Sigmund Freud

Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet.

They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.

CHAPTER I

THE SAVAGE’S DREAD OF INCEST

PRIMITIVE MAN is known to us by the stages of development through which he has passed: that is, through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left behind for us, through our knowledge of his art, his religion and his attitude towards life, which we have received either directly or through the medium of legends, myths and fairy-tales; and through the remnants of his ways of thinking that survive in our own manners and customs. Moreover, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary:

described by us as 'narcissistic', in which the satisfaction of the instincts is partially or totally withdrawn from the influence of other people.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter

or as Freud said to Putnam: "We are what we are because we have been what we have been."

Any dream could be made use of in this way. From certain motives I, however, choose a dream of my own, which appears confused and meaningless to my memory, and one which has the advantage of brevity.

I must further remark that the dream is far shorter than the thoughts which I hold it replaces; whilst analysis discovered that the dream was provoked by an unimportant occurrence the evening before the dream.

This, by the way, is a further objection to reducing dreams to a dissociation of cerebral activity in sleep, for why should such a lowering of psychical functions belong to the nature of sleep in adults, but not in children?

We are what we are because we have been what we have been."