Dream Psychology

For most of history nobody wondered where a dream came from. It arrived from outside — a favour from the gods or a trap laid by demons — and the only question was what it wanted from you.

By Freud’s time educated people had quietly dropped that. A dream, they agreed, is the dreamer’s own mental act, made in her own head out of her own material.

But notice what left along with the gods. Once nobody was sending the dream, nobody could say what it meant. Freud splits the question in two: what dreaming does for the mind as a whole, and — the one this course starts with — whether a single dream, last night’s, can be made to make sense.

Freud found three answers on offer, and you probably carry a little of each.

The philosophers kept the old reverence. For Schubert the dream was the spirit slipping free of matter, the soul off its leash at last. The doctors went the other way: a dream is the sleeping brain twitching at some stray stimulus, no more meaningful than ten fingers on a piano played by someone who knows no music. Binz called it “a physical process always useless, frequently morbid.”

And then there was everyone else, who went on believing that dreams mean something and often foretell something — and who read them by swapping each scene for another according to a fixed key, or the whole dream for the thing it supposedly symbolised.

Here is the wager the whole book rests on. Freud, a physician trained on the doctors’ side, discovered “to my amazement that the popular view grounded in superstition, and not the medical one, comes nearer to the truth about dreams.”

Read that slowly, because it is easy to hear more than he said. He sides with the dream-book reader on one point only: a dream has a meaning. He does not side with her method. The fixed key, where a snake always means this and a wedding always means that, is exactly what he is about to replace.

So the claim is narrower and bolder at once. Dreams are not messages or forecasts, and they are not noise. Each one can be made to make sense — from inside the dreamer’s own life.

Of the three views of dreams Freud describes, which one did he say came nearer to the truth?

• The philosophers’ view: dreams free the spirit from the fetters of matter
• None of them: dreams are too varied for any one view to fit
• The doctors’ view: dreams are the sleeping brain reacting to stray stimuli
• The popular view: dreams have a meaning that can be unravelled✓Correct answer

To his own surprise he sided with popular belief that dreams mean something. What he kept was the meaning, not the dream-book key or the fortune-telling; the doctors’ ‘ten fingers on a piano’ is precisely the view he set out to overturn.

His method did not begin with dreams. It came from treating obsessions and attacks of morbid dread — ideas as foreign to their owner as a dream is to the waking mind.

The patient turns his attention to the troubling idea without brooding on it, and reports every impression that comes, with no exceptions. He will say nothing comes. Freud’s reply is flat: “such a blank state of mind is utterly impossible.” Soon something does come, and with it the verdict that it is pointless or unimportant.

That verdict is the whole problem. The self-criticism that dismisses an idea is the same force that kept it out of awareness in the first place. Drop it, follow the thread, and what surfaces links back to the troubling idea. Working on yourself, he adds, write the first vague fancies down at once.

Then Freud tries it on a dream of his own, chosen because it was short and seemed meaningless. Written down the moment he woke, it goes like this.

A company at a shared set-menu dinner, a table d’hote. Spinach is served. Mrs. E.L., sitting beside him, gives him her undivided attention and lays her hand familiarly on his knee. He removes it. She says: “But you have always had such beautiful eyes.” Then he sees something like two eyes, a sketch, or the outline of a spectacle lens.

That is all, and it baffles him. He barely knows Mrs. E.L., has never wished to know her better, has not seen or mentioned her in ages. Above all, the dream carried no emotion whatever. Thinking hard about it makes it no clearer.