Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/170

152 in the conversation, so that I had to treat a subject of conversation now with the one, now with the other. I asked my colleague to recommend a common friend who had just begun his medical practice. He answered that he was convinced of the young man's thoroughness, but that his plain appearance would make his entrance into households of rank difficult. I answered: "That is just why he needs recommendation." Soon afterwards I asked the other fellow-traveller about the health of his aunt—the mother of one of my patients—who was at the time prostrated by a serious illness. During the night after this journey I dreamt that the young friend, for whom I had asked assistance, was in a splendid salon, and was making a funeral oration to a select company with the air of a man of the world—the oration being upon the old lady (now dead for the purposes of the dream) who was the aunt of the second fellow-traveller. (I confess frankly that I had not been on good terms with this lady.) My dream had thus found connections between the two impressions of the day, and by means of them composed a unified situation.

In view of many similar experiences, I am driven to conclude that a kind of compulsion exists for the dream function, forcing it to bring together in the dream all the available sources of dream stimulation into a unified whole. In a subsequent chapter (on the dream function) we shall become acquainted with this impulse for putting together as a part of condensation another primary psychic process.

I shall now discuss the question whether the source from which the dream originates, and to which our analysis leads, must always be a recent (and significant) event, or whether a subjective experience, that is to say, the recollection of a psychologically valuable experience—a chain of thought—can take the part of a dream stimulus. The answer, which results most unequivocally from numerous analyses, is to the following effect. The stimulus for the dream may be a subjective occurrence, which has been made recent, as it were, by the