Introduction Note on the Text Note on the TranslationSelect BibliographyA Chronology of Sigmund FreudTHE INTERPRETAION OF DREAMSExplanatory NotesIndex of DreamsGeneral Index
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In the following page I shall provide proof that there is a psychological technique which allows us to interpret dreams, and that when this procedure is applied, every dream turns out to be a meaningful psychical formation which can be given an identifiable places in what goes on within us in our waking life. I shall further try to explain the processes that make the dream so strange and incomprehensible and infer from the nature of the psychical forces in their combinations and conflicts, out of which the dream emerges. Having got so far, my account will break off, for it will have reached the point at which the problem of dreaming opens out into more comprehensive problems which will have to be resolved on the basis of different material. I shall begin with a survey both of what earlier authorities have written on the subject and of the present state of scientific inquiry into the problems of dreams, as I shall not often have occasion to return to it in the course of dreams. In spite of being concerned with the subject over many thousands of years, scientific understanding of the dream has not got very far. This is admitted by the writers so generally that it seems superfluous to quote individual authors. In the writings I list at the end of my work many stimulating observations and a great deal of interesting material can be found relating to our subject, but little or nothing touching the essential nature of the dream or offering a definitive solution to any of its riddles. And of course, even less has passed into the knowledge of the educated layman. The first work to treat the dreams as an object of psychology seems to be Aristotle’s* On Dreams and Dream Interpretation [1]. Aristotle concedes that the nature of the dream is indeed daemonic, but not divine—which might well reveal a profound meaning, if one could hit on the right translation. He recognizes some of the characteristics of the dream-life, for example, that the dream reinterprets slight stimuli intruding upon sleep as strong ones ‘we believe we are passing through a fire and growing hot when this or that limb is only being slightly warmed’, and he concludes from this that dreams could very well reveal to the physician the first signs of impending changes in the body not perceptible by day. Lacking the requisite and teaching and informed assistance, I have not been in a position to arrive at a deeper understanding of Aristotle’s treatise. As we know, the ancients prior to Aristotle regarded the dream not as a product of the dreaming psyche, but as an inspiration from the realm of the divine, and they already recognized the two contrary trends which we shall find are always present in evaluations of the dream-life. Thy distinguished valuable, truth-telling dreams sent to the sleeper to warn him or announce the future to him, from vain, deceptive, and idle dreams intended to lead him astray or plunge him into ruin. This pre-scientific conception of the dream held by the ancients was certainly in full accord with their world-view as a whole, which habitually projected as reality into the outside world what had reality only within the life of the psyche. Their conception also took account of the main impression made on the waking life by the memory the dream remaining in the morning, for in this something alien, coming as it were from another world. It would be wrong, by the way, to think that the theory of the supernatural origin pietistic and mystical writers—who do right to occupy the remains of the once extensive realm of the supernatural, as long as it has not been conquered by scientific explanation—we also encounter clear-sighted men averse to the fantastic who use this very inexplicability of the phenomena of dreams in their endeavours to support their religious belief in the existence and intervention of superhuman powers. The high value accorded to the dream-life by many schools of philosophy, for example, by Schelling’s* followers, is a distinct echo of the undisputed divinity accorded to dreams in antiquity; and the divinatory, future-predicting power of dreams remains under discussion because the attempts at a psychological explanation are not adequate to cope with all the material gathered, however firmly the feelings of anyone devoted to the scientific mode of thought might be inclined to reject such a notion. The reason why it is so difficult to write a history of our scientific knowledge of the problems of dreams is that, however valuable our knowledge may have become under single aspects, no progress along a particular line of thought is to be discerned.
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