Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/338

326 for the apparently logical articulation of many dreams is, however, the fact that the rationalizing tendency of mental activity, which seeks to arrange senseless material into logical' trains of thought, does not rest at night. This last activity of the dream Freud calls the secondary working-over (sekundāre Bearbeitung). It is due to this that the originally fragmentary parts of the dream are rounded out to a whole by supplementarily inserted connecting words and other little connections.

Because the dream has fundamentally condensed, displaced, disguised, scenically presented a dream thought, robbed it of its logical connections and worked it over in a secondary way, the work of interpretation is often very difficult. We are confronted by the conscious dream-content as by a hieroglyph or by a rebus which is very difficult of solution, and as a result the explanation of many dreams needs, besides the rules of Freud's interpretation, an especial capacity and inclination to occupy oneself with questions of the mental life.

Not less a riddle than the dream itself is its rapid fading out after awakening. When we awake the dream images so toilsomely built up at night collapse like a house of cards. During sleep the mind is like an air-tight room, into which neither light nor sound can penetrate from without, but within its own walls the slightest sound, even the buzzing of a flv, can be heard. But awakening is like opening the door to the air of the bright morning; through the doors of our senses press in the bustle and the impulses of everyday life, and the daily cares, lately soothed to sleep by wish-fancies, again take up their reign. The censor, too, awakes from its slumber, and its first act is to declare the* dream to be " foolishness," to explain it as senseless, to put it as it were under guardianship. It is not always satisfied with this measure, it reacts much more strongly against the revolutionary dreams (and there is not a single dream which cannot be shown by analysis to offend against some ethical or legal canon). The stronger method consists in the confiscation, the full suppression of the dream image. Mental confiscation is usually called "forgetting." One relates with wonder how clearly he dreamed, and yet when he woke all was confused and in a few minutes he had forgotten it all. At other times one can only say that the dream was beautiful, good, bad, confused, stimulating, or stupid. Even in making this judgment many times a remnant of the dream content will show itself, whose analysis can lead to a later recovery of larger fragments of the dream. Behind such additional fragments of the dream brought to light in this way one often finds the kernel of the dream-thoughts.

It is an important consequence of Freud's theory of dreams, that one is always dreaming, so long as he sleeps. That one