The Interpretation of Dreams

You wake from a vivid dream and, for a moment, it feels like something that happened to you rather than something you made. Freud thinks this morning impression is where the oldest theory of dreams came from.

Before Aristotle, he writes, people did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind at all. It was a message from outside, a divine inspiration, and it came in two kinds: true and valuable dreams sent to warn the dreamer or foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent dreams meant to lead him to ruin.

Freud does not mock this. He calls it perfectly in keeping with a world that projected outward what was real only inside the mind. The dream feels foreign in the morning, so it was given a foreign sender.

Aristotle is the first writer Freud credits with treating the dream as an object of psychology, and he is already halfway out of the temple. Dreams, he held, are "of demoniacal, though not of divine nature", yet they still hold deep meaning if correctly interpreted.

He also noticed something a doctor could use. The dream turns slight sensations into great ones: warm one part of the sleeping body a little, and the dreamer walks through fire. So a dream might betray to the physician an illness the patient has not yet noticed.

And the old view never quite died. Freud observes that in his own day even sober men, averse to anything adventurous, based their belief in superhuman forces on the fact that dreams could not be explained, and that the debate over prophetic dreams was still open.

According to Freud's survey, how did people before Aristotle understand a dream?

• As divine inspiration, either a true warning or a deceptive vision✓Correct answer
• As a signal from the body about an illness not yet felt
• As a disguised wish the dreamer could not admit while awake
• As a product of the dreamer's own mind, echoing the previous day

Freud writes that the ancients did not treat the dream as a product of the dreaming mind but as divine inspiration, split into true dreams and fraudulent ones. Reading dreams for early signs of illness belongs to Aristotle, who already stood partway outside that view.

Now turn to the opposite camp. By Freud's time the favourite theory among doctors and scientists was that a dream is a partial, anomalous waking.

The physiologist Binz put it in chemical terms. Sleep is a numbness caused by fatigue products in the brain. Towards morning they are carried away, groups of brain cells wake here and there, and each works alone, without the rest of the brain to govern its associations. The result is pictures that fit together "in a wild and irregular manner", growing less irrational as more cells wake.

The theory is tidy because it explains every absurdity at once: the stranger the dream, the less of the brain was awake to make it. Its verdict on dreaming, in Binz's words, is "a physical process in all cases useless, in many cases even morbid."

Freud found the attitude of this science best captured in a very old comparison. Dreaming, it said, is like the "ten fingers of a musically ignorant person running over the keyboard of an instrument."

Notice what the image does. It does not only say that dreams are confused. It says that nobody is playing. The keys are real and the sounds are real, but no intention stands behind them, so there is no tune to find.

That is why Freud says this view disputes the dignity of a psychic process for the dream. If it is right, a dream cannot be translated even in principle, and interpretation is wasted effort. Freud answers with the obvious question: "how could the ten fingers of an unmusical player produce any music?"

The ruling science of Freud's day held that a dream is not a real act of the mind but a bodily process, and in many cases a morbid one.

True✓Correct answer

True. The favourite medical theory treated the dream as a partial waking of brain cells, and Binz called it a physical process, useless and often morbid. Freud's objection is that this denies the dream the dignity of a psychic process.