Some of the hypnogogic visions and experimental dreams I have mentioned
contradict the wide-spread belief that sound sleep is untroubled by
dreams.
The hypnagogic vision I have so often, that I wade into a body of water
and finally start swimming, only adds one more pleasant feature to my
escape from reality. Swimming is really my favourite sport.
When my nose was tickled and I interpreted the stimulus as foliage
brushing my face on entering a forest, that vision was not meant to awaken
me, but on the contrary to keep me asleep by explaining away the tickling
sensation and removing any sense of fear which would have compelled me to
take notice once more of reality and protect myself.
Such dreams have been designated as convenience dreams.
Dreams of urination can be considered as typical convenience dreams. In
the morning, when the pressure of urine on the walls of the bladder
becomes stronger, dreams build up a convenient explanation around that
unpleasant stimulus. Our wish to urinate is either represented as
gratified or we are shown the impossibility of gratifying it (no toilet,
doors locked, people looking, etc.). Unless the pressure is absolutely
unbearable, we generally sleep on, satisfied or discouraged by such
convenience dreams.
Freud tells in his "Interpretation of Dreams" of a striking convenience
dream of his and of a variation it underwent on one occasion: "If in the
evening I eat anchovies, olives or any other strongly salted food, I
become thirsty at night, whereupon I awaken. The awakening, however, is
preceded by a dream, which, each time has the same content, namely that I
am drinking. The dream serves a function, the nature of which I soon
guess. If I succeed in assuaging my thirst by means of a dream that I am
drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy that need. The dream
substitutes itself for action, as elsewhere in life. This same dream
recently appeared in modified form. On this occasion I became thirsty
before going to bed and emptied the glass of water which stood on a chest
near my bed. Several hours later in the night, came a new attack of
thirst, accompanied by discomfort. In order to obtain water I would have
had to get up and fetch the glass which stood on a chest near my wife's
bed. I appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me to drink from a
vase, an Etruscan cinerary urn. But the water in it tasted so salty,
apparently from the ashes, that I had to wake up."
On a chilly summer night a woman patient had the following dream:
"A man took me in a canoe to the middle of a lake and upset the canoe,
saying: 'Now you belong to me.'"
She woke up shivering.
The lake, the canoe upset and the man in the dream were associated with
many conscious thoughts and memories of hers. But this was mainly a
convenience dream, which endeavoured to explain away the chilliness of the
night through an appropriate scene. When the unavoidable awakening took
place it was dramatized, as it is in so many cases of awakening, through a
fall accompanied by a certain fear of death.
The few examples I have given and which could be multiplied, tend to show
that the dream, far from being a disturber of sleep, is sleep's best
protector.
It seeks to explain away physical stimuli which might cause the sleeper to
awake and it visualizes many reasons for not experiencing the fear
usually connected with a certain stimulus.
In every convenience dream which I have analysed, I have found a close
connection between the image conjured up by the dream work and the ideas
generally occupying the dreamer's mind in his waking states.
In almost every case it could also be noticed that the convenience dream
made use of some experience or observation of the previous waking state,
which increases the plausibility of the dream's visualization.