Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/232

 nothing; or at best something forced or irrelevant. Dreams are free thoughts, free phantasies, they are not forced, and they are psychic phenomena just as much as thoughts are.

It may be said of the dream that it enters into the consciousness as a complex structure, the connection between the elements of which is not conscious. Only by afterwards joining associations to the separate pictures of the dream, can the origin of these pictures, in certain recollections of the near and more remote past, be proved. One asks oneself: “Where have I seen or heard that?” And by the same process of free association comes the memory that one has actually experienced certain parts of the dream, some of them yesterday, some at an earlier date. This is well known, and every one will probably agree to it. Thus far the dream presents itself, as a rule, as an incomprehensible composition of certain elements which are not in the first instance conscious, but which are later recognised by the process of free association. This might be disputed on the ground that it is an a priori statement. I must remark, however, that this conception conforms to the only generally recognised working hypothesis as to the genesis of dreams, namely, the derivation of the dream from experiences and thoughts of the recent past. We are, therefore, upon known ground. Not that certain dream parts have under all circumstances been known to the individual, so that one might ascribe to them the character of being conscious; on the contrary, they are frequently, even generally, unrecognisable. Not until later do we remember having consciously experienced this or that dream part. We may therefore regard the dream from this point of view as a product that comes from a subconscious origin. The technical unfolding of these subconscious sources is a mode of procedure that has always been instinctively employed. One simply tries to remember whence the dream parts come. Upon this most simple principle the psychoanalytic method of solving dreams is based. It is a fact that certain dream parts are derived from our waking life and, indeed, from experiences which, owing to their notorious lack of importance, would frequently