The Interpretation Of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900) PREFACE

preventing the dreamer from surrendering himself with pleasure to the phantasy of marriage. One of these misgivings - at with marriage he might
lose his freedom - has embodied itself in the transformation of a scene of arrest.
If we once more return to the thesis that the dream-work prefers to make use of a ready-made phantasy, instead of first creating one from the
material of the dream-thoughts, we shall perhaps be able to solve one of the most interesting problems of the dream. I have related the dream of
Maury, who is struck on the back of the neck by a small board, and wakes after a long dream - a complete romance of the period of the French
Revolution. Since the dream is produced in a coherent form, and completely fits the explanation of the waking stimulus, of whose occurrence the
sleeper could have had no forboding, only one assumption seems possible, namely, that the whole richly elaborated dream must have been
composed and dreamed in the short interval of time between the falling of the board on cervical vertebrae and the waking induced by the blow.
We should not venture to ascribe such rapidity to the mental operations of the waking state, so that we have to admit that the dream-work has the
privilege of a remarkable acceleration of its issue.
To this conclusion, which rapidly became popular, more recent authors (Le Lorrain, Egger, and others) have opposed emphatic objections; some
of them doubt the correctness of Maury's record of the dream, some seek to show that the rapidity of our mental operations in waking life is by no
means inferior to that which we can, without reservation, ascribe to the mental operations in dreams. The discussion raises fundamental questions,
which I do not think are at all near solution. But I must confess that Egger's objections, for example, to Maury's dream of the guillotine, do not
impress me as convincing. I would suggest the following explanation of this dream: Is it so very improbable that Maury's dream may have
represented a phantasy which had been preserved for years in his memory, in a completed state, and which was awakened - I should like to say,
alluded to - at the moment when he became aware of the waking stimulus? The whole difficulty of composing so long a story, with all its details,
in the exceedingly short space of time which is here at the dreamer's disposal then disappears; the story was already composed. If the board had
struck Maury's neck when he was awake, there would perhaps have been time for the thought: "Why, that's just like being guillotined." But as he
is struck by the board while asleep, the dream-work quickly utilizes the incoming stimulus for the construction of a wish-fulfilment, as if it
thought (this is to be taken quite figuratively): "Here is a good opportunity to realize the wish-phantasy which I formed at such and such a time
while I was reading." It seems to me undeniable that this dream-romance is just such a one as a young man is wont to construct under the
influence of exciting impressions. Who has not been fascinated - above all, a Frenchman and a student of the history of civilization - by
descriptions of the Reign of Terror, in which the aristocracy, men and women, the flower of the nation, showed that it was possible to die with a
light heart, and preserved their ready wit and the refinement of their manners up to the moment of the last fateful summons? How tempting to
fancy oneself in the midst of all this, as one of these young men who take leave of their ladies with a kiss of the hand, and fearlessly ascend the
scaffold! Or perhaps ambition was the ruling motive of the phantasy - the ambition to put oneself in the place of one of those powerful
personalities who, by their sheer force of intellect and their fiery eloquence, ruled the city in which the heart of mankind was then beating so
convulsively; who were impelled by their convictions to send thousands of human beings to their death, and were paving the way for the
transformation of Europe; who, in the meantime, were not sure of their own heads, and might one day lay them under the knife of the guillotine,
perhaps in the role of a Girondist or the hero Danton? The detail preserved in the memory of the dream, accompanied by an enormous crowd,
seems to show that Maury's phantasy was an ambitious one of just this character.
But the phantasy prepared so long ago need not be experienced again in sleep; it is enough that it should be, so to speak, "touched off." What I
mean is this: If a few notes are struck, and someone says, as in Don Juan: "That is from The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart," memories suddenly
surge up within me, none of which I can recall to consciousness a moment later. The phrase serves as a point of irruption from which a complete
whole is simultaneously put into a condition of stimulation. It may well be the same in unconscious thinking. Through the waking stimulus the
psychic station is excited which gives access to the whole guillotine phantasy. This phantasy, however, is not run through in sleep, but only in the
memory of the awakened sleeper. Upon waking, the sleeper remembers in detail the phantasy which was transferred as a whole into the dream. At
the same time, he has no means of assuring himself that he is really remembering something which was dreamed. The same explanation - namely,
that one is dealing with finished phantasies which have been evoked as wholes by the waking stimulus - may be applied to other dreams which
are adapted to the waking stimulus - for example, to Napoleon's dream of a battle before the explosion of a bomb. Among the dreams collected by
Justine Tobowolska in her dissertation on the apparent duration of time in dreams,[104] I think the most corroborative is that related by Macario
(1857) as having been dreamed by a playwright, Casimir Bonjour. Bonjour intended one evening to witness the first performance of one of his
own plays, but he was so tired that he dozed off in his chair behind the scenes just as the curtain was rising. In his sleep he went through all the
five acts of his play, and observed all the various signs of emotion which were manifested by the audience during each individual scene. At the
close of the performance, to his great satisfaction, he heard his name called out amidst the most lively manifestations of applause. Suddenly he
woke. He could hardly believe his eyes or his ears; the performance had not gone beyond the first lines of the first scene; he could not have been
asleep for more than two minutes. As for the dream, the running through the five acts of the play and the observing the attitude of the public
towards each individual scene need not, we may venture to assert, have been something new, produced while the dreamer was asleep; it may have
been a repetition of an already completed work of the phantasy. Tobowolska and other authors have emphasized a common characteristic of
dreams that show an accelerated flow of ideas: namely, that they seem to be especially coherent, and not at all like other dreams, and that the
dreamer's memory of them is summary rather than detailed. But these are precisely the characteristics which would necessarily be exhibited by
ready-made phantasies touched off by the dream-work - a conclusion which is not, of course, drawn by these authors. I do not mean to assert that
all dreams due to a waking stimulus admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated flux of ideas in dreams is entirely disposed of
in this manner.
And here we are forced to consider the relation of this secondary elaboration of the dream-content to the other factors of the dream-work. May not