Freud - Complete Works (92 page)
The most detailed account of the
forgetting of dreams is the one given by Strümpell. It is
evidently a complex phenomenon, for Strümpell traces it back
not to a single cause but to a whole number of them.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
554
In the first place, all the
causes that lead to forgetting in waking life are operative for
dreams as well. When we are awake we regularly forget countless
sensations and perceptions at once, because they were too weak or
because the mental excitation attaching to them was too slight. The
same holds good of many dream-images: they are forgotten because
they are too weak, while stronger images adjacent to them are
remembered. The factor of intensity, however, is certainly not in
itself enough to determine whether a dream-image shall be
recollected. Strümpell admits, as well as other writers (e.g.
Calkins, 1893, 312), that we often forget dream-images which we
know were very vivid, while a very large number which are shadowy
and lacking in sensory force are among those retained in the
memory. Moreover when we are awake we tend easily to forget an
event which occurs only once and more readily to notice what can be
perceived repeatedly.¹ Now most dream-images are unique
experiences; and that fact will contribute impartially towards
making us forget all dreams. Far more importance attaches to a
third cause of forgetting. If sensations, ideas, thoughts, and so
on, are to attain a certain degree of susceptibility to being
remembered, it is essential that they should not remain isolated
but should be arranged in appropriate concatenations and groupings.
If a short line of verse is divided up into its component words and
these are mixed up, it becomes very hard to remember. ‘If
words are properly arranged and put into the relevant order, one
word will help another, and the whole, being charged with meaning,
will be easily taken up by the memory and retained for a long time.
It is in general as difficult and unusual to retain what is
nonsensical as it is to retain what is confused and
disordered.’ Now dreams are in most cases lacking in
intelligibility and orderliness. The compositions which constitute
dreams are barren of the qualities which would make it possible to
remember them, and they are forgotten because as a rule they fall
to pieces a moment later. Radestock (1879, 168), however, claims to
have observed that it is the most peculiar dreams that are best
remembered, and this, it must be admitted, would scarcely tally
with what has just been said.
Strümpell believes that
certain other factors derived from the relation between dreaming
and waking life are of still greater importance in causing dreams
to be forgotten. The liability of dreams to be forgotten by waking
consciousness is evidently only the counterpart of the fact which
has been mentioned earlier that dreams scarcely ever take over
ordered recollections from waking life, but only details selected
from them, which they tear from the psychical context in which they
are usually remembered in the waking state. Thus dream-compositions
find no place in the company of the psychical sequences with which
the mind is filled. There is nothing that can help us to remember
them. ‘In this way dream-structures are, as it were, lifted
above the floor of our mental life and float in psychical space
like clouds in the sky, scattered by the first breath of
wind.’ (Strümpell, 1877, 87.) After waking, moreover,
the world of the senses presses forward and at once takes
possession of the attention with a force which very few
dream-images can resist; so that here too we have another factor
tending in the same direction. Dreams give way before the
impressions of a new day just as the brilliance of the stars yields
to the light of the sun.
¹
Dreams that recur periodically have often
been observed. Cf. the collection given by Chabaneix
(1897).
The Interpretation Of Dreams
555
Finally, there is another fact to
be borne in mind as likely to lead to dreams being forgotten,
namely that most people take very little interest in their dreams.
Anyone, such as a scientific investigator, who pays attention to
his dreams over a period of time will have more dreams than usual -
which no doubt means that he remembers his dreams with greater ease
and frequency.
Two further reasons why dreams
should be forgotten, which Benini quotes as having been brought
forward by Bonatelli as additions to those mentioned by
Strümpell, seem in fact to be already covered by the latter.
They are (1) that the alteration in coenaesthesia between the
sleeping and waking states is unfavourable to reciprocal
reproduction between them; and (2) that the different arrangement
of the ideational material in dreams makes them untranslatable, as
it were, for waking consciousness.
In view of all these reasons in
favour of dreams being forgotten, it is in fact (as Strümpell
himself insists) very remarkable that so many of them are retained
in the memory. The repeated attempts by writers on the subject to
lay down the rules governing the recollection of dreams amount to
an admission that here too we are faced by something puzzling and
unexplained. Certain particular characteristics of the recollection
of dreams have been rightly emphasized recently (cf. Radestock,
1879, and Tissié, 1898), such as the fact that when a dream
seems in the morning to have been forgotten, it may nevertheless be
recollected during the course of the day, if its content, forgotten
though it is, is touched upon by some chance perception.
But the recollection of dreams in
general is open to an objection which is bound to reduce their
value very completely in critical opinion. Since so great a
proportion of dreams is lost altogether, we may well doubt whether
our memory of what is left of them may not be falsified.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
556
These doubts as to the accuracy
of the reproduction of dreams are also expressed by Strümpell
(1877): ‘Thus it may easily happen that waking consciousness
unwittingly makes interpolations in the memory of a dream: we
persuade ourselves that we have dreamt all kinds of things that
were not contained in the actual dreams.’
Jessen (1855, 547) writes with
special emphasis on this point: ‘Moreover, in investigating
and interpreting coherent and consistent dreams a particular
circumstance must be borne in mind which, as it seems to me, has
hitherto received too little attention. In such cases the truth is
almost always obscured by the fact that when we recall dreams of
this kind to our memory we almost always - unintentionally and
without noticing the fact - fill in the gaps in the dream-images.
It is seldom or never that a coherent dream was in fact as coherent
as it seems to us in memory. Even the most truth-loving of men is
scarcely able to relate a noteworthy dream without some additions
or embellishments. The tendency of the human mind to see everything
connectedly is so strong that in memory it unwittingly fills in any
lack of coherence there may be in an incoherent dream.’
Some remarks made by Egger,
though they were no doubt arrived at independently, read almost
like a translation of this passage from Jessen: ‘. . .
L’observation des rêves a ses ifficultés
spéciales et le seul moyen d’éviter tout erreur
en pareille matière est de confier au papier sans le moindre
retard ce que l’on vient d’éprouver et de
remarquer; sinon, l’oubli vient vite ou total ou partiel;
l’oubli total est sans gravité; mais l’oubli
partiel est perfide; car si l’on se met ensuite à
raconter ce que l’on n’a pas oublié, on est
exposé à compléter par imagination les
fragments incohérents et disjoints fournis par la
mémoire . . .; on devient artiste à son insu, et le
récit périodiquement répété
s’impose à la créance de son auteur, qui, de
bonne foi, le présente comme un fait authentique,
dûment établi selon les bonnes méthodes. . .
.’ ¹
Very similar ideas are expressed
by Spitta (1882, 338), who seems to believe that it is not until we
try to reproduce a dream that we introduce order of any kind into
its loosely associated elements: we ‘change things that are
merely juxtaposed into sequences or causal chains, that is to say,
we introduce a process of logical connection which is lacking in
the dream.’
Since the only check that we have
upon the validity of our memory is objective confirmation, and
since that is unobtainable for dreams, which are our own personal
experience and of which the only source we have is our
recollection, what value can we still attach to our memory of
dreams?
¹
[‘There are peculiar difficulties in
observing dreams, and the only way of escaping all errors in such
matters is to put down upon paper with the least possible delay
what we have just experienced or observed. Otherwise forgetfulness,
whether total or partial, quickly supervenes. Total forgetfulness
is not serious; but partial forgetfulness is treacherous. For if we
then proceed to give an account of what we have not forgotten, we
are liable to fill in from our imagination the incoherent and
disjointed fragments furnished by memory. . . . We
unwittingly become creative artists; and the tale, if it is
repeated from time to time, imposes itself on its author’s
own belief, and he ends by offering it in good faith as an
authentic fact duly and legitimately
established.’]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
557
(E)
THE DISTINGUISHING PSYCHOLOGICAL
CHARACTERISTICS OF DREAMS
Our scientific consideration of
dreams starts off from the assumption that they are products of our
own mental activity. Nevertheless the finished dream strikes us as
something alien to us. We are so little obliged to acknowledge our
responsibility for it that we are just as ready to say
‘
mir hat geträumt
’ [‘I had a
dream’, literally ‘a dream came to me’] as
‘
ich habe geträumt
’ [‘I
dreamt’]. What is the origin of this feeling that dreams are
extraneous to our minds? In view of our discussion upon the
sources of dreams, we must conclude that the strangeness cannot be
due to the material that finds its way into their content, since
that material is for the most part common to dreaming and waking
life. The question arises whether in dreams there may not be
modifications in the processes of the mind which produce the
impression we are discussing; and we shall therefore make an
attempt at drawing a picture of the psychological attributes of
dreams.
No one has emphasized more
sharply the essential difference between dreaming and waking life
or drawn more far-reaching conclusions from it than G. T. Fechner
in a passage in his
Elemente der Psychophysik
(1889, 2,
520-1). In his opinion, ‘neither the mere lowering of
conscious mental life below the main threshold’, nor the
withdrawal of attention from the influences of the external world,
are enough to explain the characteristics of dream-life as
contrasted with waking life. He suspects, rather, that
the scene
of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational
life
. ‘If the scene of action of psychophysical activity
were the same in sleeping and waking, dreams could, in my view,
only be a prolongation at a lower degree of intensity of waking
ideational life and, moreover, would necessarily be of the same
material and form. But the facts are quite otherwise.’
The Interpretation Of Dreams
558
It is not clear what Fechner had
in mind in speaking of this change of location of mental activity;
nor, so far as I know, has anyone else pursued the path indicated
by his words. We may, I think, dismiss the possibility of giving
the phrase an anatomical interpretation and supposing it to refer
to physiological cerebral localization or even to the histological
layers of the cerebral cortex. It may be, however, that the
suggestion will eventually prove to be sagacious and fertile, if it
can be applied to a
mental
apparatus built up of a number of
agencies arranged in a series one behind the other.
Other writers have contented
themselves with drawing attention to the more tangible of the
distinguishing characteristics of dream-life and with taking them
as a starting-point for attempts at more far reaching
explanations.
It has justly been remarked that
one of the principal peculiarities of dream-life makes its
appearance during the very process of falling asleep and may be
described as a phenomenon heralding sleep. According to
Schleiermacher (1862, 351), what characterizes the waking state is
the fact that thought-activity takes place in
concepts
and
not in
images
. Now dreams think essentially in images; and
with the approach of sleep it is possible to observe how, in
proportion as voluntary activities become more difficult,
involuntary ideas arise, all of which fall into the class of
images. Incapacity for ideational work of the kind which we feel as
intentionally willed and the emergence (habitually associated with
such states of abstraction) of images - these are two
characteristics which persevere in dreams and which the
psychological analysis of dreams forces us to recognize as
essential features of dream-life. We have already seen that these
images - hypnagogic hallucinations - are themselves identical in
their content with dream-images.¹
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] Silberer
(1909) has given some nice examples of the way in which, in a
drowsy state, even abstract thoughts become converted into
pictorial plastic images which seek to express the same meaning.
[
Added
1925:] I shall have occasion to return to this
discovery in another connection.
