The Interpretation of Dreams

Dream-interpretation must seek a closer union with the rich material of poetry, myth, and popular idiom, and it must deal more faithfully than has hitherto been possible with the relations of dreams to the neuroses and to mental derangement.

It reveals itself to me as a piece of my self-analysis, as my reaction to the death of my father, that is, to the most important event, the most poignant loss in a man's life.

And if I relate my own dreams I must inevitably reveal to the gaze of strangers more of the intimacies of my psychic life than is agreeable to me, and more than seems fitting in a writer who is not a poet but a scientific investigator.

For nature is really demonic, not divine; that is to say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the laws of the human spirit.

The ancients distinguished between the true and valuable dreams which were sent to the dreamer as warnings, or to foretell future events, and the vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams whose object was to misguide him or lead him to destruction.

In this memory the dream, as compared with the rest of the psychic content, seems to be something alien, coming, as it were, from another world.

The waking life, with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, is never repeated; on the contrary, the dream aims at relieving us of these.

Maximeque 'reliquiae' rerum earum moventur in animis et agitantur, de quibus vigilantes aut cogitavimus aut egimus.

Hildebrandt then asserts that in falling asleep our whole being, with its forms of existence, disappears 'as through an invisible trapdoor.'

One is therefore forced to admit that in the dream something was known and remembered that cannot be remembered in the waking state.

A sudden recollection came to him: he opened the herbarium, discovered therein the Asplenium of his dream, and recognized his own handwriting in the accompanying Latin name.

In this new dream I addressed the golden-haired lady and asked her whether I had not had the pleasure of meeting her somewhere.

I saw, in definite orientation to my own person - on my left - a dark space in which a number of grotesque sandstone figures stood out.

The subject becomes more interesting still when we remember how the dream sometimes drags out, as it were, from the deepest and densest psychic deposits which later years have piled upon the earliest experiences of childhood, the pictures of certain persons, places and things, quite intact, and in all their original freshness.

The psychic activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly.

For most often it would lead us to ferret out all sorts of psychically worthless things from the remotest corners of our storehouse of memories, and to bring to light all sorts of quite indifferent events of long ago from the oblivion which may have overtaken them an hour after their occurrence.

The ancients, who conceived of dreams as divine inspirations, had no need to look for stimuli; for them a dream was due to the will of divine or demonic powers.

The rolling of thunder takes us into the thick of battle, the crowing of a cock may be transformed into human shrieks of terror, and the creaking of a door may conjure up dreams of burglars breaking into the house.

He was tickled with a feather on his lips and on the tip of his nose. He dreamed of an awful torture, viz., that a mask of pitch was stuck to his face and then forcibly torn off, bringing the skin with it.

It probably happened hundreds of times that the sound of this instrument fitted into an apparently very long and connected dream, as though the entire dream had been especially designed for it.

He felt his head severed from his trunk, and awakened in terrible anxiety, only to find that the head-board of the bed had fallen, and had actually struck the cervical vertebrae just where the knife of the guillotine would have fallen.

But I soon perceive that the endless din is not really a rattling but a true ringing, and with this ringing the dreamer now becomes aware that the alarm-clock has done its duty.

Thus we see outspread before our eyes innumerable birds, butterflies, fishes, coloured beads, flowers, etc. Here the luminous dust in the dark field of vision has assumed fantastic forms.

Not only pictures, but auditory hallucinations of words, names, etc., may also occur hypnogogically, and then repeat themselves in the dream, like an overture announcing the principal motif of the opera which is to follow.

During sleep the psyche becomes far more deeply and broadly conscious of its coporality than in the waking state.

The patient betook himself to the temple of Apollo or Aesculapius; there he was subjected to various ceremonies, bathed, rubbed and perfumed.

At night, however, when the overwhelming effect of the impressions of the day is no longer operative, the impressions that surge upward from within are able to force themselves on our attention - just as in the night we hear the rippling of the brook that was drowned in the clamour of the day.

Krauss even gives this process the special name of "transubstantiation of the sensations into dream-images."

The limb in any particular position may appear in the dream as an animal or monster, in which case a certain analogy between the two is established.

The imaginative life, already released from the control of reason and intellect, is here no longer held together by the more important psychical and physical stimuli, but is left to its own uncontrolled and confused divagations.

The distrust of the psychiatrist has placed the psyche under tutelage, so to speak; it requires that none of the impulses of the psyche shall reveal an autonomous power.

We are often aware that we have been dreaming, but we do not know of what we have dreamed; and we are so well used to this fact - that the dream is liable to be forgotten - that we do not reject as absurd the possibility that we may have been dreaming even when, in the morning, we know nothing either of the content of the dream or of the fact that we have dreamed.

They fade away before the impressions of the new day like the stars before the light of the sun.

Rarely, and perhaps never, has a connected dream been as connected as it appears to us in memory.

He believes, rather, that the arena of dreams is other than the arena of the waking life of the mind.

As for the images themselves the hypnogogic hallucinations - we have learned that even in their content they are identical with dream-images.

The dream hallucinates- that is, that it replaces thoughts by hallucinations.

Dreams can make us believe that we are applying such tests - that we are touching, say, the rose that we see in our dream; and yet we are dreaming.

Thus the miller can fall asleep only when he hears the clatter of his mill, and he who finds it necessary, as a matter of precaution, to burn a light at night, cannot fall asleep in the dark.

It is as though the psychological activity of the brain of a reasonable person were to migrate into that of a fool.

Sometimes we quite innocently calculate that three times three make twenty; and we are not in the least surprised if a dog recites poetry to us, if a dead person walks to his grave, or if a rock floats on the water.

All the activities of consciousness occur in dreams, but they are imperfect, inhibited, and mutually isolated.

In dreams the ideas chase and seize upon one another on the strength of accidental similarities and barely perceptible connections.

The possibility seems to have dawned upon others that the madness of the dream is perhaps not without its method- that it is perhaps only a disguise, a dramatic pretence, like that of Hamlet, to whose madness this perspicacious judgment refers.

Dreams have a wonderful poetry, an apposite allegory, an incomparable sense of humour, a delightful irony.

Would it not suffice to state that everything is possible in the dream, from the lowest degradation of the psychic life to its flight to heights unknown in the waking state?

As every one knows, dreams are especially unbridled in sexual matters.

Kant's categorical imperative dogs our steps as an inseparable companion, of whom we cannot rid ourselves even in our slumber.

The dream has not discovered it - it has only imitated and extended it; it has only elaborated into dramatic form a scrap of historical material which it found already existing within us.

The greatest thinkers have had cause to complain of this dream-like, tormenting and distressing rabble of ideas, which disturbs their profoundest contemplations.

En revel'homme se revele donc tout entier a soi-meme dans sa nudite et sa misere natives.

Dreams do not consist purely and simply of delusions; for example, if one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers indeed are imaginary, but the fear is real.

If I may draw a comparison from psychiatry, I would say that the first group of theories construes the dream like a paranoia, while the second represents it as a type of mental deficiency or amentia.

The old simile of 'the ten fingers of a person ignorant of music running over the keyboard of an instrument' perhaps best illustrates in what esteem the dream is commonly held by the representatives of exact science.

A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would in time become mentally unbalanced, because an immense number of unfinished and unsolved thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain.

The psychic energy accumulated during the day by inhibition or suppression becomes the mainspring of the dream at night.

Dreaming is the natural activity of the mind, which is not limited by the power of the individuality, nor disturbed by self-consciousness, nor directed by self-determination, but is the vitality of the sensible focus indulging in free play.

The dream is a bulwark against the regularity and commonplace character of life, a free recreation of the fettered phantasy, in which it intermingles all the images of life and interrupts the constant seriousness of the adult by the joyful play of the child.

The dream-phantasy lacks the language of concepts. What it wishes to say it must express in visible form; and since in this case the concept does not exert an inhibitory control, it depicts it in all the fulness, power, and breadth of visible form.

In dreams the psyche plays with the stimuli which are offered to it. One might conjecture that it plays in a mischievous fashion.

For the present, Scherner's theory of dreams, in contrast to the medical theory, may perhaps lead us to realize between what extremes the explanation of dream-life is still unsteadily vacillating.

The psychosis may come to life quite suddenly, simultaneously with the dream that contains its effective and delusive explanation, or it may develop slowly through subsequent dreams that have still to struggle against doubt.

Schopenhauer terms the dream a brief insanity, and insanity a long dream.

The woman who has lost a dearly beloved child experiences in her delirium the joys of maternity; the man who has suffered reverses of fortune deems himself immensely wealthy; and the jilted girl sees herself tenderly beloved.

In most of the literature which has appeared since the publication of my own work the latter has not been mentioned or discussed; it has, of course, received the least attention from the so-called "research-workers on dreams," who have thus afforded a brilliant example of the aversion to learning anything new so characteristic of the scientist.

The few reviews which have appeared in the scientific journals are so full of misconceptions and lack of comprehension that my only possible answer to my critics would be a request that they should read this book over again - or perhaps merely that they should read it!

Vaschide even maintains that it has often been observed that in one's dreams one speaks foreign languages more fluently and with greater purity than in the waking state.

Unconsciously one becomes an artist, and the story, repeated from time to time, imposes itself on the belief of its author, who, in good faith, tells it as authentic fact.

The dreamer is an actor who plays at will the mad and the wise, executioner and victim, dwarf and giant, devil and angel.

In a dream, a man is totally revealed to himself in his naked and wretched state.

Led by a dim intuition, it seems rather to assume that dreams have a meaning, albeit a hidden one; that they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.

I have been forced to perceive that here, once more, we have one of those not infrequent cases where an ancient and stubbornly retained popular belief seems to have come nearer to the truth of the matter than the opinion of modern science.

He must also be told that the success of the psycho-analysis depends upon his noting and communicating everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or another because it seems nonsensical.

You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators.

One has a comprehensible aversion to exposing so many intimate details of one's own psychic life, and one does not feel secure against the misinterpretations of strangers.

I realize that these words of my friend Otto's, or the tone of voice in which they were spoken, annoyed me.

I am startled, and look at her. She looks pale and puffy. I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection.

If Irma's pains are indeed of organic origin, it is not my duty to cure them.

For I consider Irma foolish because she does not accept my solution. The other woman would be more sensible, and would thus be more likely to yield.

I had never thought of this until now; but now it seems to me almost like a retribution of fate - as though the substitution of persons had to be continued in another sense: this Matilda for that Matilda; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

Dr. M says: 'It's an infection, but it doesn't matter; dysentery will follow, and the poison will be eliminated.'

Thus, in this dream I have already revenged myself on two persons: on Irma in the words, If you still have pains, it is your own fault, and on Dr. M in the wording of the nonsensical consolation which has been put into his mouth.

In the dream I see the chemical formula of this substance - which at all events is evidence of a great effort on the part of my memory - and the formula is even printed in heavy type, as though to distinguish it from the context as something of particular importance.

The dream acquits me of responsibility for Irma's condition, as it refers this condition to other causes.

In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.

For dream-pictures, like pictures in water, are disfigured by the motion (of the water), so that he hits the target best who is able to recognize the true picture in the distorted one.

Every dream has at least one point at which it is unfathomable: a central point, as it were, connecting it with the unknown.

The dream is not comparable to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being played by the hand of a musician, is struck by some external force.

He told himself in the dream: 'If I am already at the hospital, I don't have to go there,' turned over, and slept on.

The dream of this poor sufferer reminds me of an expression which comes to our lips when we are in a disagreeable situation: 'Well, I can imagine more amusing things!'

The girl's brothers, who evidently had not inherited an understanding of dream-interpretation, declared, just as the writers we have quoted would have done: 'That dream is nonsense.'

During the night she was heard to call excitedly in her sleep: 'Anna F(r)eud, St'awbewy, wild st'awbewy, om'lette, pap!'

What does the goose dream of? Of maize.

Eating and drinking constituted the pivot around which most of our dreams revolved.

Mungo Park, nearly dying of thirst on one of his African expeditions, dreamed constantly of the well-watered valleys and meadows of his home.

It is true that there are dreams the manifest content of which is of the most painful nature. But has anyone ever tried to interpret these dreams - to discover their latent thought-content?

In scientific research it is often advantageous, if the solution of one problem presents difficulties, to add to it a second problem; just as it is easier to crack two nuts together instead of separately.

Whether I considered the grapes to be sweet or sour did not matter, since they undoubtedly hung too high for me.

The face that I see in my dream is at once that of my friend R and that of my uncle. It is like one of those composite photographs of Galton's; in order to emphasize family resemblances Galton had several faces photographed on the same plate.

The affection in the dream does not belong to the latent content, to the thoughts behind the dream; it stands in opposition to this content; it is calculated to conceal the knowledge conveyed by the interpretation.

The stricter the domination of the censorship, the more thorough becomes the disguise, and, often enough, the more ingenious the means employed to put the reader on the track of the actual meaning.

The autocrat, on the other hand, in order to show his contempt for the popular will, may then deliberately confer upon the official some exceptional distinction which otherwise would not have been conferred.

They are wish-dreams in so far as every dream emanates from the first instance, while the second instance behaves towards the dream only in a defensive, not in a constructive manner.

But she has, on the contrary, begged him not to give her any caviar, so that she might tease him about it a little longer.

Identification is a highly important motive in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled to express in their symptoms not merely their own experiences, but the experiences of quite a number of other persons.

Thus identification is not mere imitation, but an assimilation based upon the same aetiological claim; it expresses a just like, and refers to some common condition which has remained in the unconscious.

According to this dream, I was wrong; but it was her wish that I should be wrong, and this wish the dream showed her as fulfilled.

In order to disguise her wish she had obviously selected a situation in which wishes of the sort are commonly suppressed - a situation so sorrowful that love is not even thought of.

In a fit of anger, following a violent scene with her husband, she had even struck her abdomen with her fists, in order to injure the child within.

The fact that the wish-fulfilment, which is the essence of the dream, disguises itself in such an unpleasant form, has perhaps more than one explanation.

Indeed, I have reason to expect that many of my readers will have such dreams, merely to fulfil the wish that I may prove to be wrong.

Dream-distortion, then, proves in reality to be an act of censorship.

The anxiety which we experience in dreams is only apparently explained by the dream-content.

Like some letter in cipher, the dream-inscription when scrutinized closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a serious, intelligible message.

Unauthorized emergence of suppressed yearnings under false features and names.

I believe, therefore, that for every dream a dream-stimulus may be found among these experiences 'on which one has not yet slept.'

I am reminded of a story which I recently told some friends of mine in proof of my assertion that we often forget in obedience to a purpose of the unconscious.

The surgeon, who would not know the name of his patient, would boast, as usual, how easy these operations had become since the introduction of cocaine; and I should not betray the fact that I myself had a share in this discovery.

The picture of us two children blissfully tearing the book to pieces (I should add, like an artichoke, leaf by leaf), is almost the only one from this period of my life which has remained vivid in my memory.

When I was seventeen, I ran up a very considerable account at the bookseller's, with no means with which to settle it, and my father would hardly accept it as an excuse that my passion was at least a respectable one.

The recollection of the monograph on the genus cyclamen is utilized as though it were an allusion to the conversation with my friend, just as the mention of my patient's friend in the dream of the deferred supper is represented by the allusion smoked salmon.

In this process it is as though, in the course of the intermediate steps, a displacement occurs- let us say, of the psychic accent- until ideas of feeble potential, by taking over the charge from ideas which have a stronger initial potential, reach a degree of intensity which enables them to force their way into consciousness.

The fact which Robert was trying to explain simply does not exist; its assumption is based on a misunderstanding, on a failure to substitute the real meaning of the dream for its apparent meaning.

The dream works under a kind of compulsion which forces it to combine into a unified whole all the sources of dream-stimulation which are offered to it.

If we now consider that these same indifferent impressions, which are utilized for the dream as long as they are recent, lose this qualification as soon as they are a day (or at most several days) older, we are obliged to assume that the very freshness of an impression gives it a certain psychological value for dream-formation.

Dreams which are apparently guileless turn out to be the reverse of innocent, if one takes the trouble to interpret them; if I may be permitted the expression, they all show 'the mark of the beast.'

One might use the words to a man who was making indecent overtures, and had neglected 'to close his meat-shop.'

A thin condom is dangerous, a thick one is bad.

All such criticisms of the dream, and comments on the dream, although they have found a place in the waking thoughts, properly belong to the latent dream-content.

The lovers were in the habit of making him, the elder boy, drunk with beer whenever circumstances were favourable to their nocturnal intercourse.

One is astonished to find that the child with all his impulses survives in the dream.

He refuses to appoint me Professor extraordinarius, and so in my dream I put myself in his place.

One is the story of the constitution; it tells how a poor Jew sneaks into the Karlsbad express without a ticket; how he is detected, and is treated more and more harshly by the conductor at each succeeding call for tickets.

'Jew, get off the pavement!'— 'And what did you do?'— 'I went into the street and picked up the cap,' he calmly replied.

The deeper we go into the analysis of dreams, the more often are we put on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream-sources in the latent dream-content.

The standing-in-the-corner and not lying-down-on-the-bed are in keeping with this word, as component parts of a scene of her childhood in which she had soiled her bed, in punishment for which she was put into the corner, with a warning that papa would not love her any more.

The dream unites two occasions upon which, as a little boy, the dreamer was enabled to see the genitals of little girls, once by throwing the little girl down, and once while the child was urinating.

'Pack up your seven plums and get out!'

Thereupon my mother rubbed the palms of her hands together-just as in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them- and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis which were thus rubbed off, as a proof that it is of dust that we are made.

One of the dream-thoughts occasioned by the sensation of hunger really amounts to this: We should let nothing escape; we should take what we can get, even if we do a little wrong; we should never let an opportunity go by; life is so short, and death inevitable.

In spite of the rain he arrived in an open carriage, came straight through the entrance-gate for the local trains, and with a curt gesture and not a word of explanation he waved back the gatekeeper, who did not know him and wanted to take his ticket.

Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were, the same thing.

The arrogant attitude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at my school which occurred in my fifteenth year.

I jumped up (as in the dream), became piggishly rude, and retorted that since I knew he had herded swine, I was not surprised at the tone of his discourse.

The psycho-analysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

This childish scene furnishes the elements for the last image of the dream, in which the roles are interchanged, of course for the purpose of revenge.

I should say that every dream is connected through its manifest content with recent experiences, while through its latent content it is connected with the most remote experiences.

He thinks immediately of the influence exercised on the formation of dreams by a disturbed or impeded digestion ("Dreams come from the stomach"), an accidental position of the body, a trifling occurrence during sleep.

It is "as though ten fingers of a person ignorant of music were to stray over the keyboard of an instrument."

The mind seems to be like the sleeper in the anecdote, who, on being asked, 'Are you asleep?' answers 'No,' and on being again addressed with the words: 'Then lend me ten florins,' takes refuge in the excuse: 'I am asleep.'

In the headache-dream a ceiling covered with disgusting toad-like spiders is chosen to denote the upper part of the head.

Thus the dream appears to be a reaction to everything which is simultaneously present as actual in the sleeping mind.

I am riding a gray horse, at first timidly and awkwardly, as though I were merely carried along.

Go on sleeping, you are not going to wake! You have no boil, for you are riding on horseback, and with a boil just there no one could ride!

The dream is the guardian of sleep, not its disturber.

The actual sensation is woven into the dream in order to deprive it of its reality.

The logic of dream situations would run, for example: "It is the nightingale, and not the lark." For if it is the lark, love's night is at an end.

They are treated as a cheap ever-ready material, which can be used whenever it is needed, and not as valuable material which itself prescribes the manner in which it must be utilized.

I am ashamed, and try to hurry away, and now comes this feeling of being inhibited; I am glued to the stairs, and cannot move from the spot.

She lies in wait for me, to see whether I shall take the liberty referred to, and, if she sees that I do, I can distinctly hear her growl.

But there are dreams which exhibit a complete contrast to the individual's customary liberty to endow his dream-world with a special individuality, thereby making it inaccessible to an alien understanding.

The dreamer's embarrassment and the spectator's indifference constitute a contradition such as often occurs in dreams.

This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it later, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual.

An indescribable feeling of shame and fear overcomes you; you try to cover yourself, to hide, and you wake up bathed in sweat.

One learns in a psycho-analysis to interpret temporal proximity by material connection; two ideas which are apparently without connection, but which occur in immediate succession, belong to a unity which has to be deciphered.

They are not dead, like persons who have died, in the sense that we know death, but are rather like the shades in the Odyssey which awaken to a certain degree of life so soon as they have drunk blood.

The child inspects the new arrival, and expresses his opinion with decision: 'The stork had better take it back again!'

I know of a case where a girl, not three years of age, tried to strangle an infant in its cradle, because she suspected that its continued presence boded her no good.

Mamma, I do love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room, so that I can always, always see you!

Kronos devours his children, as the wild boar devours the litter of the sow; Zeus emasculates his father and takes his place as ruler.

A particularly clever and lively little girl, not yet four years of age, in whom this trait of child psychology is unusually transparent, says frankly: 'Now mummy can go away; then daddy must marry me, and I will be his wife.'

In the state of confusion, which I regard as an overthrow of the second psychic instance by the first instance, at other times suppressed, the unconscious enmity towards the mother gained the upper hand, and found physical expression.

Anyone capable of wishing to push his own father from a mountain-top into an abyss cannot be trusted to spare the lives of persons less closely related to him; he therefore does well to lock himself into his room.

King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfilment- the fulfilment of the wish of our childhood.

For many a man hath seen himself in dreams His mother's mate, but he who gives no heed To suchlike matters bears the easier life.

The loathing which should have driven him to revenge is thus replaced by self-reproach, by conscientious scruples, which tell him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish.

The dream-censorship is therefore unprepared for this monstrosity, just as the laws of Solon did not foresee the necessity of establishing a penalty for patricide.

The following dream gives an example of really base, egoistical feelings, which conceal themselves behind an affectionate concern.

At such moments children shout with joy, and insatiably demand a repetition of the performance, especially if a little fright and dizziness are involved in the game; in after years they repeat their sensations in dreams.

The exciting games of childhood are repeated in dreams of flying, falling, reeling and the like, but the voluptuous feelings are now transformed into anxiety.

The exclamation which is regarded as a protest against the dream: 'But I am already a doctor,' etc., would in reality be the consolation offered by the dream.

Behind the dream there is hidden a phantasy of indecent, sexually provoking conduct on my part, and of repulsion on the part of the lady.

The sovereign is called the father of his country (Landesvater), and the father is the first and oldest, and for the child the only authority, from whose absolutism the other social authorities have evolved in the course of the history of human civilization.

The stratification of the meanings of dreams is one of the most delicate but also one of the most fruitful problems of dream interpretation.

I was sufficient unto myself: what did I want with a brother? And he was not only useless, he was also even troublesome.

To the uncurbed self-love (narcissism) of the child, every inconvenience constitutes the crime of lese majeste, and, as in the Draconian code, the child's feelings prescribe for all such crimes the one invariable punishment.

Now a dream is such a picture-puzzle, and our predecessors in the art of dream-interpretation have made the mistake of judging the rebus as an artistic composition.

The dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts.

The new combinations are, so to speak, corollaries, short-circuits, which are made possible by the existence of other, more fundamental modes of connection.

Botanical, then, is a veritable nucleus, and, for the dream, the meeting-point of many trains of thought; which, I can testify, had all really been brought into connection by the conversation referred to.

One throw links up a thousand threads.

The difficulty dreamed of, and probably experienced during the dream - difficulty in climbing, accompanied by dyspnoea - was one of the symptoms which the patient had actually exhibited some years before.

A lovely dream once came to me; I then beheld an apple-tree, And there two fairest apples shone: They lured me so, I climbed thereon.

The bosom of the nurse is in reality an inn for the child.

I have adopted the method employed by Galton in producing family portraits; namely, I have superimposed the two images, so that the common features stand out in stronger relief, while those which do not coincide neutralize one another and become indistinct.

In the whole of this dream I am continually recoiling from somebody who excites my displeasure towards another person with whom I can at will confront the first; trait by trait I appeal to the friend as against the enemy.

Generally speaking, words are often treated in dreams as things, and therefore undergo the same combinations as the ideas of things.

Mr. Dry jocosely refers to his habit by saying: 'You know I must drink because I am always dry' (referring to his name).

The first was the vividly remembered word Autodidasker: the second was a faithful reproduction in the dream-content of a short and harmless fancy which had been developed a few days earlier.

But the playing with names and syllables in which I am here engaged has yet another meaning.

'Well, you must be careful; there is no difficulty about the girls, but the boys are a difficulty later on as regards their upbringing.'

The linguistic tricks of children, who at a certain age actually treat words as objects, and even invent new languages and artificial syntaxes, are a common source of such occurrences both in dreams and in the psychoneuroses.

The dream is, as it were, centred elsewhere; its content is arranged about elements which do not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts.

Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly ascribe the structure of the dream.

The fact that time and space are often thoroughly shaken up, detracts not at all from the real content of the dream, because both are without any significance whatever for its essential content.

I do not see how a synthesis, to be convincing, could be anything short of complete.

When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts is subjected to the pressure of the dream-work, during which the fragments are turned about, broken up and compacted, somewhat like drifting ice, the question arises: What becomes of the logical ties which had hitherto provided the framework of the structure?

It reproduces logical connections in the form of simultaneity; in this case it behaves rather like the painter who groups together all the philosophers or poets in a picture of the School of Athens, or Parnassus.

Dreams are quite incapable of expressing the alternative either-or; it is their custom to take both members of this alternative into the same context, as though they had an equal right to be there.

The attitude of dreams to the category of antithesis and contradiction is very striking. This category is simply ignored; the word No does not seem to exist for a dream.

The same blossoming bough represents at once sexual innocence and its opposite.

Such an element of the dream-content is then comparable to a determinative in hieroglyphic script which is not meant to be expressed, but is intended only to explain another sign.

It has been my experience - and to this I have found no exception - that every dream treats of oneself. Dreams are absolutely egoistic.

The unification into one image has here been to some extent unsuccessful; the two representations overlap one another, and give rise to something like a contest between the visual images.

Another, a female patient, after her elder brother has promised to regale her with caviar, dreams that his legs are covered all over with black beads of caviar.

It is therefore always permissible, if a dream stubbornly refuses to surrender its meaning, to venture on the experimental inversion of definite portions of its manifest content.

The differences in the intensity of individual dream-images cover the whole gamut, from a sharpness of definition which one is inclined - although without warrant - to rate more highly than that of reality, to a provoking indistinctness.

The very element of the dream which is transient and hazy, and screened by more vigorous images, is often discovered to be the one and only direct derivative of the topic that completely dominates the dream-thoughts.

she had not known whether her husband was her father, or who really was her father, or something of that sort.

The gaps are the genital apertures of the women who are going to bed: Here something is missing describes the principal characteristic of the female genitals.

The censorship thrust the complex out of the way as long as possible by a constant renewal of symbolic screenings, displacements, transformations into something harmless, etc.

The fact that I cannot find my hat therefore means: 'You are not after all an honest man.'

The inclusion of a certain content in a dream within a dream is, therefore, equivalent to the wish that what has been characterized as a dream had never occurred.

Whatever is pictorial is capable of representation in dreams and can be fitted into a situation in which abstract expression would confront the dream-representation with difficulties not unlike those which would arise if a political leading article had to be represented in an illustrated journal.

A word, as the point of junction of a number of ideas, possesses, as it were, a predestined ambiguity.

This tower must be described as a composite formation by means of apposition; by its substructure it represents the greatness of the man, but by the railing at the top, behind which he runs round like a prisoner or an animal in a cage, it represents his later fate.

The dream-work does not hesitate to recast the intractable thoughts into another verbal form, even though this is a more unusual form, provided it makes representation possible.

If, while in a state of fatigue and somnolence, he imposed upon himself a mental effort, it frequently happened that the thought escaped him and in its place there appeared a picture in which he could recognize the substitute for the thought.

The ugliest as well as the most intimate details of sexual life may be thought or dreamed of in apparently innocent allusions to culinary operations.

It seems as though he were asking her for something in return for his willingness, as though he had the intention of indemnifying (reimbursing) himself in her garden, as though he wanted to evade some law or other, to derive some advantage from it without causing her an injury.

It is as though one were to base one's diagnosis of infectious diseases on the olfactory impressions received beside the sick-bed, although of course there have been clinicians to whom the sense of smell - atrophied in most people - has been of greater service than to others.

These often possess many and varied meanings, so that, as in Chinese script, only the context can furnish the correct meaning.

In the dreams of men, one often finds the necktie as a symbol for the penis; this is not only because neckties hang down in front of the body, and are characteristic of men, but also because one can select them at pleasure, a freedom which nature prohibits as regards the original of the symbol.

The dream-work represents castration by baldness, hair-cutting, the loss of teeth, and beheading.

To use long, stiff objects and weapons as symbols of the female genitals, or hollow objects (chests, boxes, etc.) as symbols of the male genitals, is certainly not permitted by the imagination.

She was quiet for a while, and then found the courage to ask why it was that one of her husband's testicles was lower than the other, and whether it was the same with all men.

She hears the bones crack. (At this she experiences a feeling of discomfort but no real horror.)

The Rotunda, he said, is my genitals, the captive balloon in front is my penis, about whose flaccidity I have been worried.

It may be said that there is no class of ideas which cannot be enlisted in the representation of sexual facts and wishes.

One may say that the dreamer has command of symbolism from the very first.

The accidental phonetic similarity of the two words violet and violate is utilized by the dream to express in the language of flowers the idea of the violence of defloration.

This lack of honesty shows that the resistance here is at its greatest because the symbolism is here most transparent, and the struggle between libido and repression is most intense in connection with this phallic theme.

The paper looks like velvet or moss.

He is going to make phenylmagnesiumbromide; he sees the apparatus with particular distinctness, but he has substituted himself for the magnesium.

Thus, following the suggestion that the dreamer should dream of homosexual relations with a lady friend, this friend appeared in the dream carrying a shabby travelling-bag, upon which there was a label with the printed words: 'For ladies only.'

We have a case of such displacement when the genitals are replaced by the face in the symbolism of unconscious thought.

In after years they repeat their sensations in dreams, but in dreams they omit the hands that held them, so that now they are free to float or fall.

The remarkable phenomenon of erection, which constantly occupies the human phantasy, cannot fail to be impressive as an apparent suspension of the laws of gravity.

Anyone who has had experience in the translating of dreams will, of course, at once be reminded that penetration into narrow spaces and the opening of locked doors are among the commonest of sexual symbols.

I can assure the reader that disguised dreams of sexual intercourse with the dreamer's mother are far more frequent than undisguised dreams to the same effect.

In this case the locality is the genitals of the mother; of no other place can it be asserted with such certainty that one has been here before.

I asked the dreamer this, and she replied without hesitation: "Hasn't the treatment made me as though I were born again?"

In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly represented, by way of distortion, as the entry of the child into water.

The robbers were always the father; the ghosts more probably correspond to female persons in white night-gowns.

This dream has accomplished its purpose by a very simple means, namely, by taking a mere figure of speech literally, and representing it in accordance with the literal meaning of its words.

The dream signifies superfluous. The abstract idea occurring in the dream-thoughts is first made equivocal by a certain abuse of language; it has perhaps been replaced by overflowing, or by fluid and super-fluid (-fluous).

However, the word liability was changed into Lie-Ability, which he regarded as X's main characteristic.

One might say that wild beasts serve to represent the libido, feared by the ego, and combated by repression.

Since I had heard that God was omniscient, the dream signified that I knew everything in spite of the hat which I was made to wear.

It will throw some light on the question of the interpretation of absurdity in dreams if I remark that this absurd detail of the dream-content is intended to represent the most strongly emphasized of the dream-thoughts: 'It was nonsense to marry so early.'

The dream-work does not calculate at all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it only strings together, in the form of a sum, numerals which occur in the dream-thoughts.

The dream-speech thus has the structure of breccia, in which the larger pieces of various material are held together by a solidified cohesive medium.

Then I look searchingly at P, and under my gaze he becomes pale and blurred, and his eyes turn a sickly blue - and at last he dissolves.

What overwhelmed me was the terrible gaze of his blue eyes, before which I melted away - as P does in the dream, for P has exchanged roles with me, much to my relief.

Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable; we had loved each other and fought each other and, as I have already hinted, this childish relation has determined all my later feelings in my intercourse with persons of my own age.

The dreamer is surprised that his father should have met with an accident (since he is dead already, as the dreamer adds in relating his dream).

To stand after one's death before one's children great and undefiled: who would not wish that?

His father was again living, and conversing with him as usual, but (and this was the remarkable thing) he had nevertheless died, though he did not know it.

I at last divined that this alternation of death and life is intended to represent the indifference of the dreamer ('It is all one to me whether he is alive or dead').

It is nonsense to be proud of one's ancestors (Vorfahren). I would rather be an ancestor (Vorfahr) myself.

The authority proper to the father has at an early age evoked the criticism of the child, and the strict demands which he has made have caused the child, in self-defence, to pay particularly close attention to every weakness of his father's.

The explanation is that here the father is only an interposed figure, while the quarrel is really with another person, who appears in the dream only in a single allusion.

You know, I have always been one of the prettiest cases of masculine hysteria.

But I do not know exactly what the date of the present year is, and so the whole calculation lapses into obscurity.

The Jewish question, anxiety as to the future of my children, who cannot be given a fatherland, anxiety as to educating them so that they may enjoy the privileges of citizens - all these features may easily be recognized in the accompanying dream-thoughts.

"What sort of 'Geseres' is this you are making?" he asked the mother, impatiently. "If one side got well, the other will, too."

Dreams behave in real life as does the prince in the play who is obliged to pretend to be a madman, and hence we may say of dreams what Hamlet said of himself, substituting an unintelligible jest for the actual truth.

The dream-representation here overlaps into the waking thought, and allows one of the elements of the dream-thoughts to be represented by a judgment, formed in the waking state, of the whole dream.

It is easy to see how the father's suppressed desire for greatness is, in his thoughts, transferred to his children.

The dream is a compound, which for the purposes of investigation must be broken up into its elements.

We know that this inference has in fact been falsified by the wish-fulfilment, and that the sentence which dominates the dream-thoughts is as follows: Four or five years - that is no time at all - that need not be counted.

It is as though in an algebraic equation there should occur, besides the figures, plus and minus signs, and symbols of powers and of roots, and as though someone, in copying this equation, without understanding it, should copy both the symbols and the figures, and mix them all up together.

The pelvis is eviscerated; now the upper, now the lower aspect is visible, and the two aspects are commingled.

I think of the effort it cost me to make public even my work on dreams, in which I had to surrender so much of my own intimate nature.

The dream seems to say: "If you must already sojourn in your grave, let it be this Etruscan grave," and by means of this interpolation it transforms the most mournful expectation into one that is really to be desired.

I wake sweating all over, because all the windows are shut, The train stops at Marburg.

The certainty that he had not left the house for weeks protected him for a time against these accusations, until one day there dawned upon him the possibility that he might have left his house while in an unconscious state, and might thus have committed murder without knowing anything about it.

If I am afraid of robbers in my dreams, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real.

Here the affect is always in the right, at least as regards its quality; its intensity may, of course, be increased by displacement of the neurotic attention.

This lion is, therefore, like the lion in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who is unmasked as Snug the joiner; and of such stuff are all the dream-lions of which one is not afraid.

The rapid motion of the ships, the deep blue of the water, the brown smoke of the funnels - all these together produce an intense and gloomy impression.

The other end of the dream-object reminds us of the boat upon which corpses were laid in prehistoric times, and were left to be buried by the sea.

It is like the peace of a deserted battlefield; no trace is left of the tumult of battle.

The circumstance that all the excrement vanishes so rapidly before the stream of urine corresponds to the motto: Afflavit et dissipati sunt, which I shall some day make the title of a chapter on the therapeutics of hysteria.

I was tired; I took not the least pleasure in my difficult work, and longed to get away from this rummaging in human filth.

If I am a master of the art of dissimulation I can hypocritically display the opposite affect - smiling where I should like to be angry, and pretending affection where I should like to destroy.

The dream-work knew how to transform the sad idea of impotence and death into a comic scene, and the sobbing into laughter.

I have for long years dragged out the shadow of a veritable tailor's life - like a ghost from which I could not become divorced.

Now I understand: when I feel proud of these analyses in my waking life, and feel inclined to boast of my achievements, my dreams hold up to me at night those other, unsuccessful analyses, of which I have no reason to be proud.

To be sure, things are going well with you today, and once you found life very hard; but, after all, life was sweet in those days, when you were still so young.

The preparation signifies the self-analyses which I perform, as it were, by publishing my book on dreams, which I actually found so painful that I postponed the printing of the completed manuscript for more than a year.

Once you have opened the doors, more people enter than it was your original intention to admit.

At the end of the dream I am greatly pleased, and am quite ready to believe in a possibility which I recognize as absurd when I am awake, namely, that there are revenants who can be swept away by a mere wish.

An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy have coincided in the same person.

Shakespeare's Prince Hal cannot rid himself of the temptation to see how the crown fits, even at the bedside of his sick father.

One has to reveal oneself as the sole villain among all the noble souls with whom one shares the breath of life.

The children's names make them revenants. And, finally, is not the procreation of children for all men the only way of access to immortality?

It is an expression of the esprit d'escalier on the part of the psychic censorship.

This function proceeds in a manner which the poet maliciously attributes to the philosopher: with its rags and tatters it stops up the breaches in the structure of the dream.

They bear very much the same relation to the childish memories to which they refer as many of the baroque palaces of Rome bear to the ancient ruins, whose hewn stones and columns have furnished the material for the structures built in the modern style.

I might mention yet one more dream, which seems to be composed of two distinct and opposed phantasies, overlapping here and there, of which the first is superficial, while the second becomes, as it were, the interpretation of the first.

He then takes a look at the woman, and notices that she has grown a large beard.

The phrase serves as a point of irruption from which a complete whole is simultaneously put into a condition of stimulation.

At the same time, he has no means of assuring himself that he is really remembering something which was dreamed.

It is natural to our waking thought to create order in such material, to construct relations, and to subject it to the requirements of an intelligible coherence.

Quick! gather things up, put them in order - any order will do - before he enters to take possession.

I demand information of a grumpy secretary, who, bent over a desk, does not allow my urgency to disturb him; half straightening himself, he gives me a look of angry refusal.

Other examples, which relate to the fluctuation between sleep and waking:

It is not so much that it is more negligent, more incorrect, more forgetful, more incomplete than waking thought; it is something altogether different, qualitatively, from waking thought, and cannot therefore be compared with it.

The dream becomes witty because the shortest and most direct way to the expression of its thoughts is barred for it: the dream is under constraint.

That person in the dream who is subject to an emotion which I am aware of while asleep is the one that conceals my ego.

Sperber believes that primitive words denoted sexual things exclusively, and subsequently lost their sexual significance and were applied to other things and activities, which were compared with the sexual.

The common element of this interpretation with that represented above may be found in the fact that in both cases (castration-birth) there is a question of removing a part from the whole body.

The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience attended by anxiety, and is thus, the source and model of the affect of anxiety.

The night before its father was to return to the front the child cried out, sobbing violently: 'Papa, Papa - Baby.'

It is particularly easy for me to hide my ego in my dreams behind persons of this name, since Joseph was the name of the dream-interpreter in the Bible.

It is the dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the only explanation of its singularity.

The dream was given precedence over waking reflection because it was able to show the child still living.

What we recollect of the dream, and what we subject to our methods of interpretation, is, in the first place, mutilated by the unfaithfulness of our memory.

In this way we arrived at the history of that unfortunate patient to whose bedside I quickly called my older colleague.

But the passages in which the expression is modified are thereby made known to me as the weak points of the dream's disguise; they are what the embroidered emblem on Siegfried's raiment was to Hagen.

The state of affairs is like that obtaining after a great revolution in one of the republics of antiquity or the Renaissance.

It shows that the forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention.

The same resistance which that day disturbed him in the work of interpretation caused him also to forget the dream.

The dream has far more frequently taken the result of the interpretation with it into forgetfulness than the intellectual faculty has succeeded in retaining the dream in the memory.

It is really not easy to form an idea of the wealth of trains of unconscious thought striving for expression in our minds, or to credit the adroitness displayed by the dream-work in killing - so to speak - seven flies at one stroke.

It is from some denser part of this fabric that the dream-wish then arises, like the mushroom from its mycelium.

The state of sleep makes dream-formation possible by reducing the endopsychic censorship.

This censorship proceeds like the Russian censorship on the frontier, which allows only those foreign journals which have had certain passages blacked out to fall into the bands of the readers to be protected.

It is as though in a mountainous region a general interruption of traffic, for example an inundation, should render the broad highways impassable: traffic would then have to be maintained by steep and inconvenient tracks used at other times only by the hunter.

On the contrary, it appears that during the day, by means of new thought-connections, we sink shafts that strike the intermediary thoughts and the dream-thoughts now in this place, now in that.

The dream reproduces the result of this reflection unchanged, but represents it in a situation which exists in the present and is perceptible by the senses like an experience of the waking state.

The present is the tense in which the wish is represented as fulfilled.

I think that we should give free rein to our conjectures, provided we keep our heads and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

The P-system, which possesses no capacity for preserving changes, and hence no memory, furnishes to consciousness the complexity and variety of the sensory qualities.

What takes place in the hallucinatory dream we can describe in no other way than by saying that the excitation follows a retrogressive course.

In regression, the structure of the dream-thoughts breaks up into its raw material.

The source of this manifestation was the suppressed, but once conscious memory of a boy whom he had often seen four years earlier, and who offered a warning example of many bad habits.

The infantile scene cannot enforce its own revival, and must therefore be satisfied to return as a dream.

We begin to suspect that Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that in a dream 'there persists a primordial part of humanity which we can no longer reach by a direct path.'

From the gleam of light that falls upon his eyes while he is asleep the father draws the apprehensive conclusion that a candle has fallen over and may be burning the body; he transforms this conclusion into a dream by embodying it in an obvious situation enacted in the present tense.

The dream would not occur if the preconscious wish were not reinforced from another source.

These ever-active and, as it were, immortal wishes of our unconscious recall the legendary Titans who, from time immemorial, have been buried under the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods, and even now quiver from time to time at the convulsions of their mighty limbs.

The day-thought, which was in itself not a wish, but on the contrary a worry, had in some way to find a connection with some infantile wish, now unconscious and suppressed, which then allowed it - duly dressed up - to arise for consciousness.

The gratification in respect of the fulfilment of the repressed wish may prove to be so great that it balances the painful affects adhering to the day-residues.

The disguises are too thin; the reference to the material to be suppressed shows through everywhere.

To put it figuratively, it is quite possible that a day-thought plays the part of the entrepreneur in the dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as we say, has the idea, and feels impelled to realize it, can do nothing without capital.

I feel tempted to say that the situation for the repressed idea is like that of the American dentist in Austria, who may not carry on his practice unless he can get a duly installed doctor of medicine to serve him as a signboard and legal "cover."

The hungry child cries or struggles helplessly. But its situation remains unchanged; for the excitation proceeding from the inner need has not the character of a momentary impact, but of a continuing pressure.

What once prevailed in the waking state, when our psychic life was still young and inefficient, seems to have been banished into our nocturnal life; just as we still find in the nursery those discarded primitive weapons of adult humanity, the bow and arrow.

No matter what impulses from the usually inhibited Ucs may bustle about the stage, there is no need to interfere with them; they remain harmless, because they are not in a position to set in motion the motor apparatus which alone can operate to produce any change in the outer world.

This is the same way of acceding to a wish-fulfilment as the queen of the Parthians was pleased to adopt in the case of the triumvir Crassus.

Such a dreamer, for example, is dissatisfied with the turn taken by a dream; he breaks it off without waking, and begins it afresh, in order to continue it along different lines, just like a popular author who, upon request, gives a happier ending to his play.

until it finally succeeds in creating a wish-fulfilment that satisfies in one compromise both instances of the psychic life.

The dream-process, therefore, takes the regressive course, which is just opened up by the peculiarity of the sleeping state, and in so doing follows the attraction exerted on it by memory-groups.

There are now, as it were, two sensory surfaces, one turned toward perception and the other toward the preconscious thought-processes.

It is like fire works, which require hours for their preparation and then flare up in a moment.

The mortification suffered thirty years ago operates, after having gained access to the unconscious sources of affect, during all these thirty years as though it were a recent experience.

Thus, like the other psychic formations of its group, the dream offers itself as a compromise, serving both systems simultaneously, by fulfilling the wishes of both, in so far as they are mutually compatible.

The phobia is thrown up before the anxiety like a frontier fortress.

I was not in a state of anxiety because I had dreamt that my mother was dying; I interpreted the dream in this manner in the preconscious elaboration because I was already under the domination of the anxiety.

From this dream he woke in terror; at first he could not cry out; then his voice came back to him, and he was distinctly heard to say: 'No, no, not me; I haven't done anything,' or: 'Please, don't; I will never do it again!'

This cerebral anaemia produces an alteration of character, demono-maniacal hallucinations, and very violent nocturnal, and perhaps also diurnal, states of anxiety.

To reproduce the simultaneity of so complicated a scheme in terms of a successive description, and at the same time to make each part appear free from all assumptions, goes fairly beyond my powers.

To be sure, we too have called the dream absurd, but examples have shown us how wise the dream is when it simulates absurdity.

It is not the dream that creates the phantasy, but the activity of unconscious phantasy that plays the leading part in the formation of the dream-thoughts.

Now, it would seem that the train of thought thus started and abandoned may continue to develop without our attention returning to it, unless at some point it attains a specially high intensity which compels attention.

The king is made two or three times as tall as his retinue or his vanquished enemies.

In particular, assonances and punning associations are treated as equal in value to any other associations.

In view of the complete identity between the peculiarities of the dream-work and those of the psychic activity which issues in psychoneurotic symptoms, we shall feel justified in transferring to the dream the conclusions urged upon us by hysteria.

The first occurrence of wishing may well have taken the form of a hallucinatory cathexis of the memory of gratification.

This effortless and regular turning away of the psychic process from the memory of anything that had once been painful gives us the prototype and the first example of psychic repression.

Owing to this belated arrival of the secondary processes, the essence of our being, consisting of unconscious wish-impulses, remains something which cannot be grasped or inhibited by the preconscious.

These incorrect processes are the primary processes of the psychic apparatus; they occur wherever ideas abandoned by the preconscious cathexis are left to themselves and can become filled with the uninhibited energy which flows from the unconscious and strives for discharge.

It is only by the introduction of these sexual forces that the gaps still demonstrable in the theory of repression can be filled.

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.

For these comparisons we will substitute a description which would seem to correspond more closely to the real state of affairs; we will say that an energic cathexis is shifted to or withdrawn from a certain arrangement, so that the psychic formation falls under the domination of a given instance or is withdrawn from it.

Everything that can become an object of internal perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the crossing of light-rays.

The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world.

It is a homage paid to the unsubdued and indestructible element in the human soul, to the demonic power which furnishes the dream-wish, and which we have found again in our unconscious.

The psychic apparatus which, with the sense-organ of the P-systems, is turned to the outer world, is itself the outer world for the sense-organ of Cs, whose teleological justification depends on this relationship.

As for the girl, she had no idea of the import of her words, or she would never have allowed them to pass her lips.

The sickle was that with which Zeus castrated his father; the scythe and the image of the peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who devours his children.

In any case, it is highly instructive to learn something of the intensively tilled soil from which our virtues proudly emerge.

The other answered correctly: "You mean: I called on you yesterday."

It is the unconscious that selects, and appropriately, in accordance with the aims of the interest: and this holds true for the associations in abstract thinking.

To speak metaphorically, they suffer no other form of annihilation than did the shades of the lower regions in the Odyssey, who awoke to new life the moment they drank blood.

A dream is the beginning of wakening.

If I cannot influence the gods, I will stir up Acheron.

Licht im Finsternuss der nachtlichen Gesichte und Traume, Nurnberg, 1715.

ESCANDE DE MESSIERES, Les reves chez les hysteriques, Th. med., Bordeaux, 1895.

D'HERVEY, Les Reves et les moyens de les diriger, Paris, 1867 (anonym.)

MEISEL (PSEUD.), Naturlich-gottliche und teuflische Traume, Sieghartstein, 1783.

Sui Rapporti d' ictentita, di somiglianza, di analogia e di equivilenza fra sogno e pazzia.

X, "Ce qu'on peut rever en cinq secondes," Rev. sc., 3e serie, I, XII, 30 October, 1886.

Fairy-tales as a Determinant of Dreams and Neurotic Symptoms

The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive

LEROY, B., "Apropos de quelques reves symboliques," Journ. de psychol. Norm. et pathol, 5, 1908, pp. 358-365.

Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage, Grundzuge einer Psychologie des dichterischen Schaffens, Vienna and Leipzig, 1912.

Ein Traum, der das Gegenteil einer Wunscherfullung zu verwirklichen schien, zugleich ein Beispiel eines Traumes, der von einem anderen Traum gedeutet wird.

Dream-interpretation must seek a closer union with the rich material of poetry, myth, and popular idiom, and it must deal more faithfully than has hitherto been possible with the relations of dreams to the neuroses and to mental derangement.

It reveals itself to me as a piece of my self-analysis, as my reaction to the death of my father, that is, to the most important event, the most poignant loss in a man's life.

For nature is really demonic, not divine; that is to say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the laws of the human spirit.

The rolling of thunder takes us into the thick of battle, the crowing of a cock may be transformed into human shrieks of terror, and the creaking of a door may conjure up dreams of burglars breaking into the house.

Led by a dim intuition, it seems rather to assume that dreams have a meaning, albeit a hidden one; that they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.

He must also be told that the success of the psycho-analysis depends upon his noting and communicating everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or another because it seems nonsensical.

One has a comprehensible aversion to exposing so many intimate details of one's own psychic life, and one does not feel secure against the misinterpretations of strangers.

The dream acquits me of responsibility for Irma's condition, as it refers this condition to other causes.

In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.

The dream is not comparable to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being played by the hand of a musician, is struck by some external force.

The girl's brothers, who evidently had not inherited an understanding of dream-interpretation, declared, just as the writers we have quoted would have done: 'That dream is nonsense.'

It is true that there are dreams the manifest content of which is of the most painful nature. But has anyone ever tried to interpret these dreams - to discover their latent thought-content?

The stricter the domination of the censorship, the more thorough becomes the disguise, and, often enough, the more ingenious the means employed to put the reader on the track of the actual meaning.

They are wish-dreams in so far as every dream emanates from the first instance, while the second instance behaves towards the dream only in a defensive, not in a constructive manner.

Unauthorized emergence of suppressed yearnings under false features and names.

In this process it is as though, in the course of the intermediate steps, a displacement occurs- let us say, of the psychic accent- until ideas of feeble potential, by taking over the charge from ideas which have a stronger initial potential, reach a degree of intensity which enables them to force their way into consciousness.

The dream works under a kind of compulsion which forces it to combine into a unified whole all the sources of dream-stimulation which are offered to it.

I should say that every dream is connected through its manifest content with recent experiences, while through its latent content it is connected with the most remote experiences.

This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it later, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual.

King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfilment- the fulfilment of the wish of our childhood.

For many a man hath seen himself in dreams His mother's mate, but he who gives no heed To suchlike matters bears the easier life.

The exclamation which is regarded as a protest against the dream: 'But I am already a doctor,' etc., would in reality be the consolation offered by the dream.

Now a dream is such a picture-puzzle, and our predecessors in the art of dream-interpretation have made the mistake of judging the rebus as an artistic composition.

The dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts.

One throw links up a thousand threads.

The dream is, as it were, centred elsewhere; its content is arranged about elements which do not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts.

When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts is subjected to the pressure of the dream-work, during which the fragments are turned about, broken up and compacted, somewhat like drifting ice, the question arises: What becomes of the logical ties which had hitherto provided the framework of the structure?

The attitude of dreams to the category of antithesis and contradiction is very striking. This category is simply ignored; the word No does not seem to exist for a dream.

It is as though one were to base one's diagnosis of infectious diseases on the olfactory impressions received beside the sick-bed, although of course there have been clinicians to whom the sense of smell - atrophied in most people - has been of greater service than to others.

These often possess many and varied meanings, so that, as in Chinese script, only the context can furnish the correct meaning.

The dream is a compound, which for the purposes of investigation must be broken up into its elements.

If I am afraid of robbers in my dreams, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real.

This function proceeds in a manner which the poet maliciously attributes to the philosopher: with its rags and tatters it stops up the breaches in the structure of the dream.

The dream was given precedence over waking reflection because it was able to show the child still living.

It is from some denser part of this fabric that the dream-wish then arises, like the mushroom from its mycelium.

What takes place in the hallucinatory dream we can describe in no other way than by saying that the excitation follows a retrogressive course.

These ever-active and, as it were, immortal wishes of our unconscious recall the legendary Titans who, from time immemorial, have been buried under the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods, and even now quiver from time to time at the convulsions of their mighty limbs.

To put it figuratively, it is quite possible that a day-thought plays the part of the entrepreneur in the dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as we say, has the idea, and feels impelled to realize it, can do nothing without capital.

What once prevailed in the waking state, when our psychic life was still young and inefficient, seems to have been banished into our nocturnal life; just as we still find in the nursery those discarded primitive weapons of adult humanity, the bow and arrow.

No matter what impulses from the usually inhibited Ucs may bustle about the stage, there is no need to interfere with them; they remain harmless, because they are not in a position to set in motion the motor apparatus which alone can operate to produce any change in the outer world.

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.

The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world.