Dream Psychology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 183 pages of information about Dream Psychology.
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Dream Psychology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 183 pages of information about Dream Psychology.
find the motives for this degree of constraint in the expression of dream ideas.  The dream content consists chiefly of visual scenes; hence the dream ideas must, in the first place, be prepared to make use of these forms of presentation.  Conceive that a political leader’s or a barrister’s address had to be transposed into pantomime, and it will be easy to understand the transformations to which the dream work is constrained by regard for this dramatization of the dream content.

Around the psychical stuff of dream thoughts there are ever found reminiscences of impressions, not infrequently of early childhood—­scenes which, as a rule, have been visually grasped.  Whenever possible, this portion of the dream ideas exercises a definite influence upon the modelling of the dream content; it works like a center of crystallization, by attracting and rearranging the stuff of the dream thoughts.  The scene of the dream is not infrequently nothing but a modified repetition, complicated by interpolations of events that have left such an impression; the dream but very seldom reproduces accurate and unmixed reproductions of real scenes.

The dream content does not, however, consist exclusively of scenes, but it also includes scattered fragments of visual images, conversations, and even bits of unchanged thoughts.  It will be perhaps to the point if we instance in the briefest way the means of dramatization which are at the disposal of the dream work for the repetition of the dream thoughts in the peculiar language of the dream.

The dream thoughts which we learn from the analysis exhibit themselves as a psychical complex of the most complicated superstructure.  Their parts stand in the most diverse relationship to each other; they form backgrounds and foregrounds, stipulations, digressions, illustrations, demonstrations, and protestations.  It may be said to be almost the rule that one train of thought is followed by its contradictory.  No feature known to our reason whilst awake is absent.  If a dream is to grow out of all this, the psychical matter is submitted to a pressure which condenses it extremely, to an inner shrinking and displacement, creating at the same time fresh surfaces, to a selective interweaving among the constituents best adapted for the construction of these scenes.  Having regard to the origin of this stuff, the term regression can be fairly applied to this process.  The logical chains which hitherto held the psychical stuff together become lost in this transformation to the dream content.  The dream work takes on, as it were, only the essential content of the dream thoughts for elaboration.  It is left to analysis to restore the connection which the dream work has destroyed.

The dream’s means of expression must therefore be regarded as meager in comparison with those of our imagination, though the dream does not renounce all claims to the restitution of logical relation to the dream thoughts.  It rather succeeds with tolerable frequency in replacing these by formal characters of its own.

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Dream Psychology from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.