Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/325

Rh wishes, which in the rude world of facts must be unfulfilled, seems to share in the language of abandoned popular science. "Dreams" are used metaphorically in most languages for "wishes" and the Hungarian proverb says just this, that "swine dream of acorns, the goose of maize" which is only to be regarded as an allusion to the similar direction of human dreams.

Some of the dreams of adults and most of the dreams of children are purely wish-fulfillment dreams. The child dreams of pleasureable experiences denied him by day, of the toys which he envied his little comrades, of victorious struggles with those of his own age, of his good mother, or his friendly father. Very often in his dream he seems "big," endowed with all the freedom and power of his parents, which he wishes for so ardently by day. Wish dreams like these also occur to adults. The difficult test (about which we are so anxious) seems in dreams splendidly passed, dear relatives awaken from their graves and assure us that they are not dead, we appear to ourselves rich, powerful, endowed with great oratorical gifts, the most beautiful of women solicit our favor, and so on. For the most part we attain in dreams just that which we painfully miss on waking.

The same tendency to wish-fulfillment rules not only nocturnal, but day dreams as well, the fancies in which we can catch ourselves at unoccupied moments or during monotonous activity. Freud has observed that women's fancies deal for the most part with things which immediately or mediately belong to the sex life (of being loved, proposals, beautiful clothes), those of men predominantly with power and esteem, but also with sexual satisfaction.

Fancies concerning the means of escape from a real or imagined danger and the annihilation of real or imagined enemies are also very common. These simple wish-fulfillment dreams and fancies have an obvious meaning, and need no particular labor for their interpretation.

But that which is new, surprising and incredible to many in Freud's explanation of dreams is the assertion that all dreams, even those which seem indifferent or even unpleasant, can be reduced to this basal form, and that it can be shown by analysis that they fulfill wishes in a disguised way. In order to understand this, we must first make ourselves familiar with the mechanism of psychic activity in dreams.

The associative analysis of a dream is only the reversal of the synthetic work which the psyche executes at night while it transforms the unwelcome thought and the unpleasant sensation which disturb sleep into wish-fulfilling dream-images. By a critical consideration one is convinced that this work never ceases during sleep, even when after waking we cannot recall