mrs W, who had been fellow- 
travellers. 

Professor V has a German name and lives at a place 
which had been mentioned in the course of a conversa- 
tion during the evening preceding the dream. 

One of my patients, whom I will call B, had been a 
fellow-guest at lunch. He had been to see me during 
the evening preceding the dream, and among other 
subjects we had talked about Germany, and I had 

told him of some of my experiences in that country 
as a student, when my interests had been largely 
physiological. The combination of dwelling-house and 
laboratory, which is unusual in England, frequently 
occurs in Germany, and I had been especially familiar 
with the combination in Heidelberg, where I had been 
the guest of Professor Kiihne. Heidelberg was one 
of the places especially mentioned during the con- 
versation in the evening. 

During the day I had received a letter from Dr C, of 
New York, an American physician with a German 
name, of whom I had not previously heard. He had 
written to me about a paper I had published, entitled 
“ Freud’s Psychology of the Unconscious.”” The strik- 
ing feature of my correspondent’s letter was his pleasure, 
tinged with wonder, at what he called my courage in 
venturing to deal with a topic which was at the time 
the object of so much contempt and obloquy in England. 
I remembered that the German name of my corre- 
spondent had led me to consider whether his pleasure 
was only due to the general character of my article, 
or whether he might have been influenced by its final 
words, which mentioned the Austrian nationality 
of Freud. These words had reference to the fact that 
several recent writers in the English medical press 
had regarded Freud’s nationality as good evidence 
for the worthlessness of his views. 

I have here put together facts which serve to explain 
various features of the manifest content, but long before 
this survey was concluded I had found my thoughts 
led to matters which pointed to the existence of a 
definite mental conflict. B, the patient who had been 
my fellow-guest at lunch, with whom I had had the 
conversation in the evening, was not suffering from any 
form of psycho-neurosis, but was in the hospital on 
account of his adoption of a pacifist attitude while on 
leave from active service. During the afternoon I had 

finished reading Under Fire, the translation of Bar 
busse’s Sur le Feu, and during the evening I had looked 
through the English Review for the month, which 
dealt with problems of peace and war, and had put the 
magazine down in the middle of an article by Gorki. 
My general reading at this time was leading me towards 
a belief that the economic position of Germany was 
creating a situation which made peace by negotiation 
possible, and one article in the English Review had put 
this point of view in so striking a way that I had found 
myself in a frame of mind more favourable to peace by 
negotiation than I had ever known before. I had 
read this journal, as well as Barbusse’s book, on the 
recommendation of B, partly in order to help me to 
understand his position. During the analysis I re- 
membered quite clearly that when I was reading the 
Review I had thought of the situation that would arise 
if my task of converting a patient from his “ pacifist 
errors’ to the conventional attitude should have as 
its result my own conversion to his point of view. My 
attitude throughout the war had been clearly in favour 
of fighting until Germany recognised defeat, and though 
the humorous side of the imagined situation struck 
me more than its serious aspect, there can be little 
doubt that there was a good opening for conflict 
and repression. Though my manifest attitude was 
definitely in favour of war to the finish, I had no doubt 
about the existence of a very keen desire that the war 
should end as soon as possible for the egoistic motive 
that I might get back to my proper studies, which had 
been interrupted by the war. I have no doubt that 
this egoistic motive was always active beneath the 
surface. J was aware that if I had been acting solely 
in my own immediate interests I should have wished 
the war to come to an end at once, regardless of future 
consequences. There were thus the grounds for a 
definite conflict in my mind between a “ pacifist ” 

tendency dictated by my own interests on the one 
hand, and, on the other, opinions based partly on 
reasoned motives, partly on conventional adherence 
to the views of the majority, in favour of a fight to 
the finish. The article in the English Review may be 
assumed to have reinforced the egoistic side of the 
conflict by providing the rational support that, owing 
to the supposed economic ruin of Germany, peace by 
negotiation had become possible. The conversation 
with B must also have served to stimulate the conflict, 
though it is not easy to say which side of the conflict 
would have been strengthened. 

The general character of the dream being thus 
referable to a conflict arising out of my attitude towards 
the war, it remained to discover how the various 
features of the manifest imagery of the dream formed 
an appropriate expression of the conflict. In the first 
part of the dream the incident which stood out most 
clearly in my memory was the search for certain lost 
articles and the finding of a hat and umbrella in the 
rack of a railway carriage. These two articles may be 
regarded as symbols of the civilian, the umbrella 
particularly being an article which is absolutely tabooed 
while in uniform. Finding them in the dream may be 
regarded as a symbol of the return to civilian dress and 
habits which the end of the war would bring. 

The chief feature of the second dream was that, 
though it was not explicitly recognised while I was 
dreaming, I was evidently visiting a German laboratory, 
and the inscription on the door makes it clear that it 
was a physiological laboratory. My reception in the 
laboratory was of just such a kind as I had frequently 
experienced on visits to Germany about twenty years 
before, when, as I have already mentioned, my interests 
were largely physiological. The dream thus reproduced 
a state of affairs which formed an appropriate repre- 
sentation of peace with Germany. The incidents of 

this part of the dream not only implied peace, but also 
the restoration of the friendly relations between the 
scientific men of the two countries which existed 
before the war and was still more definite in the student 
days twenty years ago, which the dream reproduced. 

The appearance of the journal Anthropos in the first 
part of the dream was significant, for though edited 
and published in Austria, it has an international char- 
acter, and publishes its articles in French, Italian and 
English, as well as in the German language. This 
journal thus forms a fitting symbol of international 
peaceful relations. 

A feature of the dream, which stood out very clearly 
in my recollection afterwards, was that I was directed 
by my host to turn to the left, but went instead to 
the right, and only found the laboratory when I was 
recalled and obeyed the original directions. It seems 
highly significant that Professor V, who now definitely 
dominated in the composite personality of my host, 
was a physiologist with a German name and ancestry, 
who would thus fittingly symbolise the reconciliation 
of the two nations in science.* It may be noted that 
before the war I had a firm belief in the value of scien- 
tific co-operation as a step towards international friend- 
ship, and that the war had given a rude shock to this 
belief. The dream thus revived an attitude which 
had been strong before the war. 

_ Still more significant was my change of direction in 

the dream. If my going to the left, as directed by 
my host, had symbelised my movement in the pacifist 
direction, it would have been a movement contrary 
to all my opinions since the outbreak of the war, which 
had been definitely of the “ fight to a finish”’ kind. 
The incidents of the dream thus symbolised a move- 

* IT have some reason to believe that Professor W, the other 
element of the composite host of the dream, would be a fitting 
symbol of the ‘‘fight to the finish”’ attitude. 

ment, directed from without, in the pacifist direction, 
to which I failed to respond at first in the dream, and 
only obeyed after the application of a second stimulus 
from the dream-personage who symbolised the re- 
sumption of friendly relations with Germany. 

One image of the dream which remains to be con- 
sidered is that the German professor was bandaged and 
had his arm in a sling. I suggest that this was a 
symbol of a belief that Germany had been severely 
damaged by the war, so much so as to be no longer 
dangerous to the world. The idea that Germany 
was ruined economically had been prominent in my 
mind during the evening preceding the dream as the 
chief condition which made peace by negotiation 
possible. 

Another feature of the dream which may be signifi- 
cant is that during the analysis I was uncertain whether 
I had been in uniform, although I was sure that the 
German professor was in civilian dress. The interest 
of my being in uniform or not was that it had a definite 
connection with the conflict which I suppose to underlie 
the dream, and especially with my relation to the 
patient B. So long as I was an officer of the R.A.M.C., 
and of this my uniform was the obvious symbol, my 
discussions with B on his attitude towards the war 
were prejudiced by my sense that I was not a free 
agent in discussing the matter, but that there was the 
danger that my attitude might be influenced by my 
official position. As a scientific student whose only 
object should be the attainment of what I supposed 
to be truth, it was definitely unpleasant to me to 
suspect that the opinions which I was uttering might be 
influenced by the needs of my position, and I was 
fully aware of an element of constraint in my relations 
with B on this account. So long as I was in uniform 
I was not a free agent, and though no one can be a free 
agent during a war, it was a definite element in my 

situation at the time that my official position might 
be influencing the genuineness of the views I was ex- 
pressing in my conversations with B. On the other 
hand, there was the much cruder satisfaction at being 
in uniform during the war which, in common with 
most people, though in general below the surface, I 
detected in myself at times. It is perhaps significant 
in relation to this conflict that, though the question 
whether I was in uniform or not was definitely present 
in the thoughts immediately following the dream, it 
was not a question which I was able to answer. 

Not only does this dream as a whole thus serve to 
express a complex conflict which was going on in my 
mind at the time, but there is not a single important 
element of the manifest dream which fails to form 
a suitable symbol of some element of the conflict. 
Especially prominent were the symbols of the wish 
for the restoration of peace, which I suppose to be 
the most powerful motive in the conflict. There is 
no question that the egoistic drive was in favour of 
peace, and that the effect of the article which I had read 
during the evening preceding the dream had been to 
reinforce this egoistic impulse by motives of a rational 
kind in the direction that existing conditions, and 
especially the battered economic state of Germany, 
now made a peace by negotiation possible. 

One interest of the dream I have just interpreted is 
‘that it had a number of features which illustrate its 
regressive character, and in this case it is possible to 
date the regression more or less accurately to about 
twenty years earlier. The hat which I found in the 
first part of the dream was of the kind known as a 
bowler, which I had not worn for at least fifteen, 
probably twenty, years. I can date the regular use 
of a Gladstone bag exactly to twenty years earlier 
(1897). My visits to the laboratory in Heidelberg, 
which were clearly recalled during the analysis, took 

place in 1896. Iam therefore able in this case to assign 
several of the symbols utilised in the dream to a definite 
period about twenty years before the occurrence of 
the dream. Moreover, though Professor V was still 
alive, and I had seen him not long before, he occupied 
a much more important place in my life twenty years 
ago than at the time of the dream. Most of the 
symbolism of the dream thus belonged to young adult 
age, when my aspirations after the international 
scientific relations, which found expression in the 
dream, were especially strong. If my position be 
accepted that the dream is an attempted solution of a 
conflict in accordance with the attitude proper to the 
level of mental development which is active at the 
existing depth of sleep, the dream was expressing, 
by means of the imagery and modes of thought of 
twenty years, a desire for peace which formed one 
side of the conflict to which the dream was due. An 
egoistic wish that the war should end had been strongly 
reinforced during the evening preceding the dream 
by motives of a rational kind. Thoughts of renewed 
scientific relations of an international kind had found 
expression in the dream by means of imagery from a 
period of life when interest in such international 
relations had been especially strong. The young 
adult whose personality was finding expression in this 
dream underwent in it experiences which meant the 
fulfilment, not only of the manifest desires of this 
time of life, but also the deeper craving for peace of 
the older man whose personality was the actual subject 
of the conflict. 

The special interest of this dream is that the whole 
experience has a striking unity. Every feature of its 
manifest content can be brought into definite relation 
with the conflict which I suppose to underlie the dream. 
Most of the incidents of the dream are definitely con- 
nected with the friendly relations between the scientific 

men of Germany and Great Britain which would again 
become possible with the peace, the desire for which 
was the essential leading motive. The dream has, in 
addition, several minor points of interest. 

In the first place, I may mention that though I have 
recorded the dream as one, it consisted definitely of two 
parts, and might possibly be regarded as two distinct 
dreams, the first of which was recollected indistinctly 
on account of its earlier occurrencé. If this view be 
taken, we should have another example of the reference 
of two dreams occurring in one night to a common 
content. A second feature of interest is that the dream 
affords a very good example of a composite personality. 
As I have mentioned, there is some reason to believe 
that the two persons who formed the composite image 
represented different sides in the conflict upon which the 
dream depended, and it is of especial interest that the 
element in the compound, which certainly represented 
the international as opposed to the national side of the 
conflict, should have become more evident at the phase 
of the dream when the international aspect was being 
so clearly satisfied, and that he should have taken so 
important a part in the proceedings which led to this 
satisfaction. 

Another point of interest is that this dream affords an 
example of the occurrence of right and left, to which 
so great a significance is attached by psycho-analysts. 
It is noteworthy here that the direction which sym- 
bolised a movement towards peace and international 
relations should be towards the left, while right was 
the direction which was taken when the dreamer dis- 
obeyed instructions and turned away from that part 
of the courtyard which contained the building which, 
according to the general character of the dream, would 
seem to symbolise the strongest desire. If we are to 
follow the psycho-analytic school in their belief that 
right always symbolises good and left bad, we have to 

suppose that to the dream-personality peace and inter- 
national relations were regarded as bad. It seems 
far more likely that in this case “ right’ and “left ”’ 
had reference to the customary means of denoting 
Conservative and Liberal tendencies, especially on the 
Continent. I was especially familiar at the time with 
the use of these expressions in the extracts from foreign 
journals published in the Cambridge Magazine, which I 
read regularly, and a movement to the left in such 
journals is a regular symbolic expression for Liberal 
tendencies. There can be no question that the move- 
ment towards international relations is especially 
characteristic of the Liberal parties of the world, and 
hostility to such aims occurs in association with Con- 
servatism. If this explanation does not appeal to 
the psycho-analytic school, I can only suggest that the 
situation with which the dream-personality was dealing 
in this dream was too complicated to be viewed from 
the “ simpliste’”’ ethical standpoint from which they are 
accustomed to regard the dream. 

SYMBOLISM 

A striking feature of the dream which I have con- 
sidered is its exemplification of use of symbols. The 
return to civilian life was represented by a hat and 
umbrella ; the return to international friendship by a 
journal which publishes papers in four languages, 
and also by an English scientist with German name and 
ancestry ; Germany in a state of peace but severely 
damaged through the war by a German professor 
bandaged and with his arm in a sling. Moreover, 
these symbolic expressions are of exactly the same 
kind as others recorded in this book. They are of 
the same kind as the representation of a person in 
an incongruous situation by a cup and saucer, an 
object in a game of billiards; of rowing as a symbol 

of return to life in Cambridge; of an ichthyosaurus 
as a symbol of a rapacious quartermaster. 

At the same time the interpretation of these objects 
as symbolic differs very greatly from that which would 
be given by the psycho-analytic school, and I propose to 
conclude with a brief consideration of this difference. 

Both Freud and Jung with their respective schools are 
coming to agree closely in their acceptance of certain 
symbols as common to mankind, by means of which 
it is often possible to interpret dreams without the 
necessity of resorting to free association or other 
methods of analysis./ According to Freud, the hat 
and such long articles as an umbrella are universal 
symbols of the male genital organ, and I am perfectly 
aware that my search for these articles in the “ pacifist ”’ 
dream will be interpreted by many of my readers on 
lines very different from those which I have myself 
followed. Similarly, there will doubtless be many 
who will interpret the snake in the two dreams of my 
suicidal patient on the lines that the snake is a universal 
phallic symbol, and will explain the dreams in a way 
very different from that which I have adopted. 
‘In considering this subject I will begin by saying 

that I am prepared to-go far towards accepting the 
view that there is an extensive agreement in the 
use of certain objects as symbols of certain other 
objects. Thus, there are obvious reasons why the 
male genital organ should be represented by a long 
object and the female genital organ by one of a rounder 
form, and I am also prepared to agree with Freud 
in the view that sexual objects and processes are 
especially likely to be represented in the dream sym- 
bolically rather than directly. I am therefore quite 
prepared to find a widespread tendency to symbolise 
the male sexual organ in dreams by long objects and 
the female organ by round objects.~ It is a long step 
from this, however, to the universalisation of this use 

of symbols which is discernible in Freud’s recent work 
and has become definite among his disciples, here, 
as usual, far less critical than their master. Here, 
again, as usual, we are asked by the psycho-analysts 
to accept this universal symbolism merely on their 
word and with very little evidence. “One of my reasons 
for publishing my own dreams is to provide evidence, 
which seems to me of some degree of cogency, that 
the symbols to which a universal sexual significance is 
attached, may at least in some cases bear a meaning 
of a different kind. 

Evidence derived from the dreams of some of my 
patients has led me to believe that in many cases the 
symbols to which a universal sexual significance is 
attached by Freud often have this meaning, and I 
propose now to accept this position and inquire into its 
meaning. Accepting provisionally the view that the 
snake is frequently the symbol of the male sexual organ, 
let us inquire how this association between the two 
objects has come about. Freud seems definitely 
inclined to regard the association as innate, and that 
it is a universal among mankind, because we inherit 
it from our ancestors. In other words, according to 
Freud, the association is to be classed with the instincts 
and other forms of inherited capacity. Such a view 
implies an extraordinary neglect of the mental com- 
plexity of childhood, a neglect which is the more 
extraordinary in those who have done so much to reveal 
this complexity. There is no question that the mind of 
a child is extraordinarily receptive and that it absorbs 
vast amounts of unsuspected knowledge. We need 
far more exact observations about the nature of the 
childish environment of those whose dream-symbolism 
is studied before we can accept either the universal 
or the instinctive character of any form of this sym- 
bolism. To Jung and to the disciples of Jung this 
universality of symbolisms is even more important 

177 M 

than to Freudians, for it is upon this belief that there 
is founded the concept of the collective unconscious 
which plays so great a part in their system. 

-~ Both Freud and Jung and their disciples are now 
accustomed to support their views concerning innate 
symbols by evidence derived from the comparative 
study of belief and custom, but their examples are 
chiefly drawn from Indo-European culture where we 
know of the existence of a common tradition’ The 
possibility cannot be excluded that this common 
tradition reaches the individual in infancy, childhood 
and youth through the intermediation of parents, 
nurses, school-fellows, the overhearing of chance con- 
versations, and many other sources. If, however, 
symbolism of the universal kind exists, it should be 
universal among mankind, and of this Freud and Jung 
and their disciples have as yet given no evidence. 
Indeed, such work as they have published on this 
subject has been fragmentary and uncritical. I 
once asked one of the leading disciples of Jung in this 
country for an example of some universal belief which 
could be taken as an example of Jung’s primordial 
thought-image and he chose the representation of 
good by right and of evil by left. He was wholly 
ignorant of the fact that there is no evidence whatever 
of the association among most peoples of the earth, 
and that a vast number of their languages are wholly 
devoid of words for right and left, orientation which we 
perform by means of these concepts being effected by 
means of the direction of prevailing winds or other 
crude methods of a kind similar to our orientation by 
means of the points of the compass. Even so near at 
home as Scotland the concepts of right and left are so 
vague, or have so little interest, that it was not long ago 
customary to orientate by means of points of the 
compass. A person was not said to part his hair on 
the right or left, but to the east or west. 

If I had myself to answer the question I put to the 
_ disciple of Jung, I could have chosen better instances. 
~ There are many facts of ritual and belief which point 
to the very wide distribution of certain forms of 
symbolism, but it is a question whether this wide dis- 
tribution is not directly due to a far more extensive 
spread of the traditions present in Indo-European 
culture than is generally supposed. ~ Certainly, there 
are many features of distribution which point to such 
diffusion. Thus, in Melanesia, many of the symbols 
which have a wide distribution are not common to the 
whole community, but form part of a secret ritual, 

known only to specially initiated persons, and not 
common to the general body of the community. Ihave 
shown reason to believe * that these secret rituals are 
those of bodies of immigrants from elsewhere who were 
led by certain motives to practise their religious or 
magical rites in secret. The nature of their symbols 
are no more evidence of universal thought-images than 
a piece of information given by me here, taken by one 
of you to Australia or America and there handed on, 
is evidence that the idea thus conveyed is innate 
and has welled up from the collective unconscious 
of the Australian or American. To such an argument 
the disciple of Jung may reply that even if it can be 
proved that the use of a symbol has been transmitted 
from one place to another, say from Egypt to Melanesia, 
we have still to explain why it should have taken root 
in its new home and become part of the mental endow- 
ment of the people to whom it was transmitted. They 
will argue that there must have been something in 
the mental structure of the people to whom it was 
transmitted which led to this acceptance, and the 
disciples of Jung will say that this acceptance was due 
to its compatibility with the content of the collective 
unconscious. There might be something to be said 

* History of Melanesian Society, 1914. 

in favour of this point of view, and perhaps there would 
be much to say for it if the transmitted belief were 
universally accepted by whole populations: but when 
we find such transmitted beliefs confined to the few, 
and only imparted to individuals, perhaps at relatively 
advanced periods of their lives, the need for innate 
ideas compatible with those which have been intro- 
duced becomes less strong. We need far more evidence 
concerning the nature of the transmitted symbols, 
before there can be established even a probable case 
for innate symbolism or for such a state as the collective 
unconscious of Jung.

In the Freudian scheme of the psychology of the dream 
the main biological function of the dream is to protect 
the sleeper from being awakened either by external 
stimuli to his senses, or by the internal stimuli provided 
by unpleasant thoughts or emotions. In the case of 
unpleasant stimuli to the sense-organs it is supposed 
that it is the function of the dream to transform the 
sensations which these stimuli would occasion in the 
waking life into images devoid of such tendency to 
awake. On the other hand, it is supposed that un- 
pleasant thoughts and affects are similarly trans- 
formed, and thus deprived of that character which 
would lead the sleeper to awake. The dream is regarded 
as the guardian of sleep and not its disturber. It is 
believed to act as a kind of safety-valve to the un- 
conscious. * 

AsI have pointed out elsewhere, there is much reason 
to believe that in many of the forms assumed by the 
dream in man, it has come to have this function, but 
there are certain features of the dream, and certain 
forms of dream, which can hardly be reconciled with 
this view of the biological function of the dream. 
Especially is this the case with the nightmare. The 
occurrence of this form of dream in the young, and 
as part of the regression of psycho-neurosis, makes it 
probable that this is the primitive form of the dream, 

* Die Traumdeutung, 5te Auflage, Leipzig and Wien, 1919, pages 

163 and 429. 
+ Dreams and Primitive Culture, Manchester, 1917. 

and that the pleasant or indifferent dream of the healthy 
adult is a modification of this primitive form of the 
psychologising process. 

If now we turn our attention to the nightmare or 
similar form of dream, which has a more or less sudden 
awakening as one of its most definite characters, we 
find that a pronounced feature is exaggeration of 
affect. The nightmare shows a degree of affect alto- 
gether out of proportion to the external or internal 
stimulus by which the dream has been set up... Is 
it possible to discover any biological conditions which 
would have made this exaggeration of affect service- 
able to the animal ? 

In considering this problem let us deal first with the 
isolated individual. It is evident that with the bio- 
logical-function of sleep as the means of physiological 
recuperation, there must have been associated a con- 
siderable degree of danger. For hours at a time 
and at a period of the day when his enemies may be 
especially active, an animal is accustomed to pass 
into a state of passivity and immobility which must 
seriously prejudice the success of its normal reactions 
to danger. As I have pointed out elsewhere,* there is 
reason to believe that with this passivity and immo- 
bility there goes a considerable degree of sensibility 
to the stimuli to which it would react in the waking 
state. There is even some reason to believe that there 
may be some heightening of the sensibility which is 
present in the waking state, but even if there be such 
heightening, the animal would be seriously prejudiced 
by the loss of time occupied in the process of awakening, 
by the business of adapting the limbs and other parts 
of the body to the appropriate mode of action and 
by putting the process of reaction into practice. It is 
evident that the reaction of the animal to danger 
would be greatly assisted if there were present in 

* Instinct and the Unconscious. 

sleep some kind of mechanism by which the animal 
began to adapt its behaviour to danger while still 
asleep. If this mechanism also helped to awaken, it 
would still further increase its helpfulness to the sleep- 
ing animal. I suggest that the dream has such func- 
tions. That, whatever may be the function of the 
dream in man, its function in the lower animals is to 
awaken in the presence of danger and to set in action, 
even while the animal is still asleep, the process by which 
it will be enabled to meet the danger in the appro- 
priate manner. Thus, if the appropriate reaction is 
that of aggression, with its accompanying affect of 
anger, it would be highly serviceable if the affect of 
anger arose with its appropriate bodily setting in 
sleep and thus adapted the animal, even while still 
asleep, to those aggressive movements which it would 
normally adopt as soon as possible after waking. 
If, on the other hand, the reaction appropriate to the 
animal were flight, with its affective accompaniment of 
fear, the dream would take that form of fear which 
would normally be associated with the disposition 
of the body to the movements adapted to remove the 
animal as speedily as possible from the source of danger. 

If now we pass from the individual animal to the 
herd, we find a motive not only for the presence of 
affect in the dream, but also for its presence in an 
exaggerated form, a form for which there is no adequate 
motive in the case of the individual creature. If 
the member of the herd which reacts most speedily 
to the sensory indications of danger does not merely 
react, but begins before waking to utter cries or growls, 
or to give other indications of danger, its behaviour 
will awaken the whole herd and serve to put it on 
its guard more speedily than if it had to wait till its most 
sensitive member had been itself awakened before it 
could give the warning signal. The association of 
animals in herds would provide a biological motive 

for the dream, even if no such motive could be found 
for its usefulness to the individual animal. 

It is not possible to prove that the dreams of animals 
have this useful function. We know far too little of 
the behaviour of animals in sleep to provide evidence 
of any great value for or against the hypothesis I have 
put forward. The sleeping behaviour of the dog does 
not, however, contradict it. There is little doubt that 
the dog is an animal which normally reacts to danger 
by means of the instinct of aggression. However 
larger or more powerful an approaching dog may be, 
the first and immediate reaction is one of aggression 
with its characteristic growl, and it is only when this 
form of reaction has been shown to be wholly inappro- 
priate that the animal resorts to the alternative reaction 
of flight. It is therefore of interest that when a dog 
suggests by its behaviour in sleep that it is dreaming, 
the reactions seem always to take the form of growls, 
similar to those by which it responds in the waking 
state to the presence of another of its species. 

In the absence of evidence it would be little profit 
in speculating further on the biological function of 
dreams in animals, first as an agent to awaken the 
animal, and secondly to adapt it even while still 
sleeping to the behaviour it would normally adopt on 
waking. It will be of interest, however, to consider 
how this early function of dreams has been in man 
modified to so great an extent that it has been possible 
to regard the dream not as an instrument of awaking, 
but as a guardian of sleep. 

In considering this subject it will be natural to begin 
with the nightmare, or other similar form of dream, the 
occurrence of which in childhood and psycho-neurosis 
has led me to regard it as the primitive form of the 
dream. 

The difficulty with which we are here confronted 
is that in the nightmare there is an excess of affect, 

and of physiological reactions accompanying the affect, 
which would make the dream of little or no value if 
it were produced by an actual danger. The pallor, 
coldness, and sweating of a characteristic nightmare 
are such as would not only deprive the dreamer of all 
possibility of putting into action the movements by 
which the danger might be avoided, but it might even 
obstruct the reaction by flight. The whole reaction 
is of a kind associated with the unserviceable reaction 
by collapse to which mankind seems to be especially 
liable when his normal modes of reaction fail. 

We are here brought up against the same problem 
as that with which we are faced when we consider the 
existence of collapse as one of man’s modes of reaction 
to danger.* In the case of the dream, however, it 
is possible to suggest one way in which the excessive 
reaction of the nightmare may be explained. In the 
case of the animal considered in the earlier part of this 
chapter the reaction which occurs in sleep is that 
habitual to the animal. I have supposed that in the 
dream the animal is only experiencing an affect and 
exhibiting behaviour which are habitual to it in the 
waking state. In man, on the contrary, the affects 
and reactions present in the nightmare are not only 
not habitual, but they have in most persons been the 
objects of a life-long suppression, a suppression so 
successful that in a state of health the subject of the 
nightmare may have been repeatedly exposed to danger 
without experiencing even in a slight degree the re- 
actions which show themselves in the nightmare. There 
is much reason, however, to believe that the excessive 
reactions of the nightmare of the adult are not due to 
the removal of this suppression, but are the result of a 
different though allied process of witting repression. 

It is thus possible to bring the nightmare and other 
crude forms of human dream into relation with the 

* Instinct and the Unconscious. 

hypothesis that the primary function of the dream is to 
awaken an animal and adapt it to the appropriate 
form of reaction to danger. It remains to consider 
how the dream has been modified so as to present the 
highly varied forms and apparently very different 
functions which it seems to exhibit in the eres 
adult human being. 

I may remark at once that if the view here put 
forward is valid, there is an intimate relation between 
the dream and the instinct of self-preservation. 
According to this view the dream is primarily the means 
by which the animal is assisted to react successfully 
to danger even while asleep. Let us now turn to 
inquire whether there is any other way in which the 
dream might be useful to an animal, and let us begin 
with the parental instinct. Here we have not only 
the function of protecting the young from danger 
which would act in much the same way as the reaction 
to danger of the animal itself, especially in so far 
as the reaction by aggression is concerned, but we have 
to consider the needs of the young forfood if the relation 
between parent and child is such that the young will 
only thrive if frequently supplied with food by the 
parent. In the case of mammals the function of the 
mother in connection with lactation would provide a 
possible motive for the dream. If in a suckling mother 
dreams of being suckled were aroused by the cries of 
her young, it would be possible for the young to obtain 
what they need without awaking the mother. A 
suitable dream would enable the suckling mother to 
adjust her movements to the needs of her young with- 
out waking. We have here a motive opposed to that 
which serves to produce the reaction to danger whereby 
the dream would act as the guardian of sleep exactly 
as it is supposed to act by Freud. At the same time 
it will be of the utmost importance that the mother shall 
react in a wholly different way if danger threatens her 

young and herself. In this case the dream would 
act as an awakener or as a guardian of sleep according 
to the nature of the stimulus by which the dream has 
been produced. C 

As I have shown elsewhere,* one of the characters of 
sleep is that it is a state in which the sleeper is not only 
able. to react to sensory stimuli, but is capable of 
discriminating between those which call for activity 
and those of an indifferent kind. If an animal which 
had acquired the power of dreaming as a means of 
being awakened, and of being adapted to danger 
even while still asleep, were to dream and awaken at 
every sound or smell, the dream would soon lose its 
useful function, or would have such secondary effects 
in frequent disturbance of sleep as would more than 
counterbalance the useful function. It would be essen- 
tial that the animal should at the same time acquire 
the power of discriminating between sensory stimuli 
indicative of danger and those which had no such 
significance. The power of sensory discrimination in 
sleep would be a necessary accompaniment of the 
dream if the serviceable nature of this process were 
not made useless by excess. When, therefore, the 
mammalian mother found the dream useful as a means 
of guarding sleep, there would already be present that 
power of discrimination between stimuli of different 
kinds which the double character of the dream would 
make necessary. Instead of leading to activity adapted 
to meet danger, stimuli of a certain kind would pro- 
duce dreams which would help to maintain instead of 
disturbing sleep. 

If now we turn from the parental instinct to that of 
sex, we find a still more definite motive for dreams of a 
protective kind. There is reason to believe that sensa- 
tions of smell are especially powerful as stimuli to 
instinctive sexual reactions, and where animals con- 

* Instinct and the Unconscious. 

gregate together during sleep these stimuli would 
continue and would tend to awaken. If these stimuli 
acted in the manner customary in the waking life, 
sleep would be disturbed and a similar disturbance 
would also be produced by stimuli to the sexual organs 
produced by fleas or other parasites. Some kind of 
process by which stimuli of these kinds would be 
deprived of their awakening effect would be highly 
serviceable to the animal as guardians of sleep. I 
suggest that we have here the biological motive for the 
transformation of the dream, which is a feature of the 
most characteristic dreams of man. I suggest that as 
man developed from being something more than a 
creature dominated by his crude instincts, this trans- 
forming function of the dream was utilised in the 
interest of other factors which would tend to disturb 
his sleep, but that the original character of the dream 
as an awakening agent still persisted to show itself 
in childhood and in the pathological regressions of 
psycho-neurosis. 

If it be one of the most frequent functions of the 
dream in man so to transform the results of sexual 
stimulation, external or internal, that they do not 
awake the sleeper, this would only be in direct con- 
tinuity with a biological function which has been ser- 
viceable as a guardian of sleep in all those animals 
whose sexual activity is developed on the same lines 
asinman. Moreover, the need for such transformation 
would become especially great when the sexual function, 
in place of being limited to certain seasons, came, as 
has happened in man, to be more or less continuously 
active. Ifthe transforming function of the dream came 
into existence as a means of protection against too 
frequent stimulation of the sexual instinct in sleep, it 
is natural that this instinct should serve as one of the 
most frequent, if not the most frequent of, occasions 
for the process of transformation. |

THE comparison between dreams and myths in Chapter 
IX is so brief that it is likely to give rise to miscon- 
ception. Moreover, it cannot be regarded as a true 
expression of the views of Dr Rivers. This is revealed 
in his statements on symbolism in Chapter X of this 
book and his Presidential Address to the Folk-lore 
Society (Folk-lore, March 1922). Hence, I am sure 
that if he had lived to prepare his manuscript for 
publication he would not have allowed the following 
passage in Chapter IX to appear in this form: “It 
is probable that, at the stage of social development, 
of which myth-formation is especially characteristic, 
there is a similar identification, and that every natural 
object to which man’s attention is especially directed 
is thought of as having human characteristics and is 
endowed with such human characters as the power 
of speech and the capacity for locomotion. That 
animals should talk is just as natural to the man of 
lowly culture as it is natural to the dream-consciousness 
of the most highly civilised of mankind.” But in 
the particular dream used by Dr Rivers for the purpose 
of this comparison, one of his patients personified 
certain rivers and attributed to them human powers of 
sympathy and speech simply because these streams 
were identified with Dr Rivers himself, for the specific 
reason that he happened to have the name “‘ Rivers.” 
During the last seven years Dr Rivers repeatedly 
discussed with me the late Sir Edward Tylor’s concept 
of animism, belief in which he had abandoned long ago ; 

and during the last three years he had come more and 
more fully to accept the view, which Mr W. J. Perry 
and I have been urging, that there is no evidence to 
prove the personification of any natural object or to 
attribute to animals or plants human qualities or 
powers except when some specific factor, such as led 
the patient to personify “rivers’’ in his dream, came 
into play to cause confusion between the inanimate 
object (or animal or plant) and some human being. 

In fact, the patient’s dream about the personified 
“rivers”? is an exact illustration of what ancient 
literature reveals concerning the origin of myths. 
Osiris was identified with the river Nile, or, in other 
words, his originally human qualities and powers were 
confused with the river’s. In this way the river became 
personified. Osiris was the dead king who devised 
irrigation: the story of his beneficence as the con- 
troller of the life-giving water became transformed, 
after frequent repetition by story-tellers, into the belief | 
that the dead king himself was the life-giver, and he 
became identified with the river, which bestowed the 
vitalising powers attributed to the dead king. This 
brought about not only the personification of the river, 
but also the apotheosis of the dead king, who became 
the god Osiris. The explanation of the process of 
personification of so many natural objects, and the 
attribution of human qualities to so many animals, 
is now known to be due to similarly arbitrary and 
specific causes that one is justified in doubting whether, 
in fact, “‘ every natural object to which man’s attention 
is specially directed is thought of,” by relatively 
primitive people or by any people, “as endowed with 
such human characteristics as the power of speech and 
the capacity for locomotion.”” In my book The Evolu- 
tion of the Dragon I have collected some evidence in 
opposition to this view. I refer to the matter here 
because I do not think Dr Rivers consciously intended 

Igo 

to put forward a claim which does not really help his 
argument, but exposes it to destructive criticism such 
as he himself would have brought to bear upon it. 

Dr Rivers has stated in this book that he “ dis- 
trusts analogies.””’ No experiment of this nature has 
proved more disastrous than the attempts of Freud, 
Jung, and their followers, to institute analogies between 
dreams and myths, for the sexual symbolism which 
plays so prominent a part in the former (though not 
in the way Freud and his followers assume) is alto- 
gether unimportant in myth. The fundamental motive 
underlying myth is the search for the elixir of life, 
prompted by the instinct of self-preservation, and 
not by the conflicts arising out of the desire to gratify 
the sexual instinct, as so often happen in dreams. 

The phrase “the stage of social development of 
which myth-formation is especially characteristic ”’ 
and the reference to composite animals are so out of 
harmony with the whole conception of this book that 
I feel sure Dr Rivers would have modified or completely 
deleted these passages, or made clear that he intended 
to convey ideas vastly different from the manifest 
content of the phraseology. It is misleading to speak 
of a myth-making phase in man’s history, since 
myths have been developing ever since the first human 
beings acquired the power of speech. That certain 
myths survive while millions of others are merely 
ephemeral depends upon (1) the nature of the appeal 
particular stories make to man’s instinct of self-preser- 
vation; and (2) the restraining influence which the 
growth of knowledge and the definition of critical 
insight impose upon the development of phantasy. 

I think Dr Rivers would have defined his ambiguous 
phrase to mean that there was a certain phase in man’s 
social development when most of the really persistent 
myths of world-wide distribution arose. But this was 
not due to any mental idiosyncrasy or stage of psychical 

I9I 

evolution. At a particular stage the growth of know- 
ledge seemed to encourage the belief that a real elixir 
of life might be discovered, and the fame of this possi- 
bility made a universal appeal to man’s deepest instinct, 
which was not restrained by a comprehension of 
natural phenomena. In later times myths continued 
to develop; and the present age is certainly as prolific 
in such phantasies as any earlier period: but the fuller 
knowledge of natural phenomena and the critical 
insight that such knowledge gives tend to cut short the 
careers of most modern myths. 

The problem of composite animals I have discussed 
elsewhere, and Dr Rivers accepted my views. Hence, 
I do not think he would have attached any real im- 
portance to the analogy he tentatively suggested (on 
page 148) between the composite creatures that figure 
in the dragon myth and the composite formations of 
_ dream-symbolism. 

Gd ela §