Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/73

Rh Fischer maintains that the subjective feelings and desires or affects and passions manifest themselves in the wilfulness of the dream life, and that the moral characteristics of a person are mirrored in his dream.

Haffner (p. 25): "With rare exceptions...a virtuous person will be virtuous also in his dreams; he will resist temptation, and show no sympathy for hatred, envy, anger, and all other vices; while the sinful person will, as a rule, also find in his dreams the pictures which he has before him while awake."

Scholz (p. 36): "In the dream there is truth; despite all masking in pride or humility, we still recognise our own self.... The honest man does not commit any dishonourable offence even in the dream, or, if this does occur, he is terrified over it as if over something foreign to his nature. The Roman emperor who ordered one of his subjects to be executed because he dreamed that he cut off the emperor's head, was not wrong in justifying his action on the ground that he who has such dreams must have similar thoughts while awake. About a thing that can have no place in our mind we therefore say significantly: 'I would never dream of such a thing.'"

Pfaff, varying a familiar proverb, says: "Tell me for a time your dreams, and I will tell you what you are within."

The short work of Hildebrandt, from which I have already taken so many quotations, a contribution to the dream problem as complete and as rich in thought as I found in the literature, places the problem of morality in the dream as the central point of its interest. For Hildebrandt, too, it is a strict rule that the purer the life, the purer the dream; the impurer the former, the impurer the latter.

The moral nature of man remains even in the dream: "But while we are not offended nor made suspicious by an arithmetical error no matter how obvious, by a reversal of science no matter how romantic, or by an anachronism no matter how witty, we nevertheless do not lose sight of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. No matter how much of what follows us during the