Page:Freud - Reflections on war and death.djvu/49

Rh state of sleep, which we all court every night.

Since we know how to interpret even the maddest and most confused dreams, we know that every time we go to sleep we throw aside our hard won morality like a garment in order to put it on again in the morning. This laying bare is, of course, harmless, because we are paralyzed and condemned to inactivity by the sleeping state.

Only the dream can inform us of the regression of our emotional life to an earlier stage of development. Thus, for instance, it is worthy of note that all our dreams are governed by purely egotistic motives. One of my English friends once presented this theory to a scientific meeting in America, whereupon a lady