Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/23

Rh his back upon the world of waking consciousness" (p. 17). "In the dream the memory of the orderly content of the waking consciousness and its normal behaviour is as good as entirely lost" (p. 19). "The almost complete isolation of the mind in the dream from the regular normal content and course of the waking state..."

But the overwhelming majority of the authors have assumed a contrary view of the relation of the dream to waking life. Thus Haffner (p. 19): "First of all the dream is the continuation of the waking state. Our dreams always unite themselves with those ideas which have shortly before been in our consciousness. Careful examination will nearly always find a thread by which the dream has connected itself with the experience of the previous day." Weygandt (p. 6), flatly contradicts the above cited statement of Burdach: "For it may often be observed, apparently in the great majority of dreams, that they lead us directly back into everyday life, instead of releasing us from it." Maury (p. 56), says in a concise formula: "Nous rêvons de ce que nous avons vu, dit, desiré ou fait." Jessen, in his Psychology, published in 1855 (p. 530), is somewhat more explicit: "The content of dreams is more or less determined by the individual personality, by age, sex, station in life, education, habits, and by events and experiences of the whole past life."

The ancients had the same idea about the dependence of the dream content upon life. I cite Radestock (p. 139): "When Xerxes, before his march against Greece, was dissuaded from this resolution by good counsel, but was again and again incited by dreams to undertake it, one of the old rational dream-interpreters of the Persians, Artabanus, told him very appropriately that dream pictures mostly contain that of which one has been thinking while awake."

In the didactic poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (IV, v. 959), occurs this passage:—