Why Do We Dream?

                            Sigmund Freud on Dreams

        Sigmund Freud actually called dreams the “royal road

to the unconscious,” That statement will probably remain
true in psychology forever. Freud’s classic text, The
Interpretation of Dreams, contains some of his finest work.

Freud believed every dream is a wish fulfillment, and
he kept this theory to the end, even though he gave up his
initial idea that all dreams have a sexual content.

For Freud, the concept of wish fulfillment didn’t
necessarily imply that a pleasure was sought, because a
person could just as well have a wish to be punished.
         Nevertheless, this idea of a “secret” wish being masked by a
dream remains central to classical Freudian psychoanalysis.
Freud said, “Dreams are not comparable to the
spontaneous sounds made by a musical instrument struck
rather by some external force than by the hand of a
performer; they are not meaningless, not absurd, they do
not imply that one portion of our stockpile of ideas sleeps
while another begins to awaken. They are a completely valid
psychological phenomenon, specifically the fulfillment of
wishes; they can be classified in the continuity of
comprehensible waking mental states; they are constructed
through highly complicated intellectual activity.”
It was not until Freud noticed how allowing his patients
to freely associate ideas with whatever came to mind, that
he really explored spontaneous abreaction. Freud himself
suffered bouts of deep anxiety, and it was partly this that
led him to explore the connection between association of
ideas and dreams. In 1897 he wrote to his friend Wilhelm
Fliess:
        ‘No matter what I start with, I always find myself back
again with the neuroses and the psychical apparatus.
Inside me there is a seething ferment, and I am only
waiting for the next surge forward. I have felt impelled
to start writing about dreams, with which I feel on firm
ground.’
        This move toward dreams may have come about
because in allowing his patients freedom to talk and explore
the associations that arose - free association - Freud noticed
that patients would often find a connection between the
direction of their associations and a dream they had
experienced. The more he allowed his patients to go in their
own direction, the more frequently they mentioned their
dreams. Also, talking about the dream often enabled the
patient to discover a new and productive chain of
associations and memories.
         Freud began to take note of his own dreams and
explore the associations they aroused. In doing so he was
the first person to consciously and consistently explore a
dream into its depths through uncovering and following
obvious and hidden associations and emotions connected
with the dream imagery and drama.
        Obviously previous dream researchers had noticed how
the dream image associated with personal concerns, but
Freud broke through into seeing the connection with sexual
feelings, with early childhood trauma, and with the
subtleties of the human psyche. He did this to deal with his
own neurosis, and he says of this period, ‘I have been
through some kind of neurotic experience, with odd states of
mind not intelligible to consciousness, cloudy thoughts and
veiled doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light.’
        Using dreams for his self analysis, Freud discovered
that previously unremembered details from his childhood
were recaptured along with feelings and states of mind
which he had never met before.
         He wrote of this period, “Some sad secrets of life are
being traced back to their first roots; the humble origins of
much pride and precedence are being laid bare. I am now
experiencing myself all the things that, as a third party, I
have witnessed going on in my patients, days when I slink
about depressed because I have understood nothing of the
day’s dreams, fantasies, or mood.”
        Without this powerful and personal experience of
working with his dreams, meeting emotions and fantasies
welling up from the unconscious, Freud would not have so
passionately believed in his theories regarding dreams and
the unconscious.
        Of course, like much of Freud’s theories, he related
dreams to sex. One of his basic views of dreams was that
the purpose of dreams is to allow us to satisfy in fantasies
the instinctual urges that society judges unacceptable such
as sexual practices. This was partly the reason for the
enormous opposition and criticism that he met.
        During the period of his early life, only men were
believed to have powerful sexual urges. When Freud showed
that repressed but obvious sexual desires were equally at
work in women this created a social uproar. Perhaps his
second finding in regard to sexuality surprised even him.
        During his analysis of women patients, sexual advance or
assault by the woman’s father was often revealed.
Freud struggled with this, wondering whether the
assault was memory of an actual event, or a psychic
reproduction of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that
hysterical and neurotic behavior was often due to the
trauma caused by an early sexual assault by the parent.
        Where there was not evidence of physical assault, then he
saw the neurosis as due to sexual conflict or a trauma
caused by some other event. This conflict was often
manifested through dreams. This led to Freud being
rejected by university colleagues, fellow doctors, and even
by patients.   atj