Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/312

300 selected than in our waking memory, in that subordinate and hardly noticed incidents seem to be better remembered than essential and important ones, and thirdly the hypermnesia for previously forgotten incidents, especially for those of early childhood life.

The first two of these features may be considered together, for they are intimately connected. In every, dream without exception occur mental processes experienced by the subject in the last waking interval ( Traumtag}; other recent experiences that have not occurred on the day actually preceding the dream are treated in just the same way as more ancient memories. There must therefore be some special quality that is of significance in dream formation attaching to the mental experiences of the preceding day. Closer attention shows that the experience in question may be either psychically significant or quite indifferent; in the latter case, however, it is always associated with some underlying significant experience. The dream-instigator ( Traumerreger) may be (i) a recent significant experience that is directly represented in the manifest content, (2) a recent significant experience that is indirectly represented in the manifest content by the appearance there of an associated indifferent experience, (3) an internal significant process (memory) that regularly is represented in the manifest content by the appearance of an associated, recent, indifferent experience. In each case, therefore, a recent experience (i.e. from the preceding day) appears directly in the dream; it is one either significant in itself or else associated with another (recent or old) significant one. The selection of incidents of subordinate interest applies only to incidents of the day before the dream. Older incidents, that at first sight appear to be unimportant, can always be shown to have already become on the day of their occurrence psychically significant through the secondary transference on to them of the affect of significant mental processes with which they have got associated. The material from which a dream is formed may therefore be either psychically significant or the opposite, and in the latter case it always arises in some experience of the preceding day.

The explanation Freud gives of these facts is shortly as follows. The meaning of the appearance in the manifest content of indifferent mental processes is that these are employed in the dream- making to represent underlying processes of great psychical significance, just as in battle the colours of a regiment, themselves of no intrinsic value, stand for the honour of the army. A more accurate analogy is the frequent occurrence in the psycho-neuroses of the transposition of a given significant affect on to an indifferent idea; for instance,