Possibly some of the ridicule poured upon Freud's theory of dreams would have been softened if it had been realised that the germ of several aspects of the Freudian view of dreams, including the characteristic doctrine of the censor, was to be found in Plato. The Freudian view becomes at once distinctly more respectable.

Let us examine now Freud's theory of dreams and try to see what is clearly proved, and what is a matter of speculation.

There is one fact that is clearly established, namely, that deliberate attempts at repression of unpleasant memories may, at least in patients with nervous trouble, result in their finding an outlet in dreams, in an intensified form. The following case, recorded by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, may serve an as example:*

During the war an officer passed through the terrible experience of seeing his friend blown to pieces. This experience had become an obsession with him, and threatened to cause serious mental trouble.

The Release of Repression in Dreams.

* See paper on Repression of War Experiences in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1918, Vol. xi. Republished in Instinct and the Unconscious,

Both doctors and friends whom he had consulted had simply advised him to put these disturbing ideas out of his head, and to engage his attention with other things. He had steadfastly attempted to follow this advice, but the result was that the ideas carefully repressed during the day came back with all the greater vigour during the night, and caused very unpleasant dreams. He had nightmares in which his friend appeared as he had seen him mangled in the field. Dr. Rivers tried to put the experience in a new light. He pointed out to the patient that the manner of his friend's death ensured, at least, that he had an instantaneous and painless passing - instead of one involving prolonged pain, as might have happened. In this way, the officer was enabled and encouraged to let his mind dwell on the event during the daytime. The result was that his horrible nightmares very shortly disappeared. I quote this case especially to show that some ideas, when special efforts are made to repress them, may tend to express themselves in dreams.

Many dreams are now on record which can be, partially at least, interpreted as the satisfying of impulses repressed to some degree. But many dreams seem hardly capable of such interpretation. It is quite likely that here, again, we may find a great difference between the frequency and insistence of such dreams in normal persons and in patients suffering from nervous disorder.

Freud states that dreams of children especially are merely the fulfilment of unattained wishes. I have made a record, covering several months, of the dreams related to me with evident sincerity by one of my boys between the ages of five and six. That they were genuine dreams and not "make ups," I further convinced myself by asking him occasionally to tell me stories of his own invention. The difference between these and the dreams was most striking, the dreams being much more interesting. Many of the dreams were obvious fulfilment of childish wishes; but in a very considerable proportion of cases they were dreams of fears, of horses trampling near him on the pavement, of bears chasing him, and so on. Wider studies have shown that such fear-dreams are very common among young children.*

Freud's interpretation of fear-dreams as the expression of anxieties connected with sex impulses had already, on general grounds, seemed to me most unsatisfactory, and it appears still more inadequate, in view of the appearance of so many fear-dreams at a very early age and at a period when Freud himself holds that dreams are inter-pretable on the basis of their manifest content.*

* Cf, C. W. Kimmins, Children's Breams.

Fear-dreams and nightmares form a special problem for the new psychology. I would suggest that in the dreaming of the night, as in the imaginations of the day, our fancies may run upon the unpleasant as well as on the pleasant, with the added difference that in sleep that rational control which would refuse to dwell painfully on imaginary evils is either absent altogether or is reduced to a minimum. In some moods, even of waking consciousness, thoughts of possible trouble and disaster may fascinate us. Perhaps a profounder psychology might even say that these thoughts of evil are due to a species of sub-conscious craving, for there seems to be inherent in man some strange attraction towards the fearful. The tendency to fear demands some stimulus, as is shown in the love for dangerous mountain climbing by adults, or for blood-curdling novelettes or melodrama. In children it is shown by their love for many kinds of adventures. In little children, especially, it is evinced for example by their fearsome delight when grown-ups will play at lions, even to a point at which the child cries with fright, though only to demand the game over again a moment later. Thus, in a sense, it may be said that our fear-dreams may be fulfilling some sub-conscious primitive craving not satisfied in waking life. But they sometimes seem to overdo it !*

Fear Dreams.

* Mr. Flugel comments on this paragraph: "Here I am very much inclined to differ from you. I feel that evidence both from observation of children and from analysis of adults points pretty clearly to sexual origin of these fears, and that if Freud holds that these dreams are interpretable on the basis of their manifest content, it is here that he is wrong.'*

With these brief critical comments, I will proceed to give some examples of dreams which seem to fit in with the Freudian theory, and which will illustrate at the same time several tricks of the so-called dream work. One of these is condensation; in a dream several desires may be blended and satisfied in one event, or several personalities may be blended in one. Symbolism is another character-istic of dreams, and helps to conceal from the self the real significance of the dream.

A delightful illustration of the blending and satisfying of two desires is shown in the following dream recorded by Freud.

Condensation in Dreams.

* The view that dreams may serve as compensations for impulses not satisfied in waking life, seems to gain some support from Dr. Kimmins' inquiry upon the dreams of children. Thus industrial school children recorded a greater proportion of happy dreams than did children in elementary or secondary schools; poor children dream more about food and presents than do children who are better off; and deaf children have dreams about conversations much more frequently than do their schoolfellows who can hear.

A medical student woke up one morning and reflected discontentedly that he had to get up at once from his comfortable bed and hurry to the hospital. He was, however, so loth to leave his bed that he lingered on and fell asleep again. While asleep he had a dream. He dreamt that he was himself lying in bed as a patient, in the hospital where he was due, with his name-chart over his head. Thus did the dream solve the difficulty of fulfilling both his wishes at once - to be in bed and to be in the hospital!

"The censor," as already indicated is the term given to that mental activity which results in the repression in normal waking life of wishes and tendencies of which we should not approve, or which we should even find abhorrent, or which we repress for the sake of mental peace. Freud's theory is that in dreams this censorship is relaxed, and hence in many dreams we behave in a manner which we should certainly never imitate in waking life, for example appearing in public insufficiently clad. The censor, however, is not quite off his guard even during sleep, and, consequently many of the wishes fulfilled in dreams are fulfilled in a way which is very much disguised, for there are limits to what Mrs. Grundy would approve even in our dreams. The following dream, recorded by Dr. Ernest Jones, is supposed to illustrate this activity of the censor in sleep.

Distortion in Dreams.

"A patient, a woman of thirty-seven, dreamed that she was sitting in a grand-stand, as though to watch some spectacle. A military band approached, playing a gay martial air. It was at the head of a funeral, which seemed to be that of Mr. X. The casket rested on a draped gun-carriage. She had a lively feeling of astonishment at the absurdity of making such an ado about the death of so insignificant a person. Behind followed the dead man's brother and one of his sisters, and behind them his two other sisters. They were all incongruously dressed in a bright grey check. The brother advanced ' like a savage,' dancing and waving his arms. On his back was a yucca-tree with a number of young blossoms."

This apparently absurd dream is explained as follows: the facts were related to Dr. Jones by the patient under considerable emotion. The lady had been engaged to be married to a brother of Mr. X. Her parents, however, manoeuvred to bring about a misunderstanding between them, and encouraged her in a fit of pique to marry her present husband, to her enduring regret. His drinking habits had completely alienated any wifely feeling she had for him. Yet even in a dream she could not see with indifference an explicit representation of the death of her husband. But he is admirably represented by Mr. X for several reasons. In the first place, their careers had been very similar. Both men had promised much when they were young, but the hopes their friends had built on them had not been fulfilled. Mr. X had ruined his health and career by addiction to morphia, her husband by alcohol. The military funeral also indicated her husband, for he was an officer in the Volunteers, while Mr. X had no connection with the Army. The contempt she had for her husband accounts for her astonishment in the dream for making such a fuss about the death of so insignificant a person. The gaiety shown also by her former lover at the funeral is explained if the funeral is really that of her husband and not that of his own brother, as is likewise the fact that no wife of Mr. X appeared at the funeral, although he was married. The dancing like a savage reminded the patient of native ceremonies she had seen, particularly marriage ceremonies. The yucca-tree, writes Dr. Jones, "proved, on analysis, to be a phallic symbol, and the young blossoms represented offspring. The patient bitterly regrets never having had any children, a circumstance she attributes to her husband's vices." In the dream, therefore, her husband dies unregretted, and the marriage with her former lover is suggested.* The reading of only a few examples of such distortion and symbolism in dreams is, no doubt, apt to leave the reader sceptical. We shall refer again to the interpretation of symbols, but it is only the study of many cases in which such interpretation puts meaning into an otherwise nonsensical dream, which can have the full cumulative effect. We may here, at least, recall the fact that dreams, interpreted as Dr. Jones interprets the one just given, have been successfully used in the attempts to discover the hidden conflicts in the minds of patients.

Such dreams, however, are usually the dreams of neurotics. To what extent, and in what ways, are Freud's ideas about dreams true for more normal individuals? To this question we shall turn in the next chapter, in which we shall seek a somewhat wider psychological interpretation of dreams.

* Papers on Psycho-Analysis, p. 198.