Dreams reveal to us what our unconscious cravings are and this is of
course valuable information. But cravings are only symptoms of something
more important and less easily dealt with: the subject's attitude to life.
The neurosis is merely a wrong attitude to life and its problems. A fear
of darkness, an incestuous desire, an abnormal craving for a certain food
are no more important in themselves than a small sore appearing on one's
lip. But as the sore may mean that the organism is infected with the
spirochaeta of syphilis, the "psychic" phenomena I mentioned may mean that
the organism has adopted toward reality a negative attitude leading to
death instead of life.
Owing to its visualizing powers, the dream makes attitudes extremely
obvious at the very first glance.
We are as we see ourselves in our dreams.
Positive, energetic dreams, full of action, indicate strength either in
resolve or in resistance.
Vague dreams, full of moods rather than of action, indicate stagnation,
aimlessness.
Dreams of adulthood, dealing with the present or the future, indicate
progression. Dreams of childhood or dealing mainly with the past, indicate
attempts at a regression.
In his latest book, "Introduction to Psychoanalysis," Freud states that
"the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile."
This is one of the great Freudian exaggerations. Such a statement is true
of the neurotic and explains why he is a neurotic. In fact the more
infantile the unconscious appears to be, the more severe the neurosis
generally is, until in certain forms of malignant regression, the patient
acts like a helpless newly born infant. The predominance of infantile
material in dreams indicates a fixation on infantile gratifications which
makes the subject especially ill adapted to adult life. But in the normal
individual the amount of infantile material is very small indeed.
We start gathering unconscious material at the very minutes of our birth,
if not before birth, but we keep on accumulating experiences, most of them
unconscious and only rising to consciousness when needed, and conscious
experiences which become unconscious when not needed.
It is the proportion of material from the various periods of our life
which enables us to gauge the level a human being has reached through his
intelligent, positive acceptance of present day reality. I say acceptance
of reality rather than adaptation to reality, for adaptation implies a
certain suppression, and suppression may mean neurosis.
It is the human being who satisfies all his infantile cravings within a
sphere of activity beneficial to himself and the world, who remains
healthy. He who tries to satisfy them through infantile or childish ways
merges into a neurosis.
We have seen that the dreams of children and of simple, normal people are
obvious and devoid of any symbolic disfigurement. Children dream of the
food or the pleasures they had to forego in the previous waking state.
Nordenskjold and his sailors, icebound in the Antarctic, dreamt of fine
meals, of tobacco, of ships sailing the open sea, of mail from home, in
other words of the things of which they had been deprived for months.
The use of symbols in dreams, on the other hand, indicates a lack of
freedom of expression due to some fear or repression. A repressed vision
appears on the screen of our mind in symbolized form.
A highly symbolical dream is almost always a pathological dream. It means
that we do not dare, even in our dreams, to visualize directly the thing
we are thinking of.
The phenomenon which Freud has designated as "displacement" also indicates
an attempt at repressing certain important facts by harping on other facts
of lesser importance.
A child surprised in a part of the house where his presence is suspicious
is not likely to reveal abruptly his plans. He will in all likelihood tell
some story from which the real reason for his presence is carefully
excluded. A young pie fiend found in the pantry would never mention the
word pie but make great ado over the "fact" that his ball has rolled under
the cupboard.
And likewise it is very often the part of a dream which a patient has not
told which holds the key to the enigma of the patient's mental
disturbance.
One of my hypnagogic visions which I have already mentioned, simple as it
is, reveals my entire attitude, not only to sleep, but to life in general.
I do not feel overwhelmed by sleep. I give myself up to sleep as
voluntarily as I wade into the sea or plunge into a swimming pool. Sleep
will refresh me as a swim would. When the proper depth is reached I swim
out, conscious of my ability and experiencing no fear.
I use sleep as a means to exercise my mental activities as I enjoy the
muscular exertion necessary for swimming.
Finally there is no one in the picture but myself. I am the central figure
of the dream.
To go into more details, I may confide to the reader that I have never
enjoyed any form of sport, indoor or outdoors in which I do not play an
important, if not the leading part, or which prevents me from indulging my
own whims. Witnessing some one else's athletic performances bores me to
extinction and games such as cards, checkers or golf which are surrounded
with iron clad regulations appear to me not as a relaxation but as a
useless form of hard work.
Readers may think that these self-revelations are prompted by egotism, but
an analyst should analyse himself as ruthlessly as he analyses others and
egotism happens to be the dominant feature of my attitude to life.
The following dream draws a remarkable picture of uncertainty, indecision
and gloom:
DREAM. "I am standing at the foot of marble stairs. I expect some danger
from the left where a person clothed in authority, with tyrannical
appearance, is approaching. I ask a female figure standing at the top of
the steps, and who seems to be some acquaintance, relative, mother or
sister, for help. I try to run up the steps but cannot. The figure extends
me a helping hand but that hand is so weak, lifeless, that I feel
helpless. I wake up in deep anxiety."
ATTITUDE. We have in this case a "flight to the mother" coupled with fear
of the powerful father. The patient had always suffered from some fear,
fear of examinations as a school child, fear of competition in all life
matters, fear of marriage, fear of decisions. He lived with his mother and
sister and had an affair with a woman considerably older than himself whom
he called "mother" and who called him her "boy."
We shall now see a dreamer wrestling with a sentimental problem, seeking a
solution for it and refusing to accept the solution suggested by an
outsider.
DREAM. "I was in a car with Albert, sitting in my usual seat but the
steering gear had been moved so that I could steer from my seat. I was
very inexperienced and felt anxiety. I was going down a steep city street
and at the bottom, saw a house before which I wished to park; there were
red lanterns and signs, however, which prevented me from stopping there.
I went on and Albert disappeared, then I was in the open country climbing
a hill and a man (A.T.) stood there and I asked him which way to go. The
machinery bothered me, I didn't know what button to push but trusted my
intuition and went all right. Finally I reached a desert stretch where
there was nothing and in great anxiety awoke."
ATTITUDE. The subject in love with a married man, had long hoped that he
would secure a divorce and marry her. She often went motoring with him.
Their affair was not satisfactory, however, and she had often considered
the possibility of a separation.
The situation is handled in the dream as follows. She has had her way and
is running the car from her usual seat (he has come to her point of view)
but she has misgivings about the experiment (unconsciously, she is not
very keen any more to marry him); she tries to park in front of a house
(their future home); red lanterns (danger signs, obstacles, law, custom)
prevent her from doing so. She then starts out without him and asks her
analyst for advice. He encourages her to go on her way but she reaches a
deserted place and feels so forlorn, so hungry for human company that she
escapes from the nightmare through awaking.
Even when no change is observable in a patient's condition in the course
of an analysis, constant attention to his dreams will enable the analyst
to notice unconscious changes which very soon afterward translate
themselves into a conscious modification of attitude.
The following dreams illustrate that point:
At the beginning of the analysis a patient, following in his dreams as
well as in his neurosis, the line of least effort, dreamt he had solved a
mechanical problem by means of a very simple apparatus consisting in a
rocking chair, two thumb tacks and an old rubber coat. Later when he
resumed closer contact with life, the machinery of his dreams became real
machinery and he continued in his sleeping thoughts the calculations which
had occupied him during the day and which to him were a constant source of
pleasure.
A patient whose ambition was to become a singer but whose husband was
decidedly hostile to her plans, first brought me the following dream in
which she frankly relied on me for advice:
"I am on the stage, singing. I forget my part. A foreign looking conductor
prompts me. In the wings, a man is looking at me, weeping. He falls in a
faint. I rush to him. He looks like my husband. A foreign looking doctor
picks him up and says to me: 'He will sleep now, after which he will feel
better.' I go back to the stage and sing beautifully."
Later, having acquired more self-confidence she visualized the situation
as follows:
"I see a man leading a Jersey cow on a rope. The cow is trying to get
under the fence but cannot. Then the cow is changed into a yellow bird
which flies away, perches on top of a barn and sings joyfully."
In the first dream, I am, of course the conductor and the doctor. In the
second dream, the cow is an allusion to the patient's tendency to gain
weight. The song-bird is a very obvious symbol.
A series of dreams reported by a stammering patient not only presented the
Freudian feature of wish-fulfilment but indicated clearly the patient's
changing attitude and his growing self-confidence, which finally
culminated in his complete cure.
One of the first dreams he brought me at the beginning of the treatment
read as follows:
"A congressman called Max Sternberg, who looks like me, is on the
platform, making a speech. A gang of little Irish boys in the rear starts
a disturbance. The audience, unable to hear the speaker, leaves the hall."
On numberless occasions, small boys prevented him in his dreams from
accomplishing his object, and in particular, disturbed him when he was
speaking. Later the small boys became less and less aggressive. On one
occasion he lead a group of them through a museum and they listened to his
explanations without interrupting him.
One night he had the following dream.
"I am near Grand Central and thousands of children are lined on both sides
of the avenue to welcome a school principal who is landing from the train.
He arrives and they all cheer wildly and I have a feeling that I am that
school principal."
Little boys never disturbed the dreamer after that. He had conquered his
regressive tendencies and his speech was improving.
His self-confidence grew to such a point that he had the following dream:
"I was in a room with John and Lionel Barrymore and I rehearsed them for a
Shakespearian play. Lionel forgot his part and stopped. I prompted him and
declaimed a few lines myself very eloquently. This was accompanied by the
thought: Very egotistical-good."