SEX IN DREAMS 104

VI THE WISH IN DREAMS 135

VII THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 164

VIII THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESS--REGRESSION 186

IX THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS--REALITY 220

DREAM PSYCHOLOGY

I

DREAMS HAVE A MEANING

In what we may term "prescientific days" people were in no uncertainty
about the interpretation of dreams. When they were recalled after
awakening they were regarded as either the friendly or hostile
manifestation of some higher powers, demoniacal and Divine. With the
rise of scientific thought the whole of this expressive mythology was
transferred to psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among
educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer's own psychical
act.

But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation
of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its
relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence
of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice;
its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence
between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's
evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it
aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or
rejecting it--all these and many other problems have for many hundred
years demanded answers which up till now could never have been
satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the
dream, a question which is in itself double-sided. There is, firstly,
the psychical significance of the dream, its position with regard to the
psychical processes, as to a possible biological function; secondly, has
the dream a meaning--can sense be made of each single dream as of other
mental syntheses?

Three tendencies can be observed in the estimation of dreams. Many
philosophers have given currency to one of these tendencies, one which
at the same time preserves something of the dream's former
over-valuation. The foundation of dream life is for them a peculiar
state of psychical activity, which they even celebrate as elevation to
some higher state. Schubert, for instance, claims: "The dream is the
liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a
detac