The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

[106] The World of Dreams, pp. 10, 11 (London, 1911).
[107] This function of interpretation is not particular to the dream; it is the same work of logical coordination that we use on our sensations when
awake.
[108] With these series of incoherent halucinations, the mind must do the same work of logical coordination that it does with the sensations when
awake. With a bon of imagination, it reunites all the disconnected images, and fills in the gaps found which are too great.
[109] However, I have often thought that there might be a certain deformation, or rather reformation, of the dream when it is recalled.... The
systematizing tendency of the imagination can well finish, after waking, the sketch begun in sleep. In that way, the real speed of thought will be
augmented in appearance by improvements due to the wakened imagination.
[110] In the dream, on the contrary, the interpretation and coordination are made not only with the aid of what is given by the dream, but also
with what is given by the wakened mind.
[111] It was thought that the dream could be placed at the moment of waking, and they attributed to the waking thoughts the function of
constructing the dream from the images present in the sleeping thoughts.
[112] Jahrb., i, p. 514.
[113] Jahrb., iii, p. 625.
[114] Formerly I found it extraordinarily difficult to accustom my readers to the distinction between the manifest dream-content and the latent
dream-thoughts. Over and over again arguments and objections were adduced from the uninterpreted dream as it was retained in the memory, and
the necessity of interpreting the dream was ignored. But now, when the analysts have at least become reconciled to substituting for the manifest
dream its meaning as found by interpretation, many of them are guilty of another mistake, to which they adhere just as stubbornly. They look for
the essence of the dream in this latent content, and thereby overlook the distinction between latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. The
dream is fundamentally nothing more than a special form of our thinking, which is made possible by the conditions of the sleeping state. It is the
dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the only explanation of its singularity. I say this in order to
correct the reader's judgment of the notorious prospective tendency of dreams. That the dream should concern itself with efforts to perform the
tasks with which our psychic life is confronted is no more remarkable than that our conscious waking life should so concern itself, and I will only
add that this work may be done also in the preconscious, a fact already familiar to us.
CHAPTER 7
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM PROCESSES
Among the dreams which have been communicated to me by others, there is one which is at this point especially worthy of our attention. It was
told me by a female patient who had heard it related in a lecture on dreams. Its original source is unknown to me. This dream evidently made a
deep impression upon the lady, since she went so far as to imitate it, i.e., to repeat the elements of this dream in a dream of her own; in order, by
this transference, to express her agreement with a certain point in the dream.
The preliminary conditions of this typical dream were as follows: A father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After
the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where the child's
body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for
a few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "7father, don't you see that I am
burning?" The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old man had fallen asleep,
and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle.
The meaning of this affecting dream is simple enough, and the explanation given by the lecturer, as my patient reported it, was correct. The bright
light shining through the open door on to the sleeper's eyes gave him the impression which he would have received had he been awake: namely,
that a fire had been started near the corpse by a falling candle. It is quite possible that he had taken into his sleep his anxiety lest the aged watcher
should not be equal to his task.
We can find nothing to change in this interpretation; we can only add that the content of the dream must be overdetermined, and that the speech