IV — Distortion in Dreams

If I make the assertion that wish fulfilment is the meaning of every dream, that, accordingly, there can be no dreams except wish dreams, I am sure at the outset to meet with the most emphatic contradiction. Objections will be made to this effect: “The fact that there are dreams which must be understood as fulfilments of wishes is not new, but, on the contrary, has long since been recognised by the authors. Cf. Radestock (pp. 137–138), Volkelt (pp. 110–111), Tissié (p. 70), M. Simon (p. 42) on the hunger dreams of the imprisoned Baron Trenck, and the passage in Griesinger (p. 11). The assumption that there can be nothing but dreams of wish fulfilment, however, is another of those unjustified generalisations by which you have been pleased to distinguish yourself of late. Indeed dreams which exhibit the most painful content, but not a trace of wish fulfilment, occur plentifully enough. The pessimistic philosopher, Edward von Hartman, perhaps stands furthest from the theory of wish fulfilment. He expresses himself in his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Part II. (stereotyped edition, p. 34), to the following effect:—

“‘As regards the dream, all the troubles of waking life are transferred by it to the sleeping state; only the one thing, which can in some measure reconcile a cultured person to life-scientific and artistic enjoyment is not transferred....’ But even less discontented observers have laid emphasis on the fact that in dreams pain and disgust are more frequent than pleasure; so Scholz (p. 39), Volkelt (p. 80), and others. Indeed two ladies, Sarah Weed and Florence Hallam, have found from the elaboration of their dreams a mathematical expression for the preponderance of displeasure in dreams. They designate 58 per cent. of the dreams as disagreeable, and only 28·6 per cent. as positively pleasant. Besides those dreams which continue the painful sensations of life during sleep, there are also dreams of fear, in which this most terrible of all disagreeable sensations tortures us until we awake, and it is with just these dreams of fear that children are so often persecuted (Cf. Debacker concerning the Pavor Nocturnus), though it is in the case of children that you have found dreams of wishing undisguised.”