The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

of the child must have consisted of phrases which it had uttered while still alive, and which were associated with important events for the father.
Perhaps the complaint, "I am burning," was associated with the fever from which the child died, and "7father, don't you see?" to some other
affective occurrence unknown to us.
Now, when we have come to recognize that the dream has meaning, and can be fitted into the context of psychic events, it may be surprising that
a dream should have occurred in circumstances which called for such an immediate waking. We shall then note that even this dream is not
lacking in a wish-fulfilment. The dead child behaves as though alive; he warns his father himself; he comes to his father's bed and clasps his arm,
as he probably did in the recollection from which the dream obtained the first part of the child's speech. It was for the sake of this wish-fulfilment
that the father slept a moment longer. The dream was given precedence over waking reflection because it was able to show the child still living. If
the father had waked first, and had then drawn the conclusion which led him into the adjoining room, he would have shortened the child's life by
this one moment.
There can be no doubt about the peculiar features in this brief dream which engage our particular interest. So far, we have endeavoured mainly to
ascertain wherein the secret meaning of the dream consists, how it is to be discovered, and what means the dream-work uses to conceal it. In other
words, our greatest interest has hitherto been centered on the problems of interpretation. Now, however, we encounter a dream which is easily
explained, and the meaning of which is without disguise; we note that nevertheless this dream preserves the essential characteristics which
conspicuously differentiate a dream from our waking thoughts, and this difference demands an explanation. It is only when we have disposed of
all the problems of interpretation that we feel how incomplete is our psychology of dreams.
But before we turn our attention to this new path of investigation, let us stop and look back, and consider whether we have not overlooked
something important on our way hither. For we must understand that the easy and comfortable part of our journey lies behind us. Hitherto, all the
paths that we have followed have led, if I mistake not, to light, to explanation, and to full understanding; but from the moment when we seek to
penetrate more deeply into the psychic processes in dreaming, all paths lead into darkness. It is quite impossible to explain the dream as a psychic
process, for to explain means to trace back to the known, and as yet we have no psychological knowledge to which we can refer such explanatory
fundamentals as may be inferred from the psychological investigation of dreams. On the contrary, we shall be compelled to advance a number of
new assumptions, which do little more than conjecture the structure of the psychic apparatus and the play of the energies active in it; and we shall
have to be careful not to go too far beyond the simplest logical construction, since otherwise its value will be doubtful. And even if we should be
unerring in our inferences, and take cognizance of all the logical possibilities, we should still be in danger of arriving at a completely mistaken
result, owing to the probable incompleteness of the preliminary statement of our elementary data. We shall not he able to arrive at any
conclusions as to the structure and function of the psychic instrument from even the most careful investigation of dreams, or of any other isolated
activity; or, at all events, we shall not be able to confirm our conclusions. To do this we shall have to collate such phenomena as the comparative
study of a whole series of psychic activities proves to be reliably constant. So that the psychological assumptions which we base on the analysis
of the dream-processes will have to mark time, as it were, until they can join up with the results of other investigations which, proceeding from
another starting-point, will seek to penetrate to the heart of the same problem.
A. The Forgetting of Dreams
I propose, then, that we shall first of all turn our attention to a subject which brings us to a hitherto disregarded objection, which threatens to
undermine the very foundation of our efforts at dream-interpretation. The objection has been made from more than one quarter that the dream
which we wish to interpret is really unknown to us, or, to be more precise, that we have no guarantee that we know it as it really occurred.
What we recollect of the dream, and what we subject to our methods of interpretation, is, in the first place, mutilated by the unfaithfulness of our
memory, which seems quite peculiarly incapable of retaining dreams, and which may have omitted precisely the most significant parts of their
content. For when we try to consider our dreams attentively, we often have reason to complain that we have dreamed much than we remember;
that unfortunately we know nothing more than this one fragment, and that our recollection of even this fragment seems to us strangely uncertain.
Moreover, everything goes to prove that our memory reproduces the dream not only incompletely but also untruthfully, in a falsifying manner.
As, on the one hand, we may doubt whether what we dreamed was really as disconnected as it is in our recollections, so on the other hand we
may doubt whether a dream was really as coherent as our account of it; whether in our attempted reproduction we have not filled in the gaps
which really existed, or those which are due to forgetfulness, with new and arbitrarily chosen material; whether we have not embellished the
dream, rounded it off and corrected it, so that any conclusion as to its real content becomes impossible. Indeed, one writer (Spitta)[1] surmises
that all that is orderly and coherent is really first put into the dream during the attempt to recall it. Thus we are in danger of being deprived of the
very object whose value we have undertaken to determine.
In all our dream-interpretations we have hitherto ignored these warnings. On the contrary, indeed, we have found that the smallest, most
insignificant, and most uncertain components of the dream-content invited interpretations no less emphatically than those which were distinctly
and certainly contained in the dream. In the dream of Irma's injection we read: "I quickly called in Dr. M," and we assumed that even this small
addendum would not have got into the dream if it had not been susceptible of a special derivation. In this way we arrived at the history of that
unfortunate patient to whose bedside I quickly called my older colleague. In the seemingly absurd dream which treated the difference between
fifty-one and fifty-six as a quantity negligible the number fifty-one was mentioned repeatedly. Instead of regarding this as a matter of course, or a