Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/318

306 part; the two most significant of these had for many years been forgotten.

As was mentioned above, the censor can be evaded by the dream thoughts in other ways than the usual ones of distortion. They may appear in the manifest content in their unaltered form, but their significance be misunderstood by the subject when he recalls the dream. For instance, a person may dream that he sees his brother dead, the actual dream thoughts being the wish that the brother may die. The subject fails to realise that the picture corresponds with a wish, even a suppressed one, partly because the nature of this is so horribly unlikely that it does not occur to him, and partly because the dream is accompanied by an emotion, dread, which is apparently incongruous with a wish. Such dreams are always intensely distressing (Angstträume), and in a sense it may be said that the dread here replaces the distorting mechanisms of condensation and displacement.

We have finally to consider the most important problems of all, those relating to the latent content or dream thoughts. The first thing that strikes one about these is their intense psychical significance. A dream never proceeds from trifles, but only from the mental processes that are of the greatest moment and interest to the subject. "Der Traum gibt sick nie mil Kleinigkeiten ab." The explanation of why incidents of apparently subordinate interest occur in the manifest content has been given above. More than this, the dream thoughts are processes of the greatest personal interest, and are thus invariably egocentric. We never dream about matters that concern others, however deeply, but only about matters that concern ourselves. It has already been mentioned that the underlying dream thoughts are perfectly logical and consistent, and that the affect accompanying them is entirely congruous to their nature. Freud, therefore, not only agrees with those writers who disparage the mental quality of dreams, holding as he does that the dream-making proper contains no intellectual operation and proceeds only by means of the lower forms of mental activity, but he also agrees with those other writers who maintain that dreams are a logical continuance of the most important part of our waking mental life. We dream at night only about those matters that have most concerned us by day, though on account of the distortion that takes place in the dream-making this fact is not evident. Lastly it may be added that all the dreams occurring in a given night arise from the same group of latent dream thoughts, though they often present different aspects of these.

There are certain differences between the dreams of a young child and those of an adult. In the child, at all events before