Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/310

298 a dream no intellectual operation of any sort is carried out; the dream-making is concerned solely with translating into another form various underlying dream thoughts that were previously in existence. No creative work whatever is carried out by the process of dream- making; it performs no act of decision, calculation, judgement, comparison, conclusion or any kind of thought. Not even the elaboration of any phantasy occurs in the dream-making, though a previously-existing phantasy may be bodily taken over and woven into the dream, a fact that gives the key to the explanation of highly-wrought and yet momentary dreams such as the well known guillotine one related by Maury. Any part of a dream that appears to indicate an intellectual operation has been taken bodily from the underlying latent content, either directly or in a distorted form; the same applies to numerals and to speech phrases that may occur in a dream. Even some of the waking judgements passed on a dream belong to the latent content. To repeat, there is in the dream-making nothing but transformation of previously formed mental processes.

The dream-making proper is thus a process more distant from waking mental life than even the most determined detractor of dream activities would maintain. It is not merely more careless, incorrect, incomplete, forgetful and illogical than waking thought, but it is something that qualitatively is absolutely different from this, so that the two cannot be compared. Dream-making proceeds by methods quite foreign toour waking mental life; it ignores obvious contradictions, makes use of highly strained analogies, and brings together widely different ideas by means of the most superficial associations, for instance by such a feeble play on words as shocks the waking mind with a keen sense of ridiculousness. The mental processes characteristic of dreams would if they occurred in a conscious waking state at once arouse grave suspicion of impaired intelligence; as Jung has clearly pointed out they are in fact processes that are frequently indistinguishable from those met with in advanced stages of dementia prsecox and other psychoses.

The affect in dreams has many interesting features. The incongruous manner in which it may be present when it is not to be explained by the ideas of the dream, or be absent when from these ideas it might have been expected, has already been noted above, and is quite elucidated by psycho-analysis, which reveals that in the underlying dream thoughts the affect is logically justified and is congruous enough. The apparent